At EWB we’ve been struggling with the question of how to build on people’s natural inclination to help those who are less fortunate than them to translate those intentions into actions that will lead to real impact. When it comes to the challenges faced by so many people in Africa, the charitable approach too often undermines dignity and creates dependence.
However, for many of us, a charitable instinct is what initially lights the flame. My first involvement in international development came when I was the class representative in University and I asked the class to sponsor a a child through world vision. It was this exposure – and the terrible feeling of having a representative come to my door (this was pre-internet days) with a collection of profiles and asking me which one we wanted to sponsor. Even then, that didn’t feel right. But it was a way into these issues.
The challenge with the charitable instinct as applied to Africa is that it usually manifests itself as a giving relationship – and this dominates the landscape. When charity complements a thriving business sector, it can catch those who fall through the cracks. But if charity overwhelms the business sector, it can undermine one of the key ways for people and countries to improve their lives.
When westerners give clothes, or toys, or money to people who have little, their motivations are good. However, that goodness can undermine the local textile industry, or can put small business that supply farmers out of a job because the farmer was given free fertilizer or seeds.
There are others who are working hard on this challenge of communicating these ideas more widely. Acumen Fund has produced a terrific video here that in 90 seconds captures the challenges as well as anything I’ve seen.
And there’s a new book out – The Aid Trap - that argues that until the west begins to treat the issues in many African countries as one of fostering broad based economic growth, people will be condemned.
It’s not a book I’d recommend to someone who wasn’t familiar with the issues already, but it is a book that I think will resonate with many EWBers who have seen the challenges firsthand.
The ideas in this video and book – and many others – reflect what is at the heart of EWB’s work – helping foster a widespread change in attitudes from Charity to Opportunity. We believe that we need Canadians of all walks of life to understand how they and how Canada can better foster positive change in Africa by seeking to contribute to opportunities.
It’s likely a long struggle – but one that will be needed if we are to see an end to extreme poverty in our lifetime.
Foreign Policy arguably the world’s leading and most influential foreign policy publication just released it’s first annual list of the Top 100 global thinkers, with a related survey of these individuals. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=full
Here’s my Top 5 list of my highlights and lowlights:
1. Where is Canada?
There was but a single Canadian on this list, reminding us once again that we are slipping further into irrelevance internationally. Regardless of what we might be accomplishing , if a highly respected publication doesn’t see us having more people of influence, then that should be a flag.
And the lone Canuck? Michael Ignatieff at #64 with this very strange entry:
Poised to become Canadian prime minister next year, only five years after leaving Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Ignatieff is out to prove the relevance of academia — and big ideas — in politics.
I’m not so sure Prime Minister Harper would be happy with that prediction!
2. Sachs vs. Easterly … it’s a tie!
Yup, that’s right, Foreign Policy weighed in on the most entertaining (and potentially most valuable from a macro policy perspective) debate raging in the development world today, and they ranked them both #39!
3. Africa underreported
The top 100 thinkers were surveyed as part of this feature, and there was a lot of alignment around an unsurprising message about Africa:
Although daily headlines this year often focused on the bloody mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq, our global thinkers identified news from Africa — the good (successful grassroots development), the bad (widespread crop failures), and the tragic (unrest in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) — as among the most underreported stories of 2009.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/29/the_fp_survey?page=0,3
4. Philanthrocapitalism
This is a trend, or buzzword, that is taking the world of development by storm. And its icons populate a few spots on the top 100 list. Foreign Policy puts forward a couple of pretty strong assertions, that I personally think are accurate, on the effect of these large development donors like the Gates and “crowd-sourced” funds like Kiva. A couple of choice quotes:
They can take risks that governments cannot, breaking free from old orthodoxies and conventional wisdoms…
in five years, the aid landscape is likely to be unrecognizable, and we might look back at the old government-led model as a quirky relic of the past, a bit like the fax machine or the typewriter.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/the_big_thinkers_of_giving?page=full
But not everyone thinks this is the next coming. Michael Edwards has published (online for anyone to download) an excellent view of this new wave of giving and aid spending: http://www.justanotheremperor.org/
5. An engineer in the top 5
It’s pretty amazing that an engineer,Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the IPCC, was ranked #5. A true global engineer, he’s achieved this ranking not so much through any feat of technological or scientific prowess, but rather through the influence he has had on public opinion and the policies that policy leaders are pursuing.
