Hasta Luego to Honduras - But It Was the Right Call

No doubt that Peace Corps has had a rough year or so in the media. While they've celebrated their 50^th Anniversary, they've also been subject to much more scrutiny as than in the past, and rightly so. We've seen the unfortunate death of a PCVs in Paraguay and Mozambique  from auto accidents, and most notable the suspension of the Honduras program, and that Guatemala and El Salvador are no longer receiving new training groups.  

And the story is pretty intense, and so is one volunteer's response.

A Corps in Crisis? Not so fast Charles Kenney

I’ll be the first to admit that Peace Corps has its flaws. And indeed a model based largely on sending 20-something recent college graduates across the world to good seems a bit flawed in this day and age. After all, Peace Corps was started in 1962 – just after the Marshall Plan and when humanitarian aid for development was country to country cash transfer. Sending people abroad to work in communities was a new approach as was community based development. Policy makers still believed in the trickledown effect back then.

But we’re in a different world today. Both the supply and the demand side of Peace Corps has changed. NGOs and humanitarian organizations are sophisticated. In terms of demand, people around the world are becoming more educated and are attending trade schools and universities in greater numbers. Students strive to be engineers, doctors, lawyers etc in the same vein of past generations of Americans. In terms of supply, the humanitarian aid/development field has proliferated with UN agencies, regional INGOs, NGOs and all other kinds of acronyms working at all levels on issues from food security, micro-credit, youth development, and any other subtheme. While there’s still demand for aid organizations, they become less precious when the market expands and gets crowded. There’s a host of other organizations that do programming areas better than Peace Corps. So is Peace Corps even necessary?