Peace Corps Reform

Before coming to Peru for the Peace Corps, I worked at the Brookings Institution for a short while. One of my main projects there was coordinating a Work Group on International Volunteerism whose primary objective was to double the number of American volunteers overseas by 2010. This work group consisted of representatives from a wide variety of NGOs, private enterprises, universities and government agencies including such groups as USAID, Partners of the Americas, Habitat for Humanity, Points of Light Foundation, Catholic Relief Services, Pfizer Inc., IBM, and several congressional offices. One of the most active organizations in our coalition was the Peace Corps, represented by the alumni body of the Peace Corps called the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA).

On several occasions we held subcommittee sessions on the future of the Peace Corps, with involvement from Brookings experts, the NPCA national leadership, Sen. Harris Wofford (one of the original Peace Corps architects), USAID reps, and some recently returned Peace Corps volunteers. These sessions were quite interesting for me to participate in since at the time I was a soon-to-be Peace Corps volunteer. It was insightful for me to experience the “Washington perspective” of Peace Corps before actually arriving in Peru and experiencing the “local perspective” of Peace Corps.

What I took from those meetings is that many people would like to see a bigger and better Peace Corps, fulfilling the potential that JFK saw when he first created the program in the early 60s. President Kennedy envisioned that 100,000 Americans would volunteer annually in the Peace Corps, creating America’s most vibrant and effective foreign policy tool; today, the number of Peace Corps volunteers stands at 8,000, just half of what it was in its peak during the late 1960s and nowhere near JFK’s original plan. The Peace Corps subcommittee at Brookings advocated at least a doubling of the Peace Corps by 2011, the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. With verbal commitments by the next president to double the size of the Peace Corps (with equivalent funding), hopes are high for such a change to take place.

Another topic discussed during these meetings which I found interesting was the necessity for organizational reform within Peace Corps. While Peace Corps is incredibly effective at creating goodwill and understanding between Americans and the people of developing countries, criticisms have been raised that Peace Corps does not do a good enough job improving real conditions on the ground. Part of the problem is that Peace Corps, unlike many other professional development organizations, does not measure its long-term effects in the countries in which it works. There are no longitudinal studies measuring exactly how much family incomes increase, or exactly how much diseases decline, or exactly how much the environment improves in volunteer sites. For this reason, some in the international development community do not consider the Peace Corps to be a “real” development organization. Thus, the belief is that in order to truly propel Peace Corps upwards as America’s most effective foreign policy tool and an effective development organization, it must be expanded quantitatively and improved qualitatively.

My own personal sense of this, based on the limited time I have been serving as a volunteer, is that these criticisms are basically on point. When I was accepted into the Peace Corps back in 2007, I found that during conversations with friends and family, many people were not very aware of Peace Corps’s existence. If they were aware of it, they associated Peace Corps with the 1960s decade, with “hippieism,” and with volunteer drug use. Their notion of Peace Corps is not quite up-to-date. For me, this is a shame, because Peace Corps does such great work and is by far one of America’s best foreign policy tools. Being here, I see how easy it is for Peruvians to look on TV every now and then and see their local news channel reporting something negative about the United States and believing it. People in small towns in foreign countries are disconnected from the complexity of what America is. It is very easy to form over-generalized opinions about America based on the limited information they receive. But as soon as a Peace Corps volunteer is put in the town, ideas begin to change about what America is. Volunteers put a personal face to America. Lengthy conversations between volunteers and people in their sites help to dispel misconceptions and create a genuine dialogue.

So I imagine what things would be like if Peace Corps did have 100,000 volunteers every year and I think the effect would be tremendous. To imagine the effect I see on a small scale through mine and Milene’s daily interactions with people here in our town, multiplied by the hundreds of thousands every year, is inspiring. Especially after 9-11, many Americans are looking for ways to serve their country and I think Peace Corps is one of the best options out there—but its capacity is nowhere near big enough and its presence in general American society is limited. By now it is almost cliché to say that America’s image is suffering in the world and our relations with other countries deteriorating. But the thing about clichés is that they are usually true. As a nation, I don’t think we can afford to ignore this problem, and one of the best solutions I see (albeit biased at the present moment) is to drastically increase the Peace Corps in both size and funding.

The other point raised is Peace Corps’s effectiveness as a development organization. That is, not just bringing about better understanding between America and other countries, but actually making long-lasting impacts in key areas such as education, health, environment and poverty. From my experience here, I have noticed that most volunteers are rather young (in their 20s) with limited work experience in development (including myself). I don’t think that this in and of itself is a major problem, but it just means that volunteers need more institutional structure and guidance to ensure that their projects are well-chosen, effectively managed, and sustainable in the long-run. In Peru, this is hard to guarantee because there are simply not enough trained staff to help manage the multitude of projects that volunteers undertake. In my Small Business Development program, for example, we have one staff who is capable enough to guide and manage projects, but as our program director he is swamped with overseeing 40 or so volunteers and handling all the day-to-day problems that go along with that. He simply does not have the institutional support needed to ensure that projects for all 40 volunteers are carried out successfully. Volunteers are mostly trusted to choose their own projects and carry them out as they see fit. But this brings us back to the problem that most volunteers have limited professional development experience and thus basically do the best they can.

It’s hard for Peace Corps to know if their volunteers are doing a good job in development work unless it somehow studies the changes that happen on the ground in the towns. Currently, volunteers submit reports to their in-country headquarters about three times a year. But these reports are mostly numbers-focused and not what I would call effect-focused. For example, volunteers report how many people in their town listened to a talk they gave on washing hands, or they report how many people attended a seminar on basic accounting practices. So Peace Corps knows how many people we are reaching, but what they do not know is how many people we are affecting and how permanent that affect is. Continuing with the example, although Peace Corps may know that 100 people in my town learned about the importance of washing their hands, they don’t know how many of those people went back home and actually started washing their hands, and more importantly, by how much related diseases declined. This type of information gathering would require far more sophisticated and professional studies. This is problematic, because if Peace Corps does not measure its developoment effectiveness in real terms, there is no way to know if what we are doing is working and if not, how to adjust our strategies as a result. I strongly believe that volunteers do make a real development difference, some more than others depending on experience, motivation etc., but it’s important that Peace Corps becomes more serious about knowing what that difference is that we are making and trying to make our impact a lot more effective.

If you’d like to read more about this whole debate, I am posting links to two articles below, one of which was written by members of our Brookings subcommittee on Peace Corps. Any comments you guys would like to post on these articles or this topic is fully welcomed.

Article 1:
http://devex.com/articles/where-to-go-peace-corps

Article 2:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=F.7c399238-0e20-47c1-bf5f-1adfc7f465f3