FACTSHEET ON TCDC AMENDMENT

The United Nations hosted a World Conference on Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries in Buenos Aires, Argentina from August 29 through September 12, 1978. It represented the first real South-South international conference ever held. The wrap-up report of the conference by the American delegation reported that "an air of purposeful concentration on the substantive work at hand, and an absence of political rhetoric and divisive national agendas, pervaded the entire conference".

The conference was successfully concluded when 138 nations unanimously adopted, without reservations, a Plan of Action with 38 recommendations. Most of these recommendations were directed at the developing countries, but some call for actions by the developed countries to facilitate technical cooperation among developing countries (TCDC).

In his message to the Congress, President Carter stated:

"For too long, the developing countries have tended to rely exclusively on the industrialized countries for their technology. We look forward to a world in which developing countries can be producers as well as purchasers of technology ***. The United States welcomes the opportunity to be both a participant and a beneficiary of the activities that will emanate from the plan of action of this conference."

The proposals of U.S. Ambassador John MacDonald for a "trilateral approach", whereby the U.S. Government could facilitate cooperative arrangements between groups of developing countries and American public and private institutions was well received. Ambassador MacDonald has since proposed several steps which the U.S. could take to promote TCDC before the Development Coordinating Committee.

However, the interest of the Administration in TCDC leaves much to be desired. There is a great danger that this important approach will be ignored as new issues and conferences crowd the agenda. A strong expression of Congressional interest in and support for TCDC could be of great value in keeping alive this promising approach to greater self-reliance in the developing world. Mr. WOLPE. Mr. Cotter, would you like to present your testimony now before we turn to questions?

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM R. COTTER, PRESIDENT, AFRICAN AMERICAN INSTITUTE

Mr. COTTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I assume that the entire testimony will be inserted in the record.

Mr. WOLPE. Yes, it will.

Mr. COTTER. I would simply like to go through it, page by page, hitting a few of the highlights. I will begin by saying I have been working in the development field for 12 years now, both in the Ford Foundation and in the African American Institute, and I must underline what Chuck Whalen has just said concerning the Sahel infrastructure. It is desperately necessary in African countries. The prejudice in the Congress against infrastructure really relates to countries. much more developed than African countries. I have created and attached as the last page of my testimony, a new table which demonstrates the deprivation of infrastructure taking one indicator, namely, energy consumption. You will find that correlates with a good number of other infrastructure lacks, but if you look at that list of the aid recipient countries, you will find the African countries predominate in lack of infrastructure, and you could set up standards whereby the infrastructure-poor countries throughout the developing world are given special permission to receive infrastructure help by AID. It is along the lines of Chuck's recommendations. Certainly all

of the Sahelian countries would qualify for special infrastructure help.

The other part of my testimony relates to educational deprivation in Africa. I would like now to point out to the committee that when Congress adopted the New Directions in 1973 it unintentionally forced the AID administration to walk away from building up local strong training institutions in the developing world, particularly universities. If you are in a country that has a lot of strong universities, as some developing countries do, that was not a disaster. But for virtually every African country it was a disaster because Africa is very underdeveloped in terms of its own manpower availability. It does not have the manpower to implement any of its own development projects with any kind of consistent effectiveness, and along with Chuck's recommendation that we should be engaged in the process of self-help, we must go back and, in African countries particularly, assist them in strengthening their own educational institutions that are developmentrelated.

A second point in this testimony is that I am not sure the Congress is aware of how much money we spend on American technical assistance, that is, Americans who are sent abroad to implement the AID program. On page 2 of my testimony you will see those numbers. These are not summarized anywhere in the AID presentation from the government to you. These have to be laboriously extracted from each of the 219 African projects which I did for fiscal year 1979. You will see that we spent over 90 percent of our money in the AID program on American technicians, commodity purchases, construction, and miscellaneous. We spent only 12 percent of the total AID budget on training, that is, building up the capacity of Africans to do their own development work.

Moreover, just slightly half of that money, just about $18 million, was spent on long-term training. These are the people who are the equivalent, in terms of education, of the American technicians whom we send abroad. So we spend $18 million on long-term training to build up African capacity to do development, and we spend $88 million sending Americans abroad to try to do development in a culture and environment in which they are not comfortable and frankly not very effective for the most part.

Congress is right to insist that the AID program reach the poorest of the poor. That is the goal, and it does not dictate the means by which you do that. We should be building up strong, local training institutions and building up local manpower to some extent in our own universities in this country when their training instiutions are not capable of training so that Africans can do their own development. That is the way development will happen, not by American technicians sent for 2-year contracts abroad. The shortage of local manpower is particularly acute in Africa. If you compare the African Continent with Asia and Latin America, you find the following: Asia has four times as many university students per capita as Africa, and Latin America five times as many. That is an enormous gap. That gap will not be bridged in our lifetime. There are 36 universities in Africa. There are 1,000 universities in Latin America, and when you walk away from building up local universities as we have in the AID program. Africa is par

ticularly prejudiced by this. The rest of the developing world is fairly well off in terms of their local universities, but Africa is way behind. It is a young continent, only recently free from colonialism. The number of technicians we have sent-I am now on page 3-has increased alarmingly since the 1973 New Directions. In 1973 we sent 391 American technicians to Africa. In fiscal year 1978 that number had trebled to 1,400, and in 1979 quadrupled to 1,516.

Our participant trainees, that is, those trying to train Africans to do their own development work, doubled in that same period. But more disturbingly, we are shifting now from long-term training of people who can on a consistent basis lead their deveolpment efforts to short-term courses. Some of them last no more than 1 month. American technicians are extraordinarily expensive, and training moreover consists of not just the fastest way to reach the rural poor, it is also the cheapest.

