<![CDATA[Stories by Themarginsnotes on Medium]]> https://medium.com/@themarginsnotes?source=rss-5f8551195948------2 https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/fit/c/150/150/0*VBaxwn6GAHcoKyi1 Stories by Themarginsnotes on Medium https://medium.com/@themarginsnotes?source=rss-5f8551195948------2 Medium Sat, 16 May 2026 18:22:48 GMT <![CDATA[Development Work Is Not a Hobby]]> https://medium.com/@themarginsnotes/development-work-is-not-a-hobby-31ebb8607e90?source=rss-5f8551195948------2 https://medium.com/p/31ebb8607e90 Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:44:10 GMT 2026-04-29T14:44:10.082Z Why the Global South’s Middle Class Must Build Its Own Development Sector

A $4 trillion financing gap. A two-million-person annual brain drain. And a sector quietly turning away the people best placed to fix it.

The Global South is being asked to deliver more development with less money than at any point in the last decade. In 2024, official development assistance from OECD donors fell by 7.1 percent — the first decline in six years. Meanwhile the annual SDG investment gap for developing countries has ballooned from $2.5 trillion in 2015 to roughly $4 trillion today. We are running harder, on a thinner road, into a steeper hill.

And the people best placed to run it — educated, ambitious, middle-class professionals from the very countries this work is meant to serve — are not on the road at all.

This is not because they don’t care. It’s because the system makes it almost impossible for them to show up

The numbers behind the argument

Before the prose, the receipts.

The annual SDG financing gap in developing countries is now about $4 trillion, up from $2.5 trillion before the pandemic, according to UNCTAD’s 2024 SDG Investment Trends Monitor. More than half of that — $2.2 trillion — relates to the energy transition alone.

In 2023, only 0.6 percent of humanitarian funding from Grand Bargain donor signatories went directly to local and national actors. The pledge was 25 percent. We are nowhere near it.

Sub-Saharan Africa loses an estimated two million skilled professionals every year to migration, costing the continent roughly $2 billion annually in human capital, per World Bank and UNECA estimates. More than 30 percent of trained health professionals from the region now work abroad.

72.4 percent of the world’s population lives in countries rated by CIVICUS as having restricted, repressed or closed civic space. The professionals who would do this work are working in shrinking room.

In sub-Saharan Africa, three in four young people are stuck in insecure employment. In Latin America and the Caribbean, more than half. The professional middle class is small, hard-won, and being asked to choose between consequential work and economic security.

These are not editorial flourishes. They are the operating conditions of the sector.

Who actually works in the Global South’s development sector

Walk into any decent-sized development organization from Nairobi to Dhaka to Lima and you will reliably meet three kinds of people. You will almost never meet the fourth.

There is the international expatriate. Often well-credentialed, often well-meaning, almost always paid on a separate scale with separate benefits. Devex’s compensation data shows international consultants earning up to $504,000 in country postings, while national consultants in the same sector start at around $12,000 a year. Multiple country studies — from Tunisia to Kenya to South Sudan — find expatriate staff earning three to five times what local colleagues earn in equivalent roles, often with housing, transport, school fees, and security on top.

There is the local staff member with limited mobility. Skilled, often the institutional memory of the organization, but operating in a labor market with few alternatives that match their values. Their leverage to negotiate is structurally low. The sector knows this.

There is the young idealistic newcomer. Burns bright. Burns out. Median tenure in entry-level program roles in many country offices is between 18 and 30 months. They leave for graduate school, for the private sector, for a job that lets them pay rent.

And there is the person who almost never shows up: the educated, mid-career, middle-class Global South professional. The IIM graduate in Mumbai. The Strathmore MBA in Nairobi. The FGV alum in São Paulo. The Wits engineer in Johannesburg. The AUB economist in Beirut. The person who could lead a complex programme, build durable institutions, and stay long enough to see the work through.

They do not show up. And the sector has organized itself in a way that almost guarantees they won’t.

Why they don’t show up

Three structural reasons. None of them are about whether people care.

The compensation gap is not subtle

Inside the same organization, in the same office, doing related work, a national staff member is routinely paid a fraction of an international colleague’s salary — sometimes a fifth, sometimes a third, almost never parity. Birches Group’s NGO Global Pay survey, the sector’s most-cited compensation benchmark, has documented this dual-pay structure for over two decades. Eighty-one percent of surveyed NGOs operate different policy regimes for international vs. national staff.

