“Holding the doors makes everyone late.”
This was a very interesting poster that I saw last week on the Montreal Metro … it got me thinking about incentives.
Assuming that the size of lettering bears some relationship to the importance the creators of this campaign assigned to each message, they believe the following:
- People will change their behaviours (i.e. not hold the doors open) most because of the pain they cause to others.
- That this is reinforced by saying that this resulted in over 670,000 people being delayed 5 minutes or more in the past year.
- That both of the above messages are much less important drivers of behaviour change than a $150 fine (in the fine print below the image).
So, what do you think about this strategy? Basically, it’s counting on:
- People being motivated to change their behaviours based on feeling bad about “causing pain” for others.
- Creating social pressure so that others on the subway will cause some “pain” to people holding the doors.
- Related to the above, hopefully changing the acceptable norm of behaviour.
Is this likely to be effective at change how people behave?
With the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness this coming week, I was reflecting on what these conversations are truly about. At the core, these discussions and ensuing actions are about creating the maximum value possible for people living in poverty around the world, increasing the effectiveness of relatively modest investments in aid to create the conditions and systems for long-term prosperity. Of course, aid often gets mixed up in politics and bureaucratic ego and self-interest, and the purpose of the endeavour can get corrupted − but for the purposes of this post, I’m going to be blissfully näive and assume that the purpose of development assistance is both pure and clear.
So back to the Busan conversations: What I think these conversations are actually about is a process for getting the macro-level incentives in aid delivery right. Today, these incentives are still skewed. I was reminded of this earlier today from a post on my colleague Mina Shahid’s (EWB staff in Ghana) blog on education:
There are so many systemic problems with Ghana’s education system that have been exacerbated by Millenium Development Goal #2 – Universal Primary Education. Let me pose a question, what is the point of universal basic education that sets up kids for failure? In the rush to get every kid in school, nobody thought about education quality. All the policy makers cared about was education quantity and that means physical infrastructure. This is why you can visit a fancy new donor sponsored school in a village and find a hundred kids waiting patiently in empty classrooms! No teachers, no chalk or chalkboards, no textbooks. (From http://zikomoafrica.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/they-arent-dedicated-ghanas-failing-education-system/)
I’m certain that at the time of writing in the late 90′s, the goal of Universal Primary Education inspired visions of the next generation breaking the back of poverty through higher learning – that primary education would be a leading indicator for improved governance, economic development, and higher levels of education. The goal has driven considerable increases in spending on primary education (average increase of 6% per year across Africa from 2000 to 2008 according to http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/apr/27/africa-education-spending-aid-data) and a remarkable 59% increase in primary enrollment in Africa (http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/global_education_digest_2011_en.pdf).
So, the macro-level goal created a powerful incentive for donor and recipient countries, and if aligning with that quantitative goal (get more kids into primary schools) was the outcome desired, then they nailed it.
But getting kids into school shouldn’t be the intended outcome. Instead, the outcome should be getting kids an education, having them learn.
(Unless, of course, there’s an assumption, which I haven’t seen articulated anywhere, that getting kids into school is the best first step to quality education. Something like changing government institutions to have the capability to get all kids into school is the most difficult thing to do and will lead to strong pressures to improve teaching quality and educational outcomes. If I saw this articulated well – and I’ve only looked a little, so it may be – I could be convinced of the logic.)
So, the macro-incentives have resulted in an enormous quantity of resources spent on achieving what is perhaps the wrong outcome. Even The World Bank is realizing what might be a failure in macro-level incentives in education.
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*(From The World Bank)
So, macro-level incentives are the lens I will be using to understand and judge the results of this week’s talks in Busan.
Okay, an admission first: My TEDxToronto talk was longer than the planned 6 minutes. And it didn’t just turn out that way, I knew it in advance!
But regardless of whether it was 7 minutes or 8 minutes, there is an incredible discipline of communication that comes with this kind of strict and tight timeline, especially if you’re trying to explain a new or complex idea in a compelling way. This was surprisingly challenging for me, especially given that I’ve probably delivered 600-800 speeches in the past 10 years.
I spent a lot of time on crafting this talk — probably close to 20 hours total, including ideation, various drafts, and practice — and thought that I would share a few things I learned along the way:
- What do you want to say? - This should be obvious, but it was harder for me than it sounds. I spent a whole lot of time thinking about how I was going to say what I was going to say before really honing in on my key message. It was extremely helpful when Darius from the TEDxToronto organizing team asked me: “Tell me what you really want to say, in words you would use at a party.”
