This is a very interesting debate on the World Bank Africa Can blog between the Chief Executive of Oxfam GB and the Chief Economist of the Africa Region at the World Bank.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/oxfam-and-quiet-corruption
In particular, it’s fascinating to think about the contrast between this argument from Oxfam:
The failures to achieve universal access to health and education are primarily due to lack of investment by governments and the international community in publicly financed and delivered health systems.
And this one from the World Bank:
The reason these services are failing poor people is a series of accountability failures in the service delivery chain.
While these are certainly not mutually exclusive diagnoses, the relatively weighting and influence on the debate is quite important.
What do you think?
Dictators and Disasters dominate.
Yet the facts suggest otherwise – in the past decade, some of the highest growth rates in the world have been in African countries. 22 non-oil producing countries have had 4+% growth rates, which is gradually eating away at poverty rates.
Have you been interested in hearing about the more concrete successes?
Here is an interesting list, complied by the world bank, of 42 specific success. Pretty neat to glance at.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/african-successes-listing-the-success-stories
Enjoy!
Parker
I’ve been reading a bit on China to supplement my regular set of books on Africa, aid, agriculture, and business growth. The contrast couldn’t be stronger. Shows how different the two contexts are.
From Richard Dowden, author of “Africa”
“In Europe, families shed people, in Africa families acquire people. Perhaps this is because European societies had too many people and not enough land, whereas in Africa there was always plenty of land but not enough people to control it. In Europe people stood and fought for land. In Africa wars were fought for pillage: for slaves, for cattle, for control of trade. Rarely did people fight for a piece of land. It was not necessary. There was always lots of space. If villagers did not like a chief, they tended to move away and walk of the hill to start afresh. ”
In China, from “China through the Ages”
Even their kings were known for engineering works:
“The founder of the legendary Hsia dynasty gained his reputation by taming the floods. He confined the rivers to their beds in thirteen years, traveling so constantly that he allegedly passed is home three times without having the time to enter it.”
And the structure and standardization associated with economic growth and improvements in life began in 500BC. The author talks of “famous hydraulic engineers” who dammed the yellow river, then the Yangtze. They standardized the width of wagon wheels to have identical roads throughout the empire. They had land deeds and buying and selling of land. They had emperors whose work was focused on agriculture, and on the people’s satisfaction.
They intensified their agriculture, regularly increasing their yields by a few % every decade. The built more and more irrigation, creating hundreds of thousands of miles of major irrigation canals and millions of miles of minor irrigation canals over the centuries. They had common weights and measures. The had a bureaucracy with meritocratic entrance exams. They had large scale public works and an effective state administration. They had large scale manufacturing.
And all this over 2000 years ago years ago.
I’m continuing the theme about humility and creating change.
At the Skoll Forum we were told a story, by Tim Smit, who founded the Edan project. He conceived of it in the 1990s and had dozens of people toiling away to bring it to fruition. Core to their success was receiving a 50M$ grant from the government associated with the Millennium.
They were waiting and waiting to hear the news. Finally, they received a fax. The Edan project was in category C – very unlikely to receive funding. As he told the story:
“ What was I to do? So many people were working so hard. Could I just tell them that we didn’t get this grant? That the project would have to stop? I thought about it. Then I called a press conference. And in front of the media, I congratulated the Millennium Granting authority on their far-sightedness for awarding the Edan project the 50M$ grant! And low and behold, a few months later, it appears they believe that they did grant it to us, and we got the first cheque from them in the mail”.
I have to admit, I was astounded. My reaction to something like that would be to follow the rules – that someone else had deemed our work to be less interesting than another group’s. and I’d likely abide by that decision – or at least, I’d try to influence it privately, not arrogantly, publicly.
Now, that said, the Eden project is considered a huge success, with over 4M visitors, and has revitalized a part of south western England, and has helped people to understand sustainability issues and the complexity of our planet. Had Tim Smits not undertaken this bold move, it likely would have been halted.
How does one combine an unwavering belief in one’s vision, with a deference for some rules, and with humility?
What do people think?
Parker
http://www.edenproject.com/our-work/index.php
http://entrepreneurs.bankofscotland.co.uk/get_inspired/big_interviews/tim_smit/index.aspx
I recently came across this fantastic article from a NY Times theatre reporter and immediately thought of EWB’s African Programs volunteers and staff. Here’s the defining quote:
It takes a special kind of humility to devote yourself to being backstage for the creation of a play, to knowing from the outset that you will receive little of the credit. There is, of course, a certain safety, too, in being out of the line of fire. But we are a culture that more and more seems to define success as the aggregation of renown, as the cachet of a boldface name, as the catalyst for a gazillion clicks of a mouse and qualifying for a sizable personal entry on Wikipedia.
So toiling anonymously in a public profession such as the theater translates for me into something rather noble. You know from the outset that there will be no fanfare for you, that the satisfactions will on some level always be vicarious. The good of the whole is what matters.
