Working Misunderstandings: Donors, Brokers, and Villagers in Africa’s AIDS Industry

why do development projects, and aidS projects in particular, take the forms they do? in this essay we argue that it is because the conflicting interests and world views of the key actors involved—donors, brokers, and villagers—leave only a narrow range of themes and practices that can “work” on the ground. By “work” we do not mean, in the aidS case, that they help prevent Hiv transmission; indeed, the non-medical approaches to Hiv prevention are largely ineffectual. what needs to be explained is why such approaches are nonetheless repeated so consistently. we show that these themes and practices work in the sense that they satisfy the varied agendas of the major actors sufficiently to sustain their day-to-day cooperation. understanding these actors and their varying interests and world views is key to understanding why development projects rely on such a narrow repertoire of approaches, particularly the arcane and ubiquitous practice of training. Hiv prevention projects are our case in point. Hiv prevention projects generate complex misunderstandings and conflicting motives among the critical actors in the aidS enterprise: the deeppocketed altruists who fund the programs, the local brokers who implement them, and the villagers who are the programs’ ultimate targets. much has been written about such misunderstandings and motives, both during the colonial period in africa (white 1987; Hodge 2007; Cooper 1998) and in recent times (luke and watkins 2002; Gibson et al. 2005; Burchardt 2012; maes 2012). the surprise in our story is the degree to which these disparate actors fumble toward accommodations that allow them to get along, however awkwardly. using an unusual range of data that we, our colleagues, and graduate students collected in malawi, we describe some of the cultural themes the aidS prevention and mitigation enterprise produces, and the remarkably