ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some approaches to learning tested by the Inter-American Foundation (IAF); a small agency created by the United States. The IAF was created as an alternative approach to foreign aid. The chapter describes some learning approaches employed by the IAF, emphasizing the distinction between the learning that accrues primarily to the poor people and their “promoters” and the learning that centers primarily in the donor agency for its own purposes and publics. The foundation set out to find and fund innovative projects—to discover who was doing different activities in the non-government arena. The yawning gulf between development theories, models, and paradigms on the one hand and development assistance practice, programs, and policies on the other seemed wider even than the gap between human need and available resources. The academic disciplines linked to development were in some disarray, but there is another rationale for foundation involvement.
