The Washington Monthly quotes CGD Vice President for Special Initiatives, Dennis de Tray, on local grants distributed to small villages in Afghanistan.
From the article:
"....Guggenheim designed a program that would distribute small grants to villages....Local leaders were charged with administering the projects and required to take bookkeeping classes and keep minutes at planning meetings. Billboards above project sites indicated how money had been spent, encouraging local oversight. 'The core elements were requiring that citizens participate and that there be high levels of transparency about how money was being transferred and used,' one of Guggenheim's former Bank colleagues, Dennis de Tray, now at the Center for Global Development in Washington, said. 'It had to be auditable.'
....Maybe the most surprising characteristic of NSP projects is security related. In a survey last year of school burnings by the Taliban, Human Rights Watch observed that schools built by the NSP have less chance of being destroyed by insurgents than schools built by other aid programs. The reason, as Dennis de Tray explains, relates to the matter of local ownership. 'If you're the Taliban, you feel some comfort in attacking things built by foreigners,' de Tray says. 'But you don't want to create animosity among citizens you're trying to recruit to your side.'"