- Is that your authentic voice? - My good friend and co-founder of EWB, Parker Mitchell, brought me down to earth just a few days before the talk with the question: “What gets you up in the morning?” Until that time, I was crafting a talk that was very intellectual, trying to summarize ideas that weren’t quite my own in a voice that wasn’t quite my own. Once I returned to what get’s me up in the morning, it became very clear that I was going to give a talk about how EWBers combine their heads and their hearts in a powerful way to achieve social change.
- Are you inspired? What’s the source? – I spent a lot of time re-reading these incredible posts from EWBers in 2007. I kept coming back to them for inspiration: Would they be proud of the talk I was about to give? Am I inspired about the talk I’m about to give in the same way that I’m inspired by this post? I think that inspiration is a big part of a great talk.
- Did you change your talk 8 times? - My talk went through at least 8 iterations. Each one was a lot better than the former. I started by writing something that was probably 25 minutes long, and evolved the ideas and whittled down from there. I didn’t ever get hung up on whether I had sunk costs into previous draft, which meant there were no sacred cows of either ideas or sentences. I think this made the ultimate talk much better, and allowed me to be very open to feedback and new ideas from other people.
- Have you practiced until you no longer need to memorize the words? – As I mentioned above, I spent a lot of time on this talk. A lot of that was practicing articulating the ideas/sentences to a lot of different people. This happened formally during practice, but I worked the ideas/stories into conversation for a couple of weeks in advance. I actually took my knowledge of the talk way past memorization — what I mean is that I no longer needed to stick to the script and think about what was coming next, but instead I just felt the words and ideas. This allowed me to be very present during the talk.
What could I have done better?
Well, a lot, but the main failure was that I gave too much of a speech instead of having a conversation with the audience. I think the best TED Talks are a great conversation, and I’m not sure I was quite there.
While the talk won’t be available on the TEDxToronto website for a few weeks, I’ve pasted the text of it below if you are interested in reading what I delivered!
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http://www.ewb.ca/en/whatsnew/story/98/combining-our-heart-and-head-together.html
Delivered September 23, 2011.
Combining our heart and head, together
I’d like to share two stories with you.
First, I want to tell you about this amazing kid, Mohammed. He lives in Northern Ghana, in a village called Nyologo. For six months of the year it’s hot, dusty and dry, and for the other six months it’s rainy with green fields filling the space between sparse trees.
When you and I talk about people who live on under $2 a day, Mohammed’s one of them. I stayed with him and his family for a few days 6 years ago, gathering water, working on his father’s small farm, just living life together. We’ve stayed in touch ever since.
I’m really proud of him: He’s at the top of his class in high school and has ambitious plans to attend University, and he dreams of changing Ghana.
This past August, Sari, my partner, and I had the privilege to visit Mohammed, just to hang out and catch up. While we were chatting one day Mohammed let me know some tough news: That his father’s harvest wasn’t good, one of his younger kids got sick, and someone stole some money from him – and so Mohammed’s father wouldn’t be able to pay his school fees. For lack of a hundred and fifty bucks, Mohammed wasn’t going to be able to go to school this year. Sari and decided we would pay Mohammed’s school fees.
As you can imagine, when we shared this news with Mohammed, he was ecstatic. His eyes lit up, he father was beaming, his mum was giggling. Sari and I were smiling that smile that hurts your cheeks! Man, it felt great!!
But here’s the thing – I know that Mohammed is only one kid out of thousands. I know that his father might run out of money next year, because the rains fail or because of any number of events that may happen that are beyond his control. I know that when Mohammed goes to school his class is packed and his teacher might not show up and that there’s no responsive local government to address those problems.
I know that Sari and I have helped a person, but we haven’t addressed the root of the problem.
And that’s where my second story comes in. It’s about Malawi.
Malawi has 15 million people, and ideally, every one of them would have convenient access to a safe and plentiful source of water. According to official counts, about 2 million people don’t – nearly the population of Toronto.
But the reality on the ground is different than official statistics. When I visited two years ago I would walk through some villages where there would be 3, 4 or even 5 water pumps for a few hundred people, but there were other villages with only a single pumps – this inequitable distribution leaves many wanting.
And then there were the broken water pumps. In fact, 25% of people in rural areas don’t have access to clean water because their water systems are broken.
