Mexico, and generated close to the regional service centers themselves, so that technical assistance, credit resources, via the foundation are regional in nature. This is crucial in a country the size of Mexico and it could have meaning in other countries of Latin America where everything dominates around the capital, public or private, and you have no localization of resources, technical assistance, or technical approach.

Mr. FASCELL. Give us project No. 3.

Mr. DYAL. I will describe a project which I use simply as a third kind of approach.

One of the first grants we made was to Caritas de Honduras to support a nationwide program which sounds rather prosaic, a rural housewives club.

Mr. FASCELL. There is nothing prosaic about that!

Mr. DYAL. Our grant provided almost $125,000 of a 2 year effort and represents about a half of the resources they needed for this program.

The concept was to enable Honduran women in the rural sector to convert what was a successful child feeding program into a much more broadly gaged program of family and community improve

ment.

Women have traditionally played a very passive role in most of the Latin American countries and in Honduras this was certainly the case.

Once motivated by their experience in the early child-feeding program, a rather simple approach, they became actively involved in a variety of community projects.

Interestingly enough in this particular proposal you see a variety of earlier U.S. organization involvement. Catholic relief services, Vermont Partners of Alliance, credit unions, a whole network of radio schools and other groups to experiment with this variety of community improvement projects.

Last year the 100 clubs formed themselves into a national organization in order to have more clout. They laid plans for a broad program of involvement in their country's development efforts.

They mobilized technical and financial assistance locally and a number of national as well as international agencies.

Our grant supplements what they have already raised, ideological and technical assistance they have on hand locally, and will permit the Honduran women to train paid social promoters from among themselves who have risen out of their own groups, not from the capital, but from among them, who are being democratically selected in this process by the groups of rural clubs.

These women will be trained to aid as social organizers and promoters among the clubs.

We will help to establish a $50,000 revolving loan fund for multiple uses of the grant, $25,000 of which they have raised locally.

It will test a pilot canning program simply to find out if they can improve nutritional standards from their own community gardens by the canning and preserving processes and it will carry out short courses for approximately 1,000 rural women on health, vegetable gardening, food preservation, and other subjects they decide they need help with.

We think this particular project should provide us some unusual insights into methodology, motivation, and participation of rural women in social development and the processes they have formed in clubs they themselves have organized.

Mr. FASCELL. How much money do you have in that?

Mr. DYAL. $125,000.

Mr. FASCELL. You will be in and out of that transaction before the women decide to run somebody for president?

Mr. DYAL. That is right. "Honduran Women's Lib" will have to come as a result after we are long gone.

Mr. FASCELL. Is this the kind of project that you evaluate on an ongoing basis or does that just come afterwards?

Mr. DYAL. This will be a continuing ongoing evaluation.

Mr. MONAGAN. What opportunity is there for the Honduran Government to express an opinion on these projects?

Mr. DYAL. Obviously, we operate on the basis that an organization must have as they say in Spanish, "Visto bueno" and there is no real English translation-the good view or graces of government. It obviously must be a legitimate organization within that country known to that government. We feel it is not our place to submit in formal process a proposal to the government for approval; but, in our proposal review process, we talk with a variety of host country agencies and individuals to gain some assessment of their understanding of the various national and local organizations and projects which are underway. All of this is weighed along with all of the other assessments we get in that process.

Mr. FASCELL. Your projects are supposed to come from local people but already it is being suggested that what is really happening is that the local middle class is telling you what is good for the local poor class. The local poor class are not even getting into the act and are not even being inspired to do anything. It is alleged that your proposals are really coming from a variety of outside sources, even foreigners. Mr. DYAL. This is obviously a question-

Mr. FASCELL. A low blow?

Mr. DYAL. A question we have dealt with long ago, and for a long time, Mr. Chairman.

It is not the first time that I have heard the question. Undoubtedly in many of these instances the broker to us of a project proposal is an intermediary group. Nonetheless, I think it would be unfair to an organization like COPAC, for example, in Medellin, to charge the broker, the intermediary, with a paternalistic kind of approach; the intermediary passed a concept on to us which is expressive of that very lowest marginal urban group of people in the city of Medellin who pulled themselves together and formed the project.

I think the question of who is the broker in some instances is not as important as who receives the money, controls it, and benefits from it. I think we should recognize there are many brokers. We are quite open to the U.N. or the OAS or AID or the Ford Foundation or any local organization being a broker in a process and calling some group or project to our attention.

Our concern is what happens to the people themselves in the organization, what control do they exercise, are they the true leaders within that group, are the benefits from whatever we provide actually going to them rather than to the broker in the process.

I think that would be the hard question we would ask.

Mr. FASCELL. It has also been suggested that what you are using is the old shotgun approach to development. How can you fund an innovative approach if you have not really closely examined all of the past experience and projects? What have you done about that? How do you answer that criticism? Is it valid?

Mr. DYAL. Valid perhaps only in the first instance that we have responded to rather immediate targets of opportunity in order to get moving.

We could sit and study and have prefeasibility studies for the next 5 years and might well come out where we started.

I think if we simply continued only to respond to targets of opportunity, we would be negligent indeed. There has to be some other kind of arrangement of opportunities to get a project funded and organized and to assess the dynamism of these groups.

We plan, for example, over the next year, a variety of consultation groups. These are not formal kinds of conferences to study microproblems. We see these as consultations of practictioners and theoreticians from Latin America and the Caribbean on geographic and subject matter bases to get us to the array of organizations and projects which are ongoing, to look at principal problems and priorities, and to determine where an organization like ours can provide a certain distinct role.

