It’ll only feel kinky the first few times…

The heady rush of child survival and and integrated food security has already begun to wear off. Our heart rates are returning to normal. We peek furtively out of the landcruiser. We straighten our clothes, touch up our makeup. We’ll catch a quick smoke and then get on to the next new thing, the next new… innovation!

Yeah, yeah. Before you get all up in my business, let me just make clear that I’m not saying never innovate. I’m not saying that all change is bad all the time. Nor am I saying that the ways we currently think about and do development are unequivocally fabulous. Surely there is plenty of room for improvement. But I think that too often we look at some of the famous development failures and become too anxious to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We are too ready to scrap or overhaul the entire aid machine, when what it really needs is a simple tune-up.

We need to keep in mind that…

Aid very often works better than we think it does: There. I’ve said it. Horribly unpopular, I know, in this day and age of critical theory and investigative journalism and graduate programs in international development and blogs whose shtick is all about what’s wrong with aid.

 But –

For every boondoggle training program, for every mountain of donated expired pharmaceuticals that gets incinerated, and for inequity-reinforcing clueless-donor-driven make-you-cringe-and-burn-a-candle-for-forgiveness project, you can also find a spread of well-designed, properly implemented development programs that are quietly doing all of the things the watchdogs claim are not being done: changing rates of infant and maternal mortality for the better, raising literacy rates in remote and desolate places, improving the level of food and financial security in impoverished communities…

Development takes longer than we think it does: Community-level change takes time. You cannot force it. You cannot rush it. If you try, bad things will happen. It takes patient dedication.

After three and a half years, my 60GB iPod “classic” is totally outdated. It takes, like, 2 minutes to start up. There’s a faint grinding sound every time I switch AC/DC songs (or – ahem – deep, intellectual podcasts that enhance my professional edification while spending most of my time in a white Landcruiser…). A mere 10 years ago, a pocket-sized device that could hold 60GB worth of music, display photographs, and play movies for up to six hours was practically unfathomable. And now I get bemused/sympathetic looks from strangers in airport lounges as bang my battered old iPod on the floor, trying to make the sad face icon go away.  Probably time to toss it and get a new one. That’s how fast things change in the modern world of technology.

But we cannot apply the timelines of the technology industry to community development. We just can’t. It’s tough to steal oneself from this (maybe it’s an “American” thing?). But seriously, we need to be taking the decades-long view when it comes to thinking about impact, sustainability, strategy and technique up-front.

Or the fashion world… your dad still wearing polyester leisure suits from 1977? Uh-huh… how long do you think it’ll take to persuade an entire community to change a practice that’s been around for generations?

Development is exceedingly basic: We must not let the pressure to “innovate” steer us away from that fact. Yes, there’s a great deal that can be said about inequity of different kinds at a global level. But when it comes to reducing poverty, improving health, and increasing the range of options open to people at the community level, the challenges and to a large degree the solutions are now so familiar that they can almost be check-listed.

We know exactly what causes malaria. And we know exactly how to prevent it. That prevention is nothing hard, really, but it takes times. And patience. And more time.

And although there’s a high degree of context-specificity, it’s not hard to figure out exactly where the inequities in the local economy of community X. It’s not particularly hard to figure out who has power and who doesn’t, who has access to capital and who doesn’t, or what the barriers and enablers are. The range of possible interventions in such situations are quite well-known, also very basic.

Relief situations are really the easiest yet: People need potable water, shelter and food, in more or less that order, very soon, or they will start to die.

 

I know. It’s not the message you want to hear when passing your thesis defense or appearing to remain cutting edge depends on you coming up with some penetrating insight about a “new” thing or uncovering some gross but heretofore undocumented travesty of the aid world.

Sorry.

* * *

In my own experience as a practitioner, the hardest parts of aid work come down to patience and integrity.

Follow the best practices. Follow them correctly the first time. Don’t cut corners. Don’t skimp on either good planning or good evaluation. Take the time you need to understand the context you’re working in. When an issue is over your head, say as much and bring in someone with the right expertise. Adjust midstream where it is obvious (based on actual evidence) that you need to do so.

Still, you must innovate? Come up with a way to get donors to provide no-strings-attached funding for international aid. Or a way to regulate those organizations or people who practice sub-standard aid work when they should know better.