Impact, status, conflict, values and aid – thoughts & reflections
What better way to kick off the year than a few days meeting people and communities on the front line of international development.
I have just spent 3 days travelling though western Kenya (Bungoma, Busia and Kisumu counties). I met people working in improving healthcare, tackling conflict, creating commercially viable access to clean drinking water, helping people register to vote, building county government skills & systems and simplifying border processes to unlock growth – all supported by DFID. Here are a few things I think I learnt from them:
Quality of organisations working in aid
First up, I was overwhelmed by the quality, commitment and passion of the people we met. While it might sound trite, the level of professionalism, depth of thinking and effort spent trying to improve people’s lives was incredible, from the professional aid worker to the ‘Birth Companion’ responsible for helping pregnant women.
The value of these visits, and not just to me
I learnt masses, as I always do. But what about the people we met? Despite my previous blog on Aid Jamborees and personal hang-ups about taking up people’s time in set piece community meetings, I learnt a different perspective: how valuable these visits can be for communities themselves. There was a level of self-esteem and importance people seemed to get from being able to air their views, show what they are doing and be heard. And beyond the visit itself how we – the visitors – can reinforce the development messages of our partners. I hope we left something behind…
The power of status in development.
That our development programmes can give power and status to people who’ve never had it before and can elevate their thinking and attitudes. For instance, the Community Health Volunteer proudly brandishing her Smart Phone (which she uses to collect vital data on the progress of pregnancy) who tells me that this has raised her status in her community; people in her village respect her and take her more seriously. She is happy she is making a difference.
Or the boda boda (motorbike taxi) driver who is proud to be now known locally as the ‘ambulance driver’. The transport vouchers issued to pregnant women mean they can get to the clinic. Brandishing his suit and beaming with pride he tells us how he saves lives.
But we need to be clearer on the politics of aid
But we need to make sure we think through the conflict dynamics and political economy before we intervene as every move we make changes power dynamics. Depressingly, we heard about a donor-funded water project that has sparked communal violence because it didn’t think through who would win and lose from the supply of water. Simple, but all too often forgotten.
And while the the simplest solutions are the best, they aren’t always easy to implement.
Kangaroo Mother Care is a fantastic example. It involves a simple skin to skin approach to caring for underweight babies (instead of an incubator with unreliable power and risk of infection). Simple and highly effective, but this approach has faced considerable resistance from mothers and their communities due to stigma and cultural norms.
But individuals can change deep cultural norms.
The mother of a 1 year old (who weighed 1kg at birth), who practiced Kangaroo Mother Care and is now the proud mum of a 1 year old 10kg son, tells us about how she is respected in her community. Each week she comes back to the clinic to explain the benefits to other pregnant women and new mothers in a support group. She tells us about how she has become known as ‘Kangaroo’ in her village because of her passion to help other young mothers in the area and how she is slowly changing attitudes.
How conflict sensitivity has to be pivotal
We heard how conflict mutates, ebbs and flows with new and emerging patterns and how the smallest of things can spark violence. In the Mt Elgon region we met representatives from Saboat, Bukusu and Teso communities who are working tirelessly to build peace and end the continuous cycle of violence. They speak darkly of the importance of politicians upholding the peace deal and their fears of all out war if it isn’t.
A reminder that development isn't about the tangibles.
We often spend our time fixating on quantitative results: health centers built, training courses run, even deaths averted. And they all matter, but at its heart what we are doing will only work if we get the software right – the values and behaviours of communities, private sector partners and governments that will ensure the benefits outlive aid. We met a community savings group developing who’ve spent significant time building trust and mutual confidence in each other. Hard to put in a donor report or logframe but vital to development.
Verifying what the MI reports tell us
‘Following the money’ doesn’t just mean reading reports in the capital but spending time talking to people and hearing the anecdotes to validate the official stories: the truck driver who says he’s been waiting 45 mins to get through the one stop border (when officials tell us it takes 5 mins); the young man queuing to get an ID card who doesn’t know he is unlikely to get his card in time to register to vote in the next 2 weeks; the clinical officer explaining how performance funding works for his clinic etc.
The importance of funding types
Getting the right type of funding agreement is a key driver of successful development programming. Partners tell us about how our contracting process can sometimes restrict innovation and experimentation, not to mention the time to agree. We hear a story of a DFID project that takes 2 years of in-house design, 1 year of contracting and 1 year of inception before it starts to achieve results. And even then, partners have to keep negotiating with the donor (us) to adjust and adapt. Equally we hear about more flexible approaches where we give people space, unlocking creativity and improving impact. We need to keep pushing reforms in the way the aid sector works to focus on outcomes and let front line delivery teams work out the best way to deliver and then get on with it. But there is a difficult tension to unpick: how do we strengthen accountability while giving people on the ground the freedom to innovate & iterate.
Of course, we will get it wrong sometimes
It is inevitable that not everything will work (despite the vitriolic attacks on aid by the U.K. media recently). One example of getting it wrong is by over-promising. For instance, we committed to the Busia County governor that we would fix a bit of road leading up to the border 18 months ago. For good technical reasons we have not yet managed to start actual physical work. We heard about a UN mission that visited a county 3 months ago and promised further support, yet the county government lament that there has been no follow up.
While these cases are largely about communication and engagement, it feels like a form of donor failure – how can we expect people to take us seriously if there is no accountability for our actions, promises or the time-frames we set? Wouldn’t it be good if donor contracts and agreements could have some form of mutual accountability built into them? Without it we risk undermining our credibility and contributing to apathy or ongoing dependency on donor handouts.
But when we get it right
We can see signs of real impact, of how tax payers money is changing the lives of people who have so little. More than that we can see how it is changing the underlying systems and cultural norms.
But I have a niggle – how much has really changed in the way we work?
I was hugely impressed by people we met and the impact we saw throughout the visit. However, I have a nagging feeling that not much has changed in the way we do things in the 20 years I’ve been visiting communities. We seem to be running similar(ish) projects that face similar(ish) challenges with little line of sight to an end point. In a world with so much need, with so many good things to fund, do we need a new way of thinking about what it is going to take to end the need for people like us to be needed? For each project we saw we heard about how continuing success would be contingent on ongoing donor funding: county governments presented us with wish lists; communities asked us to extend projects; partners worried about future funding. None of this is new, but this kind dependency feels like the product of the way the system works.
I talked through some of these reflections with our Secretary of State, Priti Patel, who was passing through Nairobi over the weekend and agreed that we need more sophisticated and long-term approaches that start from the end point: that governments and societies need to be able to drive poverty reduction themselves and end the need for aid. The perennial development challenge perhaps and in no way a criticism of the work we saw, just a desire to think bigger about how we achieve lasting change.
Finally,
Thanks to everyone who spoke to us and showed us around, most of whom will probably never read this. We all owe you significant gratitude for all that you do trying to make the world a better place.