Matt Flannery and David Roodman have, for me, just become icons of all that is presently going right in international development today. They have engaged, online for everyone to see, in an intelligent and nuanced conversation about development practice and communication to the public.
Moreover, Matt did this as the co-founder of Kiva.org, not blindly defending the organization in the face of criticism, but actually explaining in full view the tensions they face and the process of learning that they are engaged with. An poignant excerpt from him:
In particular, we need to avoid playing the role of “playwrights”, as the article describes. In my experience, there is no greater play than reality. Any attempt to fictionalize falls short, and never does reality the service that it deserves. With the help of technology, I don’t think Kiva needs to repeat the failures of child sponsorship. We don’t need to be playwrights on the Internet. We are going to do our best to avoid that trap, but certainly value the ongoing help of a critical and engaged user base along the way.
But this wasn’t just a proponent being gracious and open to criticism: David Roodman, Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development (and principle architect of their excellent Commitment to Development Index) offered his critical thoughts with equal parts nuance and caution:
My wife Mai heard someone say that the world needs both playwrights and critics—if more playwrights. I treasure this observation because, as this blog must make obvious, I’m a critic. I can testify that being a critic can be bruising, especially when the playwrights you critique are alive. It’s solace to think that the world needs me.
But the observation also helps me appreciate playwrights. They are the people who create things that weren’t there, the people who are a tad insane in the sense that they confuse fantasy and reality. They see something in their mind’s eye and believe they can make it real. Precisely because I am not like them, I hold playwrights—visionaries—in some awe. The most skillful, passionate, and lucky of them “put a dent in the universe” as Steve Jobs said. (An early employee described Jobs’s uncanny ability to create a reality distortion field that altered bystanders’ perceptions of the technologically possible.) Without playwrights, we might be still living in caves. At least, we wouldn’t have iPhones.
We also probably wouldn’t have the Grameen Bank, BRAC, and dozens of other successful microfinance institutions (MFIs) founded by driven visionaries. And we wouldn’t have Kiva, the person-to-person microcredit web site founded by Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley.
On the other hand, without critics—analysts driven to understand the world rather than change it—we might not have mastered electricity. So we needed them too to get to iPhones. Critics and playwrights are yin and yang. Of course the two essences exist within all of us.
These two remarkable individuals have demonstrated for all of us what is both necessary and possible to “get development right.” You can read their complete exchanges here:
http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/2009/10/kiva-is-not-quite-what-it-seems.php
http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/2009/10/matt-flannery-kiva-ceo-and-co-founder-replies.php
http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/2009/10/reflections-on-the-kiva-story.php
Development is a complex endeavour, and we will only be successful together if we impale ourselves on the challenges and wicked questions, with equal parts playwright and critic.
I strongly believe that it’s not enough for some people to play the critic, and some to play the playwright as other exchanges have demonstrated (http://aidwatchers.com/2009/10/do-millennium-villages-work-we-may-never-know/ and http://aidwatchers.com/2009/10/millennium-villages-comments-we-respond/).
Instead, any of us who are dedicated to human development — and who are explaining to Canadians and other Westerners what they can do to help increase opportunities for those living in extreme poverty — need to fully grapple with the tensions and ongoing learning that this work requires.
As a final note, I sincerely hope that when EWB Canada is criticized publicly that we have the wisdom to respond with such candour and thoughtfulness.
A few weekends ago we had 9 stellar EWBers in Toronto from across the country in the second gathering of EWB’s inaugural Social Change Entrepreneurship Competition. As part of this working weekend, each social change entrepreneur has access to one-on-one mentoring from a remarkable group of social and business leaders in Toronto, including Edward Greenspon, Matt Strand, Ryan Merkley, Suzanne Stevens, Anil Patel, Dev Ajula, and Celia Cruz.
One theme certainly ran throughout the weekend, and that was this concept of social innovation. To provide some clarity around this theme, Tim Draimin, who is the executive director of Social Innovation Generation (http://sigeneration.ca/), spent a lunch with us talking about his experience in social change. I didn’t take diligent notes, but I did write down a few very interesting ideas:
What is social innovation?