This is not a question of cost-of-living adjustment. National staff working alongside expatriates, on the same projects, under the same leadership, with comparable qualifications, are being paid as though their labor — their language, their networks, their judgment — is worth a third of what a foreign passport adds to the same role.

The sector calls this “localization.” From the outside it reads as something else.

The localization promise vs. the localization reality

In 2016, donors and the largest international NGOs signed the Grand Bargain — a commitment to channel at least 25 percent of humanitarian funding as directly as possible to local and national actors. It was the sector’s marquee promise to itself.

Eight years later, 0.6 percent of direct funding from Grand Bargain signatories reached local and national actors in 2023. Combined direct and indirect funding to local actors fell from 2.7 percent of all humanitarian assistance in 2021 to 2.1 percent in 2022.

Money, decision-making authority, and reputational credit continue to concentrate in international hands. A development professional from the Global South looking at this data is not seeing a sector eager to invest in their leadership. They are seeing a sector very comfortable talking about it.

The hazard premium that does not exist

A deep-sea fisherman receives hazard pay. A conflict-zone journalist commands a premium. A surgeon working in difficult specialties is paid more, not less. We have a clean economic intuition: when work is remote, dangerous, technically demanding, or psychologically heavy, we pay people more.

A development professional working on maternal health in rural Bihar, on land tenure in eastern DRC, on water systems in northern Kenya, on conflict-affected schooling in northern Nigeria, works in conditions that are remote, sometimes dangerous, bureaucratically complex, and emotionally demanding. They are routinely paid less than the entry-level salary at a Big Four consultancy in their nearest capital.

This is not a hobby pay scale. It is a punitive pay scale, justified by appeals to “calling” and “values” — the same framing historically used to underpay teachers, nurses, and women.

What walks out the door

The cost of this is not a hypothetical. Every time a mid-career professional decides not to enter the sector — or enters and leaves inside two years — something specific and irreplaceable walks out the door.

Native-language fluency. The ability to read a room in a panchayat meeting, a barangay council, a kebele assembly. Networks built over fifteen years with district officials. Field intuition that knows when a survey number is off. Cultural code-switching between donor decks in English and farmer conversations in Marathi or Hausa or Quechua. Continuity of relationship with a community that has been surveyed by sixteen organizations and trusts none of them.

None of this shows up on a logframe. None of it is measured in any donor report. And it is exactly what determines whether a programme actually works.

When this layer is hollowed out, the sector compensates the only way it knows: more international consultants, more short missions, more reports, more workshops. The map gets thicker. The territory gets thinner.

The bridge nobody talks about

Here is the part of the argument I most want you to take away.

Development is not charity. It is infrastructure.

Government has scale, mandate, and the constitutional authority to act. It rarely has the agility, the trust, or the last-mile reach. Communities have lived knowledge, rooted legitimacy, and the most accurate map of what is actually broken. They rarely have the resources, the platforms, or a bridge to the systems that allocate them.

Civil society organizations — NGOs, social enterprises, cooperatives, grassroots collectives — are the connective tissue. They translate policy into practice. They take a school-meals scheme on paper and turn it into a child actually eating in Bihar. They take a national health budget on a spreadsheet and turn it into a midwife actually present in a Lagos peri-urban settlement. They take a water rights statute and turn it into a working borehole in northern Kenya.

This is infrastructure. It is the kind of infrastructure no road can substitute for, because it is the social and institutional fabric through which every other kind of infrastructure becomes useful.

When this layer is starved of talent, the bridge does not just bend. It collapses. Schemes are announced and never reach. Money is allocated and never lands. Communities lose faith. Governments lose legitimacy. Donors lose patience. And the next generation of middle-class professionals watches it all from the offices of consulting firms and concludes — reasonably — that the sector is not serious.

What needs to change

Three levers must move together. Pulling on one without the other two is theatre.

Funders

The Grand Bargain commitment to 25 percent direct funding to local actors is a floor, not a ceiling. The 0.6 percent figure should be treated as a sector-wide failure, named as such in every annual report, and tracked publicly. Compensation in country offices must be benchmarked to local private-sector parity for equivalent roles, not to international NGO median (which is itself depressed). Multi-year, unrestricted core funding — not project-by-project grants that force organizations to lay off staff between cycles — is the structural minimum.