Each U.S. national serving abroad costs $80,000 a year. Some tell me that is a conservative number, that the number is closer to $100,000 or $120,000. Each American per year training an African to do development, to get, for example, a masters degree in agriculture in this country, or a Ph. D. to train him to the same level as an American technician costs about $8,000 per year in an American institution. That means if you spend $160,000, you can get one of the two following: You can either finance 1 U.S. technician in Africa for 2 years, or you can train 10 Africans to the masters degree or 5 to the Ph. D. level in our institutions to do their own development work.

Now, if you further assume that each African goes home at the end of his training, and Africans do go home, Africans do go home at the end of their training, you can purchase either 2 man-years of an American or between 100 and 200 years of Africans working on their own development. This is an efficiency ratio in dollars spent of 50 to 1 in favor of training Africans to do their development instead of having Americans try to do it on a short-term basis. This does assume, of course, that Africans go home and that they do get relevant jobs in the development field. The experience of organizations running AID programs for the past 15 years shows that they do go home. Our own AFGRAD program supported by AID has a 90-percent return rate at the completion of masters and Ph. D. degrees in this country. Other studies confirm this.

This does not mean the U.S. Government should support training in the arts or other fields not relevant to development, but in addition to agriculture, health, and nutrition, we should also be supporting economics, engineering, management, sociology, natural sciences, anthropology, and other development-related fields.

Right now there is a prejudice in the Congress and the AID agency against such training despite the lack of such people in African countries. American universities, of course, right now are well equipped to train Africans. They are sensitive to the development needs and the particular kinds of training necessary, and they will have increasing space over the next 15 years as the number of our 18-year-olds drops dramatically by over 25 percent. Africans coming here are also exposed to an open society which can have only positive results in terms of human rights considerations in their own countries. It is true that there

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are a lot of foreign students in this country and that the numbers are increasing every year, but not from Africa. These students are coming from the Arab oil producing countries, 31 percent, or from Asia, 55 percent. Only Nigeria is in the top 15 countries, foreign countries, Sending students to the United States. So if we are going to increase the number of Africans in American universities who are destined to do development work in their own countries, the U.S. Government is going to have to do more.

I should also point out for those Members of the Congress who are interested in the race with the Communist world that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe recognize the importance of training. They have 18,000 Africans studying in their universities now. We have 2,000 under American Government sponsorship. They have nine times as many as the United States is supporting, nine times as many Africans in their institutions as we do in ours.

Now, training in an American university need not be elitist. It is not elitist if the people are selected on the basis of their ability rather than on the basis of some ascribed position in their society. Increased support for the development of African universities and other training institutions also fits with African priorities.

One of the problems Congress must be concerned with is that too often you legislate here in Washington without consulting those who are supposedly the beneficiaries of your largesse. African governments are asking you for this kind of assistance, but the AID administrators say the Congress does not let us do it. I have quoted from a Nigerian development plan which notes that, "it is not the lack of money so much that retards development, it is the lack of people, the lack of trained indigenous manpower."

We know that this is going to be a rough year for the AID program and other foreign assistance programs because of the competitive domestic demands on a limited budget. I would argue that if we are going to have cuts in the AID program-and I pray we do not-if we are going to have them, that the impact of those cuts can be cushioned by reallocating money more efficiently within the AID program. I have several suggestions on that ground which are on page 11 of my testimony. First, we should increase substantially the percentage of funds devoted to long-term high level manpower development, increasing it from about 6 percent where it now is, to, say, 15 percent. We should decrease the funds spent on American technicians from the current 33 percent to 20 percent. And, if we are going to continue to send large numbers of Americans, let's send them under the private, voluntary organizations. They can send a technician abroad for $30,000 or $40,000 a year instead of the $80,000 or $100,000 a year at which AID sends them. Use the PVO's for American technical assistance. Point four is to encourage AID to strengthen use of universities and other development-related post-secondary training institutions abroad, especially in educationally-poor AID recipient countries, and most African countries would come into that group, if you look on the chart attached at the end of the testimony. Finally, reenforcing Chuck Whalen's point, allow the AID administrators to do infrastructure work in those countries which are desperately poor and short of infrastructure.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[Mr. Cotter's prepared statement follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF WILLIAM R. COTTER, PRESIDENT, AFRICAN AMERICAN INSTITUTE

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss some aspects of the foreign assistance program with your Committee.

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In 1973 Congress ordered AID administrators to chart a "new direction" that would channel all development assistance into a direct attack on the problems of the rural poor the "poorest of the poor." As a result, projects intended to build the institutions or infrastructures of developing countries are now undertaken surreptitiously, if at all.

Reacting to congressional pressures, AID has deemphasized two very effective tools: strong local training and research facilities and a supply of well-trained, indigenous manpower adequate for managing current and future development projects.

The problem has afflicted AID worldwide, but the symptoms can be seen especially clearly in Africa. A page-by-page review of the budgets for 219 separate African projects in the AID's congressional presentation for fiscal year 1979 shows that only 12.2 percent of AID funds spent on that continent are devoted to training. Of this,

* William R. Cotter, president of The African-American Institute and president-elect of Colby College, was assistant attorney general of Northern Nigeria in 1962-1963 and the Ford Foundation representative for Colombia and Venezuela in 1966-1970.

This testimony is based on an article which will appear in the Spring 1979 issue of Foreign Policy.