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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IPP Class Tackles Cambodia’s Maternal and Child Health

It was the Monday before Fall Quarter finals when 12 Harris School students boarded a plane for Cambodia and, though most had just finished taking their exams a week early, some were still writing research papers on the seemingly endless flights to Phnom Penh. The added pressure was a small price to pay after devoting the last seven months to studying Cambodia’s health care sector as a part of Harris School’s annual International Policy Practicum (IPP) course, which travels to a different country each year.

The group spent hours talking with representatives from The World Bank, Asian Development Bank, USAID, and the editor of The Cambodia Daily newspaper about, among other things, the challenges of rebuilding the country’s health care sector.

“It’s just a mess,” remembers Elizabeth Vivirito, a student in the class. “We saw that all the time between organizations, and even within an organization, the two hands weren’t talking to each other.”

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