Organizations

Stop treating “lean” as a virtue when it is in fact starvation. A sector whose program officers earn less than first-year associates at the consulting firms across the road is not lean — it is bleeding. Build real career ladders. Pay for retention. Treat institutional memory like the asset it is. Audit your own dual-pay structures honestly and publish what you find. Localization is not the same as cheaper.

Young middle-class professionals

Stop treating development as something you do “later” or “on the side” or “after I make some money.” It is a profession. It is infrastructure. It is among the most consequential careers a person can build in this century — and it is the one career in which the Global South is most starved of the kind of judgment, networks, and continuity that you specifically can offer.

Show up. Stay long enough to matter. Build the institutions you wish you’d inherited.

Does this argument actually hold up?

I want to be transparent about where this case is strongest and where reasonable people will push back. Steel-manning the counterarguments matters more than scoring rhetorical points.

“Higher salaries will pull money away from beneficiaries.” This is the most common pushback and it is intuitively powerful. It is also wrong. Underpaid programmes are not cheaper — they are paid for in a different currency: turnover, reinvented institutional memory, donor-pleasing instead of beneficiary-serving. The counterfactual to a well-paid programme officer is not “the same programme but with more money for villages.” It is “no programme officer and no programme.”

“Development is a calling, not a career. It is supposed to be different from the private sector.” A calling does not pay rent. The “calling” framing has been used historically to underpay nurses, teachers, social workers, and overwhelmingly women. We do not ask surgeons to choose between calling and salary — we pay them well because the work matters. The same logic applies here. Treating low pay as a moral filter is a way of restricting the sector to people who already have inherited wealth or a working spouse.

“If the middle class enters, won’t grassroots leaders from low-income backgrounds get crowded out?” This is a serious risk and worth naming. The answer is not “fewer middle-class professionals.” It is “more diverse pipelines and intentional internal mobility”: grassroots entry points, mid-career laterals, fellowship pathways, and active sponsorship of frontline staff into leadership. A sector with multiple entry points is healthier than one that draws from a single pool — at either end of the income distribution.

“ODA is shrinking. Where is the money supposed to come from?” Real concern. ODA fell 7.1 percent in 2024 and is likely to fall further as donor governments retrench. But ODA was never going to be enough — it covered a fraction of the SDG gap even at its peak. The serious answer involves domestic resource mobilization, philanthropic capital, blended finance, diaspora bonds, and — critically — paying the people who deploy these resources well enough that the deployment actually works.

Where I am genuinely uncertain. I do not know how fast country-office compensation can rise without disrupting fragile local labor markets in the smallest economies. I do not know whether middle-class career expectations can shift quickly enough to matter for the 2030 SDG horizon. I do not know whether donors will move first or whether change has to be forced from below — historically, the answer to that question has been “from below,” and slowly.

The direction of this argument is right. The exact policy recipe is contested. Anyone who tells you otherwise — including me — is overselling.

A note on India, and why this matters everywhere

India is the case I know best. The IIM graduate who went to McKinsey instead of Pratham. The IIT engineer who joined a unicorn instead of a rural electrification organization. The public-health postgraduate who took a pharma role instead of a community-health collective. Multiply that by every graduating class of every middle-tier and elite institution in every Global South country, and you start to see the scale of what is being lost — not in any single year, but compounded across two decades.

The structure of the loss, however, is identical in Lagos, in Lima, in Manila, in Karachi, in Cairo, in Mombasa. A professional class is being built. The development sector is not where it is going. And until it is, the sector will keep doing more with less, watching its best people leave, and wondering aloud why progress is slow.

The middle class built India’s tech sector. The middle class built Kenya’s mobile money infrastructure. The middle class is building Brazil’s fintech, Indonesia’s e-commerce, Nigeria’s creative economy. The same middle class can build a world-class development sector across the Global South.

We just have to make it possible to show up.

References and sources

The data points in this article are drawn from publicly available reports. Hyperlinks below.

Where I have rounded a figure or paraphrased a finding for readability, the primary report should be treated as authoritative.