I can’t think of a better way to describe our volunteers and staff who are in the field. They are necessarily out of the limelight, working diligently to ensure that it’s their local counterparts who are credited for every contribution they make. They are working to ensure that the behind-the-scenes development processes – like the un-sexy, but critical, incorporation of accurate data into district level medium-term development plans in northern Ghana – are increasingly effective.
 Our Governance and Rural Infrastructure Team in Ghana leads a 3-day workshop on computer skills to allow for more effective district planning. These incredible individuals who I have the honour of calling my colleagues are doing the work that few people talk about or know about in development. That their work is so unknown is something that we at EWB believe is part of the problem. In particular, too many donors – and I’m talking about large development agencies with “experts” along with individual donors who aren’t thinking about poverty alleviation as a fulltime job – undervalue the organizational mechanics of delivering effective programs for poverty reduction.
Certainly it’s a great moment when the ribbon is cut on a new AfriDev water pump in a community, but if the location of the pump wasn’t based on community-level data and nobody thought about ongoing monitoring and maintenance activities, then the water is not likely to flow much beyond the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
So, here’s my recognition for the stagehands of development, because a curtain call isn’t possible if nobody is there to raise the curtain.
We have seen outsiders working in Africa screw things up royally. We have seen outsiders arrive, feel confident, be unaware of an implicit and explicit power dynamic, and make suggestions that are totally unfeasible. We learned early on that being conscious of how little we knew about the local context was critical, and that being open to asking questions and actively seeking feedback was key to learning.
This humility in our work in Africa is a cornerstone of what we do.
However, I’ve recently been wondering how this should translate into our work in Canada. I was reminded the other day of the story of the VCR wars between the two formats: VHS and Beta. Beta was a better technical solution with the best picture quality, whereas the company behind VHS worked hard to sell their approach, to get their idea out. It reminded me that “the better answer” doesn’t always prevail, and that groups sometimes have to promote what they are doing to generate momentum. I want to throw out a controversial question – is our humility in Canada preventing us from promoting ourselves and our work as much as we need to?
I feel that, compared to other groups that engage engineers in development, and compared to other groups that are trying to tackle the challenges around agriculture, water and sanitation, and rural infrastructure, and compared to other groups that are trying to support local organizations’ capabilities, EWB has a pretty darn good solution. It’s far from perfect, and we need to work hard every day at making it better. But, it is among the best in class. And most importantly, we learn and we change!
So I’ve been wondering. Can we simultaneously be proud of our model, be proud of what we’ve accomplished, and be willing to promote this idea widely, while also maintaining our value of humility? Is there a contradiction?
Because the fact is, EWB needs more money, and more people, to meet the demand from our African programs. We also think there needs to be more groups in Canada who chose to promote opportunities in Africa, rather than charity in Africa. And there needs to be more groups who are willing to engage their members in a sophisticated way to bring about change, rather than a simplistic way. That’s where progress lies. Can we simultaneously be humble and say “we want to be the best and biggest outreach group in Canada”? Can we simultaneously be humble and say “we think we have one of the most cost-effective and sophisticated programs and we would like your support to grow this work?”
I was thinking the other day that I’d hate to feel in ten years that we’d followed a “Beta” approach – that while we were quietly creating a really good model, working to improve it every day, other more simple, and frankly less appropriate, models were being promoted and would eventually supplant EWB’s more thoughtful approach.
“A billion Africans depend on countries like ours to work with them to change their all too bleak and desperate circumstances. They know we cannot do it for them, but they expect we will help.”
That was the opening salvo of the third day of the Canada at 150 from one of Canada’s great diplomats, Robert Fowler, who set the stage for a day of impassioned conversation.
I had the great honour of following that as a panelist later in the day, sharing some thoughts on Canada’s role in the world generally, and in development more specifically.
(You can watch the panel I participated in online at the Canada at 150 conference website – www.can150.ca .)
My opening remarks actually challenged the premise of the panel, implied in the title “Canadians Making a Difference in the World” – that conversations of what Canada contributes to the world are very Canada-focused, what influence do we have, what’s our presence, what power do we have, are we a middle power or model power, does the US like us and are we their best friend or is that Britain, and so on. “Let’s stop” I pleaded.
Instead, I suggested that we start talking about the ideas we want to implement, the difference we want to see in the world, and then pour our passions into bringing that about. We’ll discover our role in the process. But we should be bold in what we want to see brought about.
And then I proposed two principles that should guide these ideas, and one way of operating that we need to embrace:
Two principles
- That we have an unwavering and unequivocal commitment to universal dignity in our world, and that anything less is simply unacceptable.
- That we have a dedication to critical friendships among diverse people based on trust.
One way of operating
- Viking Leadership: That we need to embrace the fact that we live in a complex world. We know the changes we want to see, but we can’t pretend to know the path before setting out on our journey of change. We must embrace the uncertainty, realizing that success depends on our ability to adapt and understand in the face of changing circumstances. But we can’t be meek – we need to be bold in the face of this uncertainty, like the Vikings were!
I also shared some specific policy recommendations, mostly on development:
Development and CIDA
We need to make a decision as a country: Do we see our development contributions as critical to the world we want to see? If the answer is yes, which I believe it is, then we need to get serious about development as a country.
