NEWSBYBROOKS KEENE

Running a series this week by Brooks Keene looking at the intersection between aid and the environment, focusing on whether aid interventions are truly sustainable.  Brooks previously worked as a development policy consultant in Kenya, and now works for a US-based NGO.

For previous posts in the series, see here.

Expanding the Concept of Do No Harm

Okay back to you people working on the non-fundamental issues like saving people from malaria.  We love you guys too, but you still need to ask yourself some questions.  First why aren’t you working on something important?!?  Just kidding, I like messing with you, and I’m not a big fan of malaria either.

The question you still need to ask yourself at a minimum is, “Am I causing harm on the fundamentals - things like sunlight, water, air and fertile topsoil?” If you can’t answer no with absolute certainty, then back to the drawing board.  If you did answer no, good for you.  You get an added bonus if you didn’t create carbon that will eventually drown the Seychelles.

The United States drained a ton of swamps to get rid of malaria.  That doesn’t mean it was a good idea in the long run or that we had any idea what we were doing.  Our default should be to conservatism in its best sense: If it’s working and you don’t have all the information, then don’t mess with it.

Running a series this week by Brooks Keene looking at the intersection between aid and the environment, focusing on whether aid interventions are truly sustainable.  Brooks previously worked as a development policy consultant in Kenya, and now works for a US-based NGO.

For previous posts in the series, see here.

New Approaches, New Priorities

What would a magical new framework - for making aid more environmentally sustainable - look like?

My idea is that it should go something like this. When thinking about a program for a new area, you first ask yourself what the fundamental problems are.  Are there problems with sustainable water, soil, air or sunlight?  If there are, that’s something fundamental you could work on.

Yes, I realize I just cut out most disease prevention, emergency relief and economic development work.  It’s okay if you want to work on something non-fundamental as long as you’re fully aware that you’re dropping the ball and dooming humanity to the depths of hell.

I’m just kidding, but you do need to be aware and we’ll get to why. 

Running a series this week by Brooks Keene looking at the intersection between aid and the environment, focusing on whether aid interventions are truly sustainable.  Brooks previously worked as a development policy consultant in Kenya, and now works for a US-based NGO.

For previous posts in the series, see here.

Aid Worker, Question Thyself

How do aid organizations bridge the gap between our rhetoric about sustainability and our actions in a more substantial way?  We need a framework for our thinking that will let us dodge our own cultural proclivities.  I think there are three basic cultural barriers keeping us from making progress.

First, though the majority of aid workers work in their own country, the organizations themselves and usually senior management are, for the most part, from “the West.” This makes aid organizations subject to the “culture of life.”  Death, or at least death at the wrong time, is the enemy that we are trying to save everyone from.

The focus then becomes on immediate short-term needs of individuals versus needs for a healthy society in the long run.  You’re less likely to accept short term costs for long term gains.

Second, I suspect that, though we’ve worked hard to exorcise it, there’s still a lurking thought that everyone should live like us or at least be able to if they want.  Aren’t our lives great?  Well…sort of.  The fun of playing Guitar Hero (Metallica edition) notwithstanding, a lot of our technologies and “advancements” are also killing society as we know it.

Running a series this week by Brooks Keene looking at the intersection between aid and the environment, focusing on whether aid interventions are truly sustainable.  Brooks previously worked as a development policy consultant in Kenya, and now works for a US-based NGO.

For previous posts in the series, see here.

Short Term Benefits, Long Term Costs

While environmental groups were substantively ignored for a long time (yes, I’m talking to you Senator Inhofe), aid organizations made and are still making environmental mistakes.

For instance, I visited the Millennium Village Project in Sauri, Kenya. While I think they have a worthwhile experiment going on, they were also promoting fertilizers and pesticides as part of trying to help create a “green revolution” for Africa. Green in this case certainly refers to the color of plants because use of inputs like these is far from environmentally friendly.

In the short term, we get more food with less work. In the long term, we kill the earthworms that make new soil for us and leach chemicals into our streams and water tables, reducing fish populations (another kind of food) and hurting humans who drink the water.

Running a series this week by Brooks Keene looking at the intersection between aid and the environment, focusing on whether aid interventions are truly sustainable.  Brooks previously worked as a development policy consultant in Kenya, and now works for a US-based NGO.