I visited one particularly offensive project, a Canadian funded water system, built by a Canadian engineering firm. In the shadow of one of the last functional taps of over a hundred, were the remnants of an American funded, American built water system identical to the Canadian one.
This is outrageous. Broken water systems on top of broken water systems.
This caused us at Engineers Without Borders Canada to ask: Does Malawi really need another new water pump?
Instead of building more infrastructure, we focused on understanding and solving the systemic problems.
One bottom-up innovation we’ve developed along with our Malawi government partners is a way to collect and simply display information about every existing village and waterpoint in a given district.
Now, for the first time ever, people like our partner and Malawi colleague Mr. Chaponda has all the information at his fingertips to prioritize repairs and locations for new wells, based on legitimate needs.
But that one innovation took three years and tens of thousands of volunteer hours to develop and refine, and we’ve still only brought it to a quarter of Malawi. And of course, this tool is not a silver bullet – it’s only one piece of a much bigger and more complex puzzle.
We’re focused on solving the larger systemic problem, but in the meantime a lot of people still won’t have water.
So how do these two stories come together? For me, they represent the choice each of us is often forced to make when supporting international development, and especially when supporting Africa.
Should I follow my heart?
Or should I follow my head?
I know that following our hearts can be profound – $10 bucks for a bednet, volunteering at an orphanage in Tanzania for a couple of weeks, $150 for Mohammed’s school fees – these are tangible, personal and immediate. But they are rarely enough.
On the other hand, following our heads leads us to lobby our government for better aid policies, make investments in patient capital or undertake work like EWB’s in Malawi. But these approaches alone risk creating tools that don’t reflect ground-realities, they risk representing people with numbers that can just be moved around in a spreadsheet. Employing the head along can leave you de-motivated by the enormity of the challenge, and cynical about the $50billion development industry.
My journey over the past 12 years of dedicating my life to international development has taught me that the true power – the true big idea – is eschewing this false choice between heart and head. I’ve learned that the true power of change comes from combining the heart and the head.
For me and thousands of EWBers who have contribution millions of hours over the past few years, this has meant balancing tensions: Feeling urgency, while having the patience for change. Employing rigorous management, while caring about people. Listening and being humble, while pushing forward big ideas.
For me bringing the heart and head, together, has been powerful.
Bringing the heart and head, together, has brought partnership.
Bringing the heart and head, together, has brought empathy.
Bringing the heart and head, together, has brought true meaning.
The real magic of this approach is in personalizing it – we can each make it our own. And so I give you that challenge, to discover how you’ll combine the heart and head as global citizens, as investors in Africa’s development and perhaps as practitioners.
What’s truly beautiful, is that it’s also bringing the heart and head together that will propel Mohammed to learn what he needs to learn, whether a teacher is there or not, to get himself to University and ultimately to drive Ghana’s development, from Ghana.
As the leader of a respected international development organization with substantial operations in Africa, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I don’t know a lot about drought or famine or the situation in the Horn of Africa right now. I’ve read Amartya Sen’s essays on the subjects, and so I know the basics that droughts are neither necessary nor sufficient for famines to happen, and that these crises are about the ability of people to access to food (availability, access to money, effectiveness of markets and governments, etc), but my knowledge of the present situation in the Horn of Africa is limited. And I have no on-the-ground knowledge that will help me, which always makes me less able to engage.
EWBers have engaged with this issue in a typically rich debate on MyEWB. But I haven’t waded in because I really didn’t know a whole lot.
So I decided to do some reading and scraping around for some of the best writing and ideas on the current situation. I’ve posted some of these below.
From ODI.org:
“Here we go again: famine in the Horn of Africa”
“Famine forecasting: Prices and peasant behaviour in Northern Ethiopia”
“Archetypes of famine and response”
From the Duck of Minerva Blog (great series):
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
One.org:
Famine in Somalia: Never again, again
Foreign Policy:
Famine is a crime
Open the Echo Chamber Blog:
Drought does not equal famine
Globe and Mail:
K’naan returns from Somalia with hope rather than despair
Any other great reading you can suggest?
I’m excited to kick off this blog again, with the inspiration of being in Ghana, with it’s great energy, sights, sounds and smells.
