Ribbon Cutting is Sexy, Monitoring & Evaluation is not

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together"

 - Aboriginal Activists Group, Queensland, 1970s

Since I began with Engineers Without Borders in December, people have remarked to me about how proud they are of my selflessness and my taking time to help in Ghana. While I appreciate the compliment, it is not the view I have on my efforts. To me, the idea of "helping" assumes that I know more than Ghanaians. It places me in a position of power and strips others of their agency. More than that, it simplifies the complex issues that see some countries, people, and cultures flourish, while others stagnate. This post contains a series of anecdotes I have observed about the troubles with international development and aid work. It concludes with my current thoughts on how we might all be able to contribute to more effective development in our own countries and around the world.

I) Ribbon Cutting is Sexy (Ego)

In my experience, the desire to work in development is generally rooted in a mixture of adventure, curiousity, compassion, and ego. The first three elements I will leave as self-explanatory, and will instead focus on the narcissism (it appreciates the attention). Part of what drives people to move to other countries to work in development is a fundamental belief that they have something to teach or give to others that will improve their lives. It is sometimes rooted in a sense of cultural superiority, that presumes that the lives of others need to be more like ours.

The website Humanitarians of Tinder illuminates this for us in a way only pictures and a hook-up phone application truly can. Let me be clear: I am all for traveling, meeting new people, and doing our best to work with communities to tackle problems they want tackled, but something just doesn't feel right when pictures of Westerners in African villages are used on a dating application.

Source: http://humanitariansoftinder.com

I met someone when I first arrived in Ghana that was a Western elitist in pure form. She was here to help and save others out of compassion and religious duty. However, she did not often associate with those she was claiming to help, and professed a strong distrust of Ghanaians. She remarked to me one afternoon: "Ghanaians don't think like you and I, they will be nice to your face and then betray you." While this individual is very much an outlier, a more subtle sense of superiority and xenophobia that we all might carry within ourselves can be just as damaging. Here is how it can manifest:

The Play Pump

Roundabout Water Solutions released the Play Pump in 2006 to great fanfare. The idea is simple: attach a merry go round to a pump so that when children play, water is pumped and stored in a tower.

It's child's play really...

Conceptually, this sounds all well and good. Children get something to play on and provide the kinetic input for a pump that would otherwise have to be pumped by the individual in need of water.

Come on kids, play like your access to clean water depends on it!

So what is the problem? This lengthy video by AfriDev truly captures the absurdity of the Play Pump. The video is a little long, so let me provide you with the synopsis: Children do not play on the Play Pump all day, everyday (or in some cases, at all), meaning that inevitably, someone who is not playing on the Play Pump has to spin the merry go round by hand until they get enough water. In the video, this took a man three minutes and seven seconds of spinning to get a 5 gallon bucket of water.

In some villages, people have reported paying children to play on the merry go round so they don't have to suffer the embarrassment of spinning the Play Pump. On the other hand, the pump pictured below takes just thirty seconds of pumping to get the same bucket of water, and you don't have to look ridiculous while doing it. A comprehensive report of everything wrong with the Play Pump Project was released by Unicef in 2007 and is available here.

Play Pump: 3:07 + Loss of Dignity

AfriDev Hand Pump: 0:28

Why does this happen?
In most cases, communities are not really engaged before projects like this are put into place (in some cases, existing working pumps are replaced by Play Pumps). People won't say no to a free lunch, but in general, the projects are much less effective than they would have been with community engagement and often fall into disrepair quite quickly.

In addition, a lot of deference is often given to white people and NGOs. This is driven by the fact that a great deal of funding comes from these sources, and there is the view that Western education, products, and solutions are superior. As Westerners, we forget we are no longer in Kansas. We try and implement our solutions as if we were in our context, instead of allowing the communities we are working in to lead the way. We can help foster the development of projects, but if we want the solutions to be effective and sustainable, we cannot drive them.

Note: This is not Kansas

II) If I throw money at the problem, it will surely go away (Mismanagement)
Over the past 60 years, more than $1 trillion has been spent on development in Africa. At its best, this money has saved lives, improved the efficiency of governments, and worked to unlock the human potential in and around the globe. However, at its worst, it has granted power to oppressive militia groups in destabilized areas, sustained and even furthered corruption in institutions, and destroyed the sustainability of local businesses. It is a complicated issue, so in the spirit of this post, I will continue to focus on issues associated with a few well-meaning projects.