A note on transparency

This article was drafted in collaboration with Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic. Claude helped me structure the argument, fact-check claims against the public sources cited above, draft the visuals that accompany this piece, and stress-test the counterarguments in the “does this hold up” section.

The argument, the perspective, the choices about what to include and what to cut, and the judgment calls throughout are mine. The data is sourced and footnoted. AI did not invent any of it; where I cite a number, I have linked the report.

I am putting this note here because I believe AI-assisted writing should be visible, not hidden — especially in a sector that runs on trust. If you build on this piece, please cite both the underlying reports and this article. If you disagree with any of it, I want to hear it.

]]> <![CDATA[Energy Swaraj: Why Rural India Needs to Power Itself First — and Why the Grid Can Follow]]> https://medium.com/@themarginsnotes/energy-swaraj-why-rural-india-needs-to-power-itself-first-and-why-the-grid-can-follow-6f095ffabd58?source=rss-5f8551195948------2 https://medium.com/p/6f095ffabd58 Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:02:30 GMT 2026-04-15T05:02:30.629Z
Illustration created with AI assistance. Concept and editorial direction by Robin Hood | The Margins.

his isn’t a policy paper. It’s what years of working in villages across Bharat teaches you about what development actually looks like from the ground up.

There is a question that comes up often in development circles: “Why energy? Why not water, or education, or health?”

The answer is always the same.

Because without energy, nothing else works at scale. A health clinic without power can’t refrigerate vaccines. A school without light makes access to education difficult. A woman with skills but no electric tool remains a subsistence worker.

Energy isn’t one sector among many. It’s the foundation for everything else.

But the ground teaches you something the reports don’t: energy access alone isn’t enough.

The real question is — who controls the energy?

Gandhi asked this first

In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi wrote about villages as complete republics — independent of their neighbours for vital wants, yet interdependent for many others.

His philosophy of Gram Swaraj wasn’t just political. It was economic. He believed in “not mass production, but production by the masses” — a moral stance about human dignity and the bonds of community.

Self-reliance, or Swadeshi, was the backbone of that vision. Not cutting off from the outside world. Building local capacity to meet basic needs — and then engaging with the broader economy from a position of strength, not dependence.

Think about what that looks like with today’s tools.

A village with its own solar generation. Locals trained as energy workers. A local economy that generates, captures, and circulates value within itself.

That is Energy Swaraj. Not just freedom from darkness. The power to build something with that energy. On your own terms. In your own village.

We have been asking the wrong question

For decades, the question has been: how do we connect villages to the grid?

It’s the wrong starting point.

India today has achieved 99.9% village electrification. And yet over 24 million rural households still face unreliable supply, especially for productive agricultural use.

Connection is not the same as empowerment.

The bigger problem: grid expansion is slow, capital-heavy, and centralised. It takes years. It serves density — not remoteness.

Distributed renewable energy does the opposite. It can be deployed quickly. It reaches the places grids take the longest to reach. And it creates local employment in the process.

So flip the question.

What if villages power themselves first — and the grid catches up?

This is not anti-grid. Grids are essential. But in rural and remote India, decentralised solar can move faster, generate local income immediately, and lay the foundation for grid integration later — rather than waiting for a grid that may take years to arrive and hours to work reliably.

What this looks like on the ground

Here is a thought experiment worth sitting with.

Every year, India trains thousands of people in solar installation, microgrid maintenance, and clean energy enterprise. The programmes exist. The curriculum exists. The demand exists.

The training can go to anyone.

So who does it go to?

Mostly men. Because that is who we picture when we picture a technician. Because that is who shows up when the outreach happens in the wrong places at the wrong hours. Because the system was not designed with any particular intention in mind regarding gender, and when you design without intention, you reproduce what already exists.

Now ask a different question.

What if clean energy — not just as a cause, but as a technical career, an entrepreneurial path, a domain of genuine expertise — becomes the space where women enter technology at scale in rural India?

Not as users. Not as beneficiaries. As Technicians. As grid operators. As business owners who understand voltage, load, and cash flow in the same breath.

The global conversation about women in tech has largely been an urban, English-speaking, software-centred conversation. It has left out the woman in a village in Jharkhand who could diagnose a faulty inverter faster than anyone in the room — if someone had handed her the training instead of her brother.

