St Paddy’s Pifflery

Earlier this month the Irish celebrated St Patrick’s day. If you are an expat working in the aid sector posted to the capital city of a developing country you might well have received an invitation to a St Paddy’s day celebration at the local Irish Embassy. Or you might not. It really depends upon which circles you move in. Here is Bottom Up Thinking’s simple cut-out-and-keep guide to getting an invitation to this and similar soirées.

May be invited	Won’t be invited
Has almost zero contact with aid beneficiaries	Works directly with aid beneficiaries
Sits in endless meetings and workshops which achieve very little	Attends as few workshops as possible because nothing gets done in them
Most meetings in air-conditioned offices	Meetings often under a tree or in the local school house
Constantly harasses grantees/subordinates to comply with long lists of conditions	Is constantly harassed trying to meet latest ridiculous donor demands
Lives in a nice big house, with maid and gardener, rent paid by employer	Lives in the bush; cadges a bed for the night with friends when up in the big city
Job satisfaction from a big salary and drinking oneself silly with friends at the Irish Embassy	Job satisfaction from actually helping poor people and sense of worthwhile achievement
Gives/receives large amounts of cash to/from drinking buddies at pet NGO/donor at end of each year when surplus budget needs to be used up	Has to write ten pages of meaningless donorese just to get enough cash to pay themselves and colleagues

Sour grapes? Me? Am sure I wouldn’t want to talk to most invitees any way, it’s just I do like a touch of the black stuff every now and then …

On whose behalf do they speak?

How Matters recently featured a guest post by Scott Fifer on the need to listen to local leaders, especially when they say “Thanks but no thanks.”

As with the paper on which I commented yesterday, Scott was making one of those obvious points which are too often forgotten, and I found myself agreeing with just about every word he wrote. However, I was also a tad concerned that the excellent points he was making all depended on one critical question which was never fully addressed: to what extent is Scott’s local partner, Abel Barrera Hernández, actually a good representative of the people Scott and Abel want to help?

Us expatriate advisers often worry a lot about the extent to which we should speak on behalf of the beneficiaries we are seeking to support, but can suffer serious blind spots when it comes to our local partners. As far as I could tell from Scott’s post Abel has not been elected by the people of Guerrero, Mexico. Even if he is extremely popular, and has helped the people there a lot (Scott implies both), they might not agree with Abel when he argues against the GO Campaign providing funds to improve the local school with a new floor on the basis that this ought to be the government’s job.

“Admittedly, part of me wanted to say to Abel, the hell with the cultural traditions, and to hell with the government! These kids need an education. These kids want and need books and desks and chairs and a floor.  But that part of me shut up (mostly).  My years of grant-making have taught me to know that I don’t know it all. And if a respected leader and human rights champion is telling me my well-intentioned ideas don’t fly with him, then I gotta figure he knows more than I do.”

It seems that Scott and Abel came up with a solution that sounds sensible and will give the practical support to the communities they need, so, without knowing anything more about the situation in Guerrero, I do not wish to imply any criticism of this particular instance; indeed the conclusion they reached sounds praise-worthy. But we do not always get it so right with our partners selection, e.g. in Guinea-Bissau it appears IUCN put rather too much trust in their local partners when they embarked upon a community conservation initiative on the Cubucan peninsular.

Local partners are vital to the success of development projects, but just because they are local and they are your chosen partner, does not necessarily make them good, nor automatically entitle them to speak on behalf of your would-be beneficiaries. Both labels have to be earned, and sometimes you might even find that actually it is the international partners who do a better job of protecting the interests of the beneficiaries.

Why expats bargain hard for their taxis

The Roving Bandit ponders the ethics behind bargaining down a taxi fare when one can easily afford to pay more. As the Bandit himself realises, this is hardly the most pressing problem on the planet, but, hey, us expats working in the Aid industry do like to agonise over these sorts to things.

