What I read

AfDB and Gates’ Delivering on the promise: Leveraging natural resources to accelerate human development in Africa is a good read. It basically looks at how revenues from oil, minerals and gas could contribute to education, health and social protection in Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda. With no surprise, estimates are high, e.g., they could cover half of the health and education needs of Ghana for the next decade. The paper does not just look at how to get cash from extractives but also at how to get the industry invest more in human capital, e.g., developing local skillsets. What struck me then was the absence of discussion on safeguards and rights (the words are not even used). Shouldn’t the first investment in human capital be to-do-no-harm? This was all the more striking as the paper came on my radar, today, at the same time as the UNICEF-sponsored Guardian post on Identifying the impacts of the extractives industry on children.

NYU David Steven’s Time to Deliver the Post-2015 Agenda’s Promises to Children presents a short and powerful story around 4 core promises for children. It caught my attention because I am returning from a short stint with UNICEF Indonesia to work on a short narrative on children that connects to, but trims the fat of the SDG agenda. What struck me in David’s piece was the omission of “ending child poverty” in the list of promises. We did put it in our Indonesian list. I asked him why. He replied that the multidimensional poverty measure would be partially captured in his four promises. Fair. He also felt that the income poverty measure (which is what I was hinting at) would get “mixed up in the broader challenge of ensuring all ages are above this threshold” and would prefer to leave it out. I really like his commitment to keeping things lean and on par, but I would keep poverty in.

My graph of the week is from The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015 because of the online argument it started between Yale University Thomas Pogge and FAO quants, the former accusing the latter of a flawed methodology that underestimates the magnitude of undernourishment. A solid disagreement is always a good place to learn. This one illustrates the power of data from the decision to what gets collected, to what gets estimated, to how it gets used.

My quote of the week is from Madeleine Albright at the Chicago Forum on Global Cities [10’45’’]: “People talk to their government on 21^st century technology, the government hears them on 20^th century technology and is giving 19^th century responses”.

[Originally published as a World Economic Forum blog post]

Constrained by an ageing model of “North-South” assistance and linear thinking, development organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the complexities and interconnectedness of global challenges, from climate change to communicable diseases. However, the convergence of three trends promises a structural change in the way development organizations operate: new ways of framing development problems (complexity theory), new information technologies and new types of coalitions. How can development organizations reform themselves to become more effective at improving the world?

Development organizations exist to help reduce poverty and inequality, and improve human well-being. These problems are becoming increasingly complex as the world grows more connected and volatile. Cross-border flows of goods, services, people and ideas are expanding. Shocks and crises, whether social, political, economic or environmental, are increasingly frequent. As issues become more interconnected and uncertain, the outcomes of development interventions are harder to predict or explain and it is less possible for one actor alone to get things done.

Despite these changes, the operating model of development organizations is constrained by its legacy. This includes centralized assistance from “developed” country governments to “developing” country governments and practices that largely rely on linear models to understand risk and to plan, execute and evaluate action.

Can development organizations be more agile and adaptable in today’s context of constant change? The combination of three trends that can help frame, understand and respond to complex problems differently offers an opportunity.

First, complexity theory is shifting attention from linear cause and effect relationships to dynamic processes of change. Complexity theory has been used in physics and ecology to study how systems adapt to their environment and cope with uncertainty. Many development scholars argue that complexity theory can strengthen development organizations’ ability to understand dynamic and interconnected development problems and respond more appropriately.

In Aid on the Edge of Chaos, Ben Ramalingam shows how this approach can be applied to household food security. Traditionally, most of the work concentrated on predicting the occurrence of a food crisis in order to best respond. Analysing and modelling food systems and the multiple connections between socio-economic and ecological factors that contribute to their stability helped create an understanding of households’ capacity to respond to the negative effects of unpredictable climatic shocks. Analysing these variables, which change over time, can support policies to strengthen household resilience and adapt aid interventions more strategically in crisis situations.

Second, new technologies are opening the door to understanding and anticipating complex development problems through the so-called “data revolution”. New types of data and analytical tools have the potential to provide real-time information on complex situations or sudden change and enable quick feedback loops to inform planning and adjust operations. They can also be used to collect citizens’ voices and feedback and integrate them in programme design.

For instance, mTrac, a Ugandan platform supported by UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the UK Department for International Development (DFID), surveys local health workers via mobile phone text messaging and then alerts national public health officials about malaria outbreaks and medicine stock situations to anticipate and resolve shortages. The share of health facilities that have run out of malaria treatments has fallen from 80% to 15% since it was introduced. The platform also includes an anonymous text message hotline that citizens can use to report any service delivery problems they face.

Third, new kinds of coalitions and movements are emerging as the multiplication of development actors provides opportunities to redefine partnerships. A growing number of actors operating in the development space, from businesses and municipal governments to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and communities, are starting to figure out how to work together on a voluntary basis to solve specific issues. These coalitions of diverse actors bring information, expertise and funding together in ways that cut across domains, geographies and interests. This can lead to new solutions to old problems, e.g. by presenting development challenges as investment opportunities.

Examples of such projects already delivering results include the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) initiative. SUN brings NGOs, businesses and the UN together to accelerate global efforts on under-nutrition. Organized in a global network, each group of actors supports national efforts to improve nutrition by providing funds and expertise. For actors engaged in the SUN initiative, improving nutrition for women and children is no longer only a moral objective, it is also a way to strengthen the workforce and thus contribute to the growth of markets and nations alike.

None of these trends are completely new in themselves. But their confluence could transform the operating model of development organizations in ways that include more effective delivery of essential services for the poor; changing engagement with the private sector, from donation providers to partners for supply, investment and solution design; changing engagement with citizens, from intervention recipients to agents of change; enhancing knowledge and data systems co-created by a diversity of actors to inform decision-making; and a growing capacity to tackle multi-dimensional problems and operate effectively in uncertain contexts.

The opportunities presented by these changes come with challenges, notably, that of changing the culture of development organizations to encourage experimentation and value adaptive strategies. The use of big data raises issues of privacy that could, if mishandled, exacerbate discrimination and inequalities. The growing number of actors, coalitions and movements also raises leadership and coordination challenges, in particular for the intergovernmental decision-making structures created for these purposes.

However, development organizations exist to solve challenges. Leadership from within to overcome existing political and technical tensions could help mobilize these trends and make development more effective.

5 June 2015

Agile Development: Can Combining New Approaches, New Data and New Coalitions Make Development Organizations More Effective?