Sustainable, Or Not So Much

I’ve been increasingly thinking that aid organizations (here I mean both humanitarian and development organizations) have a very uneasy relationship with the concept of sustainability. We throw the word around everywhere. It’s almost become a necessary placeholder in grant proposals as in, “The project will provide sustainable access to safe drinking water for 200 households.”

By this, if they even think about it, aid agencies often mean that what they are doing will continue after they leave. And yet, there’s a slow and painful transformation taking place as humanitarian agencies begin to grasp the foundational meanings of the word.

At its root, all human activity exists at the pleasure of the natural environment. The bare equation of survival goes something like this: sunlight + water + air + fertile topsoil = life. Of course, if you throw in shelter, air conditioning, a car, hot showers, access to anti-retro viral drugs, Guitar Hero (Metallica edition) and a shovel, then the perks go up from there.

Unfortunately, the list of ingredients gets more complicated as well, including things like silicon, fossil fuels or iron ore and most of the time some things from that original list as well.

All is well and good with the ever-expanding list until your list starts colliding with that first equation. Those foundational ingredients literally pass in and out of our body, and our health and survival is their health and survival. These ingredients need to remain “sustainable.   It is when used in this context that the word is its most powerful.

They'd rather be fishing.

Photo from the BBC.

I had the good fortune this weekend to meet up with Michael. Aside from our epic and publicly discussed Settlers of Catan throw-down, (my wife trounced both of us two games in a row), we had a short discussion about the merits of development versus emergency humanitarian work.

Humanitarian work is easy to quantify (e.g. 14,000 people got two meals today), while development can seem more fluffy. I've been thinking about it, and I don't think it's unfair to say that the need for humanitarian relief often comes from poor development such as bad food production models or other root causes like bad governance or injustice.

I've been reluctant to talk about the Middle East because it's such a firebrand topic, but it's one of the most accessible examples I can think of to show that humanitarian relief is too often a temporary band-aid while we tolerate the root causes of the suffering. We can talk about humanitarian access in the occupied Palestinian territories until we're blue in the face, but these are not areas that need humanitarian access outside of the fact that every other kind of access is cut off. I make no judgment on the need that Israelis feel to protect their own security, but they aren't doing themselves any favors--even from a security perspective--by creating a defunct state dependent on international aid next door.

Palestinians are well-educated and live in what would otherwise be a solidly middle income economy. We see lots of video of Hamas fighters training in black face masks, but how many videos do we see of strawberry farmers with their crops rotting in their fields? It's not as exciting, but it might be a helluva lot more important in the long run.

Here's an article from 2007 in the Independent about how Gaza strawberry farmers lack access to their markets to sell. And here's an article from AP about how Israeli Navy restrictions and harassment hurt the Gaza fishing market. The UK's Department for International Development has a series of articles about how lack of access to markets hurts Palestinians as well. Now, I've talked about markets, but you need to factor in other root causes of the need for perpetual humanitarian assistance (access to drinking and irrigation water, ability to buy imported goods such as spare parts for machinery, access to fuel, access to hospitals and drugs...the list goes on; check out the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs excellent PowerPoint presentation for more info and maps on impediments to movement and access).

And there you have it. Quantifiable as it is, humanitarian relief in this case is nothing but a band-aid. It's a case of perpetual hopelessness or--if you like to think about the dolla' dolla' bills--an endless money pit. I could have easily made this blog about how Niger is a constant food aid recipient because they have rampant deforestation, a changing climate, bad agricultural practice and an exploding population, but I figured most Americans can identify more closely with the Middle East case.

The point is, while things like development assistance, institution-building or advocacy might seem like fluffy expenditures compared with humanitarian relief in conflict or disasters, we could often spend money on them forever and only be applying--at best--a temporary fix.

This follows on my previous post about getting the military out of development.

The best way to build peace?

Photo from the NY Times.

