SOMETIMES progress takes place in extremely small steps. The mistake of development specialists for many years was to overlook the little improvements in favour of big projects which looked spectacular on paper but proved impractical in the field.
So instead of building ponds to supply villages with water the experts constructed multi-million dams which flooded some villages and deprived others of their supply.
Likewise, western donors were prone to spending their money on training doctors and engineers, when the real need in developing countries was for nurses and technicians. Or employing expensive western consultants when local expertise was available.
The failure of this top-down approach has prompted a radical rethink of aid priorities among many donors, including Ireland.
The most dramatic transformation has been in Ethiopia, which is the biggest single recipient of Irish Aid.
Everything about Irish Aid in Ethiopia is deliberately low-tech and focused on basic needs ford water, health and agriculture. Why use an electric water pump, when a hand pump will do? Why dig a deep bore hole when a water pond will collect the rain?
Why spend money on an expensive health centre, when a three-roomed clinic can dole out the aspirins and anti-malarial and anti-parasitic drugs that account for 80 per cent of medical problems.
This year, Irish Aid will spend a massive £8.5 million in three zones in Ethiopia, the largest investment ever made by the Government in a developing country. Most of the Irish aid agencies also have large programmes here, including Concern, Goal, Self Help and Action Aid.
Yet for all the Irish involvement, there are surprisingly few expatriate staff working in the field. This is because most of the work - and in some cases, all of it - is carried out by highly qualified and able Ethiopian staff.
Irish Aid's programmes are run by four local experts, covering the areas of health, education, agriculture and gender issues.
There isn't a single Irish staff worker in the field. "It is largely run by the Ethiopians and their institutions. We're not the line managers, or the decision-makers. We don't even sign the cheques," says Mr David Barry, the charge d'affaires in the Irish Embassy in Addis Ababa.
Mr Barry admits there were doubts in the Department of Foreign Affairs about the new approach: "We were asked whether we could run a programme without Irish faces, and without accounting for every pound spent."
But he says the standards of accountability are the same, "no better and no worse than if expatriates were holding the purse strings. The programmes are regularly audited. In three years he says, there hasn't been a single case of misappropriation.
Mr Barry concedes that the programme in Ethiopia is "a reaction" against the approach taken in other developing countries where large numbers of expensive western consultants were used. "The Department went down that road for 10 years and then decided that it wasn't the right approach," he says.
But there is another reason for the difference of approach here, compared to other sub-Saharan countries. Ethiopia is different, as its inhabitants are quick to tell you. The visitor is constantly reminded of the country's independent past, of its 5,000-year kingdom, and of how Christianity came here first before travelling to Europe.
Aside from Mussolini's short-lived incursion in the 1930s, it was spared the colonial yoke. Even then, it seems the legacy of the Italians - especially their cappuccino bars and gelaterias - is unusually positive.
There is tremendous pride and self-reliance here not found elsewhere in Africa. This partly explains why Ethiopia has become the largest recipient of Irish development assistance, and why aid workers say their programmes arc more fruitful than almost anywhere else.
This model of local control has proved unrealisable in many other sub-Saharan countries, where agencies have too many doubts about control and probity to put their theory into practice.
But in Ethiopia, it is producing results. A country which suffered horrific famine a decade ago is now virtually self-sufficient. Ethiopia is a star pupil with the World Bank for its debt management.
But the true scale of the achievement will not be found in macro-economic indices. More importantly, the twin virtues of peace and self-reliance are helping Ethiopians to develop their own solutions. In small but appreciable ways, their villages, farms and pastures are becoming better places to live in.
