Please stop building schools in Iraq and Afghanistan

I've been in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.

There are a lot of issues with the way aid is distributed. The most successful parts of both places, the wireless networks and decentralized power systems, have been totally market driven, and actually hindered more by centralized efforts and regulation than helped.

Somalia, where it is too dangerous and chaotic for aid agencies or telco regulators to operate, has cheaper Internet access and mobile calling than almost anywhere else in Africa or the developing world!

Communications infrastructure (roads, signals/fiber/wireless, electrical grid) is one of the few areas where scale can be helpful. In Afghanistan there is a lot of money coming through the military to pay for a road network (with benefits to both the foreign militaries and the local economy; dual use technology at its best). Communications is basically wireless backed by satcom, with some microwave backbone and upcoming fiber, with microwave/fiber driven by military and government customers paying top dollar, then going out to connect up the cell systems. For $20/mo you can buy 3G service.

One of the biggest issues in Afghanistan is that aside from the US Military, the other US funding agencies (primary US AID) have to operate through local contractors, and a rather inefficient process which leads to overpaying for everything, and thus not accomplishing enough concentrated change to be successful. The "Provincial Reconstruction Teams" are afraid to go out except with a huge military presence, and are pretty sheltered from everything, whereas I was riding around in an old pickup truck with a 9mm and no problems.

Irrigation systems are probably the next thing to do after roads (the military has roads under control); these can be done for $5-12k each by local labor, and 20-30 systems per district, all in parallel -- or, you can pay $500k via US AID and get 1-2 systems done after 2 years. The US AID requirement to use local contractors is "trickle down economics" -- basically the hope is that paying an Afghan with political connections $500k to do work will lead to $500k staying in the local economy, paid in wages to other Afghan laborers, etc. It turns out it turns into the connected Afghan spending the same $5-10k to get the project done, and then buying $490k in real estate in Dubai or Canada.

Government and government contracting is the opposite of the startup world in every way. Very few people seem to have done both.

That's a bit of a silly comment on the page. Halliburton, Sodexho, Serco (et al) schtick is services. They would happily train teachers if that was what the government paid them taxpayer's money to do.

edit Just read the original post, and the poster there makes much better points, basically noting that Aid can't be divorced from the overall security plan, or it will be wasted. Restating this as "Don't build schools in Iraq" is, IMHO misleading link bait.

Two points in opposition to this,

#1: Most charities and NGO's that build schools also include yearly stipends to fund teachers and supplies. I don't have a cite for this with me, I'll track down a reliable source later to be sure. I know for instance that Greg Mortenson's does. Most also do independent audits every few years.

#2: In many of the most isolated areas, even if they 'know how to build buildings', local custom requires gender segregation, and building a girls' school isn't a budget priority, but if someone else pays for it, families will gladly send their children to school. Some areas of rural Afghanistan and Pakistan have had skyrocketing rates of female education once additional schools were built.

As with any foreign aid, throwing money at the problem isn't the answer (and lucrative large-scale construction projects rarely are either), it's how the aid is deployed and used. The most effective aid organizations are almost without fail also the ones that require the most accountability from recipients.

A nice read about this is "Three cups of tea".

There's a passage in there that goes something like "Thank you, Dr. Greg, for offering to help us build a school. We talked about it and before we build the school, we decided we need to build a bridge." So they built the bridge instead...

I can't help but feel this is a very broad pattern that happens all the time.

"Hardware is always easy to built. Software is always hard to written except trivial case. Wetware is always expensive just for a competent one."

I think the question to be asked, is the question of if it is in the self-interest of the American taxpayer to subsidize schools in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, this is hard to answer. On one hand, it is unclear how more schools in these countries serve our national interest. On the other hand, without education, young people are more privy to fall into the brainwashing of terrorists. So one could make the argument that if one spends on education, that enhances national security by having more educated people in these unstable countries and therefore fewer people who are possible recruits for terrorists. I guess it is all in the way one does it, if one builds schools with good oversight (i.e. overseen by the coalition and Iraqi/Afghan governments) then one could perhaps justify that. However, if there is no oversight, then who knows what kind of stuff might end up getting taught there. We obviously don't want to spend our tax dollars building schools only so that religious extremists can teach in them. The same is true incidentally in the United States. Government vouchers for private schools are wrong, because these private schools often teach nonsense like Intelligent Design, which to my mind is the Ultimate-747-In-The-Junkyard-As-Designer theory and merits no serious consideration, let alone our tax dollars. So if there is a self-interest in our national security in helping with education in Iraq and Afghanistan that may be justifiable, provided there is strict oversight, and if there is no oversight then it is a no go. Similar to how education here at home should not have tax dollars going to private religious agendas. Ideally of course I think states, and not the federal government, should handle education, since this is an issue of federalism, but that is another issue than the present discussion.