Sustainable Development Requires a “People-first” Approach
Wherever we have seen community resilience in the face of the public health, economic, and education crises of 2020, we find strong local leadership at work.
However, rather than supporting local people to strengthen their own capabilities to identify, prioritize, and solve their own problems as the path to sustainable development, the world’s current development paradigm prioritizes working on behalf of local people to define the problems, identify practices, interventions and infrastructure that work in one context, and replicate and scale them in others. Although all major aid agencies have included “capacity building” as a key program element since the mid-1990s, in practice, capacity building efforts have primarily focused on targeted technical skills for the purpose of implementing specific projects and interventions, rather than the more comprehensive leadership training focused on soft skills including decision making, adaptability and self awareness that allows local people to solve their own problems and leads to long-term sustainable change.
Sustainable development requires a “people-first” approach, which cultivates the agency and leadership skills of people in developing contexts, thus equipping them to craft and drive responses to changing demands and innovate in real time, in order to meet urgent but varied local needs.
A group of leaders whose work encompasses a range of such approaches met on September 23, 2020 to discuss the topic “Unlocking sustained outcomes with a “people-first” approach to development.” The convening was part of the 2020 Concordia Annual Summit and the panelists included:
Melissa Adelman, Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Education Global Practice
Yawa Hansen-Quao, Executive Director of Emerging Public Leaders
Wendy Kopp, Co-founder and CEO of Teach For All
Andrew Youn, Co-founder and Executive Director of One Acre Fund
CONVENING REPORT
Wendy Kopp, Co-founder and CEO of Teach For All
Teach For All is a global network of independent partner organizations across 58 countries and six continents that cultivate their nations’ promising future leaders to ensure everyone has the chance to reach their true potential. Wendy explained how efforts to improve outcomes within education are often built on the assumption that outside intervention is a prerequisite for success, and, as a result, a great deal of time and energy is spent to find and fund programs that have shown strong results in one context, with the assumption that those results can be replicated in other context.
Across Teach For All, however, they’ve seen that sustainable, holistic change and continuous improvement requires something different — it requires a critical mass of people exerting leadership at every level of the education system and policy, and around the whole ecosystem around children. And they’ve seen that this leadership can be developed.
In the face of the COVID-19, the case for a “people-first” approach that prioritizes leadership development has been amplified. As Wendy said, “With schools shut down, really all you have is innovative creative teachers and school leaders. The biggest divide is between communities that have invested in cultivating those people and those leaders, and those who have not. Across the Teach For All network, we’re seeing students take heroic actions to keep other kids safe and give them chances to learn, and we’re seeing incredible examples of teacher leadership and school leadership and parent leadership and people exerting leadership at every level.“
Yawa Hansen-Quao, Executive Director of Emerging Public Leaders
Emerging Public Leaders takes a “people-first” approach to building a pipeline of leaders in Africa, helping governments build their public servant talent pools to build local agency and capacity.
With six program modules adapted for every country’s context, EPL works with governments to align the placement of fellows, the work they will do, and how that coordinates with government priorities. EPL has seen that the “people-first” approach builds trust with government partners, who recognize that they’re being approached collaboratively, not prescriptively.
As one example of the impact of EPL’s approach, getting a passport in Liberia used to take several months, but an EPL fellow’s initiative helped transform the issuance process so that it now takes just a few days. In Ghana and in Liberia, all of the EPL fellows have also been on the forefront of the pandemic response. “A country like Ghana often relies on technical assistance that comes from abroad,” said Yawa. “In times of crisis, as we’re experiencing now with COVID-19, these technical experts go back home. It’s important before a crisis like COVID or Ebola to start cultivating networks of talent that can really foster resilience to ensure continuity.”
Andrew Youn, Co-founder and Executive Director of One Acre Fund
“When it comes to the “people-first” approach, I am definitely a learner,” said Andrew. One Acre Fund provides finance, farm input delivery, and training to smallholder farmers in East Africa. They’ve been producing and delivering interventions utilizing a more traditional process. In agriculture, that means foreign scientists coming up with solutions to make farming more productive, sending those solutions off to farmers, and measuring success in terms of each year’s crop yields and profits.
Andrew says that when One Acre Fund is at its best, it is co-creating agricultural solutions with the farmers they serve. Instead of foreign scientists working in isolation to inform solutions, their best work has come when working alongside local government and community partners, facilitating groups of farmers to think through what they want to grow and how to do so productively, and collaborating with local government research institutes.