The New York Times ran an article this week discussing how the U.S. military is using both training of security forces and development assistance to combat terrorism in the Sahel (the article is about Mali).  I saw a model of the development assistance type in Niger.  There are (at least) two questions that have not been satisfactorily answered as to why this is a good expenditure of U.S. taxpayer money:

1. Why are we supporting who we're supporting? It's been clear from the get-go that, from the military training perspective, the U.S. is siding with national governments.  While this might be a decent strategy when dealing with Germany or China, the situation gets murkier when dealing with some governments in the developing world.  Both Mali and Niger, where similar work is happening, have been dealing with challenges to their stability and legitimacy from Tuareg tribes in the north who feel left out of the social compact.  In Niger, this is a lot more serious as the north holds uranium deposits that account for the majority of the country's export earnings (see NY Times article).  These are the kinds of things that can lead to government overthrows or coups (both Niger and Mali had coups in the 1990s).  The New York Times article on the counter-terrorism work in Mali says that one of the Malian commanders was trained at Fort Benning in Georgia.  For a picture of how well this type of training has worked out in the past, check out School of the Americas Watch, an organization that has done extensive research on what Fort Benning graduates have sometimes been up to in the past.  Hint: It's sometimes called the "School of Assassins."
2. Is any of this actually the best way to curb terrorism? Like I said in my last post, development done for selfish reasons can be problematic.  Good development requires trust, and--in my experience--such programs are not necessarily completely forthright about why they do what they do.  It's difficult to work with people as partners in their own future when your starting point is, "You're at risk of becoming a terrorist, so we're going to help you reform the curriculum in your Koranic school and get a job while you're at it."  Don't get me wrong, some of these programs can have great positive impact, but they carry an in-built booby trap should the reality become clear.

An alternative method?  Well, we already have several U.S. government agencies whose specialty is foreign assistance.  Why not strengthen them and then let them do their job?

More Excel tables needed.

I jested in my post on Saturday about failure being okay for aid workers as long as they could write a "lessons-learned" document about it.  Sometimes it feels like that, but--and I say this in all seriousness--development is a field where we still don't know squat.  We write LOTS of lessons-learned documents.  Every NGO, UN agency, regional development bank and the World Bank write their own.  I have my doubts about how many of them are read, even by people designing almost identical programs.  Whether these are read or not, I don't think we actually ever find out about the vast majority of our failures.

Many times, we judge the performance of programs on first-hand witnessing or talking to stakeholders in the programs.  The pressure is on for us to show good results to donors so they'll want to keep working with us, and recipients often feel like they have to show appreciation or be positive in order to be considered for future programs.

I've done some work on a water, sanitation and hygiene program in primary schools funded by the Gates Foundation.  The program is far from typical and suggests some ways forward.  While I don't know that the quality of the work the program is doing is really any higher than most development projects, I do know that we're really going to be accountable for our results.  The Center for Global Safe Water at Emory University is also on the project, and they essentially serve as an independent learner, measuring things NGOs wouldn't have the staff time or capacity to get at like levels of fecal coliform on kids hands or absenteeism levels in schools using a randomized and controlled study.  We'll know exactly how effective this kind of program is, and the Gates Foundation will know if it's worth investing in.

If we're really going to learn what works, development agencies need to invest far more in learning. Donors need to prioritize learning over feeling good about themselves.  There's plenty of time for that later when we really know what works.  The bigger and more professional aid organizations are already heading in this direction, but there are thousands of smaller NGOs getting money without such efforts.  Some first-class research organizations of note working on this problem already are the MIT Poverty Action Lab, the Center of Evaluation for Global Action at UC Berkeley and the Overseas Development Institute in the UK.

Photo from MSNBC.

You know you're working at an aid organization headquarters if...

