Searchers vs. Planners
In the December Atlantic, Sarah Chayes tells the fascinating, frustrating story of her Afghan adventures in entrepreneurship--and the utter lack of interest she encountered from U.S. funders charged with aiding Afghan economic development. Her business idea was brilliant--high value, low weight products that play perfectly into the U.S. aesthetic economy.
This is what we do: Eleven Afghan men and women and I scour this harried land for its (licit) bounties and turn them into beauty products. Our soaps, colored with local vegetable dyes and hand-molded and smoothed till they look like lumps of marble, and our oils, elixirs for polishing the skin, sell in boutiques that cater to the pampered in New York, Montreal, and San Francisco.
The scale of the effort--we sell about $2,500 worth of soap per month--is tiny. Still, our business, the Arghand Cooperative, represents what reports and think tanks say places like Afghanistan need: sustainable economic development. And it is almost entirely the product of private enthusiasm and generosity. From the institutional donors whose job I naively thought was to foster initiatives like ours, we have reaped much travail but almost no support.
Chayes's story is a must read. (The magazine must think so too, since this is a free link.)
Former World Bank economist William Easterly put his finger on the problem in The White Man's Burden
One reason I support Spirit of America is that it gives U.S. military personnel deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa the small-scale, private funding they need to meet local needs, without a lot of bureaucracy.