An International Achilles’ Heel

Tuesday August 3rd 2010

In this post I’d like to share some of the big picture issues I’m seeing in development as well as some of the recent questions I’ve been asking myself. These thoughts are my own and aren’t necessarily shared by EWB Canada, my Ghanaian partner organization, or any of the other individuals with whom I’m working. Also, keep in mind that the opinions presented in this post are reflective of three months of personal experience with agriculture value chain work in Ghana, and may not be aligned with the experience and/or opinions of individuals in other segments of the development industry.

I’m working on a small piece of an agriculture development project, which in itself represents a very small piece of the development industry. Because of the nature of my placement, I’ve been able to learn a lot about three different levels of this project’s hierarchy– field realities, middle management nuances, and overall project implementation. I think this has been one of the most exciting aspects of my placement, as I’ve been able to learn from different sources of information, triangulate, and form my own hypotheses.

Now that I have three months of learnings under my belt, I’ve started to compare and contrast these different sources of information. When I look at the operating conditions and assumptions for both the agriculture development industry and my field-level work, however, I see very different, disconnected pictures. Recently, I’ve found this tension confusing as I’ve struggled to map out and attempt to understand some of the complexities of Ghana’s agriculture development industry.

Development projects occupy a small sphere within the larger sphere of the development industry. I think of it using a Russian doll analogy, where the development industry is the largest doll, implementing organizations are mid-sized dolls, and development projects are one of the smaller dolls stacked inside. Sticking to this analogy, the differences I see between the big doll and the smaller dolls is perplexing. It’s like someone has taken multiple different Russian doll sets and mixed them all up, such that the outside doll is stacked with multiple mismatched smaller dolls inside.

Let’s zoom in on a piece of what I’m working on. A portion of my work advocates for competitive advancements within the agro-input industry in Ghana. This means that we seek out willing partners amongst the many unspecialized, small-scale agro-chemical entrepreneurial initiatives, and support their adoption of competitive business tactics. Ultimately the goal is that the success of the few entrepreneurs with whom we’ve partnered will prompt industry copycats to shift their business practices similarly in order to stay in the game. Over time, the hope is that the agro-input industry will move towards a state where behaviours like risk taking, innovating, and searching for strategies that benefit their clients, are rewarded and result in an industry that sees continual business upgrading as a competitive edge. Despite the setbacks I’ve seen in my work, I believe in the approach and am optimistic about the scale of its impact.

Now, let’s zoom out. Picture the entire agriculture development system in Ghana– inclusive of everyone from big donor agencies like CIDA and USAID, to small local NGOs, to the Ghanaian government. International development practitioners rarely seem to fully agree with one another, but from my experience one topic goes without debate: human development is complex, context-specific, and dynamic. Additionally, development is further complicated by the ineffectiveness of the aid industry. In Ghana, agriculture focused aid initiatives distort aspects of the private sector, making it less likely actors will engage in commercial trade. Initiatives like free seed to maize farmers or subsidized fertilizer to rice farmers are examples of this.

The aid industry is rife with ‘entrepreneurs’—splinter organizations who write project proposals filled with new jargon to appear innovative to the big donors, who often distribute funding based on the organization’s perceived level of sophistication, creativity, and willingness to be flexible. However, it appears to me that are no overarching mechanisms in place through which implementing organizations compete based on their results. Because this isn’t happening, comparable data is often unavailable to members within the development system, thus removing our ability to classify and interpret industry-wide results. And thus, in my estimation, it’s currently extremely difficult to tell what approaches have or have not worked. If our industries aren’t learning from each other, valuing knowledge sharing, or feeling pressure to upgrade approaches, I have a hard time seeing wherein lies the incentives to improve the development industry.

If the system is not complimentary to its components, it’s not surprising to me the industry is often ambiguous, and that failed projects tend to outnumber the successes. In my opinion, the enabling environment for success in agriculture development projects is absent– innovation and upgrading aren’t going to happen organically because no one (both internal and external to the system) is putting consistent, unified, unwavering pressure on the industry to value context-specific, knowledge driven interventions, to be accountable to its mistakes, or to dynamically manage the course of its trajectory such that the probability of project success increases over time.

I have a few questions to share that I have recently been exploring. Feel free to respond to any of the following:

Set One: Is international development a service based industry? If so, what services are being rendered and to whom? If it is a service based industry, what has allowed industry progression such that the service recipients have little choice what types of services are rendered or how they are delivered, and such that recipients lack the mechanisms to provide critical feedback to the service provider?

Set Two: Is the aid industry both too complex and too distorted to repair, or are there solutions to the system’s challenges that haven’t been explored/implemented/supported? Do we have too many cooks in the kitchen, and if so what would streamlining aid look like? Alternatively, what effect would increasing competitiveness amongst actors internal to the aid system have on our beneficiaries? What are the set of incentives that would help translate competitiveness into to better service delivery?

