What’s wrong with the Peace Corps, and what can be done to improve it?

A former volunteer, recruiter, and country director for the Peace Corps, Robert Strauss knows the organization inside and out. More than anything, he knows the problems inherent in sending thousands of people– many inexperienced, many recent college grads– all over the world to try to “make a difference.” Writing for Foreign Policy, Strauss recently dispelled some myths about the organization, and offered suggestions for improving the Peace Corps’ reputation and its effectiveness.

Although some of Strauss’ column is spent shooting down straw man arguments in favor of the organization, as in “The Peace Corps is a Potent Diplomatic Weapon” and “The Peace Corps Recruits Only the Best and the Brightest,” he makes a number of serious and important points.

For starters, volunteers aren’t sent where their help is needed most.

Like many bureaucracies, the Peace Corps operates predominantly on inertia. The agency sends most volunteers to the same places where volunteers have been sent before, often to do the same thing volunteers were doing 20 and 30 years ago—regardless of whether their mission still makes sense.

Why, Strauss wonders, are we still sending volunteers to Romania and Bulgaria when they’re already part of the European Union? Why not concentrate on the poorest of the poor?

Strauss also questions whether the Peace Corps is a true development organization:

The reason the Peace Corps is overlooked as a development organization has a lot to do with the youth and inexperience of the majority of its volunteers. Equally important is its unwillingness to decide if it is a development organization or an organization with a mission “to promote world peace and friendship,” as stipulated by Congress in the Peace Corps Act. It would like to be both, but finds itself falling short on both objectives because it cannot decide which is the more important.

So how to improve the Peace Corps? Recruit less, but recruit better. Less emphasis on we-are-the-world hand-holding, more on economic development in the places that really need it– and want it. To live up to its founding ideals, Strauss suggests, the Peace Corps

must go out and recruit the best of the best. It must avoid goodwill-generating window dressing and concentrate its resources in a limited number of countries that are truly interested in the development of their people. And it must give up on the risible excuse that in the absence of quantifiable results, good intentions are enough. Only then will it be able to achieve its original objective of significantly altering the lives of millions for the better.

Reactions to Strauss’ piece from returned Peace Corps volunteers, both pro and con, can be found here and here.

That the Peace Corps is often inefficient– sending fluent Spanish speakers to Africa, maintaining small presences in dozens of countries rather than focusing on a select five or ten– is sort of the nature of the beast. It’s a government-funded (that is, taxpayer-funded) organization with little accountability for its failures.

It goes without saying that many volunteers are passionate about their work and do making positive contributions to their host communities, even if they don’t always recognize it. A few friends of mine are currently working their tails off in the Philippines, and I admire and applaud them for it. I’ve always thought, and still do think, that the Peace Corps is a fantastic opportunity to live and work in a less privileged part of the world. But in all too many situations, as Strauss so forcefully argues, the opportunities created for the volunteers, at a total cost of $41,000 per year for each volunteer, are probably greater than the opportunities created by them.

Vagablogging on “development tourism” here.