Don't work for the World Bank!

Christmas, in terms of gifts anyway, makes me think of lists.  So here's a quick post in the form of a list I read recently.  Participatory change agents are essentially outsiders, probably professionals, who want to be agents of change in poor communities. As our posts from this year suggest, doing this kind of thing well is difficult and requires deeply self-critical stance and a good understanding of power/knowledge structures.  Bill Cooke (2004) thinks these 7 things are essential.

Rules of thumb for participatory change agents:

1.       Don’t work for the world bank

2.       Remember: co-optation, co-optation, co-optation

3.       Data belong to those from whom they were taken

4.       Work only in languages you understand as well as your first

5.       Always work for local rates, or for free

6.       Have it done to yourself

7.       Historicize theory and practice

Cooke insists these are in no particular order.  I'm skeptical.

Jordan (slogging through the last of his papers for term 1, in Manchester)

Reference:

Cooke, Bill (2004) “Rules of thumb for participatory change agents”, in Participation: from tyranny to transformation? Exploring new approaches to participation in development, Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (eds.) , Zed, London.

Power, Knowledge and Subversive acts of the Poor

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is someone that comes up all the time in my readings around development.  This was particularly true in readings around the idea of participation.  Participation has been a buzzword in international development for around 30 years.  Now, with the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy project, participation, in a sense, is mainstream. Getting the poor involved in Development is the latest fashion.

So what does all this have to do with a famous French philosopher, the smiling, bald dude in the photo (right)? I have hardly read any of his writing (one lecture of his, to be exact), but I've read a lot more about his ideas. Essentially, Foucault is quoted with regard to the relationship between power and knowledge and how this is played out in Development.

Here's my faltering attempt to summarize what I know on this subject.  Knowledge is often created through relationships, discourses and the repetition of ideas. Relationships include norms of behaviour, certain expectations and often, a certain hierarchy.  These are not pre-ordained by an objectively true social order, they come about in the context of that relationship and they form knowledge about that relationship. The relationship reinforces that knowledge. Knowledge that is created in that relationship usually reflects the distribution of power in that relationship.  Both parties understand themselves in the context of the knowledge created by that relationship.  Unless new knowledge is created, countering the established knowledge, it is very difficult to change the power distribution of that relationship. Make sense? Okay, maybe not, so let me try to provide an example from development studies.

Poor people in an urban setting, illegally build shelters in what becomes a slum.  These people have very little voice or power in society and they are already on the wrong side of the law. So the government comes along with an order to evict everyone and destroy their shelters to make way for an airport runway extension, for example. Intuitively we know that the government has more power than the poor slum dweller.  In fact, we might see the slum-dweller as uneducated, incompetent and even in the way of progress.  And we know, without a doubt that the slum-dweller is illegally occupying land and therefore has no right to be there anyway. But stepping back, we might observe that what we believe to be true about the slum dweller is in fact based on knowledge constructed through the relationship between the more powerful party, the government and the less powerful party, the slum-dweller. Maybe the slum-dweller has the capacity to be a productive member of society, to build his or her own shelter, save money, and even tackle other infrastructure issues in the slum. Maybe the law that says the slum-dweller has no right to establish a shelter on that piece of land is a law that needs to be contested, a carry-over from another time, or even another political system.

That's not the best example, perhaps.  But it's my attempt to describe the kinds of knowledge that SDI (see my last post) is helping slum dwellers to contest, through the creation of new knowledge.  The processes that SDI and its affiliates use revolve around supporting the poor in the creation of new knowledge and in doing so, contest the prevailing knowledge and power structures that make it almost impossible to establish security of shelter and greater political voice. The tools that the slum dwellers use are simple, painstaking, slow and subversive (Patel 2004).  They get under the skin of those in power. These tools include settlement surveys (the creation of knowledge about how many people there are, where they live, what they do, etc.) conducted by the slum dwellers themselves and house-building demonstrations. Underpinning these and many other tools, is the community-building exercise of saving.  Poor people, organizing together to save regularly and in doing so, build trust, develop community and prove they are capable of managing money and, together, bigger projects - defying the embedded knowledge about poverty.

