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Sectoral successes: activities with big payoffs or problems
OECD 1999
Real Progress: Fifty Years of USAID in Costa Rica
Looking at all sector studies, the story is usually similar to the two cases above.
USAID provided resources that helped incrementally steer in a positive direction.
In some cases, however, the USAID contribution seems sufficiently large that its role
was more than incremental. It was associated with changes so large or dramatic that
it made an unmistakable contribution to a changed reality in the country. Specific
cases where this occurred include:
– The Inter-American Highway. Major infrastructure projects can play a key role in
national development. Although not funded by USAID, this may be the single
most important US government – financed investment in Costa Rica. The
Bureau of Public Roads spent USD60 million on the road between 1942 and
1972, with Costa Rica contributing about USD20 million. Before the road was
built, motor vehicle traffic was feasible only in the central valley. Communication
with the ports of Limón (on the Caribbean coast) and Puntarenas (on
the Pacific) was only by railroad, and transport to Nicaragua or Panama was
by boat or aeroplane. The Inter-American Highway provided the backbone of
the Costa Rican transport system and ended the isolation of much of the
country. It created a national market for agricultural products, broadening the
diet of Costa Ricans considerably. It made possible real Costa Rican participation
in the Central American Common Market. US training of Costa Rican
engineers established procedures still in use for contracting public works
projects.
– The agricultural servicio. The impact of US – financed technical assistance during
the 1940s and 1950s was high. The people provided were hands-on agronomists,
and they worked in an environment where little effort had been made
to use scientific approaches to agriculture. The changes they introduced
were generally simple, but they proved highly profitable to farmers who rapidly
disseminated them to one another. The cost of the programme was modest,
as US agronomists earned USD5 000 – USD10 000 a year, and overhead
support costs were probably far lower than they came to be when USAID
became bureaucratised.
– Health projects. Between 1945 and 1980, life expectancy and other health indices
improved dramatically. As Mata (1996) has shown, the Costa Rican
achievements were due to the sustained efforts of a group of socially conscious
Costa Rican medical professionals, who were able to count on substantial
resources and similarly dedicated professionals in USAID and other
organisations such as the World Health Organisation. The success of the
effort, however, goes back decades earlier, when a sense of purpose and esprit
de corps in the Ministry of Health gradually became institutionalised.
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