International Development: The What and the Why.

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.