Doing Development Differently

This is a speech that Oxfam's Associate Country Director Justin Morgan, made late last year under the topic of "doing development differently". The speech was made as part of VSO's 50th anniversary in Tanzania events,  on the 8th December 2011.

In the business community, when 80% of your ideas are successful, you are a market leader, looked upon with the highest regard and seen as a champion.  Within the development community, if you show that 20% of your programmes did not achieve their desired results, you are soon looking for a new job, or you just don’t look for it/report it.

Development, is a place where the Government, donors and NGO can get together, most often with the common higher goal of equitable growth and access to essential services, but regularly with differing views on what is needed to achieve this.  The views I am sharing today, aims to capture actions that affect each of these institutions, however with a bias towards the work of NGO’s as this is where my experience is.

Doing development differently is about aims that promote evolution of concepts.  Each programme should know where they want to get to “what does success look like”, but we should not be bogged down in thinking that we have to define each of the steps, with its cause and effects, before the programme has started.  We must trial, we must adapt, we must recognise that it is not bad to fail.  It is poor practice to dismiss the possibility of failure, monitoring to prove results only, and not monitoring so as to improve the work that we are doing.

I would like to draw on an example where I believe this type of thinking is going into development work.  The Accountability Tanzania Fund, or AcT, supported by DfID through UK Aid and managed by KPMG in Tanzania, is providing financial and technical support to civil society in Tanzania so as to increase the practice of good accountability. The programme has express aims around learning, expecting to see that different partners will adopt different approaches in achieving more accountability from the government to its citizen.  They expect success, but also accept failure, looking to stop things that do not work quickly and expand things that are showing positive change.  This AcT fund is important in terms of the way in which funding is provided, being primarily core funding of organisations, but also the way in which organisations are supported by KPMG.  KPMG has a team of development experts who are helping partners develop their thinking and demonstrate their learning.  This approach is beyond the log frame approach that is seen in some places within the development community.

Following on from the funding that is available, doing development differently can still be learnt from looking back to the past.  Paulo Friere shared with development practitioners in the 1960’s the importance of being context and cultural specific, seeking to listen to the questions that communities are asking and providing support for them to answer these questions for themselves.  Doing development differently is about depth as well as breadth.  The pressures of the government to provide sustainable services yet at the same time get re-elected, the donors to demonstrate results are being achieved to their taxpayers and from NGO’s to document positive results while maximising the usage of funds, often leads us to seek out the one size fits all solutions and adopt very linear or mechanical thinking to change. We are focusing a lot on breadth – numbers of beneficiaries, rather than quality of real change.  Our world today, and the rich and poor alike do not operate in unity.  Complexity is real, and we cannot realistically predict the future.  Therefore our solutions must be routed in the contexts of the individual country and at times the individual district or community.  This is looking at the visible resources available, but also understanding the power dynamics and cultural norms that so often shape how plentiful resources in fact benefit so few.

Drawing on an example of development work that I feel is doing things differently is Oxfam’s work on Chukua Hatua, or Take Action.  Within a variety of different approaches that are being used, one project is what we call “farmer animators”.  We have worked with over two hundred of these farmer animator groups, some of the groups already having being formed with membership to organisations like MVIWATA and some naturally forming around market access programmes that Oxfam is supporting.  Our engagement within the farmer animators is providing collective as well as individual support.  The approach has seen that within one year there are over 30 success stories (and equally a number of failings).  The successes are extremely diverse and varying in techniques used and the numbers of people engaged.  They range from animators getting community members engaged within government planning processes, to animators getting compensation for the communities from mining companies for sums of money in excess of $100,000.  What is clear, is the time spent understanding each community, each farmer animator as an individual has allowed for the collective changes led by communities not NGO’s.  The results are not predictive, with the main aims being to see that awareness raising of rights increased, communities are  mobilising around common issues, forums and spaces existing and now where people can freely contribute their thoughts, and that government leaders increasingly respond positively to the citizen voices.

Justin Morgan, Associate Country Director for Oxfam in Tanzania

Doing development differently, is about doing some things differently, but using success of the past as well.  There will not be a one size fits all to development, and we will progress further and faster the more we allow our programmes to evolve within a complex world.  The evolution of development work needs critical analysis, as VSO is doing today by bring different thinkers together, and also increased consciousness that both success and failure is a natural part of development.