I think can think of three legitimate reasons an expat might legitimately bargain down their taxi fare:

• They may be a very junior intern / volunteer who really does not have any cash to spend, and has to eke out what little they have over the time they are here. The whole accounting for their life out in whatever far-flung place they have gone to depends upon the fact that life is significantly cheaper than wherever they call home. Quite simply they cannot afford to pay the rich white person’s fare.
• Alternatively they may take this taxi on a regular day: over-paying today means over-paying forever, and that may have a more significant impact on their costs.
• Finally they may be concerned about sticking out as a rich fool, and thus making themselves a target for thieves and other chancers. If they can bargain hard in the local lingo then that might signal they are not such an attractive target.

However, I suggest that the reason most expats bargain down the cost is that they think it is not cool not to bargain it down, and feel they would look silly to their friends and work colleagues (local and expat) if they paid way more than the going rate. And looking silly does decrease ones social capital which may impact upon one’s ability to get useful stuff done. But mostly I reckon folks just don’t want to be taken for a ride when they go for one.

Book Review

Happy 2013 to all my readers. Hope you had plenty of festive cheer and all that!

If you went away did you experience the latest bit of air travel nonsense? I mean when, taking off and coming into land, they tell you to turn off all electronic devices, including a basic Kindle, but leave the airplane entertainment system going. Cos the ultra low energy requirements of e-ink are really going to interfere with flight computers over all the electromagnetic waves given off by those bright LED screens right in front of us, yeah right! Kindles (and other e-readers!) are perfect for those of us who regularly travel long distances, but alas our airlines are all still stuck in the 20th century, and so the e-readers suck for ~30 minutes of each flight.

Mini-rant aside, what you have on your e-reader ought to be much more interesting than when you are and when you are not allowed to read it. Part of my xmas relaxation was reading The Hydrogen Sonata*, the latest in Iain M Banks’ loosely related Culture saga. (The ‘Culture’ are a “post-scarcity, hedonistic, Machiavellian, libertarian … infinitely capable, technologically miraculous, polymorphously perverse” pan-galactic society of various humanoid races plus super-powered artificial intelligences that dominate the universe 10,000 years from now.) If you cannot stand science fiction and get weirded out by ‘little green men’ and related subjects then I suggest you stop reading now. Those of you still with me may nonetheless be wondering what a review of a sci-fi book is doing in this particular blog.

The answer is that horrible little cliché about art holding up a mirror to our world. Science fiction is no different in this respect from other art genres, and offers imaginative opportunities not afforded to story-telling situated in more conventional settings. Reviews of the Hydrogen Sonata on the interwebs (epitomised by that in the Grauniad from which I lifted the above quote) have centred on the major theme of religion in scientifically advanced societies that permeates many of the Culture books.

But reading it I was struck first and foremost by the incredibly strong parallels between the Culture’s efforts to deal morally with other alien societies and the conundrums of expatriates working in the Aid sector, especially in how to navigate the sense of neo-colonialism that permeates much of what we do however much we may wish it did not. The Culture’s almost omnipotent resources, of course, put in the shade even the best present day efforts of the international development movement, but can equally be read as a fantasy of how we wish the UN and other big agencies would work. Equally, as almost always happens in Banks’ novels, when things get martial, they are a fantasy of how we wish the American armed forces, technologically superior in every facet, would behave if they had the scruples we do. (Indeed Banks conceived the Culture as much as a reaction to the right-wing world view that is prevalent in much science fiction.)

So if you’re an expat aid worker in search of a rather more lyrical reaction to the contradictions of our lives than that provided by Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like, then I can heartily recommend a spot of Iain M Banks. From the short biographical details available it does not appear that he ever worked or volunteered as an overseas Aid worker, but he hits the nail right on the head time and time again. His books are both wish fulfilment for our frustrated, ill-informed work and a reminder of how far up our own arses we can sometimes go with moralistic agonising. They are also stonkingly well written!

If you are entirely new to the Culture universe, which can be pretty baffling, then starting with one of the earlier books (Consider Phlebas and the Player of Games), may be easier, but there are only very loose plot connections between the different books, so jumping straight in with the Hydrogen Sonata or one of the other more recent books should work fine for those more intrigued by the aforementioned parallels with the Aid world than with pure entertainment.

Happy reading for 2013!

* Disclaimer: I have no connection whatsoever with Iain M Banks or his publisher. I wasn’t even asked to review the book. I will not earn any affiliate / referrer fees through this link.

