SAN FRANCISCO - The young girl walked four hours on foot with her teacher from her home district of Aileu Kota to East Timor’s capital to compete in the reading contest finals sponsored by the Ministry of Education. Her commitment to books paid off when she not only won this, but also the primary school competition, beating out contestants from 49 other schools. In a country where the literacy rate is only 50 percent and access to education is limited, this was no small feat.

Books have always been a central part of the Asia Foundation’s approach to international development in the Asia-Pacific region. The organization has distributed more than 52 million books and educational materials to 17 countries over the past half century. In 2007 alone, it donated $33 million worth of materials through projects like Books for Asia and the mobile library initiative in Sri Lanka.

Books for Asia is the foundation’s longest-running and most successful program, said Debbie Felix, the Asia Foundation’s communications manager.

“Books in English are highly valued in Asia,” she said, explaining that in many areas these books are the only new, high-quality and up-to-date ones available. “We do highlight it a lot because it’s something more tangible, it’s literacy, it’s education, it’s empowering young minds with embracing education.”

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, founder of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, credited the Asia Foundation with providing books to his school library in the 1950s and making it possible for each student to have a textbook.

“That was a fantastic opening for us,” Yunus says in a video on the foundation’s Web site.

Later, when Yunus became an economics professor, he asked the Asia Foundation to help provide the books his students needed in post-war Bangladesh.

“These were the books that came in very handy, very useful, to start all over again teaching,” he says in his video message on the Asia Foundation Web site.

For 54 years the nonprofit, non-governmental Asia Foundation has sought to improve governance, law, and civil society in Asia through programs focused on women’s empowerment, economic reform and development. Headquartered in San Francisco with 17 offices in Asia and one in Washington, D.C., the foundation consistently receives the highest marks from organizations that rate NGOs for effectiveness and efficiency. With a 2007 budget of $112 million, the foundation is the third largest charity in the Bay Area. It receives funding from private and public sources, including most major donor agencies, and provides millions in grants to organizations and NGOs throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Last year the foundation gave $68 million to support programs throughout Asia, a region that almost two-thirds of the world’s poor call home. The organization’s cores areas of expertise are economic reform and development, law and governance reform, elections, women’s empowerment, the environment, international relations, information and communications technology, and book donations.

Encouraging entrepreneurship

Barnett Baron, the group’s executive vice president, said that the most fundamental challenges facing Asian countries relate to economic opportunity.

“The biggest challenge is job creation and economic policies that promote innovation and entrepreneurship because fundamentally if you’re going to have food riots in countries with functioning parliaments, then where have you gotten?” he asked.

He said he foresees a second round of agricultural crises because of the lack of investment in agriculture.

“The foundation’s trajectory will continue to focus on improving governance, that’s our particular niche in international development,” Baron said.

This means improving the quality of government services, improving representativeness and openness of government and improving the quality of services and processes like elections and constitution building that underlie effective development. With about half of its funding sources coming from outside the United States, Baron noted that the foundation will also continue to diversify funding to ensure program continuity during times of economic trouble.

The foundation takes a holistic view of development that includes the usual realm of programmatic activities but expands the meaning of development to include fostering cross-cultural understanding and improving relations through exchanges between Americans and Asians. In Afghanistan, for example, the foundation sponsored a regional exchange with government officials from the world’s largest democracy, India.

“In some countries, we function more as a grant making organization, in other cases our staff are conducting the work themselves so we have nice ability to respond to needs,” said Felix. Such an approach “allows us to get to the root of the issues and respond in most appropriate ways,” whether that is by helping local organizations build capacity, increasing funding for particular issues or carrying out programs directly.

“In some cases you want to be more behind the scenes,” Felix said. In other cases, it makes the most sense for the foundation to take the lead, she indicated.

Field offices, rather than headquarters or donors, make programmatic decisions at the Asia Foundation, a fact many staff see as the organization’s greatest strength.

“We can understand the issues facing citizens in each country and respond in a more dynamic way because we’re there,” said Maya Salomon, a senior recruiter in the San Francisco office who has also worked in Asia.

She noted that although there are centralized themes, the San Francisco office does not “dictate” policy or programs.

Felix explained that since the foundation is not an endowed organization, it earmarks all money raised in the U.S. for programs in Asia. If it cannot raise the money, the group has to be creative. Donor agencies may fund programming for a certain amount of time or aimed at a particular crisis, like tsunami relief in Sri Lanka, but these deals often lack the longevity needed to resolve a problem or need. The Asia Foundation will seek parallel funding or funding for programs that grow out of the initial project.

“We are very program-focused,” Felix said. “We look to offices to let us know what areas they want to program.”

Involving locals

One of the distinguishing features of the Asia Foundation’s approach to international development is its focus on longevity, locality and autonomy. As Felix put it: “We aren’t an organization that arrives for the issue, addresses it and leaves. We stay.”

“We have local staff in each office that have worked with us their whole professional life,” Felix said, noting that the foundation’s staff makeup gives it a depth and breadth of institutional knowledge, perspective and vision that can only come from people who are dedicated to its mission and active in their communities.

This, to Baron, is one way in which the foundation distinguishes itself from other international development organizations.

“The vast majority of our staff are Asians, not foreigners that come in for a few years and leave,” Baron said.

Although the size of field offices varies significantly as does the ratio of expatriate to local staff, in all cases the majority is local. These staff have the same opportunities as non-Asian staff, which is not necessarily common in the international development sector. Local staff are encouraged to participate in “temporary duty assignments” so that there is overlap and sharing among all staff, Felix noted.

Felix recently returned to headquarters from the Thailand office, where she worked for a year and a half and got to see first-hand the impact programs have on people on the ground.

“An election program might seem obscure, but that’s their election they get to vote in,” she said about Thailand’s 2007 general elections. “They’re creating history and that was really inspiring.”

The foundation has been active in Thailand since it was founded in 1954, and for many years its work focused on human trafficking, from funding training sessions to workshops and NGO projects. Through years of working closely with the police, prosecution and service organizations, the foundation has been able to pull back and turn much of its activities fighting against trafficking over to Thai organizations.

“It’s very important to be involved, however long that takes,” Felix said. “In a way, that’s a small success that they don’t need an American organization. The best case scenario is when the issue isn’t a problem anymore.”

Fast facts
• Name: Asia Foundation
• Founded: 1954
• Type: NGO
• Mission: To “improve governance, law, and civil society; empower women; strengthen economic reform and development; and promote international relations” throughout Asia
• Annual budget: $112 million (2007)
• Director: Douglas Bereuter
• Number of employees: roughly 600
• Headquarters: San Francisco
• Opportunities: asiafoundation.org/about/employment