At its core, a social innovation is an idea that substantially and sustainably changes the flow of authority in a social system. Social innovations get to the heart of our complex and seemingly intractable problems to create a new normal that is more resilient and has more justice.
When I think about this in the context of EWB, having the amazing network of student chapters and leaders across Canada is a social innovation. By virtue of their passion, ideas and level of activity, EWB student leaders at these chapters have changed the flow of authority in engineering faculties nationwide. Canadian engineering professors and administrators are more aware and actively engaged with global issues, whether it’s implicit in what they teach or how they approach engineering problems, or whether it’s through changing engineering curriculum.
Clearly social innovations are necessary for change, and so it’s interesting to keep what’s at their core in the back of our minds while working in the social change space.
Phases of social innovation
Tim had a really interesting observation from his experience: That social innovations generally happen at the margins and between the silos. For example, the great organization Roots of Empathy turned education on its head by making infants the “teachers”. The remarkable founder of this organization, Mary Gordon, brought early childhood development theory and practice into a traditional classroom, merging two previously siloed areas with excellent results.
Because social innovations are generative and often disruptive to existing structures, their acceptance by the “mainstream” is often a rocky ride. This is typical of any new ideas that force a new equilibrium in society − think about something as uncontroversial today as women’s suffrage:
First, the idea is ignored: The late 19th century saw the beginning of a movement in Ontario for women’s right to vote (by Dr. Emily Howard Stowe), which was eventually granted for municipal elections in 1884 (for widows and spinsters). But at this time the movement was under the radar and the issue was seen as a non-issue by society.
But then momentum built up in provincial capitals around the country, and with it opposition. There were dozens of women’s groups involved in the last decade of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century, and dozens of motions were defeated in parliaments around the country. The order was being challenged by a new idea, and it was roundly opposed. There was attention to this issue, and even changes at the municipal level to allow women to vote that had been made previously, were being repealed amidst protest.
Slowly, small wins built up. More municipalities allowed widows and spinsters to vote, and even a few allowed unmarried women. Then in 1910 Alberta allowed widows and spinsters the right to vote, and this idea (that in the absence of an available male vote, a woman’s vote would be allowed) started to become more widely adopted through the country. The needle on this issue was moved ever so slowly along, with Manitoba the first province to allow all women to vote in 1916. Other provinces followed, and in 1919 the right to vote at the federal level was extended to all women.
With broad adoption, and elections happening in which women were voting (for over 2 decades), woman’s suffrage entered the final phase of social innovation and became a normalized idea that had set a new equilibrium in Canada (except of course for Quebec which shamefully and shockingly did not grant women the right to vote until 1940).
These are typical phases for many innovations, but particularly defined for social innovations which challenge at a core level some fundamental truths in society.
Brief final thoughts and questions:
I’m asking myself, what is the social innovation that EWB is trying to create, particularly in Canada? I believe there are at least two:
1) We’re trying to redefine the relationship that Canadians, our governments, our institutions and our companies have with Africa’s people, institutions and governments.
2) We’re hoping to shift engineers and the engineering profession to organize around the principle that their role is to serve a global society.
In my analysis, we’re now kind of in the “ignore” phase #1, and perhaps just entering the “opposition” phase of #2. I’m thinking a lot about what this means as we move our work forward.
If some banks are “too big to fail” and need living wills, then maybe development projects are “too important to fail the people they’re supposed to benefit” and could also benefit from this requirement.
The basic premise around living wills for banks is simple – some financial institutions were so large and so complex that managers and regulators found it hard to come up with solutions on the fly to cope with their collapse. The concept is that by thinking about this in advance, having a plan, a more orderly and less painful shutdown of these banks could happen in the event of another financial crisis.
But another benefit of living wills, at least for banks, has emerged from some of the dissenting views. They might effectively slow down the growth of these institutions by forcing them to think more about dissolution and also to have more streamlined, less complex operations (lest they are unable to write sufficiently accurate living wills).
Effectively, living wills could force broad-based attitudinal changes within banks.
