• Service delivery is an approach to development in which critical services are provided to people who could benefit from them. Some examples of these services are building infrastructure and emergency relief.

• Top-down development: Service delivery is sometimes called, top-down or centrally-planned development.

• Service delivery programs are created and implemented by people other than the poor and hungry themselves.

• Mainstream approaches: For the past 50 years, mainstream approaches to development have been largely service delivery oriented.

• They include activities such as government-sponsored development programs, technical assistance, foreign aid for disaster relief, or provisions of health or education by a non-governmental organization.

Need for an alternative 

• The experience of South Asia shows that the service delivery approach has largely failed to truly end hunger.

• Resource limited: Service-delivery programs depend on government budgets, which are never large enough to meet more than a small fraction of the needs.

• Unsustainable: Programs stop when the funding stops.

• Insensitive to local conditions: In a region with more than 1 billion people, it is hard for top-down approaches to be sensitive to local realities. Plans are often unable to take into account changing conditions in local communities.

• Bypass the poor: The majority of South Asia’s, and the world’s, poor and hungry never have access to the programs that are supposed to provide services for them.

• Inefficiency: The late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi stated that only 15% of government funds for the poor ever reached them. Some experts estimate that since the early 1950’s, $100 billion in aid has been given worldwide to less developed countries. Less than 1% of that money has actually reached the bottom 20% of humanity.

• Encouragement to corruption: Top-down government programs also create an opening for corruption, since money must pass through the hands of people in power before it can reach the beneficiaries. Corruption has now seeped into all levels and sectors of South Asian society.

• Mindset of dependency: Most importantly, top-down, service delivery programs create a mindset of dependency among grassroots people, rather than focusing on people's own creativity and strength. Many local people feel alienated by central planning, since they have very little say in initiatives as they are developed.