Please stop building schools in Iraq and Afghanistan

by mattsteinglass



Filed under: Development May 12, 2009, 9:18 amFiled under: Afghanistan

BruceR, just back from a research tour of Afghanistan, has many fascinating insights (via Kevin Drum). Among them:

Well-meaning people have built a whole ton of schools in Kandahar Province over the last few years. As far as I could tell when I was there, none out in the rural areas were actually being used as schools during our tour.

Here’s a general rule that applies to basically every development program in every poor country in the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan: want to do something nice and useful for these people? Don’t build them a school. Believe it or not, people in poor countries actually have buildings. And they are capable of building more of them. They know how to do it, and it usually, for fairly simple economic reasons, does not cost more in any country to build a building than local people can afford. You know what they don’t know how to do? Teach science and math and English. And often, employing a trained teacher does cost more than they can afford in a small village, because such people are scarce, and it’s hard to spare extra labor in subsistence economies. If you want to spend your money on education, don’t build them a school; pay to train some teachers, and then pay the teachers’ salaries.

Development is not about buildings. It is not about objects. It’s about people.