Set Three: What can and/or should we do to address the systemic flaws within the development industry that stand in the way of making real, sustainable, healthy progress at the community level in Africa? What are the trade offs in working from the bottom up verses from the top down in agriculture development? Realistically, where is EWB best positioned for impact?

Thanks for reading,

Erin

Connections through Questions

Friday June 25th 2010

Over the past week I’ve received several questions from some of the beautiful folks at EWB-UNB about my experience in Ghana. Their questions have been super interesting, and I’m really appreciative of the effort that has gone in to them. I thought it would be worthwhile to write a post with my response to one of the questions that I could share with everyone here. Their questions also gave me a new idea for encouraging dialogue between my blog and its readers, which you can read more about in the last paragraph.

Q: What has been the hardest thing to get used to in Ghana? What is it that makes you say ‘Wow, this is a whole different world’ ?

A: There are certain aspects of life in Ghana that generate a sense of wrongness within me. It’s not that I know certain things are ‘wrong’ or ‘right’— clearly no one can claim to be the sole arbiter of that. But, this sense of wrongness starts to percolate into my consciousness when I’m exposed to situations that are unfamiliar and that go against what I’ve always known in Canada. Here are two examples to help illustrate the point I’m making:

Example 1: Recently I witnessed Bosit, a 2 year old boy in our compound, fall while playing outside. He scraped his chin on the cement ditch that boarders the perimeter of the compound, and was left with a terrible gash. His mother Stella, hearing his cries, attentively scooped him up into her arms and began sopping up the blood with a dishtowel, not the sterile, one time use gauze pad or band-aid that my mother may have used. It’s certainly not that Bosit’s mother is a negligent parent—it just simply isn’t as common to have ready access to basic medical provisions at home. These goods do exist at the Hohoe District Hospital, but given that the hospital is a 50 pesewa taxi ride across town, and that upon arriving you’re undoubtedly greeted by a long wait due to the mass of other individuals waiting for service, Stella chooses to remedy Bosit’s situation on her own.

Thankfully this was a relatively minor incident and Bosit wasn’t in dire need of professional attention. But, what if the injury had been more serious? I don’t know how things would play out, and I hope I don’t have to find out any time soon. Certainly, it wouldn’t be as easy and dialling 911, waiting only minutes for an ambulance, and promptly receiving world-class medical care.

Example 2: Last week, Hohoe township was without running water for five days. Rumour was that a pipe in town had burst, but after asking around I noticed that no one seemed to have more information than that.

I’ll ask you to think for a moment about how disrupted your life would be if the water stopped running in your community for five days. That means your toilets don’t flush, you can’t run the dishwasher, and you have to purchase water every day for cooking, drinking, and washing. What would you do? Who do you call? What are your questions?

Lack of reliable, hygienic, safe infrastructure in Ghana is not Haiti, BP, or the Gaza blockade. The media won’t have any casualties to report on, or stories of shock and despair to capture. Although on a lesser magnitude than some of the heavy hitting crises mentioned, I believe the story of infrastructure in Ghana still deserves a blip in the global media’s spotlight. Living side by side with those who aren’t empowered to call on their government, to expect honest and reliable answers, and to advocate for solutions they feel are appropriate, seriously makes me stop in my tracks and think about how different the life I’ve known in Canada is from the one I’m beginning to feel a part of here.

Superficially, the clothes, the food, and the scenery take my breath away and make me appreciate all of the beautiful ways in which Ghana differs from Canada. However, it’s not the new people and their culture; it’s not my being the only white girl around that truly makes me feel like I’m in a foreign place. It’s when I so starkly see a contrast to what I’ve always known, and what I’ve always thought was right, that I realize I’ve grown up in a place that operates with a completely different set of rules than Ghana. Those rules, both formal and informal, govern what individuals expect from themselves, their community, and their government. Ultimately I think it’s these rules that are different between nations, and that people behave differently largely as a result of their existence.

I plan on posting my responses to questions I’ve received from you, the reader, once per week for the remainder of my placement. You can either ask questions by commenting on this post, or by sending an email to erinflanagan@ewb.ca. This series of question-based posts is meant to compliment the type of writing you’ve already seen from me, not replace it.

This plan hinges on your participation, so please jump in with both feet and take advantage of it. There are no limits to the type of questions you can ask– from my work, to the JF experience, to culture and life in Ghana, and everything in between– I’ll do my best to answer all of the questions each week.

Alright, Canada, now the ball is in your court. I can’t wait to read and reflect on your questions.

Thanks for reading,

Erin