development thoughts

After working with a development organization (and around many others) for only a few weeks, I must confess to a bunch of opinions on the experience, first and foremost of which is that we (the wealthy world) do not do enough development work. Undoubtedly, a great deal of money gets spent (in Aceh and Nias reconstruction spending will amount to US$5.7 billion over five years) and while some goes for SUVs and high-priced expatriate staff, irregardless, in the field the marginal return on dollars spent is truly staggering. Like both of the Bills (Gates and Clinton) pointed out at commencement, wealthy countries can dramatically improve the fortunes of poorer countries for what amounts to relatively small sacrifice. This is the best investment we have going in terms of both philanthropy and security and we need to do a lot more of it.

However, I do not intend to sell the process as the paragon of efficiency or to make it sound easy. Often it is the exact opposite of this, such that even though I was surprised the first time the Chief of Party for Aceh used the idiom ‘like pushing a rope,’ I also understood.

Note: This was originally a much longer piece and I have tried to make it more managable by cutting in back as well as organizing separate sub-headings. I don't know if it helps. If you skip it, I will understand.

Today’s secret word is ‘unprecedented’

To digress, it is important to differentiate between disaster relief and development work—they engage differently, have different goals, prioritize differently, etc—but bear with me for a moment. I say that the disaster in Aceh blurred this distinction, not necessarily because it was completely unpredicted (after all few natural disasters are ‘predictable’) or the scope and scale of destruction, but because of two unique elements. One is the fact that Aceh already was in desperate need of development work (of which there were many organizations already engaged) as a result of 30 years of military conflict. The second is simply the sheer (and simply unprecedented) scale of the humanitarian response from the wealthy world. $5.7 billion has a way of obliterating the niche. Maybe I am lazy, but I am going to talk about them as one in the same.

Local Context

A key part of the problem is that you end up with a massive mobilization of people and resources hitting the ground with little or no ties to the community and cultural context. In any situation where money is being given out (in a figurative sense) inefficiencies will be created and in situations light on local contextualization, organizations often create suboptimal incentives and undertake projects that are both wasteful and alienating to the community. Stories abound about NGOs spending lots of cash to start up something like a livelihoods project for a local mat weaving cooperative that has no market and, after six months, a room in someone’s house overfilled with mats.

Community Mores

This sounds a bit snobby, but I have been amazed at how little some of the NGO community here actually understands local mores, both in terms of their work as well as private lives. It would be misleading to think that this only refers to westerners getting into the sauce or showing off a bit too much arm, as in fact there are a group of missionaries in town (the best way to pick the missionaries: Carolinians who work for obscure, never-before-heard of NGOs) who in a strategy apparently designed to ingratiate themselves to the community all (the females) wear jilbops (Islamic headscarves) in public. Not only is this kind of weird, but it offends many Muslims to have something Islamic appropriated by people who are not Muslims.

What exactly is an NGO?

Another element that has stood out to me is that local people, including (and perhaps most stunningly) the staff, do not seem quite clear on what NGOs actually can and cannot do. People certainly understand that these organizations have a lot of money but there is decidedly less understood about what some of the key tenets of development—sustainability and investment, to name two—actually mean. Many people (again, including the local staff) believe that there is a great deal of ‘free’ money and do not see why they cannot spend it on whatever they want. One colleague, our communications director in the province, is famous for handing in stories (per his job description designed to trumpet the organization’s successes) that focus largely on how craven and miserly our NGO is, for example, only replacing things lost in the tsunami/conflict, rather than building its beneficiaries bigger houses or more techy boats.

I think this sort of challenge can be expected and, what is more, in a way further underscores the argument for more development, as global inequality looks even more lopsided from this vantage. Moreover, in terms of capacity building among the local workforce, exposure to these types of organizations is something that I think will prove really beneficial. Not only does it provide stable, enumerative employment for local people who want to build their communities, but it demonstrates an organizational framework that is predicated on phillanthropic, consultative, and sustainable interventions.

Professionalism (and my Economics rant)

In terms of improving the quality of programming, a greater degree of professionalism would go a long way. Basically too many of these organizations are trying to design microeconomic interventions without the proper tools to get at the effects they are interested in. Basically what ends up happening is an organization tries to cobble out assessments and strategies based on an awkward synthesis of macro-style baseline indicators (often at a national or provincial level) and anecdotal evidence. Their capacity to analyze microeconomic effects is virtually nil, a considerable problem when you trade is in household-level interventions. Many of these organizations have no capacity (and what's more troubling, no idea anything is amiss) for in house data collection or analysis, a weakness that has really surprised given the state of funding and sophistication of other elements.