(Post updated later on 08/01/13 to correct statement of Bank’s inspiration for the Culture: as a reaction to right-wing imagery in other science fiction, not religion. Doh!)

(Not) Speaking on behalf of poor people

While I was away my long-ago written contribution to Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like finally came out. For those of you who missed it, here it is again (slightly edited to restore the original intended meaning of the final bullet point). Those sensitive to sarcasm should stop reading now.

---

“Please can you speak on our behalf?” (Image: Avatar – the ultimate white knight movie)

From time to time, every Expat Aid Worker will be asked to speak on behalf of their project, and, by implication, on behalf of said project’s supposed beneficiaries. This could simply be in a workshop, which is not such an issue. However, it may also involve fronting up to the insatiable maw that is the modern international media circus. It’s these circumstances that fill the newbie EAW with trepidation. Oh, the moral minefield through which she* will have to tread!

• On the one hand this could be a great opportunity for the EAW to get her name out there. It could be just the career break she needs. Plus the oxygen of publicity can be great for Field Cred!
• Except that all EAWs are justifiably wary of White Knight Syndrome. Being called a White Knight (or Lady!) instantly reduces the EAW to some totally insensitive boor.
• Moreover, except for those EAWs who have utterly succumbed to the Dark Side, there is still a kernel of idealism that EAWs like to nurture inside their hard candy shell of cynicism. Falling into the White Knight trap is simply terrible for one’s idealist karma.
• The veteran EAW will thread this needle by prefacing her points with the disclaimer that she really has no basis on which to speak for her project’s beneficiaries, but here’s what she thinks any way.
• Unfortunately this will be cut by the film editor, and the EAW will have to tell everyone she knows how she hated being portrayed as the White Lady she is not. This makes a good excuse to let everyone know that she was interviewed by the media, even if it was only featured for 5 nano-seconds on an obscure piece put out during the graveyard shift on Crap Network News.

The smartest EAW, however, will realise that all of the above is utter tosh, and will instead write a snarky blog post about it, explaining the Lewis Carroll-esque contradictions of her position: that frequently in such situations there is nobody else in the room in a position to speak on behalf of her project’s beneficiaries, so if she doesn’t step up to the plate, they’ll be left entirely unrepresented.  Anyone agonising about such issues are therefore just spouting self-indulgent pretentious BS.

And who needs karma any way? If her project’s beneficiaries had even a fraction of their fair share, they wouldn’t need the EAW to speak on their behalf in the first place.

*All male EAWs are honoured to be called she or her, as nothing else quite demonstrates our gender sensitivity than not objecting when others get it wrong.

The need for self-doubt

I, and many sages wiser than myself, have frequently remarked upon the lack of an adequate feedback mechanism in the aid industry. Randomized Control Trials may be the new M&E gold standard but they suck compared to the rapid feedback of no customers that a businessman with a duff idea experiences.

If the system in which you work has little capacity for self-correction, then, to my mind, it makes it all the more important that we contain such a capacity within ourselves. Which is why I totally agree with Dialectician Terence’s critique of the dangers of over-confidence and self assurance within the development sphere. Whether the road concerned is going to hell, nowhere, or somewhere in between, at best hopes will be raised and money wasted; at worst poor peoples’ livelihoods opportunities could be significantly knocked back.

And yet the conservation and development world holds plenty of attractions for the messianic side that lurks within many of us. Moreover, the need to prise money out of sceptical donors readily pushes us into over-emphasising the potential benefits and pooh-poohing the risks. It can be a short step from there to starting to believe our own guff. Whether it is the Millennium Villages Project or the One Laptop Per Child initiative, we can all too easily find ourselves on a runaway train of propaganda and self-justification.

I’ve had personal experience of working with such people. When they are on the money there is no better ally to be had. But when they lose the plot it can be incredibly difficult to persuade them of the merits of an alternative path. Constructive criticism is dismissed as base politicking, and a multi-stakeholder partnership can, in their eyes, be suddenly transformed into a conspiracy to block progress. When they perceive the project is threatened, then everything becomes about defending the project.

