International
Development: The What and the Why.
What is international development? If only I had an answer.
The definition eludes me yet it is what I have decided to pursue… a career in
something so hard to explain my dad chalks it up to “I don’t know what she’s
doing; she’s crazy and she keeps going to Africa but we support her.” And maybe
I am, but what’s wrong with a little crazy, or a lot of crazy for that matter
if it manifests as a will to invest in people?
That’s the way I think about international development, as a
long-term process of investing in people. Throughout history international
development has been defined in myriad ways. Definitions have ranged anywhere
from “a process of modernization in which society becomes industrialized and urbanized,“
to “how nations, governments and individuals organize themselves, use
resources, improve their wellbeing and increase their range of choices.” (AVI; UNDP,
2000)
Up until the mid to late 1980’s international development
was economy-centric. It was believed that if a country had a high enough Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Product (GNP) then it was “developed”
and its people generally enjoyed a dignified way of life that allowed them to
meet more than just their basic needs. It wasn’t until 1990 when Amartya Sen and
Mahbub ul Haq introduced us to the human development index that we began to
dissociate GDP and GNP with the way that people were actually living. Sen and
Haq made us aware of the reality of more than 1.2 billion people in the world
by showing us that a country’s economic standing doesn’t tell us anything about
its distribution of wealth, its access to education and the quality of its
health care.
The contributions of Sen and Haq, amongst others, helped the
field evolve but it didn’t stop its critics. Critics of international
development say it creates dependency i.e. dependency theory, that it’s a new
form of colonialism i.e. neocolonialism and that it does more harm than good,
e.g. http://matadornetwork.com/change/7-worst-international-aid-ideas/
- if only it were that simple.
The truth is, I believe, that most people involved in
international development are well intended but ill informed, Aaron Ausland put
it best:
The
world is littered with community development projects gone wrong. More often
than not the source of failure was an overemphasis on output and underemphasis
on process. Take, for example, the ubiquitous latrine project. When project
success is measured by output, most latrine projects are successful. After all,
most such projects do, indeed, get latrines built. But if you go back in a few
years and look for the outcomes that these latrines were supposed to generate –
fewer diseases, cleaner water, ect. – there seem to be far more failures. In
fact, most latrines that I’ve seen
in the developing world aren’t even used, at least not as latrines!
Part
of the problem is that planners don’t map out logic models that take people and
their incentives into account. Logic models are maps of interventions. They are
intended to show a complete, coherent causal chain from inputs through
activities to outputs, and then to short-, medium-and long-term outcomes. But
often there are unexamined,
yet critical, assumptions made about how people are going to behave-assumptions
that create weak or broken links in the chain. For example, just because you
estimate that 300 families need latrines doesn’t mean that 300 families will
use them in the ways you intend them if you build them. You have to ask, “What
would motivate this behavior?” (Ausland, 2005)
At the heart of what makes this work so challenging is that
it is largely based on predicting and influencing human behavior, and if you’re
human you know that merely knowing that something is good for
you doesn’t necessarily make you do it.
Despite the uncertainty that characterizes the field I chose
to become a development professional because I could feel the hunger of others,
the pebbles under their bare feet and the shame brought on by their inability
to read or write their own names. I chose it because I was a child with a dream
who didn’t realize how fortunate she was that she had the “privilege” of
dreaming. Have you ever considered that some children never dream? That some
living conditions are so bleak that there is no room to even imagine a
different existence? I believe dreaming is a human right, for if nothing else,
one should be able to dream and get lost in the possibilities and the potential
of one’s own life. So I am here essentially trying to help people cultivate
their ability to dream – that’s how I choose to define it.
