IMPACT: Can You Measure PC Effect?

Does the Peace Corps have a measurable effect on a country?

The first attempt at answering that difficult question has been made by a team of anthropologists from Cornell University who have just turned in the first scientific study of the impact of Volunteers assigned to communities in the Peruvian Andes.

The results of this scientific study fill a 329-page report which details two years of on-the-spot research in 15 communities where Volunteers were active in community development work, using as a control five other villages where no Volunteers have been assigned.

General conclusion of the study: Peace corpsmen do make a difference. Among the findings is that Peace Corps communities progressed at a rate 2.8 times faster than those communities without volunteers.

Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver the report as being of "great practical and historical significance."

For the first time we have objective, scientific validation of the successes Volunteers are registering in the field of community development. It is hard, demanding work in isolated areas under sometimes difficult and frustrating conditions, but the report shows that the Volunteers have been successful even beyond our initial hopes."

Help Program

He said about one third of all Volunteers and more than half of the 4,000 now in Latin America, are engaged in community development work, i.e., teaching democracy on a community level, encouraging people to work together to solve their own problems.

The subjects were 50 Peace Corpsmen, the first Volunteers in the Andes. They operated in communities located in spectacular mountain country at extreme altitudes (some as high as 13,000 feet), inhabited by the Indian descendants of the Inca civilization, interspersed in the larger towns and cities by mestizos, Peruvians of mixed Spanish and Indian blood.

Dr. Henry F. Dobyns, one of the Cornell research team leaders, describing the report's findings, said that in the field of community development "results are normally computed over the course of decades ... these Volunteers produced measurable results in two years. Some would consider this progress incredible."

Tales of Two Villages

The study, however, is a human as well as a scientific document, and it reports candidly on the Peace Corps' failures as well as its successes.

The authors (Dr. Dobyns, Dr. Allan R. Holmberg, chairman of the Cornell anthropology department and Dr. Paul L. Doughty, now on the Indiana University faculty) tell the story of how Peace Corpsmen were expelled from the village of Vicos by a vote of its Indian inhabitants, and how some of the Volunteers were then specifically asked to return to the village.

Also related is the story of the community of Chijnaya where one Volunteer successfully transplanted an entire Indian community whose homes had been lost to floods.

Peace Corps Institutes Changes

Research such as the Cornell/Peru report is not an exercise in vanity as far as the Peace Corps is concerned. Frank Mankiewicz, Latin American regional director of the Corps, said the Cornell team's observations and recommendations resulted in immediate changes in the Peace Corps' operations in Latin America even before their final report was completed.

Preliminary reports led to a marked increase in language training, improved relations between the Volunteers and Peruvian institutions with which they worked, and modifications of the Peace Corps' training and overseas operations.

Community Development Pioneers

Mankiewicz, who describes the study as a "landmark" in community development research, points out that the 50 Volunteers who were the principal subjects of the study were among the first Peace Corps community development workers.

They operated almost without precedent or textbook in a difficult culture among people to whom even Spanish was an acquired language.

"That they did so well is remarkable; but, as importantly, we have been able to benefit from their mistakes."

Mankiewicz said he believes one of the most important contributions Peace Corps Volunteers such as the Peruvian group make is their role as "witnesses to the condition of the poor among whom they live, prompting the community at large to pay attention to the needs of the poor."

Among numerous other conclusions of the Cornell report:

* Volunteers form one of the most effective channels for U.S. assistance.

* Volunteers are most successful when they work effectively with both local community action organizations or other institutions, such as AID, involved in technical assistance.

* Volunteers contribute significantly to basic long-term socio-economic development in the Peruvian Andes, creating and strengthening organizations so that they can continue to solve local problems even after the last Volunteer has departed.