The Aid Debate: What we can Learn from Health Care Delivery in Cambodia

With three-thousand aid organizations in a country of 14 million people, the aid community in Cambodia seems “small” as the workers regularly run into each other on the street. While it is true that aid workers, on rotation from developing country to developing country, are knowledgeable about Cambodia it is almost in a CIA Factbook or WHO health indicators sort or way. It is as if they all got the same cultural briefing from the Peace Corps and knowledge acquisition stopped there.

Those on-the-ground may be using the same phrases to describe the situation, but they are by no means touting the same party line. Major complaints include “aid fragmentation,” “corruption at all levels,” “pharmaceutical anarchy,” and “over-reliance on harmful traditional practices.” The challenges are uncontested. Yet for all the complaints on “aid fragmentation,” each representative had his or her own approach to solve the problem. The in-fighting of the aid organizations hampers not only aid organizations’ effectiveness but also their credibility as staying true to the mission of improving Cambodians’ lives.

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