In Borom Sarret (1963, translated as The Wagoner), Sembène’s camera follows his protagonist as he leaves his wife and child in the morning, taking his horse-drawn cart around Dakar as a taxi for hire. Throughout the day, he suffers a range of abuses at the hands of fraudsters and police, returning home to his hungry family worse off than he started. The short film ends with the wife setting off ominously into the night to earn the family its only meal of the day.
Atlas Network’s local partners are tackling, and solving, the institutional problems Sembène featured indirectly in his films. Do we need USAID’s $50 billion budget to meet this moment? No. Our local partners achieve verified results for pennies on the dollar compared to foreign aid largesse. We vet 800 projects a year and select roughly one-third for funding with a typical grant size that is between $30,000 and $50,000.
For that kind of money, you wouldn’t think our local partners could successfully:
· Secure property rights for women in South Sudan
· Ease business licensing in Burundi
· Increase freedom to work in Brazil
But they do. That’s the power of localization done right. When our grantees report their success, we do not celebrate ourselves as foreign experts who solved a problem. We, along with our grantees, celebrate the power of freedom to unleash human potential. We marvel at the ingenuity of free people who prove fully capable of ending poverty for themselves.
When you support Atlas Network, you’re investing in today’s very best projects for freedom around the globe. You’re also investing in tomorrow as we work alongside a growing network to build its capacity to achieve future results. Transitioning away from foreign aid will be disruptive, but it will be worth it. There is a better way. Atlas Network’s supporters have been right about that all along.