Paper short abstract:

Exploitation and coercion harden indigenous West Africans against development interventions. To combat these impediments, agencies must craft new policies that mandate field-level corruption checks, guidelines detailing value change objectives, and preference for supporting indigenous innovations.

Paper long abstract:

As development planners have devised new means of introducing sustainable practices, many African communities have been unresponsive, or even hostile. Are these communities so steeped in tradition that they are unwilling to adopt new ideas and techniques?

I offer two alternate explanations for resistance among West African farmers: "Forced value change" involves development agencies pressuring project participants to adopt the values held by the development agency, and "systematic corruption" involves resource capture by locally-hired development facilitators.

Linking arguments in the literature with field observations, I suggest that constant pressure to change beliefs, values, and behavior forces West African farmers to drop out of project participation. In addition, farmers complain about corruption, claiming that they are being systematically cheated, exploited, and excluded from the development process, which often occurs without the knowledge of project directors.

Several strategies for overcoming these widespread problems are proposed. Forced value change is a problem primarily because it occurs surreptitiously. Thus, agencies must be transparent about value change objectives, both at the institutional level and local project level. Second, local-level corruption is primarily the result of heavy funding and project manager ignorance. Thus, mandated corruption checks and a shift in project emphasis to supporting indigenous innovation could help eliminate corruption. Mandating corruption checks will force managers into the field to verify that intended beneficiaries are receiving project deliverables. Focusing on indigenous initiatives will reduce involvement of exploitative development agents since these ventures tend to be small-scale and labor intensive rather than capital intensive.