Projects for the sake of projects
Many non-profit organizations raise money to do projects. This makes some good sense: if you want to provide universal access to water, it is likely that you will have to build a well or two. The issue that arises with this mentality is that the measure of success for these organizations becomes, "how many ______ they have built." As a result, little to no thought goes into how well the systems will be maintained, nor who will operate the systems.

A report from NGO Water for the People estimates that 60% of wells
may be in disrepair.

A brand new biogas digester built by a Chinese NGO. The farmer
was not trained to use the digester before the NGO left.

The solution to this issue is easy in concept, but very difficult in practice. Monitoring & Evaluation is not sexy, in fact, studies show that 55% of audiences fall asleep at the merest mention of the term. Nevertheless, without the ability to keep track of what the impact of the project is long-term, it is possible that the project falls into disrepair, or fails to create the desired impact. Moreover, organizations need to have long-term plans for how to transition the maintenance of the projects into local hands. This requires more staff, more training, more time, and more money. The end result could be less ____ being built and less funding in the future.

Ribbon-cutting is sexy

Monitoring & Evaluation is not sexy

III) Destroying some industries and building others (Externalities)

It is often said that "the road to hell is paid with donated t-shirts and volunteerism at orphanages." Good intentions, and notions of charity have created some terrible side-effects over the years. Here are two:

The Clothing Industry

I will admit, nothing makes me happier than seeing a man riding a bicycle in a busy market in Accra wearing a "Yankees Suck" T-shirt. I am elated to see that Ghana did not fall victim to Derek Jeter's charms. That being said, the issues that arise out of donating our unwanted clothing to other countries are no laughing matter.

First, people were buying and wearing clothing prior to your donation, which means that your free goods displaced existing production. You may actually have put someone out of business.

This is Kwame, he wants you to know that your dumping
of goods is a violation of Article VI of GATT 1994.

Second, your clothes are then sold to traders, who sell them to other middle men, who then sell them to consumers. They are often not given out by the organization you donate them to. Shannon Whitehead has a great post summarizing this issue.

I bought a pair Georgio Armani trousers for $8 yesterday!

Lastly, we all know that American culture is fairly dominant across the globe, and that many American brands are in demand everywhere. The erosion of local cultures is taking place everywhere, but there is something particularly disturbing about seeing old campaign t-shirts in a crowded market in Ghana.

Source: Link

Orphans
I wanted to end this post with something uplifting, so I apparently settled on orphans. Voluntourism has grown in popularity over the years and volunteering at orphanages has been a large portion of this effort. In 2010, Projects Abroad alone sent 8,000 volunteers to orphanages in 26 countries. For its effort, the organization raised $24 million in revenue, and $3 million in profit. Now to be fair, Projects Abroad is not a non-profit organization, so there is nothing illegal about it making profit from supplying volunteers to orphanages. Nevertheless, we all might be able to agree that there is something just a little immoral about this arrangement. That's right, it creates the economic incentive to enter into the "business of orphans."

Al Jazeera and others have reported on some of the many issues that have been created by private orphanages in Cambodia. To summarize: 1) it's estimated that nearly 70% of orphans in Cambodia have at least one living parent, and 2) some orphanages paid parents to give their children up or have even "rented" children for the day. In case this needs further elaboration, "renting an orphan," is where the orphanage compensates the parents of the child for the day or week during which volunteers are visiting.

In Closing: let's all do better
It is not my intent to dishearten anyone looking to make a positive change in the world. Instead, we have to put just a little more effort in to make sure that the impact of our donations and volunteer hours is done in collaboration with the communities we want to work with. This means:

1. Let the community drive what projects will be scoped and implemented,
2. Use local partners and suppliers,
3. Work with the community to put a long-term maintenance plan in place,
4. Monitor and evaluate the impact of the project,
5. Work with local governments and partners to transition the responsibility of these projects away from foreign organizations.

Beyond improving the projects and organizations we work for, the single most important thing we can do is to push for changes in our own countries and governments on issues that perpetuate cycles of poverty abroad. Of note:

1. End the dumping of no cost or ultra-low cost excess goods into foreign markets
2. Hold companies accountable for their health, safety, environmental, and social actions abroad. At this time, EWB is currently raising awareness on the "Mandatory Reporting on Extractives." This initiative will require extractive companies to report on their payments to governments around the world. This type of transparency is necessary in holding companies accountable.
3. Read and talk about how our governments currently approach aid and then push for meaningful reform. It is a long and unglamorous path, but if we succeed, the impact may be much larger and systematic than our individual efforts.
4. Work to alleviate poverty and inequity of opportunity in our own communities.