Technical assistance—or technical co-operation as it is now more often called, partly in deference to the susceptibilities of its recipients—is part of foreign aid. Its purpose is to create the skills and institutions needed for faster development, also referred to as ‘capacity building’. Technical co-operation (TC) consists partly of people sent to countries in need of particular kinds of technical or other professional expertise, and partly of training or education in the donor countries. Sometimes the technical assistance takes the form of a brief visit by consultants. More typically, foreign experts stay for a year or longer—to work as economists in the Ministry of Finance, as science teachers, as agronomists or to set up a rural development project. Much technical assistance comes as part of a project that also contains financial aid. A new computer system in the statistical office, financed by foreign aid, may require experts to install it and to train local staff in its operation. Increasingly, technical assistance is provided under the aegis of non-governmental organizations like Oxfam or Médicins Sans Frontières.
Taking the OECD countries as a whole, technical co-operation now accounts for some 25 per cent of their total foreign aid. But that percentage is an average, with large variations between member states. For instance, 43 per cent of UK bilateral aid takes the form of TC, while in Norway, Sweden and Japan it accounts for only about 14 per cent of total aid. In 1991 there were some 150,000 trainees or students from Third-World countries in the OECD countries, while 80,000 TC personnel were working overseas (OECD 1994).
Technical assistance, like the rest of foreign aid, began after the end of the Second World War. Before that, colonial governments had often provided such assistance, but on a much smaller scale. Technical assistance received a great boost in 1949 when President Truman delivered his Inaugural Address and under Point Four urged ‘a wider and more vigorous application of modern and technical knowledge’ in the interests of Third-World countries. Much of it came through the specialized agencies of the newly established United Nations; some of the agencies devoted themselves very largely to providing technical assistance. The Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Health Organization are just two cases in point. Much of the funding for UN technical assistance comes from the UN Development Programme (UNDP). World Bank projects also often contain large elements of technical assistance.
One major problem with technical assistance is that it is often inappropriate to conditions in the recipient countries. The technology used in advanced industrial countries tends to reflect the fact that labour has become expensive in relation to capital. It is therefore capital intensive. It also reflects these countries’ affluence. This technology may be quite inappropriate in countries in which it is capital that is scarce and expensive, not labour, and which cannot afford, for example, the standards of medical care found in countries with a much higher income per head. Much technical assistance has unfortunately been insensitive to these considerations. Nor is it the donor countries alone that have been responsible for the transfer of inappropriate technologies. Often governments and others in Third-World countries have put pressure on donors to provide the very latest technology, regarding anything less as part of an attempt by advanced industrial countries to perpetuate the backwardness of the recipients. Inappropriate technology is also sometimes transferred by returning students, who want to put into practice what they have learned, however inappropriate.
The most common model of technical assistance is the expatriate expert working with a local counterpart who will eventually take over. The efficacy of this model has been questioned. To induce foreign experts to live and work overseas they have to be highly paid and comfortably housed, but this is often resented by their locally paid counterparts, and that impedes the effective transfer of knowledge. Moreover, not all experts are good at imparting their expertise to others. The increasing use made of volunteers is in part a response to the difficulties experienced with technical assistance.
Walter Elkan
Brunel University
Reference
OECD Development Assistance Committee (1994) Development Cooperation 1993 Report Paris.
Further reading
Berg, E.J. (ed.) (1993) Rethinking Technical Cooperation, UNDP Regional Bureau for Africa, New York.
Cassen, R. (1986) Does Aid Work?, Oxford.
Mosley, P. (1987) Overseas Aid: Its Defence and Reform, Hemel Hempstead.
Seers, D. (1962) ‘Why visiting economists fail’, Yale, University Growth Center Paper 10, New Haven, CT.