Mr. FASCELL. Mr. Dyal, part of the problem seems to be that social development experts in the United States who are either not being contacted or not being funded by IAF, have gotten the wrong idea about what you're doing. They just have not gotten the message. Therefore, they are being very critical that they are left out of the thought processes and that you and your staff are not smart enough to do it alone. They are not so sure the smart guys know anything about social development in Latin America.

Mr. DYAL. Mr. Chairman, at the risk of being too blunt, I would say expertise does not sit in a single individual or a single organization either on this continent or any other.

I think this is a reason we have elected an approach that recognizes we are not experts. We are a group of generalists, picking the brains of all in sight and attempting at the same time to weigh what the priorities are in that process so we look for expertise whenever and wherever we can find it.

Mr. FASCELL. From a practical standpoint, you have no U.S. constituency because you are not funding any local organizations who are in the social development field. You are not funding any universities and therefore no one in the academic community is getting any of the benefit of what you are doing. Isn't all of this going to create a problem since all of the social experts in the United States are going to say you are wrong.

Mr. DYAL. This will create a problem if we fail to seek counsel and listen to counsel insofar as it is germane to our problems.

For example, we have not ignored the whole field of social development experts by any means. In our early program study even before the Foundation began, more than 100 U.S. academicians and others were approached and asked their views and counsel in the direction of the organization.

At any given time half of my staff is in some kind of contact with U.S. organizations and with universities. We just completed a 2-day session workshop in which we had five evaluation experts primarily from universities along with two private sector individuals involved, to give us guidance on evaluation processes even before we go to the Latins to confer on their suggestions about evaluations. So we got guidance from them recognizing that we are not evaluation experts ourselves.

Mr. FASCELL. One of the suggestions that has been made is that in your evaluation process you really have not taken into account all you might have. For example, it is said that you have failed to evaluate rejected proposals to determine why they were poor proposals. Is that true or false?

Mr. DYAL. I think that is false. I am not sure that I understand the question.

Mr. FASCELL. The question is whether you evaluate rejected proposals to learn about the processes that led to a poorly planned proposal that you had to reject. Are you looking at the rejects to see why they are rejects?

Mr. DYAL. Yes, sir.

Mr. BELL. I think a good example of not only how we have learned in this process but also how potential grantees might have profited by our initial review, would be the example of the Dominican Development Foundation which requested a half million dollars initially, purely for capitalization of its lending program. Our decision was that we could not merely add half a million dollars to its lending program which really would have almost interminable requirements and in which there was really nothing at all new. The Dominican Foundation came back to us later with a proposal which we eventually sent to the Board-and was subsequently approved by the Board-to provide assistance to move marginal groups from their normal lending program into the mainstream of commercial credit, with the Dominican Foundation with the first round of loans serving as guarantor to the banks. These are groups of people who have had a good experience who have demonstrated with their initial loans with the Dominican Foundation that they can be trusted, that they can actually manage their funds and pay back the amount loaned.

So in that case, you might say that we both learned from the process of that original rejection.

There are other examples in which we have felt that we would like to be able to help a group restructure their program. We are often concerned that we not in this process become once again manipulators where we say "we will show you the hoops and you jump through and then you get the prize."

So we have had to be careful that in avoiding one problem, we do not get into another.

Mr. FASCELL. Right, Mr. Monagan?

Mr. MONAGAN. Along this line, to some degree in this process of appraising, I notice that there is an Advisory Council that is established by the legislation. Has such a council been put into effect?

Mr. DYAL. The Board in reviewing the legislation provision for an advisory council felt that, because of the tremendous complexity of social development and given the political scene in Latin America, it

would be more appropriate to fulfill that part of the legislation by having a series of groups and ad hoc committees give us counsel and guidance rather than a single body. The Board was concerned that representation by political groups or certain countries could create problems that would not be understood by all of the countries involved. What we have attempted to do in this process is utilize a variety of groups of expertise from various geographic areas to give us counsel and guidance.

Mr. MONAGAN. There is no advisory council as such, is there?
Mr. DYAL. Officially, no.

Mr. MONAGAN. Do you set one up for each country?

Mr. DYAL. I think, even there, problems are created if you have a group that becomes the foundation group in that country or an individual, such as our man in Colombia or our man in Brazil, and consequently we felt this is much better done on an ad hoc basis. Mr. MONAGAN. There is no formal Advisory organization? Mr. DYAL. No, there is not.

Mr. MONAGAN. And such advisory groups as there are established from time to time for a particular purpose.

Mr. DYAL. Right.

Mr. MONAGAN. That is fine. There is one advisory committee that has never been established. We have been looking over these advisory councils and committees throughout the Government. There has been a tremendous proliferation of them at rather substantial expense and as I read through the provision about paying travel and other expenses, I wondered just what the status was, that is all.

Mr. FASCELL. Questions about projects getting down to the grass roots level keep coming up. It is said that your funding effort so far has concentrated on former organizations as against new indigenous groups. In response to that kind of criticism, what is the ratio of your funding?

Mr.DYAL. To nonorganized groups.

Mr. FASCELL. In other words, you have two projects, one in Mexico and one in the Dominican Republic, both a half million dollars each. They are being funded through existing organized institutions which have been in being for a long time.

You have one other group, a garbage collection outfit, that was not around anywhere. No one had thought of it and it was not formally organized:

Mr. DYAL. Interestingly enough, I suppose with perhaps two exceptions, all of the grants we have made have been to organizations that have come into being within the last 4 years including the Dominican and Mexican Development Foundation.

The Mexican is 18 months. The Dominican is 5 years. The Colombian group fairly recent. In every instance I believe it is less than 5 years, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. FASCELL. Yes. But do you find a trend being established here? Are you dealing with processes already established, even though they might be new, instead of with the poor group which has never applied for anything and never gotten anything?

Mr. DYAL. I think in this case you may well have a small poor group which is a spinoff from some of these organizations.