In summer 2013 I was fortunate enough to work as a volunteer investing money and trying to generally make improvements at a secondary school in rural Uganda. I recently entered the following essay in a competition (
give it a go here!) on a title along the lines of 'what did you learn/how did your view of development change?'
Basically my key idea (not that original: similar sort of idea from Angus Deaton
here) is we zealous international development-minded students should either:
a) accept that the projects we get involved with (and I'm not talking about hopeless gap yah projects which no one would claim are very beneficial) may very well not have great long-term impacts
but keep doing them anyway because of an intuitive feeling that we can't be wrong about micro, short term impacts (building a school is surely never bad right?) or some ideal of solidarity whereby us being there is a good thing in itself.
OR
b) don't go on summer projects but concentrate on campaigning at home on issues like
illicit financial flows,
transparency,
indigenous rights/environmental destruction, take your pick (there is no shortage), where governments in the global North could often be doing a whole lot more.
If you fancy reading the whole thing, here it is below for your enjoyment...
"I spent summer 2013 working with two other volunteers for an
NGO
in a secondary school in rural south-west Uganda, planning and implementing
initiatives to improve the quality of education for the students using money we
fundraised previously. We worked alongside school management, students and
teachers, ultimately introducing measures improving the library, sanitation and
counselling provision, among others. We were fortunate enough to receive constant
and engaged support from the school, as well as a brilliantly warm reception
from both school and community. Yet despite this overwhelmingly positive
experience, in which we witnessed tangible outputs in infrastructure and school
resources, the question of whether we have a long-term, sustainable impact
remains doubtful. Having subsequently joined the central charity administration
in a monitoring and evaluation capacity, I was struck by a double realisation:
first, that we currently lack a means of knowing that our work is effective;
and second, with the further discovery that our water purification scheme had
failed, that it is possible that our work is
not effective in many areas, and even that our whole model may be
partly misguided(see Crawfurd 2013). Fundamentally, the idea of international
volunteering and indeed international development, in the broadest sense, is to
help promote positive changes in the lives of others. Therefore, short of rigorous
evidence of impact, we are left with a challenge.
One immediate lesson to be learnt is that we need to focus
our attention to the evaluation of programmes, in order to find out empirically
what works. And indeed, impact evaluation and RCTs are undoubtedly ‘in fashion’
in the development world, as demonstrated by the popularity of Banerjee and
Duflo’s Poor Economics(2012) and the
establishment of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation in 2009. My
own charity is itself doing some excellent work to put in place a more robust
M&E programme. But leaving aside the empirics and entering speculatively
into the theory of how development
happens, my volunteering experience suggests some potentially sobering lessons
for any young international volunteer.
Our school did not perform well academically, achieving
generally poor exam results and failing to get many students into university.
In a wider sense, it is a school with many talented teachers and fantastic
students, but which could be much better. We observed unmotivated and often
undisciplined students and teachers, unfocused lessons starting late, and a
chronic lack of effective communication between staff and administration, among
other problems. To address these, we attempted to plug some gaps: we
facilitated better access to the many books the school possessed by expanding
the library; we introduced a system to improve students’ wellbeing through a
peer-to-peer counselling system; and we improved sanitation to get more happy,
healthy students in class more often. Nevertheless, comparing the problems we
perceived with what we supplied as ‘solutions,’ it is clear that they do not
match up. Part of this, admittedly, is due to the size of our investment, which
was insufficient to even attempt to cover the financial shortfall faced by the
school. Yet we also failed to prompt change in areas not directly determined by
money: the basic operating pattern of the school; the motivation to teach well
or learn; the power structures which deny voice to innovative and motivated
teachers, for instance. In this way, what we supplied was investment,
creativity and time to plan projects to facilitate
better delivery of education and better learning at the school. But
unfortunately, what I have come to realise is that this sort of facilitation cannot
drive dynamic change or permanently improved outcomes.
Acemoglu and Robinson(2012) offer a broad theory of why some
countries prosper and others do not, and I suggest that their analysis holds
some relevance for us. They locate the drivers of prosperity in ‘inclusive
economic and political institutions,’ implying that improvements come from
gradual alterations in the institutional makeup of a country rather than an
imposition of the ‘right’ policies. The latter idea they denounce as a
manifestation of the ‘ignorance hypothesis’ which “asserts that world
inequality exists because we or our rulers do not know how to make poor
countries rich”(2012:57), therefore “enlightening and informing rulers and
policymakers can get us out” of poverty (2012:440). This manifests itself, for
example, in the ‘Washington Consensus,’ generally accepted to have been largely
unsuccessful, which advocates “seemingly attractive macroeconomic goals such as
a reduction in the size of the government sector, flexible exchange rates, and
capital account liberalization”(2012:440). Applying these ideas to my
experience, this logic seems evident at least partly in what we did; we came
with ideas about how to better run a school (and the money to make change
happen), on the assumption that the school management may not be aware of such
ideas. Extending this thought further, we too advocated ‘seemingly attractive
goals’ such as enlarging the library and improving sanitation. However, like
Acemoglu and Robinson who find that it is “institutional patterns” which are
“condemning them[poor countries] to poverty” (2012:61), it strikes me that the institutional
pattern and environment of the school is what condemns it to underperforming.
It is thus the interplay of fundamental factors, often political, including why
students comes to school, what opportunities(or lack thereof) are available post-school,
the private situation of students and teachers, the distribution of power and
authority amongst the staff, the decision-making process at school, the demands
made on and interests of the management, the relationships with boards of
governors and with local authorities, extending all the way up to the ministry
of education. And these areas are generally beyond the scope of student volunteers’
capabilities.
So where does this leave us? We have seen that many
development NGOs lack empirical evidence of positive impact for ‘beneficiaries’,
and are faced with a theoretical argument which locates the long-term solution
to beneficiaries’ problems outside the remit of what we can achieve. There are
therefore perhaps two options for young people in the global North. First, to
continue participating in international volunteering programmes in their
current form whilst striving to improve monitoring and evaluation to improve
our offering, meanwhile recognising that the benefits will often be limited to
(i) short-term gains,(ii) promoting ‘solidarity’ whereby our being there and
interacting with people is recognised as an intrinsic good,(iii) encouraging volunteers’
interest in development in anticipation of further, more productive involvement,
or even (iv)(more controversially) boosting the reputation of the school or
organisation through our prestigious status as ‘outsiders’, often connected to
racial factors. This option would reflect Chouliaraki’s (2013)idea of an
‘ironic’ attitude to development, whereby the desire to help others exists
alongside a fundamental scepticism towards the benefits of the project of
development itself. Second, we might avoid international volunteering, and
instead concentrate either on fundraising on behalf of charities with demonstrated
impact, or lobbying governments to change policies detrimental to the prospects
of the global South. Indeed the recent revelation that for each dollar that
reaches the global South in aid, seven escape through illicit financial flows(Green
2013) provides an arresting starting point. Whichever option is chosen, what is
essential is that young people with an interest in development actively examine
the value of what they are doing, and ensure that their actions are dictated by
concrete outcomes not good intentions.
Bibliography
Acemoglu, D. and
Robinson, J. A. (2012) Why Nations
Fail (London: Profile)
Banerjee, A. V. and
Duflo, E. (2012) Poor Economics
(London: Penguin)
Chouliaraki, L.
(2013) The Ironic Spectator:
Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism (Cambridge: Polity)
Green, D. (2013) ‘Poor countries are losing $1 trillion a year
to illicit capital flows – 7 times the volume of aid’
From Poverty to Power accessed
22/12/2013 available at <
http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=16967>