Clean energy infrastructure is physical. It is local. It does not require relocation to a city or fluency in a global tech culture. It requires skill, trust, and proximity — three things that rural women already have in abundance within their own communities.

This is not an argument for reservation or charity. It is an argument for efficiency. When you exclude half your potential workforce from a sector that is about to become the spine of the Indian economy, you are not being neutral. You are making a choice — and paying for it in deployment gaps, maintenance failures, and last-mile reach that never quite arrives.

The clean energy transition needs ten million skilled workers in the next decade. That number will not be reached without women. The only question is whether we get there by design or by accident.

And if by design — what does that system actually need to look like?

The gig economy arrived before the village did

Consider what is happening in parallel.

India’s gig economy is projected to reach 23.5 million workers by 2030. On the surface, that sounds like an opportunity. But look closer at who is filling those roles.

Young men/Women from Jharkhand, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh — delivering food in Delhi, driving cabs in Bengaluru — earning ₹400 to ₹500 a day after platform cuts, with no health cover, no leave, no future.

The Economic Survey 2025–26 put it plainly: cities are reaching capacity limits, and this migration is unsustainable. The youth are leaving. The elderly are being left behind. And the rural economy is hollowing out — not because villages have nothing to offer, but because no one built the infrastructure before the algorithm arrived.

This is not a workforce finding opportunity. This is a workforce being absorbed into a system that needs them to be interchangeable.

The gig economy did not create these workers’ aspirations. It simply arrived before the village did. Before the microgrid. Before the solar enterprise. Before the local income that would have made leaving unnecessary.

Energy Swaraj is not just about power. It is about arriving in the village before the algorithm does.

This is also an employment argument

Distributed solar is not just clean energy. It is a job creation model.

Every village-level microgrid needs someone to install it, maintain it, sell from it, and expand it. Every solar product sold through a local entrepreneur generates income that stays in the village and circulates within it — rather than being remitted from a city where the worker has no roots, no rights, and no safety net.

This is what Atmanirbhar Bharat needs to mean at the village level. Not dependent on government schemes or urban employers. The actual capacity of a village economy to generate, capture, and keep its own value.

The gig economy offers flexibility without security. Village-based solar enterprise offers ownership. That is a fundamentally different contract with a worker’s future.

Three things the ground actually teaches you

One — infrastructure and enterprise must grow together, not in sequence. You cannot ask someone to build a business on a foundation that doesn’t exist yet. The solar entrepreneur needs the product, the credit, the training, and the customer — all at once, not one after the other.

Two — the community always knows more than the survey. A 60% willingness-to-pay figure in a baseline survey does not mean 60% of people will buy what you designed. They will buy what fits their cash flows, their seasonal rhythms, their actual lives. Energy Swaraj works only when technology is designed around rural life — not the other way around.

Three — sustainability is a discipline, not a destination. It is not a phase you reach after enough years. It is built from day one. Programmes that cannot sustain themselves cannot credibly guide others toward sustainability.

The road ahead

India is now the world’s third-largest solar energy producer. Renewables account for over 50% of total installed power capacity. The scale of the transition is real.

But the question the transition hasn’t fully answered is this — will that capacity be centralised and consumed, or distributed and owned?

Energy Swaraj is not against grid expansion. It is about ensuring rural communities are not just connected to energy — but empowered by it.

Let the village generate first. Let employment take root. Let the economy stabilise. Then the grid connects — not to deliver power from outside, but to absorb the surplus from within.

That is a development model Gandhi would have recognised.

And one that is more urgent now than ever — because the alternative is 23.5 million gig workers, delivering someone else’s dinner, in a city that was never really theirs.

— Robin Hood | The Watcher | The Margins

Sources & credits

Data on rural electrification and solar capacity: Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), India, 2024–25. Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE)

Grid reliability figures: Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW); PIB India. Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW)

Gig economy projections: NITI Aayog; industry estimates cited in Economic Survey 2025–26. NITI Aayog Official NITI Aayog

Migration research: Economic Survey of India 2025–26, tabled in Parliament, January 2026.

Gandhi’s philosophy of Gram Swaraj: Hind Swaraj (1909); academic interpretations via published research on Gandhian economics.

Solar Sakhi income figures: field observations from last-mile clean energy programmes across rural India.

Visual design: AI-assisted illustration. All editorial content and analysis are original.

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