We all have our blind spots, and over-confidence is a dangerous trait in many walks of life. But the project success rate in conservation and development is not good. Even if we have good reason to think our proposal is the best thing since sliced bread, we should be wary, for many before us, equally able, have failed. Thus the capacity for self-doubt is, I think, one of the most important assets you can have if you want to work in conservation or development.

Is development work a route to compassionate conservatism?

Excluding the missionary types most conservation and development workers I’ve met are about as far, politically speaking, as you can get from the neoconservative agenda of Bush junior. However, they all do start out with a substantial minimum quotient of compassion that differentiates them from the average denizen of Wall Street. What I think few of them expect is the degree of conservatism many will take on as a result of a field career in development.*

This came up in a conversation not so long ago with a good friend of mine here. We were discussing the various Occupy <insert-capitalist-symbol-of-choice> protests. My friend’s point was that while she sympathised with friends and acquaintances back home who supported – and may even have actively participated in – the protests, this sympathy was tempered by the fact that the 99% in America are way better than the 99% in this particular part of Africa.

However, it was not just this sense of perspective that lessened her sense of agitation, but also the experience of living and working in a country where the day to day management of government responsibilities is so often completely dysfunctional. In contrast you rapidly come to respect those businesses which can reliably deliver a consistent service at a competitive price; mobile phone companies being the best example. (This experience is may well be different in countries like Ethiopia which reportedly are getting their acts together quite impressively.)

Thus it is, in many developmental discussions across various sectors, that often we seek the involvement of the private sector and other non-governmental actors in preference to the government-centric approach which many officials take as a default. Even the public-private sector partnership beloved of developed country economists leaves us shuddering: how can such a thing work with a government notorious for not paying its bills on time? Similarly, Norman Tebbit’s injunction for young people to “get on their bike” and find some work is a message that many a time we wish we could deliver in its starkest terms to apparently apathetic aid-dependent communities.

I doubt this will translate into many additional votes for right wing parties all of a sudden – development workers (except for the missionaries) are definitely socially liberal – but it is an interesting case, perhaps, of the collision that many of us experience as we grow older between the high ideals of youth and pragmatism in a world consumed by self interest.

* The exception would presumably be all those development economists who dominate the development blogosphere, or at least those sections of it that I follow.

Rome wasn’t built in three years

This is a follow-up post to my previous one over the lack of adequate diagnosis by Engineers Without Borders in determining the cause of failures they have admitted. Here I turn my attention away from the admitting failure process to address the substance of EWB’s failure. It is also specifically a response to Erin Antcliffe’s question on Twitter and an expansion on my 140 character response:

However, this isn’t really about EWB’s volunteer-based business model. The mediocre achievements of the development industry over the past 50 years suggest that all the development experts in the world don’t amount to very much, at least not if they’re working in the wrong framework. As such I applaud EWB’s intentions and efforts to “search for new models for development impact” (Erin in comments on David Week’s post).

My top tweet above might come across as harsh, but I think is fair. I’ve been working where I do for over 10 years, and I’m still very much learning about the country and its people. All the really effective NGOs I know around here have staff who’ve equally stayed around for the long haul, many longer than me.

And yet expatriate development programme staff the world over typically stay for only 3-5 year posts at maximum, with many doing shorter stints. I had one friend who had worked for 3 different UN agencies in 3 different countries doing 3 different jobs, each for only one year. He wasn’t a senior consultant brought into to lend his advice for a set period, but a junior officer who was presumably good with spreadsheets. But why would the UN seek to foster such wasteful career management?

I can guess at two ‘inspirations’ for this myopic approach to HR management:

• Many aid projects, equally myopically, last only 3-5 years.
• Diplomats tend to get rotated quite regularly, and donor bureaucracies generally evolved out of foreign ministries.

But it doesn’t really matter how we arrived at this ridiculous situation, we just need to get out of the rut. Rome was not built in a day, or even a 3 year project cycle. It’s quite simple: if you are serious about tropical conservation or development then you need to make a serious time investment. We need staff who’ll stay the distance, not just lay a few bricks on an aqueduct then move on.

