Rhetoric and reality: USAID-funded training programs for professionals from the former Soviet Union in the United States

Abstract

This study: Rhetoric and Reality: USAID-Funded Training Programs for Professionals from the Former Soviet Union in the United States, attempts to gauge the intentions and motivations of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) foreign national participant training programs. USAID facilitates these training programs by providing foreign aid money to local subcontractors to train professionals from the former Soviet Union. Against this backdrop, the views of USAID are contrasted against the views and perspectives of the local training directors who receive this funding, and the training participants who are recruited by the U.S. government in their home countries so that they may travel to the United States to take part in this training. The results of this dissertation indicate that the U.S. government has been using these participating local training organizations to transmit an ideologically conservative agenda onto the training participants. The data portrays, however, a nuanced acceptance of this ideology among the trainers and the training participants. The data is also rife with contradictions, or 'disconnects', concerning the U.S. government's motives of its foreign aid policies, the training directors' acceptance of federal grant money to conduct the training, and the training participants' reaction to and internalization of the training messages embedded in the training programs.