Culture shock: what is ‘development’ again?

Balloon Kenya encourages “entrepreneurial thinkers to imagine the solutions that will not only create new avenues for growth and prosperity, but also recast the course of human development”. After previous posts gushing about the freshness and coherence of the Balloon approach, the ‘d’-word appears and it all gets messy.
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Balloon Kenya foregrounds the entrepreneur as a primary agent of social, economic and technological change, transforming the society around her. Here in Kericho, aid is dead, replaced by youthful exuberance and Business Model Canvasses. The talk is of empowerment, of young people undergoing transformative processes that give them the confidence to unleash the creative, innovative potential inside, and improve their own lives through doing so. Four weeks into the process, the stories of personal-level development are emerging, both from international participants, and from Kenyan entrepreneurs; hearing Everlyne remark “I have never thought about that” when working with us to come up with a tutoring business to operate alongside her small tea shop was quite momentous, even for a cynic. And the implicit point is that the benefits for the individual spill over to the surrounding environment (“...recast the course of human development...”).

This makes me jumpy. When we’re talking about the concrete case of the individual, the benefits are palpable, even if their sustainability is uncertain. Of course Balloon Kenya isn’t claiming to have all the answers; its approach to bringing about social good is inevitably partial. But the seductive slide, more or less present, into thinking that we have found a new model for societies to develop on a broad, macro scale is troubling.

Because “development, when you get down to it, is a political process”. As Guillermo Toro points out, whether you adopt the right-wing version of this (think Easterly) or the left-wing (i.e. From Poverty to Power) is less important than accepting the basic concept. Which means that encouraging enterprise carries ambiguous benefits, because the private sector emerges and evolves within the context determined by a number of groups, businesses, citizens, states and all. We’ve seen this at a macro-level recently in the criticism of the turn to the private sector of a number of development agencies.

Part of this unease is definitely about culture: coming from an NGO-, blogosphere-background, used to academic debates about power and institutions, an unapologetically pro-enterprise attitude grates, even if I often agree with the ideas. To be jolted out of your comfort zone is no bad thing: as the great Chris Blattman puts it “If you work in international politics or development and do not have an intellectual and existential crisis every year, then something is wrong”.

Kericho: causing me headaches

But, coming back to the micro-level, one of our entrepreneurs’ businesses is to act as a middle man between tea farmers and factories; tea farmers individually do not produce huge quantities of tea each day, meaning that factories often subcontract out the management of the plantations. So the middle man acquires a contract from a given tea factory to supply a certain weight of tea per month, earning significant profits working relatively few hours, once he has the all-important license. The process smells a lot like rent-seeking, and the benefits to society seem debatable. You don’t see many rich tea labourers around despite them putting in the hours, rain or shine. And this isn’t the only example: the difference between moneylender and loan shark is a thin one. These are, at least partly, questions of political economy, where the focus on entrepreneurship and innovation has to be complemented by a look at the social, political and economic context.

I guess I am asking too much. During the programme, the word politics is not even mentioned but that’s because we are not here to ‘do development’ (not that that exists), we are here to help individuals. The broader effects of that on society could be positive or negative. We shall see.

'Talking to people about tea'

This post originally appeared on the Balloon Kenya blog

... The answer I have given every working day for the last week to the question, “What have you been up to today?” ‘Testing’ has begun, and for my partner and me, it has meant asking passers-by how much they would pay for a pack of Kapchebet; ascertaining from restaurant owners why they switched from Litein to Toror; discovering that Tusky’s (a local supermarket) stocks 12 different tea brands but none from the Kenya Tea Development Agency; and much more.

In a way, our ‘Dream Team’ group of entrepreneurs, now streamlined to three businesspeople all stationed at various overlapping perches in the tea supply chain, has worked out perfectly. From plantation to consumer, it’s allowed us the chance to immerse ourselves in the tea industry: fragrant, if nothing else. Plus we’ve been able to wow unsuspecting Kerichans with our in-depth knowledge of local tea prices, which is almost as good as speaking Swahili.

Immersed in tea

So we’ve been testing. The word brings to mind ideas of objective science, experiments, the confirmation or rejection of a hypothesis, and those are precisely the terms in which we were introduced to the concept in the Balloon curriculum. Go out and test your assumptions, convert those guesses into facts. A coffee business illustrates the alluring clarity of the idea: build your ‘minimum viable product’ (i.e. 100 cups of coffee) and test the assumption that people will pay for fresh coffee (run around town selling those 100 cups).

In real life, it’s often not that simple. Talking to people, the method of ‘testing’ we have used most, does not give straightforward answers: confirmation bias, ambiguity, uncertainty, and the general messiness of human psychology and social reality gets in the way. ‘Just sell’ sounds easy, but translate that into a tea agent trying to get a school to make an order, and an hour sitting in the cateress’ office and two mugs of uji (porridge with the texture of liquid gravel) later and slowly the snappiness of the idea, and my ability to think, fades. Product accepted or rejected? Who knows. Preferences are elusive, inconsistent and unpredictable; we surveyed nearly twenty restaurants and hotels and asked them which tea they stock; we got 11 different answers but one reason: [insert tea name] ‘tastes the best’.

This feeling of wading through mud makes me wonder if the Balloon Kenya-endorsed, build-measure-learn approach is really any different to how any other entrepreneurship consultant would go about things. But I would still say it is; the relentless emphasis on customer development has meant that there has been a rush to get to this phase, which cannot be taken for granted.

At Toror Tea Factory: a key stage in the tea production process. Also describes the experience of talking to customers at times.

Is speaking to people always useful? No: testing can be done well or badly. Witness this guide to customer development, or the laziness implied by the fact that many in our group resorted to the ‘customer survey’ within 2 days of the first pair to do so, with perhaps less reflection on how to do this well than eagerness to start.  Personally I’d definitely confess to this.

Testing: easier in the classroom.

So, conclusions? Testing is a tricky concept, and not all talking is useful talking. But better to muddle vaguely with customers than to muddle vaguely inside your own head. For someone with antisocial tendencies and a penchant for writing lists, that is saying something.