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
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.
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.
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