Sustainability, Business, and Aid

Schaffer&Combs partner Arthur Combs is working this week in central Vietnam on a wheelchair project…

Sustainability is a buzzword that gets thrown around so indiscriminately that it sometimes makes us want to grind our teeth.

It is, nonetheless, a vital concept. In international aid a lot of foreign groups show up with grand ideas for a two week hitch and then disappear. Locals have learned to take what they can and ignore them as much as possible. It’s the rational response to smart people who think they know a lot about your country and your business.

After all, these projects are businesses in their way. To be successful they require sources of funding and must respond to local impulses you could accurately describe as market forces. An American business wouldn’t think much of a group from Vietnam showing up for a week with a quarter million dollars, minimal skills in the English language, zero local knowledge, and a ton of advice. And yet, that is what foreign NGOs do far too often.

I’ve been ruminating on this all week. We’re working with a rehabilitation hospital in Danang, as well as a number of small NGOs around Central Vietnam. I first worked in this hospital in 2007, with the same group of Vietnamese administrators, doctors, and physical therapists. Some of my teammates here have been back a dozen times.

Our hosts were extremely polite and accommodating when we first embarked on the project. Today we have an actual working relationship and a reasonably free exchange of information. Some of the things we found inexplicable about their operations are now clear to us. They feel free to tell us when something will not work in their context. We are able to push back from time to time from our own perspective. The work–distributing complex wheelchair seating systems that cannot be sourced in Southeast Asia and simultaneously helping local factories to produce better products–is progressing quickly and well now, with efficiency, good humor, and tremendous teamwork.

In order to reach this point, we had to achieve a baseline understanding of local needs, practices, and businesses so that we could understand what our local partners are trying to teach us. We had to come back over and over again in order demonstrate our seriousness and professionalism, and in order to earn our partners’ trust. We had to demonstrate to our donors that we were achieving the impacts we set out to achieve, and that we know our business.

We have achieved a reasonable level of sustainability with this project. We think we can use the word here without danger of dental injury.