Doing Harm
We want to do good, but we often do harm. How can we begin to reverse this?
Mary Burns
“Do no harm” is a mantra in the world of humanitarian education and education in conflict and crisis (EiCC). It is both an operational framework and an exhortation that those providing assistance and resources practice due diligence to ensure that their activities, resources and intentions do not exacerbate precarious situations or jeopardize personal safety. It is EiCC’s version of the Hippocratic Oath.
Beyond the specific contexts of humanitarian and EiCC settings, I don’t hear much about doing harm, and in particular, not doing harm. This is unfortunate because in the education development community writ large, all good intentions aside, we often do harm — and lots of it. While our actions may not rise to the threat of jeopardizing personal safety, they can jeopardize personal agency, individual opportunity, and the overall quality of the interventions we create and do with teachers and students.
“Doing harm” has components of omission and commission. Withholding a known benefit from someone (an act of omission) may be as harmful as delivering a poor intervention (an act of commission). “Doing harm” also occupies a continuum: we can do a little harm or a lot.
As I write this, US foreign aid will inevitably face cuts, which will dictate how aid is allocated, to whom, and how the education sector will be impacted. Thus, in the Churchillian spirit of not letting a crisis go to waste, this might be an opportune time for introspection on the harm we do, why we do it, and how we can begin to do more good than harm.
When do we “do harm”?
We can probably all point to times in our work when we’ve done harm. I’ll note three practices that are fairly common:
· When we deliberately underbid on Requests for Proposals — promising activities we know we cannot satisfactorily complete because of budget constraints
· When the complacency of “good enough” replaces the goal of “the very best”
· When, as part of “cascade” or “Train-the-Trainers” approaches, we let poorly trained “trainers” go forth and teach — and metastasize mediocre and poor practice
I could go on. I’m sure we all could.
Why do we do harm?
It’s worth asking why we do harm, especially since the international education development world is governed by good intentions and the work is largely implemented by “do-gooders” — who are far more often than not caring, committed, decent, smart, experienced, and thoughtful people. Donors (Disclosure: I consult for one), for the most part, are comprised of the same types of folks, obviously, and they want to create sustainable lasting improvements in literacy, quality teaching, poverty reduction, and educating refugee children.
Yet the very mechanism — donor funding — that makes possible “doing good” also facilitates “doing harm.” Part of that impetus results from two paradoxes of aid, both rooted in good intentions and both rooted in free-market models — competition and scale.
Competition
Implementers compete for government contracts, ostensibly because competition will produce excellence and efficiency. Unfortunately, the reality is often different. First, however “healthy” it’s supposed to be, competition often breeds a host of “unhealthy” practices — underbidding and over promising on contracts; the Request for Proposal (RFP) as agitprop; an unwillingness to collaborate or share information across organizations; using inexpensive (read: inexperienced) staff; and the hopeful (cynical?) belief that once we start on the project, more money will come later.
Next, in the free market, competition works because “excellence” is determined by the customer who chooses a service or product based on how well that product fits his/her needs and expectations. But in the donor-funded aid world, our customer (teachers and students) have no say (apart from perfunctory needs assessment which is often confirmatory versus exploratory) in determining excellence or in choosing their service or product provider. It’s all decided for them.
Finally, while the whole notion that we can do more with less is a catchy, optimistic slogan, in the real world, reduced budgets typically mean doing less with less. The efficiencies promised in an RFP often result in the programming implementation equivalent of Woody Allen’s complaint about a New York City restaurant — “What lousy food…and such small portions!”
Scale
Scale is based on the very understandable desire to expand and replicate quality interventions to spread the benefits of good practice over a nation or region so that all citizens benefit. It’s hard to argue against this impetus. The problem, however, is that scale becomes an end in itself — not a means to an end. The focus on scale often results in a host of deleterious practices — using misleading statistics (precise numbers grounded in imprecise constructs); valuing quantity over quality or ignoring quality altogether; using overly simplistic practices that tinker at the margins of a problem versus addressing fundamental, vexing, high-leverage issues; premature dissemination; denigrating small successful innovations that aren’t scalable; privileging product over process; and paradoxically ignoring the very foundation of scale itself — depth (of knowledge of and in practice) which often takes years to cultivate.
Both of the above — competition and scale — are grounded in the larger political and bureaucratic exigencies of aid. They are exacerbated by an existential reality — implementing organizations depend on aid for their very survival. The present system of bidding has created massive imbalances and inconsistencies that may help some organizations do well but often at the expense of doing good. And in the process, they may be inadvertently doing harm because they are more concerned with ensuring their own success and well-being than those of their customers — vulnerable children and adults.
Whom do we harm?
Together, competition and scale can quickly and invisibly result in interventions that are of poorer quality, shorter duration or that deprive education systems of ongoing support and resources. Thus, we end up harming the very people we purport to be helping — teachers, school directors, students, and families by providing them with mediocre interventions or interventions that are not deep enough, long enough, or sustained enough — or by doing less when we should be doing more. We undermine belief in the effectiveness of professional learning and coaching and support. We undermine belief in the worthiness, the effectiveness and the moral imperative of aid.
How do we turn harm into good?
There are efforts to reverse the first of these issues (competition). For instance, USAID’s communities of practice around reading and education in conflict and crisis — are starts. Results4Development and MSI have initiated a community of practice (with which I’m affiliated) to address issues around scale. But many of these issues raised here are foundational. They are at the heart of how we do aid.
Transmuting harm into good, to my mind, constitutes nothing less than radically changing much about how we do aid — no easy task where money, careers, organizational survival and politics is at stake. But maybe it could begin more modestly — through organizational and personal introspection and by asking ourselves some fundamental questions. Here are mine:
· What are our core values? Is it the desire to perpetuate our own existence or contribute to improving education quality for poor and vulnerable children?
· Do we care about our real customers — teachers and students? If so, then how do we make them front and center in everything we do?
· How do we professionalize international educational development so there is a code of conduct (as in other professions) with professional standards for technical specialists (as in other professions)?
· Can we, as an industry or profession or community, agree on what constitutes doing harm and work to avoid it?
· Can we, as an industry or profession or community, agree on what constitutes doing good and focus efforts on attaining it?
· How do we encourage ideas and innovations that are realistic, feasible, truly beneficial and give taxpayers the best value for their money?
· How do we resist the seduction of quick, easy slogans and fixes and instead fund and focus on the long, hard, unglamorous work of meaningful change and improvement?
· How do we create initiatives that really can scale not just inputs but quality outcomes?
· How do we incentivize real collaboration and best ideas versus unhealthy Darwinian competition?
· How do we ensure that goals and scale match funding realities? How do we begin to make politically palatable the idea of doing less with less?
· How do we work together, across organizations, to bring to bear collective expertise to address truly vexing educational issues?
· How can we begin to truly value quality over expediency and ethics over politics?
· How can we help to focus work on people versus numbers, depth over reach, and quality over quantity?
Let’s start a conversation — in our own offices and across projects. We won’t change the world overnight, but maybe we can stop and think hard about why we do what we do and we do it. And maybe in doing so we can do a little less harm and a little more good.
(The views expressed here are mine and do not represent those of my organization, employers or colleagues)