The primary criticism of the Development industry is that it fails miserably to understand and engage with structures of power and knowledge at all levels (local, national and global). In other words, mainstream Development interventions avoid political realities on the ground. James Ferguson, an anthropologist working in Lesotho in the 90s called Development the "anti-politics machine"(1994).  This is not to say that Development has an underlying agenda to ignore politics, just that the way that it operates cannot engage with politics (Li 2007). But the poor can.

Jordan (Manchester)

References:
Ferguson, J. (1994) The Anti-politics Machine. "Development," Depoliticization, and Bereaucratic Power in Lesotho, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Li, Tania Murray (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics, Duke University Press, Durham.

Patel, S. (2004) Tools and methods for empowerment developed by slum dwellers federations in India, Particpatory Learning and Action, 50, IIED, London.

Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction

It's Monday morning and I'm at a computer in the library, about to get back to my paper for my module: Conflict Analysis. But I'm going to write this post first.  It's about my course of study, like Kurt, letting you know what I've actually been up to.

I'm enrolled in a 1 year Master's (MA) program (or course, as they say here - it's all very confusing for North American's like me) at the University of Manchester (Manchester, UK). I'm just completing term 1.  Classes started on Sept. 27 and ended (for me) last week.  The assessments for my classes (or modules) this term are all 3000 word essays - no exams. So that's what I'm working hard on now, trying to get the bulk of the 4 essays done before New Years so I can have a bit of a holiday with my wife's family. 3 of the 4 essays are due on January 5, 2011.  Then I have a whole month off before term 2 begins.

So, back to my course of study. When I orginally applied, I chose a pathway (within the MA International Development course) called "Economics and Management of Rural Development". Over the course of the induction week (induction always makes me think of a certain process to get babies out more quickly, but here it means "introduction"), I realized that the courses/modules that really grabed my attention were all part of a pathway called "Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction". So I switched.

I registered for the full load of four modules:

1. Conflict Analysis - an overview of theories that have been developed to explain why conflict (we focused primarily on international or inter-ethnic conflict) occurs. This is not a standard Development module.  It doesn't deal directly with questions of poverty reduction or economic development.  But it's fascinating in terms of thinking about why conflict occurs and, especially, why conflict is prolonged and how conflict affects development. Theories we've looked at include: structural violence - the idea that economic or social structures that limit peoples freedoms constitute a form of violence; greed and grievence - the ideas that people are motived to be violent out of greed or out of a sense of deprivation; and the impact of history and culture on violent conflict - that's what my paper is about.

2. Poverty and Development - a study of poverty and the relatively new poverty agenda in development, whereby poverty reduction has become a primary focus (at least on paper).  In the past, Development has focused largely on stimulating macroeconomic growth in developing countries, assuming that poverty reduction would follow 'naturally'. Here my paper will look at the extent to which the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategies acknowledge issues of exclusion.  In other words, does this new poverty-focused aid vehicle really help to include the very poorest and marginalized who are often excluded from the benefits of economic growth.

3. Perspectives on Development - a broad overview of the history of Development and of major development theories. Interesting, but fairly general.

4. Citizen-led Development - the most interesting of the four courses - looking at development as opposed to Development and how citizen-led groups in poor countries (or the global South) are making a big difference for themselves.  Participation has been a buzzword in Development for the last 40 years or so and has taken on all kinds of faces.  It's based on the idea that Development needs to include the voice and knowledge of the people it's trying to develop.  By 2000, a book came out calling participation "the new tyranny" and all but called for stopping participatory approaches all together, claiming (with some merit) that participatory approaches were doing more harm than good, that they were simply another way of co-opting the poor into a Western-led project for macroeconomic development and market liberlization.  My paper looks at how one citizen-led group, SDI, overcomes a lot of these problems.

This has definitely been an eye-opening 3 months for me. And I'm convinced that Manchester is a great place to be studying this.  Lot's of current development thinking comes straight out of this university. I feel like I'm studying in the context of the really important debates that are on-going.  And, as I've alluded to in past posts, I feel like my ideas about what my own role in development could be are crystalizing. Like Kurt, I see, more than ever, the need for dramatic change in the rich countries in terms of social norms about energy consumption and also about global poverty. Something has to change and change soon.  But I'm also even more committed to the idea of working in development on the ground and trying to be an agent of change, perhaps more in the organizations that I work for than in the context of the people I might work with.

Jordan (Manchester)

What I'm actually up to...

I apologize to all our active readers for the delayed post - it's the end of term for me so things are a bit hectic.

I'm taking my Master's of Engineering in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada. I'm focusing on a stream of courses that focuses on sustainable energy.

 

So this first term I took "Sustainable Distributed Energy" and "Power Systems". The first course covers all the broader technical implications of distributed generation (DG) -ie solar panels, wind turbines, biogas, geothermal scattered here and there all providing power to the grid. It's fairly interesting though so broad that I'm worried what he's going to throw at us for the final. Things that we have covered include all the benefits of having DG as well as all the many, many technical issues that need to be addressed when installing DG.

The main points come down to this:

1. The electrical grid wasn't really set up to handle power being generated all over the place and so lots of the equipment (especially protection devices) need to be considered when analyzing where DG can be installed
2. Renewable DG power (mainly solar and wind) is highly variable and may not match the demand at any given instant. So we need "dispatchable" energy (coal, hydro, etc) that we can turn on and off as needed to fill in the gaps left by renewable energy. This is somewhat a matter of perspective since if you had 1000's of acres of solar panels and wind farms then you would be able to order what you need when you need it. But it is true, 10billion solar panels won't do you much good at midnight.
3. Renewable DG (again mainly solar and some wind turbines) give a very different quality of power that needs to be dealt with. Sometimes the DG can actually help improve the quality of the power but because it's brand new technology it's not allowed quite yet for a number of other reasons. (Oh yes, electricity has quality! And when all your electronics are connected, especially the discount electronics, the power quality goes to pot.)

 

My other course is "Power Systems" - a very standard electrical power engineering course. Just a whole lot of math concerning how to calculate power at points all over the grid as well as other things (stability of the grid, reactions to various fault conditions, etc) It's a lot of complex (as in a + bi) number crunching and not what I'm interested in but fairly foundational to everything else so I'm glad I'm taking it.

 

These courses have given me quite an appreciation for the power grid. It really is probably one of the most complexly, interconnected systems in the world and it's really cool to begin to understand it.

 

And I think this is where this blog has given me food for thought. Through my course projects and looking back at my career I've realized that I'm more interested in facilitating change or looking at the bigger picture than actually designing more efficient solar panels or wind turbines. And through writing this blog I've realized (or verbalized something I already knew) that the real change that needs facilitating is here in North America, not in the developing world. So maybe all this questioning of Mr Easterly will really make me plant my feet firmly on this side of the ocean (don't tell my wife that though!).

 

In ending, I'd like to recommend one website, http://www.grist.org/. It's often fairly light but scattered with new ways of looking at society and the way we could or should be doing things.

Kurtis (Waterloo)

How, Mr. Easterly?

In preparation for our last lecture in my module “Poverty and Development”, we were asked to submit questions which would then be taken by a panel consisting of David Hulme and Caroline Moser (both staff at the Institute for Development and Policy Management). One of the questions dealt with Easterly’s book, reviewed by Kurt in last week’s post. The question asked: “Is it time to consider a more bottom-up, piecemeal approach to combat global poverty, as proposed by Bill Easterly?” Good question.

David Hulme responded by saying Easterly’s ideas are great, apart from the fact that Easterly does not flesh out his idea of “searchers” with theory. How would a strategy favoring searchers actually work? Would governments still have a role? Our lecturer for the course, moderating the panel, gave his view that Easterly is actually a free-market libertarian and doesn’t expand on his theory of searchers because it has long been discredited.

An important point that Easterly makes, however, is that rich countries need to be held accountable for the promises they make to the rest of the world. Searchers are accountable to the market, at least. For example, in the panel discussion today, it was pointed out that of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the only one that puts an onus on the rich countries to do something is the one that is not subject to Results-Based Management (RBM). In other words, while the poor countries are held to account for meeting MDGs one through seven, the rich countries will not be held to account for whether or not they reach their goal.

So, does Easterly’s idea, that searchers should replace planners in international development, hold any promise? Like Kurt, I think it does. But I agree with David Hulme that the question, How?, is not answered by Easterly. I also agree with David Hulme in his assessment of Easterly as overly pessimistic in asserting that Development has done no good. In fact, many things have improved for the majority of the world’s population in terms of incomes, average life expectancy and infant mortality. That should not be discounted, even if the Development model is fraught with difficulties.

How, then, do we move forward, as a rich world, trying to do something about the huge disparity in incomes, living conditions and opportunities (freedoms) between our countries and most of the other countries in the world? This is essentially the question that at least two of my modules ask at their conclusion. And this is the question that we are left with at the end of Easterly’s book.

I come back to the idea that I put forward in my last post, that top-down and bottom-up have to work together. There is a role for planning at the state level (though maybe not at the global level), and there is a role for the entrepreneur and for the grass-roots civil society. How these work together is not straight forward and it’s unlikely that what works in one country or region can be duplicated in another. One thing is certain, however, strong, free civil society, effective institutions and transparent, competent government cannot be manufactured or planned. They must grow organically (as has been the case in all of the richest countries) through a long-term, risk-laden process. The questions we (the rich) should be asking ourselves are:

1. Is anything we’re doing right now likely to help such a process? and

2. If not, why are we doing it?

Jordan (Manchester)

Review of "The White Man's Burden"

So now a bit of history on the title of this blog - a topic which Jordan is far better suited to cover but we reserving his talent for a review of other development writings.

The title of this blog, “Two White Men with Burdens”, is a tip to William Easterly’s “The White Man’s Burden; Why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much Ill and so little good”. Similarly, Easterly’s book is a tongue in cheek reference to the poem by Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" (or the Wiki-link) However, Easterly's book is even more of a direct response to Jeffrey Sach's "The End of Poverty". (In fact, the two are listed as "Opposed" in their Wikipedia entries.)

I first read WMB somewhere in the middle of term term in Tanzania and it immediately struck a chord with me. As I read it, I was in the middle of my own development projects (I cringe to use that term) but more importantly I was familiar enough with my community to begin to recognize the ghosts and failures of so many projects that had gone before me.

Easterly provides a fairly easy read starting with an overview of the differences between the economic systems of western capitalism and the systems of traditional development work. His main argument is that while capitalism is driven by Searchers (entrepreneurs looking for a demand market that is not being met) , the development world is largely made up of Planners (people who assume they know the answer from their own experience disconnected from ground work developing strategies solely on paper). Throughout the book he provides case studies of development projects that have failed because they have far too much outside planning. What I found even more interesting was his contrasting of aid between various countries. With admittedly broad strokes he reviews many of the countries which received IMF money (ie BIG money) IMF over the last 50 years and where they are now. (Hint: It's not a pretty picture.) He contrasts this with places and countries that did NOT receive IMF aid and it makes for an interesting observation.

At the end of the book he does provide his own, albeit in my opinion, weak suggestion for how to reform the aid industry. He talks about "aid dollars" with which the recipients of aid project could vote, or buy, the aid projects that they were interested in from the aid agencies that they trusted. It is an interesting thought and does begin to address his criticism that there is no proper feed-back mechanism within the aid industry in which agency's are answerable to their donors and not the people they are trying to serve.
(Also read the NYTime's review of "White Man's Burden)

In some of our correspondence Jordan enlightened me to the fact that the one thing Easterly does NOT do very well is acknowledge the growing body of research that demonstrates his points very clearly. In other words, he leaves the reader to assume that he was the first to hold and promote this perspective on development. But I think Jordan may expound on this a bit more next week.
And I would be amiss not to acknowledge Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist with very impressive credentials. She wrote "Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa". This book is fairly high up on my to-read list and hopefully I can read it before the end of this year.
(Interesting disclosure. I had always had a bit of reservations for Bono's (lead singer from U2 - no links, you look him up) views on aid for Africa. I really appreciate Bono for a number of other reasons but in doing this research I've realised that he is on of the Sach's camp and definitely not in the Easterly / Moyo camp which is unfortunate in my opion.)

Well, there you have it, not the most interesting post but for those of you with the same sentiments (and especially anyone of differing sentiments!) please give it a read.

