The International in RTI
In the fall of 1961, RTI took on its first international project in Nigeria; two years passed before the institute undertook its second, again in Nigeria. It's a different story today, with diverse projects spanning the globe in dozens of developing countries.
RTI's work is predicated on helping governments in developing nations build governing infrastructures; improving water quality, energy, agricultural production, sanitation, pollution, literacy, and health care; and helping to optimize the allocation of resources. Although diverse, this work is closely aligned with the institute's mission of improving the human condition.
RTI works chiefly with USAID, whose primary objective is to assist developing countries while furthering U.S. foreign policy objectives. Other clients include the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations, and the developing countries themselves. RTI was a founding member of a USAID consortium called WASH (Water and Sanitation Health), and it dispatched many scientists over the years to third-world countries to analyze water and sanitation problems and then train local technicians in remediation tactics. The institute helped the government of Morocco plan and carry out measures to address malnutrition and, in the 1970s, it assisted the fast-growing city of Tamale, Ghana, in executing plans for better health care services, roads, drainage ditches, and other infrastructure. "Ghana was rapidly urbanizing, which caused demands on services like sewers, water, and streets," explains Jim McCullough, Ph.D., who led the project.
RTI's international projects proliferated in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. They ran the gamut from developing an R&D center on solar, wind, and hydroelectric power in Morocco to helping the central ministries of Indonesia craft national laws permitting local-level governance.
Dan Goetz, who joined RTI's Office for International Programs (OIP) in 1983, recalls his first USAID-funded project to create a property tax system for local governments in Tunisia—"something that would make it possible for Tunisian towns to no longer hand-copy their tax rolls but actually start managing data," he says. "Database software for microcomputers had just become affordable, and it would give the local governments an effective way to see immediately who was and who wasn't paying their property taxes. We led the creation of this software."
By 1987, more than 50 RTI staff members provided research and technical assistance to developing countries, undertaking projects in Senegal, Mexico, Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Malawi, and Nepal, among other places.
Governance Projects
Local Governance in Nepal and Indonesia
In Nepal, RTI provided training and technical assistance to improve the financial health of town governments. "Nepali cities were doubling their population every nine years, as compared to a normal urban growth rate in developing countries of two to three percent," says McCullough, who directed the project and lived with his family in Nepal while on assignment. "The task was to help city officials mobilize local monies to keep up with existing services like water, roads, and sanitation." Funded by the World Bank, the project called for working with eight local Nepali governments. "Our basic approach was to identify local governments doing things well and then present them as examples to other municipalities," McCullough explains. "The client was so pleased with our work that we were engaged to go national with it—beyond just the eight towns."
RTI also helped the central ministries of Indonesia craft national laws permitting local governance. "This was a much bigger project than Nepal, with a country ten times larger and spread out among thousands of islands," McCullough notes. The successful completion of this USAID-funded project launched a long relationship between RTI and the Indonesian government.
Education has been another focus of international projects. RTI and Harvard University developed methods enabling education agencies in developing countries to improve the planning, monitoring, and evaluation of their national education systems. This work led to STEP (System for Tracking Educational Progress), a microcomputer software package developed by the institute to evaluate school populations, enrollments, dropouts, and graduates. STEP also produced cost analyses and needs assessments for teachers, facilities, and equipment. Five Central American countries and the government of Egypt implemented STEP in the mid-1980s.
In the 1990s, OIP became the institute's new Center for International Development (CID), which offered its services in urban and regional finance and management; policy support systems; health, social, and human development; and the environment. The institute's agricultural economists, for instance, worked with developing countries like Mali to improve farm productivity and food supply and distribution, while its education specialists provided critical advice on literacy to the country's Ministry of Education. Other economists improved tax collection procedures and increased the efficiency of additional administrative tasks in Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand, and Egypt. Modern financing systems were developed for Indonesia, and environmental regulations were crafted for Thailand. Other RTI researchers, led by Sally Johnson, studied how women in developing nations could contribute to the economic growth of their countries. Working with USAID's Office of Women in Development, they created simulation models and prepared presentations for high-level policymakers.