1. You just had a pre-meeting to discuss your strategy planning session for the new initiative to reduce poverty by increasing access to safe water/credit/food/health care through fair and equitable distribution to those with the right to said good or service through engagement with duty bearers in the government and other stakeholders and civil society organizations.
2. You just repeatedly slammed your head into your keyboard after spending the last 20 minutes trying to get your Skype conference call between Port au Prince, West Bank/Gaza, Delhi, Nairobi and New York to work only to fail miserably.
3. You realize that you can no longer squeeze into your cubicle past that cool hand-woven cloth from Mali, the wooden mask from Congo, the elephant figurine from Thailand and the rug from Afghanistan.
4. You just completed an annual report to your donor explaining that you're very sorry that you only managed to accomplished 2 of your 14 objectives due to sudden onset of war, drought or an invasion of futuristic nano-robots.
5. You just finished explaining to the donor that you are likely to need a two-year extension and an extra $200,000 to hire an independent consulting company to come up with a plan to fight off the nano-robots, carry out said plan and then finish up the original activities.
6. You realize that you just used cheers, karibu, Insh'Allah or namaste in casual conversation despite the fact that you are neither English, Kenyan, Arab or Indian.
7. You realize that your favorite and most frequented cafe is located in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.
8. You just finished depressing a volunteer caller from the Red Cross for the 12th time this year who reluctantly agreed that you are not eligiable to donate blood because you just got back from <fill in malarial region here>.
9. You're pumped with antibiotics more frequently than a cow in a concentrated feeding operation.
10. You tell yourself it's not failure if you turn it into a lessons-learned document.

Hope you enjoyed it and until next time, cheers.

Photo by Aaron Huey from National Geographic.

Rory Stewart, who I blame for making me feel like I'm wasting my life whenever I read about him, wrote an outstanding book about his walk across Afghanistan in 2002 (see New York Times review).  The book is so amazing that a very substantial footnote--yes, a footnote--from the book has been stuck in my head for over a year now.  In the footnote, he describes the kind of international policymakers who inevitably end up in international projects (in this case, post-Taliban Afghanistan):

"Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

"Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation and oppression.

"Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan." (p. 247-248)

Everything Stewart says could probably apply to most humanitarian/development workers, so that's how I'll discuss it.  I approach this footnote with mixed emotions.  Part of me screams in protest at the depiction of aid workers as unaccountable, lazy nomads floating from place to place.  We put in an enormous amount of hard work.  Also, who wants to be compared to the likes of Captain Kurtz?

Still, something rings true in Stewart's depiction.  With some notable exceptions like the Peace Corps (which has its own issues) most development workers really don't put in half as much time getting to know cultures as colonialists did.  We're separated from people in areas where we work by all sorts of barriers.  These can be economic, spatial, cultural or mental.  In Nairobi, a regional development hub for East Africa, expatriates tend to live in neighborhoods where none but super-wealthy Kenyans can afford a house.  It's also just not comfortable after an exhausting day of work to try and make small talk with people who really don't identify with your life and vice versa.

If I look at the circle of expat development workers around me in Kisumu, the one who's planning on staying longest is here for five years, and most of us are just here for six months to two years.  It's the rare individual who truly devotes herself to a specific culture and location.  In this sense, Stewart is dead on.  Responsibility for results rarely if ever rests on expat development workers.  If something fails, it was the macro-level forces that were responsible and not us.

Development organizations have tried to get around this by relying more and more on "national staff" from the country where they're working.  This is less true in emergency humanitarian work where many temporary expats are hired, particularly in early days.  Expats are then increasingly relegated to senior jobs where they write reports in English for donors or others who need such things (see blog by Alanna Shaikh on what expats tend to do).  Still, it is inescapable that the senior levels of the large development organizations are run by often Ivy League-educated people from developed countries or, a step closer in understanding, by the educated elite (often also with Ivy League educations) from developing countries.  These people tend to have similar lifestyles and practices to their compatriots from the developed world.

And so, I ultimately find myself thinking that Mr. Stewart has a point.  Would it be better if development and aid workers committed themselves to specific places for a significant portion of their lives?  I tend to think so, but if that's going to happen, then donors need to look critically at funding models and how we judge performance.  If you want to measure real impact on things like health or educational outcomes, that costs real money.  If you want to measure sustainability, then require evaluations five years after projects are done by universities or other objective researchers.

Better yet, if you want people to really understand the problem, then cut the idea of two-year projects out altogether.  It's a ridiculous time frame to know anything about anything.  Development is not like manufacturing computers.  We don't really know how to do it well yet, so we need time to learn.  If people need to live in a village for two years to figure out what's really going on, then fund them to do it.  Don't be afraid to fund a 20 year project.  Instead, let's be afraid of the short term gain that we put so much money and effort into but that fades away two years after we're gone.

If you want to hear Mr. Stewart's criticism from his own mouth, forward this video to 6:16: