a million gossamer threads

Essential reading for sure. I’m very glad to see this issue getting attention. I’ve personally had experience with both examples they used (One Laptop Per Child Child and clean cookstove initiatives) when I worked in India and they’re spot on with the issues raised. Technology-led development almost always fails because it doesn’t change long term, community-wide behaviour.

Unsaid in the article, but the slavish demand by funders that NGOs exit interventions and communities in 3-5 years (with more and more push to the shorter end of that) plays a role here too. If we are serious about outcomes and serious about behaviour change and uptake of any given single or linked set of interventions, then we have to accept this takes time and a dedication to not cutting corners because we are juggling dual directives (solve the problem AND get out within the parameters). One almost always naturally ends up compromising the other, in decision-making or what we consider possible.

Interestingly, companies, who have infinite experience matching products with markets, can explain how you ignore the market to your peril, but also that if you do start with a product first and want to create your market (cough, DeBeers, cough), you need some serious behaviour shifting strategies and a long time horizon. Semi-seriously, we in development really should be hiring the psychology, positioning and marketing whizzes of these companies if we want the developing world to uptake all these whiz-bang techo solutions we’re peddling.

A very interesting post at the World Bank blog. I’ve been following the change in leadership, and while not sure by any means to matter tomorrow, it could if the leadership changes how the World Bank, the 100-pound gorilla of international development, carries out its mission. 

What the article does well is highlight a lot of the deep concepts behind the dominent approaches to development. Not being an economist myself, I tend to favour smaller ‘d’ approaches in my own work and perspective, but I do recognize their inability of small ‘d’ development (at least directly) to deal with the confounding factors of governance, geopolitical upheaval, economy systems and climatic stressors that can erase in a second years of work. (of course most of those can derail big ‘D’ development approaches too).

I really don’t know what the answer is except a new blend is needed as clearly the old Big ‘D’ approach doesn’t work as an outside influence and the small d approaches do seem more triage than systemic cure.

As the article says though, the two approaches are certainly not incompatible and I might welcome the Gorilla world bank being more open to the complementary approaches of empowerment and direct targeting from the bottom up to balance their expertise in top-down system improvement. 

Worth a read if development and the progress of nations interests you.

Look, to all my friends and loved ones and readers who are still clinging to the defence of the Kona2012 debate that awareness building and goodwill are good, pure enough concepts to counter the issues surrounding approaches that consistently and continually ignore the complexity of issues, outright gloss over realities, are devoid of any actual action or meaning or change, well, please accept my quiet disagreement and read this. 

And really think about why you so passionately defend your position of goodness. Does our grasping, in honest well-meaning desire to help, to false straws and false prophets really amount to A Good Thing. 

I love ya all, but Kona2012 and Invisible Children have to go and never come back. The negatively of their lowest-common-denominator approaches outweighs the benefit of mistake- and stereotype-laden “awareness”. Sorry.