Kurtis (wrapping up my first semester in Waterloo)

Freedom to Aspire

Development is dead. I’m trying to be a good academic and cite everything I quote, but I can’t remember who said that, or, in fact, if anyone put it quite that way. But around the late 80s and early 90s at a time in Development history called, optimistically, the Impasse, that was the consensus of many. Someone else has commented that development studies nearly didn’t make it into the 21st Century. There’s even a development school known as post-Development. They basically say that Development should be stopped altogether. But the next question is: then what?

And why do I spell Development with a capital D? By Development, I mean the large-scale international effort by rich countries to help poor countries get to where the rich countries are in terms of GDP, industrialization, material standard of living, etc. Development has been a massive project, starting, effectively, after WWII with the Marshall Plan. The US injected (development studies loves the word injected, usually coupled with the word ‘cash’ as I will do after this next parenthesis) cash into the European and Japanese economies. The amount of cash was staggering. The US did it for two reasons, because they felt bad for nearly obliterating Japan and bombing the hell out of (or maybe into) Germany and (I think more importantly) because they knew that if Europe did not recover economically, neither would the US.

With the Marshall Plan, money seemed to be the answer. With so much cash injected at once (a tactic known as the ‘Big Push’, a term coined, I believe, by Walt William Rostow) the economy would slowly recover, until it reached a ‘take-off’ point at which time much less outside money would needed and the economy would grow under its own steam. This appeared to work in Europe and Japan in the 40s and 50s. And it failed miserably in Iraq (of late). My analysis: if a doctor loses his clinic in a fire and you build him another one, his practice will be up and running in no time. If you go to a poor person in rural Ghana who survives on subsistence agriculture and build him the same clinic, a medical practice will not magically appear.

That’s Development, trying to find scientific formulas to generate economic growth, measured by GDP increase. What about development? 'Small d' development has been defined as freedom (Amartya Sen1999) as the achievement of human rights or human justice. Paulo Freire talks about education (in many ways the core process for development) as a process of awakening an understanding of our own capacity to change our circumstances. These ideas fit with Kurt’s ideas about life, liberty and the freedom to share these things. I agree. And I want to take the idea of freedom one level deeper. Development as freedom is about nurturing the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai 2004). To turn that into a question: can we (professionals) be involved in facilitating a long-term process of building the capacity of poor people to realize their aspirations?

Our role as professionals is not to suggest an answer or a project, or even to suggest aspirations, but to avail ourselves to the poor as a tool to help them overcome the relationships and structures of power that keep them poor. If we can do this and see development as a long term, risk-laden, learning-by-doing process and not as a project, we might just be of some use. That’s from the bottom up. I believe things have to happen from the top down as well. Governments need to reform, income needs to be spread out, good institutions need to be built to protect property rights and stand for justice. But those reforms alone will not help the poor help themselves.

Jordan (Manchester)

References:

Appadurai, A. (2004) The Capacity to Aspire: Culture in Terms of Recognition, World Bank, Stanford University Press (I apologize that full citation details are not available).

Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

Many of people who mention the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" come from very different perspectives than I have and I think that is important for this post. I almost named this entry "Paradigm Shifting".

So, the topics at hand are my answers to the three opening questions we of this blog; What is development? Why should I be involved in development? What is our hope for development – what to we think can be accomplished, what is our ideal outcome of development?

Before I get into things, I am a zero-sum type person, I have a strong conviction that in almost everything in life there are no gains without losses. As it applies to development, I feel that it is unreasonable to frame development in terms of bringing everyone up to a Western style of living, that is certainly unsustainable - see global footprint. And just to throw in one more wiki-link, in a very similar vein, I am often reminded of the tragedy of the commons. To me, these ideas are different perspectives of the same thread and I see them pop up often in life, not just with respect to ecology but, also economics, personal life and even my faith.

(The global footprint link obviously addresses sustainability but I was surprised how quickly the TotC link gets into ecology - I thought it was a broader theory than that. And VERY interestingly that the zero sum article was categorised under the international relations theory which really ties in well.)

So, what is development? Last night Carla and I watched a special by David Suzuki about Europe's attempts at sustainability and they mentioned quality of life. In my opinion, development is helping all people achieve a good quality of life. Yes, I just shifted the question to, "What is a good quality of life?" but I think it does help to re-frame the question like that. For example, 30 min commute times is not a decent quality of life for many reasons and therefore it is not development. Getting people involved in the rat-race (ie the global economy) does not ensure a decent quality of life. For the record I do not have any rose-coloured glasses on the traditional ways of life in Africa or South America, I am aware (or at least I KNOW that I am NOT aware) of the poor quality of life that those lifestyles offer.