It’s Tuesday morning here in Accra, and I’m on Day 3 (and city #3) of traveling to my final destination just outside Kumasi for EWB’s twice-yearly African Program strategy meetings. After 55 hours in-transit, I’m stuck waiting in the Accra airport for a few hours, sorting out the final leg of my travels.
As with most clouds, there’s a silver lining — I had the chance to be part of a bit of a dust-up, Ghanaian style.
As I entered the airport cafe, a rush of security guards pushed past me, and a bunch of very loud, aggressive yelling began just inside the doors of the cafe. By the time the security guards were there, about 15 people — big Ghanaian security guards, a few young cafe workers, three men in suits who seemed to be appreared of the cafe, and a very large Ghanaian woman dressed in traditional fabrics who was obviously the boss — were yelling aggressively at the top of their lungs at a slight man in a red golf shirt seated at one of the tables. He was yelling back, holding his own.
This went on for about 5 minutes, the most aggressive, loud yelling match I think I’ve ever witnessed in my life. And then it ended.
The man in the red shirt stood up, shook all of the men’s hands, offered some kind of apology to the women, and everyone just went back to work. The cafe workers started cleaning dishes and tables, the mens in suits went back to their coffee, the security guards disappeared, and the man in red just sat down again.
Now, I have no idea what the altercation was about (I think they accused the man of being a thief), but I do know that there were apparently no hard feelings after it was over. And this is one of the most interesting characteristics I’ve observed in Ghanaians during my few times here. At least on the surface, they have no problems expressing the extremes of emotion, anger even, and then just walking away, letting it go, once a situation has been resolved.
What this means is that you see a lot more emotion outwardly expressed, especially extreme displays of emotion in public, than in Canada. And a lot more apparent reconciliation. I have no idea if there’s still festering emotions, but I suspect that they aren’t as prevalent as in Canada when we hold back from expressing ourselves.
The lesson here for me? Perhaps the process of public conflict, with complete strangers, which we entirely avoid in Canada, is healthy? Maybe this would also be healthy, if contained, in our workplaces and relationships? Then maybe we could all be free to share thoughts and ideas, emotionally, rather than letting them fester beneath the surface, growing into something more ugly?
I had a great conversation two days ago with Ashley Good, the amazing EWBer leading http://www.admittingfailure.com/. During this conversation, one of the things she asked me was “what do you think is sophisticated development, and why is EWB doing it?”
The first thing going through my mind was, “wow, ‘EWB is doing sophisticated development’ sounds really pretentious when said aloud!” It certainly made me think about our value of Striving for Humility.
But once I got over that, I responded that I think 3 parts of our approach are “sophisticated”, intelligent development:
- We work at multiple levels within a given system to drive change. For example, our Water and Sanitation team works right alongside district water officers and community leaders to co-develop new ideas that will address insufficient water and sanitation coverage. They are also using these ground-level lessons to influence sector-wide policy approaches at the national level − and they’re working everywhere in between. This vertical approach means that policy and practice are more tightly aligned.
- We think about human behaviours and work to align incentives. While it’s nice to think that logic rules the day, and that sensible ideas will be taken-up and scaled efficiently once they are proven, anyone who’s tried to go on a diet can tell you that it’s really really tough not to reach for that tub of ice cream in the freezer at 11:30pm after you’ve eaten raw swiss chard for 2 weeks straight! Seriously, humans are not rational beings, and so if you’re trying to have district planning officers consult data before deciding how to allocate a new donor grant for education/schools (instead of just giving the donor an answer, or accepting their suggestion without question), then you need to think about behaviours and incentives. All of our teams put this at the centre of their approach.
- We build capabilities and habits and tools for constant iteration at the implementation level. Our foundational assumption is that iteration will be essential for success − any solution to complex problems will inevitably involve a lot of failure and evolution of ideas and approaches. With this assumption, a big part of our work is helping organizations, and whole systems, build in this ability to adapt. This means having strong up-down-sideways communication, strong processes for reflection and course correction, a culture of honest inquiry, built-in flexibility, and the evidence needed to make decisions. All of these elements take time to build into any organization, and they require skill on behalf of staff and leaders, but this type of change is powerful.
So, those are the 3 ideas for intelligent development that came to mind for me.
What do you think of these? What did I miss?
On the occasion the 100th International Women’s Day, I’m relaunching my blog and dedicating my first entry to the incredible women around the world who are creating positive disruptions.