The status quo is not acceptable: our most talented young people graduating today and who are interested in development don’t want to go near CIDA and instead aim for DFAIT or the Department of Finance. That should be a flag. So should indicators of CIDA’s entrenched bureaucracy outlined in the recent Auditor General’s report.
I believe we need to get serious by creating a Development Ministry, like DFID in the UK, with a senior Minister and an independent voice in foreign policy that is focused exclusively on poverty reduction. We need to get serious by making Canada’s development about ideas and innovations, perhaps by creating more IDRC-like entities (Crown Corporations that are quasi-independent of government) that can test out new approaches with fewer constraints and more room for failure. We need to get serious by reforming Treasury Board regulations that inhibit smart funding and establishing a world-class arms-length evaluation body for Canada’s development assistance. And we need to get serious about development by putting more resources, human and financial, against it.
Some other ideas I put forward or wanted to but couldn’t fit in:
- A “pause button” on student loan payments (or even some forgiveness) for young people doing international or domestic volunteer placements within 5 years of graduation.
- A set of government funded think-tanks (and special tax incentives for privately funded ones) that would create an ongoing intellectual capacity around international issues in Canada, particularly development. These would be similar to the FFRDCs and FACAs in the United States.
- See Canada’s unique development contribution as potentially around knowledge and information systems – leveraging new technologies, organizing information and knowledge, and ensuring that all the new information being generated is used responsibly.
- Creating a National Secondment Program with the goal of involving 30,000 people (or 10% of the federal workforce) that would see 1-3 year secondment opportunities between the federal government, provincial governments, private sector, NGOs and perhaps other governments or multilateral organizations. This would create the cross-learning and understanding that will be necessary for the “Viking approach” to the challenges of the coming decades.
- Time to lose the Whole of Government thinking –> future challenges and solutions are going to come from a Whole of Canada approach.
For those in the need of critical yet informed opinions about development thinking, here are the three blogs that I find myself revisiting most regularly.
Owen Barder has a great blog with analysis on contemporary development challenges and is focused on helping to make aid work better for those it is aimed to support.
Duncan Green, director of policy at Oxfam UK, who wrote “From Poverty to Power” (their analysis of social change is superb and fascinating for our work in Canada and Africa) has a regular blog in which he shares thoughtful ideas, more at the macro level.
Finally, the “What we’re reading” section of the ONE Campaign’s blog provides daily stories of what’s happening in development. It’s an easy way to stay on top of current events.
Hope you find them interesting!
I also love some of our EWB blogs:
The First Mile and Innovations with Farmers capture some of EWB’s teams’ prospectives on farmer realities.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/can-better-roads-reduce-poverty
This is an interesting post and paper on a pretty counter-intuitive result for me. Perhaps it was the example of Saskatchewan: An amazing network of roads enabled farming growth and market access in that province. And so I never questioned the basic assumption that roads are good for agricultural growth and an important investment if you have the money.
But this line from the conclusion of the paper yet again summarizes what we should all remember in development – there are few solutions that are not context specific:
The implication for roads planning is that a one size fits all approach is not effective in addressing the problems of all regions of all African countries. Government and donors probably need to adapt an approach that supplies the appropriate road for a rural area, realizing that a large tarred road may not be required and should take more into account the economic potential of the region and do not preclude that roads investment has a quasiautomatic impact on poverty reduction.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/can-better-roads-reduce-poverty
R.E.S.P.E.C.T. … just a little bit!
“I suspect it’s Maslow’s second highest need – respect – that people most crave from work: respect not just from their colleagues but from the world. No one wants to have to cringe when they tell people where they work.”
This insight from Michael Skapinker’s excellent column in the FT last week got me thinking about using social pressures to drive business and institutional change.
My experience and observations suggest that Skapinker didn’t go far enough: I was recently at a cinq à sept in Toronto and starting chatting with someone who works for a business consultancy. He talked about a variety of projects he was working on to reposition various resource extraction companies in the global market – interesting stuff if you’re into business strategy.
The conversation turned to what I spent my days (and nights!) working on. I told him briefly about Engineers Without Borders and our work in Africa and Canada.
And then R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
I started hearing about all the Corporate Social Responsibility projects he and his consultancy have been helping out with over the past few years. Here I had a very well paid business consultant, who was previously telling me about positioning the company for an extra $2billion of capitalization on the public markets, talking about community empowerment. Beautiful.
More than “not wanting to cringe”, my experience is that people want to be sincerely proud of the companies that they work for. This is one of the drivers behind CSR policies, corporate values and codes of conduct, and it results in business leaders being responsive to their employees wishes.
This has obvious relevance for the change we desire in EWB. If we want a company’s offices to offer exclusively Fair Trade coffee, then we should start by convincing employees that this is a good way to support global development. Change from the inside out.
I’ll take the chance to point out a great example of this by EWBers Anthony Candelario and Binnu Jeyakumar who have been respectively working to evolve their company’s Codes of Ethics/Conduct (http://my.ewb.ca/home/ShowPost/72223).
Now, the devil is in the details. How can we have a change movement driven by R.E.S.P.E.C.T.?
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