I am fairly certain that there is a quality of life standard by which most people can look to their own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Many people in Africa do not have that and, unfortunately, many people in North America do not have a good quality of life either. So I'll stop there - development is achieving a better quality of life for all people.

Number two, why should I want to be involved in development? I think this segues rather nicely. I am interested in development not only because I want to help people achieve a better quality of life but I want that for myself and my family. In general, I am interested in defining what is a sustainable, good quality of life. Not only from the technical perspective (ie a house built this way and this much travel by this means per year) but also from the paradigm perspective. For myself I want to promote the mindset where people are OK with biking 20 minutes to get to work or understand that some food may not be readily available because seasonality or their geography.

As you can see, I am trying to promote the idea that there is just as much development work needed in North America or Europe as in the third world. So as for why I am interested in doing development work overseas, I think it again gets back to quality of life. Both Carla and I feel that the quality of life for us and our kids is better in many ways than here in North America. Don't get me wrong, we are very happy to be "home" now but often talk about the broader implications.

Finally, what is my hope for development – what do I think can be accomplished, what is my ideal outcome of development? To reiterate the above, my hope for development is to help people find a decent quality of life that they can share with their neighbours. And this as much about mindset as anything else.

I am reminded of one of my favourite Dilbert strips which I know most people won't find too funny but I laugh out loud every time I read it, even now - check out paradigm shift.

Personally, I found this entry flowed rather well but I am all to aware of how my ideas look when others reflect them back to me so let the criticisms fly. As well I know these thoughts are hardly novel, so please share any links for recommended reading (blogs, books, etc) of people who have expressed these thoughts better and more completely than I just did.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

Jordan's Skepticim: a brief history (Introduction Part 2)

Now I’m into the thick of my course/programme, trying to read as much as I can on topics range from climate change to structural analysis of conflict, to social movement theory, to the debates over how to measure poverty. This post is all about the skepticism side of the White Man’s Paradox, the realization that I/we can’t save the world and the question: where my skepticism has come from? So as I read for my courses, I’m trying to evaluate the effect on my skepticism. At the end of one of my lectures last week (for a module/course called ‘Citizen-led Development’) I remarked to a colleague: out of my four modules, this is only one where we hear about things that work. And the White Man is notably absent from the picture that is being drawing in the lectures.

This seems to confirm my skepticism. When I look at some of the things the World Bank has done, all of what I know about the IMF (International Monetary Fiend?), the philosophy of USAID, the mammoth, sluggish, cobbled UN, I despair. After reading a lot last week about the politics of climate change, I am now down to zero hope that a global consensus will ever be reached in time to make any difference. The conclusion that I came to in the essay I handed in on Friday is that the poor in the Global South may have to help themselves. The White Men will not agree to cut emissions soon enough, maybe never (I fully acknowledge that countries in the Global South have to cut back as well, though I have no more hope that they will agree any sooner). And the mantra of economic growth only leads to development practices that increase the vulnerability of the very poorest to global climate shocks. Growth, growth, growth. If cancer had a motto, that would be it.

But I digress. I’m supposed to be a critical-thinking professional and avoid taking cheap shots…

Unlike Kurtis, my skepticism has formed after I left Pakistan upon graduation from high school. Growing up, I watched my father and two other White doctors start up a small community health programme in North-Western Pakistan. The project focused primarily on education – helping villagers help themselves with basic sanitation and with pre- and post-natal health and safe home deliveries. The overheads were small, the project was local and most of the staff were from the area. In many respects the project was a success in small scale, sustainable poverty reduction and capacity building (a lecturer recently told us that, under no circumstances, should we use terms without defining them: I just used two – sustainable and capacity building. In retrospect, I still see projects like that, as a beacon of hope, that development (yet to be defined in this blog, I know) can work and that my education may be of some use to someone else.

So what am I, skeptical or hopeful about the prospects for development to work? Ask me tomorrow, and I might know.