Today, I’m inspired (and dismayed) by articles like this by the brilliant Stephanie Nolen http://tinyurl.com/47vnfaq and thinking of people like Charity Ngoma, an incredible “positive disruptor” in Zambia who recently attended the EWB National Conference.
When I think of women causing positive disruptions, though, my mind immediately jumps to Michaelle Jean, Canada’s past Governor General. I had the great honour of accompanying her during her State Visit to 5 African countries in 2006, the highlight of which was most certainly a speech she gave to the Soweto Businesswomen’s Association in South Africa − to this day I still get shivers up my spine thinking about the power of that moment.
Below is a short entry I wrote following the speech:
“Empowering women is empowering a nation.” With these six words, the entire audience at the Soweto Business Women’s Association luncheon erupted into applause. “Say it again with me,” encouraged the Governor General: “Empowering women is empowering a nation.” Then it was our turn, as men in the audience, to speak these words aloud.
In the middle of Soweto, the South Africa township that forced apartheid into the consciousness of people around the world, there was hope. Among this group of entrepreneurs, who in their former lives galvanized a global struggle against an oppressive regime that offended our humanity, there was palpable optimism.
If there was only one message I took from this remarkable trip to Africa with the Governor General, it was that of hope and of an “Afro-optimism.”
This is not the Africa that we typically read or hear about in Canada. Usually its images of war and suffering that we see. We hear of destitution and hopelessness, people barely struggling to survive in the face of hunger, natural disasters, AIDs.
No, the Governor General’s Africa is one that includes people like Madame Adisa, an exceptional woman who grew up in a rural area in the north of Ghana. She is the founder and director of Africa 2000, a non-governmental organization that empowers communities all over the country. This inspiring Ghanaian leader talked about her vision for Ghana’s communities—how people can be helped to come together and take action, together, on improving their lives. One example she gave was of a community that chose to set-up a business turning shea nut butter into soap, an export product and moneymaker that helped empower women in the community.
Seeing Madame Adisa and the Governor General talk with each other was something special—two strong, articulate and passionate women sharing ideas, both of them committed to taking action.
Madame Adisa is living proof that there are many Ghanaians, and many many Africans, who are passionate about their countries’ and can be trusted to set direction and take decisions. Our job as Canadians is to support them in this. Often this means offering advice, technical assistance or funding, sometimes it means getting out of the way. We learned on this trip that is should always involve asking the question “what do you need?”
Another lesson was that we can’t realistically expect dramatic results in a short time that are also sustainable. Successful human development is a slow march to freedom of choice, rather than a quick sprint to the finish. So our approach to supporting success in Africa must be long-term and flexible. This hasn’t always been the attitude of “donor” countries like Canada, but on this trip we saw how successful this approach can be.
Canada, through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), has been supporting GRATIS for over 15 years. GRATIS is an independent organization that has two major areas of activity: First, they provide opportunities for technical vocational training to Ghanaians who would not otherwise be able to afford to learn marketable skills such as forging steel or working a lathe. Second, they design, manufacture, market and sell appropriate technology for rural areas, like hand powered oil presses that enable local value-add of palm seed.
The Governor General visited GRATIS on this trip, and she saw that by almost every measure, this is a success story. They have training centers throughout the country, creating skilled workers and entrepreneurs by the hundreds each year, people who will drive Ghana’s economy for years to come. And they are creating useful and sustainable technologies that allow people to strengthen their livelihoods. One of the main reasons for this success has been the flexibility, continuity and predictability of Canada’s support for GRATIS.
So the lessons were many on this visit by the Governor General to Canada. Hope and optimism; trusting “African solutions to African problems”, a quote from Kofi Annan repeated by the Governor General; and committing to long-term partnerships that will achieve sustainable results.
The Governor General helped all of us as delegates on this trip, and all Canadians, see a different side of the countries we visited. Upon reflection, I am proud of this.
But we also saw that there is still much to be done, many millions who are still living in suffocating poverty. There are those in Africa who are working very hard to change this, and they need Canada’s help—cooperative help, as partners.
In the words of one of the women sitting at my table during the business women’s lunch in Soweto, “this woman is as passionate and optimistic about Africa as we are.” May we all take that lesson to heart.
As you would expect Michaelle Jean is still making change, as the UNESCO Special Envoy for Haiti, and through her own foundation:
http://twitter.com/#!/MichaelleJeanF
http://www.fmjf.ca
Here’s to all the amazing women who are empowering so many others to create change.
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.
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