And then I thought about development projects. What if they had to develop plans, as part of every project proposal, to anticipate possible modes of failure (or at least a process for judging failure) and develop adaptive strategies for either changing course or ending the project altogether.
Let me take a semi-hypothetical example based in some experience. Suppose a development project was outlined to drill boreholes and install 1,000 water pumps across rural Zambia over 5 years. The typical way that this project would be managed would be to start installing these pumps, probably 200 per year, and encourage local management and operation by volunteer water committees. Success is generally determined on the basis of whether the original workplan is being followed (pumps in the ground, committees set up). Progress on this plan continues afoot through to the end of Year 5 when a final evaluation is completed. Perhaps there was also an interim evaluation in Year 3.
Now consider this project with a living will. At the end of each year, the entire project would need to be considered. Is it alive or dead? Are the pumps we installed at the beginning of the year still functioning? What about the volunteer committees? Is the average cost what we expected? All of the modes of failure, or how to figure out new modes of failure, would be right there in the original project proposal. And this would be evaluated at the end of each year. Depending on the answers, different plans would be followed, with an understanding that parts of the project could be changed drastically or killed off.
When I write this out, it sounds intuitive. Why the concept of a living will … isn’t that just common sense? Well, in our experience it’s not how development projects are managed.
So, what about calling this adaptive approach for development projects as “living wills”. Maybe this could be just the requirement needed to bring about broad-based attitudinal changes that will allow projects to be more flexible and ultimately effective.
And the bonus: If living wills for development work, it could represent the first useful innovation to come out of the financial services industry in the past few years!
“To help people through technology.”
“I decided to go into engineering because I believe engineers are here to spread education globally. I also believe engineers are here to improve the standard of living for all of the globe’s citizens. Finally, to create a situation where engineers can work together in a network around the world. I hope that I can do that at the end of my four years.”
These are the answers I got when I posed the question “what is engineering?” to 1,300 first-year engineering students a few weeks back during their first lecture on their first day. Those answers, and many of the remaining 1,298 blew me away. But why was I so surprised?
First, some context: To say it was intimidating to follow a Nobel Prize winner (John Polanyi) and Canada’s most recognized international statesman (Stephen Lewis) to give UofT Engineering’s third annual opening guest lecture is an understatement. But that’s where I found myself, a few weeks ago, on the stage of UofT’s Convocation Hall in front of 1,300 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first year engineering students (though I was heartened by the fact that, considering that it was the first lecture of their University career, my audience was likely as anxious as I was).
In true EWB fashion, the lecture I gave was a group effort. Ideas came from across the organization (http://my.ewb.ca/home/ShowPost/63767), and I ultimately sat down with students at our amazing UofT Chapter for the finishing touches.
The theme and core concept of the lecture was a simple imperative: That each one of them, as a first-year engineering student, are responsible for answering the question “What is engineering?”
So why was I so surprised by the inspiring, visionary answers? Well, because when you look at the course content that awaits them in their degrees, different answers emerge. At UofT, definitely one of the more progressive and leading engineering schools in the country, of 500 or so engineering courses offered, roughly 10 are set aside to deal explicitly with the role of engineers in society or in the environment or in policy. That’s 2%!
And so a massive disconnect awaits these students.
That’s why I challenged them to ask the question − what is engineering? − and why I begged them to spend the next 5 years of their engineering degrees pushing for the answers that they expect.
Now we have 1,300 answers to that question, on cue cards (please get in touch if you have a passion for data entry!). Let’s ask it again every year to each class of first year engineering students at UofT. Let’s ask it every year to every first year engineering student across Canada. And then let’s ask it as they receive their iron rings. My guess is that the answers today would change substantially from day 1 to day 1,800. My hope for the future is that they are quite the same.
Mina Shahid, the Co-President of the UofT Chapter of EWB, recently asked all of the UofT Engineering Faculty: “Is U of T ready to help make these visions a reality?”
From listening to this first-year class during their first lecture on their first day of engineering, I don’t think it matters if UofT is ready because they’re about to be hit with a vision of the next generation of engineers, a vision that includes engineers serving a global society. And this vision is coming whether faculty at any engineering school in Canada like it or not … and that’s a beautiful thing!
