Let The People See My Work

Jesse:
In the interests of writing something more substantial than a book club post today, I want to talk about my foreign aid thought.

I was reminded to bring this up because of this Andrew Sullivan post, suggesting that it would be impossible to send tens of thousands of experts in various fields (doctors, lawyers, business executives, professors, nurses, whatever, to participate in nation building in places like Afghanistan because it would be impossible to convince those types of people. There was also these outtakes from Paul Wells's interview with physicist Neil Turok, in which Turok suggests that what Canada should be doing for Africa is helping Africa nations build up health care and education systems like ours, rather than just handing out money and food.

This is something I've thought was the way to go about this for a long time (the first time it came to me was when a friend working at DFAIT was writing a paper about aid). I think the thing to do when it comes to improving the way Canada delivers aid is to pick a country or two (Haiti probably makes the most sense, but I think Canada should really be involved in Africa, as well). Then pick a town. And then absolutely go bananas trying to help that particularly town improve. Send city planners to plan things to build. Then send construction workers to build things, like serious schools and a serious hospital. Then send teachers to teach in that school and work with local teachers, and post-secondary students to spend time with those kids, and send doctors and nurses to help run that hospital, and help train locals to continue to run it afterwards. Canada, like other western countries, seems to me to have a glut of business consultants. Let's send them in there, and have them help locals figure out what can be done in that direction. And on, and on, and on.

This would not only be a fantastic help, it would also be a way to start building up, from the grassroots, some Canadians who could actually understand for themselves what it means to "do" foreign aid, and especially who locals in aid recipient countries actually are. To me, this is the way to improve the quality of our aid, and the engagement of us with recipients, and recipients with us.

As a further idea, build a university. Just build it. And then get Canadian professors to help staff it. Call it the University of Canada, or even (shudder) the University of Toronto African Campus. Give people in that country a chance to learn without leaving the land they know. Make it affordable. Recognize that some of those people will leave, but lots of them will stay, and put their knowledge to work.

I think all of this would make aid real, and would constitute a worthwhile Canadian project for the 21st century.