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