“We need to reassert the notion that roles of authority are positions of responsibility rather than declarations of personal merit and routes to personal enrichment. That notion goes with old-fashioned concepts of social obligation and public service. An insistence that power is a duty, not a prize, is probably the most important reason why some countries in the world are rich and others poor.”
These three sentences were written by John Kay, a columnist in the financial times.
Has there ever been a truer paragraph?
I remember from my master’s degree learning about Korea – how they had astronomical tariffs – 9000% is what I remember – on luxury goods, and next to no tariffs on machinery. That meant that as generation of industrialists began to grow, they were forced (or rather, given strong incentives) to reinvest in ever more capital equipment. There were no Mercedes, no Rolexes, but lots of machine tools.
In Africa, however, too often political and other leaders use their time with access to power to extract, rather than invest. It’s a fascinating conundrum that we should be thinking more about.
I recently finished reading a terrific book called The Origin of Wealth which looks at how organisations affect the ability of a country to improve their standard of living. Lots of fascinating ideas.
One chapter looked at how the principle of evolution applies to ideas within an organisation. According to the author, evolution is about differentiation (finding different ways to solve a problem/address and opportunity); selection (finding which new way is the most effective); and multiplication (getting that new idea out as widely as possible).
I asked how these fit with EWB? I think that we are great at differentiation – there are constantly new ideas being hatched for most parts of most programs.
It seemed to me, however, that we might find better processes for selection and multiplication. Do the best ideas get identified, and do they spread throughout the organisation? Are there mechanisms that we could put in place to facilitate or accelerate this?
The question for Blair: what is it that keeps on killing hope in Africa?
-Matthew Parris in Ethiopia
Can a ruler ever be in touch with the everyday lives of ordinary people? The age-old question, with the numberless tales it has spawned of princes moving disguised among their people or messiahs passing unnoticed through the crowd, pressed itself on me as I made my way through the fortified gates of the Addis Ababa Sheraton in Ethiopia eight days ago. We drove through into another world: of landscaped gardens dotted with plastic palm trees in primary colours.
Here Tony Blair stayed when he arrived last year for a summit to promote the launch of his Commission for Africa. I was calling at the Sheraton to e-mail last week’s column. Briefly I entered Mr Blair’s planet. Music tinkled, glasses of iced drinks clinked, Westerners – tourists, plutocrats and men and women of affairs – in bright casual clothes drifted between swimming pool and souvenir shops as uniformed porters hovered ready to help with the smallest bag. Outside there was an illuminated fountain in a pool built from Ethiopian marble. At the entrance the air-conditioned Mercedes-Benzes of the wabenzi – the African elite – awaited their masters.
Continue reading …
It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by sheets of paper covered in scribbled sentences:
“We know caring is not enough, and thoughtfulness is not enough (though both are necessary), therefore we take decisions and move to action.”
“We recognize the intrinsic worth of others and invest in them.”
“We are intense! The time together we have is too valuable to use on sleep!”
“We are persistent and relentless with the work that we do. This often involves a lot of sacrifice.”
“We are mindful of our depiction of Africans and of our role as Westerners”
“We know we can’t do everything all by ourselves, all at once.”
“We enjoy the process of coming up with new ways of looking at things, of new solutions and new activities. ”
These are some of the fifty or sixty inspirational sentences that have emerged from ewb’s discussion on our values. Robin lead a process that involved a few hundred people from across ewb, from experienced overseas volunteers who have been around for years to brand new members. She and a team of volunteers have drawn together the ideas that were expressed in discussion and posted to vision.ewb.ca into themes and poignant sentences. And I volunteered to narrow this down to and attempt to draw them together where possible into a smaller set of values that are core to who we are and the change we want to created.
And I’m feeling both elated and challenged. It’s pretty inspirational to read the expressions of what matters to so many ewbers – but also pretty hard to imagine how we can identify the overlaps, pick out the level of specificity vs. generalness that allows for a thoughtful statement, and boil it town to a few key values – because with too many, we’d lose the essence, the core. An EWBer, Mike Spendlove, related to me a quote from an artist that is, roughly paraphrased, “what you leave out is as important as what you leave in.” It rings true. A laundry list isn’t memorable.
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