In Africa, lives are improved without handouts

When Joao Bueno and his team of field workers first visited the dusty village of Inhamizua, Mozambique, they knew they had a tough sell.

They weren't offering money, food, or help to build houses. They wouldn't dig wells or pay teachers' salaries. All they could do, they told the villagers gathered under a mango tree, was help Inhamizua help itself. The audience of subsistence farmers, already accustomed to scratching a living from this flat swath of southeast Africa, was less than impressed, Mr. Bueno recalls. Some people even told the group to leave.

"They were very suspicious," he says. "Five other organizations had come before us, did lots of paperwork, and never came back. The community doubted we'd do what we said we'd do."

But months later, attitudes in Inhamizua are changing. Residents have built a bamboo school and community center. More than 100 women – about one-quarter of those who live in the village – are in adult literacy classes. As in other Mozambican villages where Bueno's organization, Care For Life, is working, living conditions here have improved. Villagers are repairing roofs, digging latrines, and clearing trash from their yards themselves.

"This is what happens when people realize that they can be self-reliant," Bueno says.

Care For Life, a US-based charity that is staffed primarily with Mozambicans, is at the forefront of what has become a new trend in foreign aid to Africa. After decades of large donor boondoggles – multimillion-dollar highways to nowhere, expensive water pumps that deteriorate after a few years – many aid groups are now focusing on smaller projects that are, at least in theory, designed and controlled by locals.

Large UN organizations like UNICEF and the World Food Programme regularly team with local nonprofits. In aid lingo, "handout" is out, while "capacity building" and "local control" are in. On a macro level, some donor countries – such as the Britain – are giving more aid dollars directly to African governments, with the idea that local officials best know their countries' needs.

"There is a changing view of Africa," says Rhyddid Carter, a spokesman at the UK Department for International Development. "It's not this sort of bottomless pit that you throw money into. There are ways of helping people invest in the communities and to help them from repeating mistakes.... You work with the local people; you work with the local governments."

But in practice, the meaning of "local control" and "sustainability" – two of the current buzz phrases – varies from project to project.

Care For Life, started by Arizona couple Blair and Cindy Packard, treats those concepts as goals.

Ms. Packard, a midwife, first focused on Mozambique after watching footage of the 1999 floods there – in particular, the famous image of a woman giving birth in a tree. When she read about the high child-mortality rate in this region, she decided that she and her husband needed to try to help. In 2000, she visited Mozambique; the next year, she and her husband set up their nonprofit.

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