As one example of a “people-first” approach, One Acre Fund developed a tree planting program, which is not something development practitioners generally would have done. Farmers said they didn’t only want to grow food, they wanted to build sustainable assets but were having trouble finding tree planting stock. In response, One Acre Fund partnered with hundreds of local institutes and nurseries, and hundreds of thousands of farmers to help local communities choose, grow and plant diverse seedlings. This year farmers will be planting tens of millions of trees on their farms. The program facilitated a development future chosen by the community, and has helped local partners build their own capacity to achieve their preferred futures.
The case for a people first approach has challenged One Acre Fund to measure success not just in terms of each year’s crop yield, but in how farmers are developing sustained crops and food choices over time. It is also encouraging One Acre Fund to think on a longer time frame. Andrew says his organization does not fully embody a “people-first” approach across all of its work, but he has found this case for change a welcome challenge, and helpful in re-shaping how to think about the path forward.
Melissa Adelman, Senior economist in the World Bank’s Education Global Practice
Melissa leads the World Bank’s global work on management capacity in education, as well as work in Latin America and Africa. She shared how the World Bank could utilize the “people-first” approach, and what it might look like to prioritize investing in building agency and local leadership capacity.
The World Bank works exclusively with and through governments, through funding and technical assistance. Therefore, Melissa said they, “know intimately the difference between having counterparts with the ownership and the capacity for the work that we’re trying to do with them versus not. Because essentially I think the outcomes of everything that we finance hinges on the existence of that capacity.” Melissa believes that one of their top priorities should be to tackle the complex issue of how to build and develop agency and capacity, in order to maximize the impacts of investments.
Currently, the vast majority of World Bank financing flows in the form of projects — time bound and articulated activities focused on outputs and outcomes. In education that includes supporting urgent needs such as access to textbooks, teacher training, and curriculum development. However, such projects don’t always allow for long-term investments in building agency and capacity. She suggests that a step forward would be to create a separate stream of funding, outside of a project cycle, devoted to developing and implementing a program that supports the functioning of high quality public servants needed for sustained outcomes in, for example, a Ministry of Education staff.
She ended by making the point that leadership is taken for granted as being an incredibly important aspect in the private business sector, both in businesses themselves and in business and public administration schools. Why would that not also be true for local development? Melissa credits the International Monetary Fund for sustained efforts over the past decades to build the leadership capacity and credibility of central banks and ministries of finance in most countries. She presented the idea of doing the same for ministries of education, although ministries of education are larger and involve complex political issues. However, her conviction is that there’s no good reason to run away from confronting such difficulties. The default of pressing for quick outcomes while ignoring the complex long-term issues is obviously self defeating.
To conclude, the panelists discussed what might be holding people back from making a shift towards a “people-first” approach. The barriers include that investing in leadership capacity requires a five or ten-year time frame; and that donor agencies and NGOs are creatures of habit, accustomed to coming in with a solution that works in one place and importing it into a different context.
CONCLUSION
The panelists agreed that much of the pandemic conversation has been about vaccines and health infrastructures, but that we haven’t heard enough about leadership. In countries that are getting it right, it’s due to good leadership. Governments that have invested in building leadership capacities are faring much better.
An analysis of Official Development Assistance (ODA) grant descriptions found that only $15.2M went to projects related to local “leadership development” across sectors in 2018 — approximately 0.01% of total development assistance and a fraction of what was spent on reproductive health, for example, or roadway construction. There is a clear gap and an untapped opportunity resulting from the lack of a concerted effort to invest in the fundamental leadership capabilities that are critical to driving sustained outcomes.
Bringing the “people-first” approach to a global scale will require the development community to embrace a mindset shift and embed this approach in its core strategies and initiatives by prioritizing approaches that foster individual agency, build pipelines of new leaders, and invest in the development of people who hold positions of leadership today. It will also be necessary to develop the growing body of research about what works in cultivating agency and leadership in a developing context, in order to continue to grow the case for change.
The impact these panelists have witnessed first-hand shows that developing leadership capacity is both possible and critical to increasing the likelihood of improved outcomes and systems change. Current events present us with an opportunity to immediately apply “people-first” mindsets and principles. The development community will undoubtedly face challenges in responding to the devastating, wide-ranging effects of the pandemic. Through investing in the leadership of people in impacted communities and countries, we can enable these communities to emerge stronger, more resilient, and more prepared to create a better future.
