5 - Lewis in Ghana and after

Summary

This chapter recounts one story about how expectations grew, about how the modest idea of UN technical assistance, perhaps inevitably, ‘got grand’. It is also a story about how one man, associated with much of the rest of UNDP's history, began to see beyond the ‘grand’ ideas of the 1950s and to anticipate the ideas that would govern UNDP a half century later. Bill Draper, the Administrator in the early 1990s, argues that the first Human Development Reports ‘showed how national budgets could be redirected from … prestige projects into priority areas … such as basic health and universal primary education’. This is the story of how one man began to learn that lesson.

It is a story about the way in which people from the UN's development network played a central role in the economic transformation of a new country; in that sense, it is one story that could stand for many more, one instance of the roles that UNDP and its predecessor played in scores of countries. Thus, it is the story of a country where the UN's early role paralleled its role in Singapore, but this storyhasaverydifferent outcome. It is a story about the archetypal development project of the time: a giant hydroelectric dam at Akosombo, Ghana, behind which rose what was intended to be the world's largest man-made lake, stretching more than 200 miles up the Volta River.

The central players in the story are just as big as the project itself.