So to answer Erin’s question: obviously you cannot demand that staff sign up for 5+ years right from the word go (and especially not with volunteers), but you can orient your whole HR management to encourage long stays, with career development in situ. New recruits should understand that this is the organisation’s culture from early on, and learn the importance of continuity to achieving lasting results.

This would require a complete redesign of the architecture of bilateral aid projects (which certainly could do with an overhaul), but NGOs have greater freedom and could much more easily push this approach starting right now. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but then tropical conservation and development clearly aren’t easy. Time to saddle up for the challenge!

ps. The counterpoint to all of the above is that fossilised staffing is also not a great road to success. As such aid organisations need to balance continuity and long term management with regular injections of fresh blood. Again, not always an easy task.

Good for personal development, bad for economic development

Ranil Dissanayake has written a perceptive elegy to his time in East and Southern Africa.

“I will miss the constant obstacles, challenges, fights, compromises, small victories and major changes that come when working in a developing country Government here. There is no such thing as a simple task in Government: a photocopy could take an hour of begging or a day spent searching for the magical combination of a machine, electricity, printer toner and paper in one place. … It can be frustrating, but when you finally start seeing all these small things coalesce into something bigger, you begin to thrive on the little challenges.”

I recall one of my early visits out here I was searching for a job (any job) that might keep me here for a bit longer: talking to a boss of a small company, I said that I relished dealing with things like regular power outages. He cut me off dismissively complaining that these were incredibly bad for business. Even worse, he was massively frustrated at being constantly undercut by competitors who slip a bung to procurement managers rather than competing squarely on service and price.

Many years later, I can see both sides of the coin. Every single power cut and episode of slippery business is individually immensely frustrating and sets us back. However, like Ranil, I also thrive to a certain extent on the knowledge that I can cope and that we have the robustness in our approach to deal with these challenges: not in the way that embassies and big businesses will just throw money at a problem – insulating their staff from vagaries of life out here – but because we built up our NGO from zero and have overcome many obstacles along our way. We are proud of what we have achieved, but also one gains an individual sense of satisfaction of having adapted to a challenging environment.

On my visits back to UK I am sometimes struck by the apparent banality of conversation, e.g. the latest good wine found down the supermarket, rather when was the last power cut. Both topics are equally parochial, and talk of power cuts may seem equally banal to people who live deep in the bush – off-grid – and have to generate their own power. Nonetheless, one feels toughened up living out here, and though many years ago I might have sounded a bit wet behind the ears with my talk of relishing such challenges, now I’d far rather hire someone with a bit of gung-ho like that than someone who will fall to pieces when faced with sheer number of things that just don’t work as straightforwardly as they do back home.

All of which is to say that, for all the nonsense talk you hear sometimes about people coming out here to find themselves (and it is utter tosh), there is no doubt that if you’ve got the right personality in the first place then this is a great place for personal development; you will be challenged in so many ways you’ve never been before.

Unfortunately what is great for personal development, is absolutely **** for businesses and economic development. I decided to come here, and so have to accept the rough with the smooth as part of the life I’ve chosen for myself. Locals and local businesses merely despair at the dysfunctionality of  their country. Things are getting better, but there are so many other things which could so easily be so much better still if  important government institutions just worked a bit more like what they should do.

To be continued …

Development Thought for the Day

Newspapers back in  the UK almost never use the word ‘expert’ in a headline. In articles, it is mostly only ever used as a description of a specific person, e.g. ‘Dr Nobbs, an expert in …’

Contrast that to here, where ‘Experts’ (often capitalised) feature large in the media landscape:

• ‘Experts call for new investment in roads’
• ‘More anti-retroviral drugs needed say experts’

Often these ‘Experts’ are anonymous, or identified only by their institution, e.g. ‘World Bank experts’. There may be a slight bias towards anonymising expatriate experts over national experts, but they do it to both.

Part of the explanation, I think, is linguistic: in contrast to Western cultures, one is much more likely to be called here simply by what one is (white person / mother / father / old man / child / doctor / mechanic) than by your name. However, in a country where the political leadership is somewhat dysfunctional, I also wonder whether it is evidence that the technocratic dream lives on … ?