Page "government" Paragraph 16

D.

Encouraging self-help

1.

The reasons for stressing self-help

A systematic approach to development budgeting and programing is one important kind of self-help.

There are many others.

It is vitally important that the new U.S. aid program should encourage all of them, since the main thrust for development must come from the less developed countries themselves.

External aid can only be marginal, although the margin, as in the case of the Marshall plan, can be decisive.

External aid can be effective only if it is a complement to self-help.

U.S. aid, therefore, should increasingly be designed to provide incentives for countries to take the steps that only they themselves can take.

Aid advice is not interference

In establishing conditions of self-help, it is important that we not expect countries to remake themselves in our image.

Open societies can take many forms, and within very broad limits recipients must be free to set their own goals and to devise their own institutions to achieve those goals.

On the other hand, it is no interference with sovereignty to point out defects where they exist, such as that a plan calls for factories without power to run them, or for institutions without trained personnel to staff them.

Once we have made clear that we are genuinely concerned with a country's development potential, we can be blunt in suggesting the technical conditions that must be met for development to occur.

2.

The range of self-help

The major areas of self-help are the following: ( A ) the effective mobilizing of resources.