Saturday, September 04, 2010

No Dough!

I recently took a job with an agricultural development project in the country of Georgia and it seems pretty interesting, certainly in my line of work (Agriculture) but at the same time it seems to suffer from lack of interest from all sides (except the donor and my organization of course). In my years of working in Agriculture I have come to learn that my line of work is about as unsexy in the development realm as work could be. The problem is that from the beneficiary side they are quite often looking for hand outs and the idea of having to do more than write an agreement saying "I promise I will use these things you gave me for free to better my life" is just not worth the time. On the other side you have government which has little interest in anything that they can't say they helped with, and if you aren't making something then they don't care (unless there are big revenues involved, ie casinos, there are a ton of them around here). In the end, in talking with my predecessor, it looks like it will be worlds easier than Azerbaijan but at the same time not so easy in that they (gov/people) just aren't investing in anything agriculture (I do have to give the gov props for the roads and the un-corrupt police, nice change from Azer).