In Egypt, also during the early 1990s, RTI helped develop a policy analysis, communications, and information strategy for the Ministry of Education. In the Philippines, RTI staff trained local officials in management and finance, and in South Africa, where negotiations were under way to end apartheid, the institute developed a unique dialogue support tool called APEX to assist policymakers assessing the future of education in a post-apartheid government. APEX focused the dialogue by sidelining the negotiators' divergent opinions, thereby facilitating a climate of fact-based cooperation to provide equal opportunities for education to all citizens.
Governing After the Soviet Breakup
When the Soviet Union collapsed, researchers helped the constituent countries, including Russia, develop decentralized governments. "No country in the world was as centralized from a government standpoint as the USSR," says Ronald Johnson, Ph.D., who was then vice president of an RTI group that included CID. "Functionaries took their marching orders from people at the top. Now, systems were being created to provide more government authority at the local level."
In research funded by USAID, RTI worked with municipal officials to diagnose existing financial management systems. Based on this research and the priorities of towns and cities, the institute developed training programs for government staff and created computer programs to manage accounting, budgeting, capital finance, personnel management, performance measurement, and property tax administration. "We put advisers in maybe half a dozen cities in Russia; at the same time we were undertaking similar projects for the fledgling local municipal governments in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other central Asian republics," McCullough recalls. By the end of the 1990s, RTI International had crossed the geographical boundaries of 105 countries, including Ethiopia, Swaziland, Haiti, Cambodia, El Salvador, Peru, Uganda, Zambia, the Republic of Tajikistan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Democratic Governance After 9/11
The terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq had a dramatic effect on RTI, leading to one of the institute's largest and most challenging projects and focusing new attention on the Middle East. Since 2003, RTI has been working with Iraq's government under a contract with USAID to improve the quality of governance and public services and to help Iraqi citizens raise the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
Under another project for USAID, begun in January 2003, RTI led the implementation of Pakistan's Education Sector Reform Assistance (ESRA) program. Until recently, fewer than 30 percent of Pakistani children had ever attended school, and only half that number had completed the fifth grade. The literacy rate was 42 percent, and only 51 percent of primary school teachers had more than a high-school education. As the project ended in 2007, efforts were under way in two Pakistani provinces to help district governments work with parents, teachers, administrators, and others to improve schools' effectiveness short-term, develop long-range improvement plans, and access funding. By focusing on the needs of Pakistani children, RTI was strengthening the country's future.
The institute also has been working with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport of the Kingdom of Cambodia since 2004—with USAID funding—to modernize the education curriculum for students in grades one through nine and to increase collaboration between schools and communities—especially by encouraging parents and children to take an active part in education. "When parents, students, and teachers can see the value and relevance of what is taught and learned, children will stay in school longer, even in rural areas, and learn more," says George Taylor, RTI's director of the project in Cambodia.
New curriculum standards completed in 2006 established literacy, numeracy, life skills, and other basic education goals to be reached by all students in four core subjects—language, mathematics, science, and social studies. RTI is helping the ministry implement the standards in support of a national policy to increase the relevance and quality of basic education. The multidisciplinary project involves collaboration with a number of other RTI projects, donors, and nongovernmental organizations, including UNICEF, the European Union, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, the World Bank, Handicap International, and World Education.
Similar work is under way in other developing nations. In El Salvador, for instance, RTI is working to improve the country's health, decentralized and democratic governance, education, public finance systems, and information and communications technology. RTI opened a permanent office in El Salvador in 2003.
Meanwhile, in Africa and South America, Amber Gove, Ph.D., an IDG senior research analyst, is working to increase literacy rates. "A good chunk of the population in Peru, as late as the sixth grade, cannot read and write," she says. In partnership with the World Bank, RTI produced a video to encourage parents to talk to their children about the importance of reading, as well as to motivate the children to read to them. The video has been translated into thirteen languages. "We're trying to demystify reading," says Gove. "It's just another way we can improve the human condition."