Jordan (Manchester)

The Gritty World of Development, Kurtis in Tanzania

I spent the first half of 2010 working on a water project. This was out of my comfort zone but really gave me an opportunity for some “classic” development work. The objective was to lay a foundation for a regional water project and there were two aspects towards that end. First, a learning tour where a group of us travelled around the region interviewing stakeholders from the village to the government level. The second component involved a hands-on project mainly as a way to provide some meat to all the talk that went on during the tour.

I'm not sure how I can phrase this best but in short: the tour was a who's who of water project failures and the small project, although good, was filled with all the classic development roadblocks that I had previously read about.

Driving around the Serengeti revealed failed project after failed project. Three out of 300 shallow boreholes still working after 10 years, hand pumps broken or stolen, a school water tank that had collapsed, a massive spring that was now harbouring more parasites in it's “protected” state than it ever had previously and I will stop there. Most painful were the projects that were in disrepair (and destined never to help the community) before they had even been completed!

It is tempting at this point to get into a critique of what exactly had failed and what should have been done differently but the point is simply that these projects had failed. We [development workers] have had 50 years to find the best way to bring clean water to communities in need (by modern standards) so there is not much more room for should haves and could haves.

I will not list the organizations behind these projects; they and their staff were all working out of the best of intentions. The one organization I will mention is Mennonite Central Committee. In the mid-nineties MCC protected a few natural springs (ie provided a way to harvest the water before it was contaminated) and 15 years later those protection mechanisms were still being used daily by hundreds of people.

My own small water project was extremely interesting. I do not have the time nor space to relate the whole project but in short, we tried to protect one spring to provide clean water to a small, rural community. It certainly wasn't a spectacular failure but in reality I do not feel as good about the process as I would have liked. The final product was good and I hope that it will still be going after 5 years but I am not so certain about 15. The main result for me was a very clear picture of what grass-roots development can look like and a lot of questions.

As for that regional project; we inundated the head office with ideas about what could be done and “how to” reports from all the lessons we had learned.

The truth is that I was left very hesitant about any outside initiated water project in the region but could not bring myself to voice that because it was so different from what the local people wanted & needed and what I, as a development worker, was sent to do.

So now you know a bit more where I am coming from,

Kurtis (Waterloo)

ps. For an example of a water provision technology that does seem to dodge the typical development short falls do some research on “sand dams”.

Where I Come From: Introducing Kurtis, Part 1

A significant part of my childhood was spent in Nairobi, Kenya. Like Jordan, I attended a school for missionary kids (Rosslyn Academy). It was during those formative years that I was exposed to Nairobi’s vast and permanent missionary and NGO expatriate community.

As such I saw missionaries and NGO workers living in the “wilds” of Africa with the latest in Home A/V technology and multiple SUV families. I have memories of my father ranting after reading “Lords of Poverty” (A scathing critique of the UN). So I learned the art of compartmentalization – where I lived I saw the isolated world of the expat but also, through the efforts of my parents, saw normal life in Africa. And somehow with the innocence of a child I was able to accept each for what they were in and of themselves.

Later, in 2007, I returned to East Africa to do ICT development work with Mennonite Central Committee in Mugumu, Tanzania. This time things were much different as I had a family of my own, we lived three hours from the nearest paved road and were the only foreigners living in our town. I was forced to turn my cynicism inward and critique my work and reasons for being there.

Our work was with a grassroots community development program which mainly supported people living with HIV/AIDS. My tasks included computer maintenance (virus’s are incredibly prevalent in those kinds of settings), improving access to the internet, moving financial and client records to electronic systems as well as developing a web presence for the program.

So over the course of our three years I managed to tackle most of those tasks. I had got the computer virus situation under control, set up an couple of WAN/LAN’s, put up www.imaratz.org and even a VSAT connection by our final year thanks to my MCC supervisor who secured the large amount of funds needed. I never did implement electronic records but I think my successor might concentrate on that.

It is very difficult to describe these conditions to anyone who has never worked in development. Accomplishing the most basic task can be thwarted by anything from looking for a key, to a power outage, to lack of credit or charge on a cell-phone to a funeral. Listing off my work in a single paragraph completely disregards the incredible range of circumstances that I encountered while doing this work.

