The ILD Program

Over the years, the ILD has used the metaphor of a bridge to show how its Program moves, stage by stage --from building Awareness of massive extralegality and the need for institutional reform to a Diagnosis of extralegal practices and their causes to Institutional Reform, Implementation and Capital Formation. Each stage is a discrete project that provides the necessary information and personnel for the next one. The objective of the Program is to move the dispersed, extralegal assets of the poor majority (mainly houses and small enterprises), languishing as dead capital into a newly reformed legal market economy where the potential value of those assets can be unleashed to help lift people out of poverty and create homegrown capital.

The constant in ILD's research in developing countries around the world over the past 25 years --fieldwork has been completed now on four continents-- is that most business and property assets are extralegal, typically more than 80%. Also in every country, the evidence is overwhelming that the primary causes for such massive extralegality are burdensome, costly, or just plain bad laws. Nevertheless, as similar as the developing world's extralegal sectors might be, fundamental legal reform cannot take a cookie-cutter approach; one size does not fit Tanzania, Egypt, and Mexico. Each country has its own specific problems, needs, and timetables; the ILD takes those contexts into account when designing reforms. Moreover, no successful implementation is possible without carefully designed and sound reforms; and no such reform design will emerge without a careful, complete diagnosis. Modern market economies cannot be built in developing countries with "quick fixes."

The bridge metaphor has served the ILD well. But in the course of all of this experience --and to meet the growing demand for the ILD's help-- the ILD Program itself has evolved. We have learned, for example, that Awareness is not simply one preliminary stage; rather it runs all along the bridge. The ILD has also faced up to the fact that because of its limited personnel, time, and budget, the ILD can work in only half a dozen countries simultaneously. With demand for the ILD Program now at 47 countries and still counting, the ILD had to adapt and reorganize. The result is the new "Training and Monitoring" strategy for creating implementation teams in client countries, trained by the ILD in its methodologies and experience and set up in the field to execute the ILD Program, thus not only creating local capacity for generating reforms but also the kind of leadership and ownership in the results that will sustain them over time.

In short, the old bridge has been revamped to handle more traffic with an added stage of "Training and Team-Building [0]" (see Fig. 1 below).

 Fig. 1: The Current ILD Program Bridge

Cont. 

The Stages of the ILD Program [0]

Training and Team-Building [0]

Crucial Institutions for the Creation of Wealth [0]

.