I've met people who did Peace Corps, and my opinion was much better after meeting them. First they actually became fluent in the local language. Second their focus was often more on enabling locals than on trying to do stuff themselves. For example, they would work with locals on how to push through applications for grant money from developed countries. Dealing with American foreign aid bureaucracy was actually a skill they were well suited for due to their background and education. Finally, they lived on almost no money in the community for a long period of time. The standard of their living was commensurate with the average person in the host community.
Personal development is fine and yes, the Peace Corps is incredible for that, but only one thing you mentioned is beneficial to the host country: money.
If pushing through grant money is the volunteer's primary talent, they can just as easily do so without spending all that useful money on plane tickets and training.
The other issue is that money by itself doesn't solve problems. You have to use it to solve real issues. But the Peace Corps doesn't fund research into what the issues are, because that's expensive and unsexy to anyone touting what the volunteers are up to. So you get grants to fund construction of libraries when everyone in the country can already go to an Internet cafe and read Wikipedia.
There are multiple decent reasons for Peace Corps not to fund formal research into what the issues are. There is no general recipe to make such research actually useful, especially without local knowledge. The function is already being done by development agencies or NGOs in their own flawed ways, and Peace Corps doesn't have funds for it. Peace Corps doesn't fund big infrastructure projects like building new libraries either. Its capability and mandate really only extends as far as placing and training requested volunteers. Volunteers are limited to the missions requested by the host government and local hosts. If those hosts want help applying for grants, volunteers might help them with that. It's unlikely we know better than locals how we should be helping them. It's actually impossible to determine and carry out locally meaningful interventions entirely from offices in the US, still less if nobody has any training. Even just applying for grants (for what, to be used by whom?)
Peace Corps isn't saving the world, but it does a little in a lot of places and it costs peanuts. If you can do better local work in the same places with the same resources, that's great, do it.
>you get grants to fund construction of libraries when everyone in the country can already go to an Internet cafe and read Wikipedia //
Everyone?
Perhaps you misunderstand what a modern library is - it's a place for accessing information, not limited to books. Most likely it's effectively a free internet cafe or an information centre for a particular school.
Mind you I've seen government funded medical centres without even beds (well mattresses, they had the frames) - so the chances of the information resources turning up and staying put are perhaps slim.
Libraries are also community centers. They offer a lot more than just books. They can offer community programs, children's programs, and assistance on a lot of matters from librarians. They also can offer plenty of fiction that is copyrighted and not on the Internet (legally). Internet cafes are expensive, libraries are completely free. They are also a meeting place for the community and a sense of pride. For some reason they get a bad rap here on HN and in the tech world in general.