So although my time in the Serengeti was somewhat frustrating at times, it was for the most part incredibly rich. The here & now attitude of life in rural Africa is surprisingly refreshing for those used to constantly living in the future. The people I worked with were extremely dedicated to their work but approached it through different set of priorities and expectations.

Interestingly the word for outsider, mzungu, in Kiswahili has the same root “zungu” as spin, confused and drunk. The hope for this blog is that as we begin to spin our way through our Master’s courses we will find some clearer vision for how our education and experiences can be resolved.

Kurtis (Waterloo)

Introducing Jordan, part 1

In 2006 I spent two months in Gilgit, Pakistan working for an NGO on a small hydro project. While there I received an e-mail from another white man of similar heritage and small town Manitoba origins. He signed his e-mail something like: take care, Mennonite boy. And I looked at the salutation in surprise wondering to whom he could possibly be referring. Outside that context, I had subconsciously slipped into a new-old identity, the one I wore as a child growing up in Pakistan where my father worked as a medical doctor in a mission hospital and then in a community health project in villages in the Himalayan foothills. Although I look Germanic with blue eyes, blonde hair and white skin, I’ve spent my life more at home wandering the world than in any one place.

How is it that I’ve ended up in Manchester enrolled in a Master’s degree in International Development for 2010-2011? These are the facts: After graduating from Murree Christian School in Pakistan and saying good-bye to my 17 classmates (representing 10 different nationalities), I moved to the wide open prairie of central Canada and studied mechanical engineering. Two years into the program I thought I might have picked the wrong one. But I finished it and spent 4 years working in Winnipeg designing brackets (oops, I mean buses) before taking 4 months out to work in Gilgit with the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme. On that same trip I met up with one of my 17 classmates (she of English and Finnish extraction) in Kabul and a little less than two years later we were married. At that time I had already started applying to Master’s programmes in the UK and she was finishing an MA from a university in Finland. In August we moved here to a small flat in central Manchester.

I should mention that while studying engineering at the University of Manitoba I met another white man of similarly ambiguous identity – he just arrived from Kenya. And two weeks ago I found myself playing Lego with his son and then talking long into the night about why we still want to save the world, how we plan to self-publish our experiences this year for the edification of our many readers, and how we’ll handle the book deal offers that are sure to come in response to these excellent tales of graduate studies in Green Energy and International Development at Waterloo and Manchester respectively.

Jordan (Manchester)

The White Man's Paradox

Kurt Unger and I (Jordan Fast) are two white men with burdens. We want to save poor people in developing countries. That’s one burden. Another burden we carry is that we know we can’t, in fact we are deeply cynical of so many attempts to do that. We know that just to state our goal in that way is predisposing us to repeat the failures of countless white men before us. So let me start again.

After three years working with the Mennonite Central Committee in Tanzania, together with his wife (and now three kids) Kurt met up with me in Winnipeg at a great Thai restaurant. Kurt had spent the day helping me build a crate to ship stuff from Winnipeg to Manchester. I had spent the last three years working for New Flyer Industries as a product development engineer and plotting my return to university and then onward to a new career in development. Kurt and I were both moving to the places where we would start Master’s programmes (or courses, if you’re British). And Kurt said (at least that’s how I remember it): “we should start a blog”. I bit into a chop stick full of delicious Pad Thai and said (after swallowing the food, of course): “great idea”. The only remaining question was: what about?

During that same conversation Kurt recommended William Easterly’s book “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good.” And later on, when we hashed out the details for the blog we decided we would use it to explore this paradox in our lives: we have deep cynicism about the development effort – we are taking a year or two of our lives, at significant expense to ourselves and our families, to better prepare for careers in development.
We will begin, over the next 4 posts, by introducing ourselves, our experiences with development to date, our cynicism and why we have hope that development can work.

As we document our experiences this year at two different universities studying two different programmes we will try to answer the following three questions:

1. What is development?

2. Why should I be involved in development?

3. What is our hope for development – what to we think can be accomplished, what is our ideal outcome of development?

And likely, we will revise or add to this list of questions during the year. This is as much about constructing our own realities and taking charge of our own learning as about enlightening anyone else. In fact, we have no pretenses of enlightening anyone else, but we hope you’ll keep reading if you got this far.

Jordan (Manchester)