Time to get real
Responding to Joni Hillman’s article published on the BOND website in March, Mary Ann Mhina argues that greater honesty is required about the complexities and impacts of development work.
For many of you the questions posed by Joni Hillman's article on effectiveness may well have rung true. Many of us are keenly aware of the huge challenge posed by our very genuine desire to make sure all our work is of good quality and to be able to demonstrate that.
The nature of international development makes this challenge particularly pronounced because most of what we do is semi-detached from our UK offices. Put bluntly the ‘poorest of the poor’, whose lives we seek to improve, remain other people in other places. As a result, our understanding of what really goes on in poor people’s lives is disjointed and selective. We have to rely on local staff, field staff, facilitators and evaluators, as well as occasional field visits ourselves, to mediate this knowledge and inform us of the change we are making.
This distance allows for a considerable amount to be ‘lost in translation’. While our monitoring tools and indicators are developed for the most part by educated groups of professionals, the changes we seek to make are in the lives of the people who the world has forgotten to equip with the skills necessary to develop a logframe and fill in a monitoring form.
The majority of the professional tools of international development owe more to the management theory of the boardroom than a genuine understanding of the experience of poverty. This is born out by countless conversations with colleagues from a range of organisations; who realise that poor people are shut out by our systems of fundraising, planning and monitoring and ‘need us’ to translate them.
Meanwhile, (though it may be to our collective horror) the international development game gives few points for genuine honesty and little reward for admitting how hard it is to change your commitments to donors into genuine social and economic change. Rather, a greater income stream, and thereby financial security and versatility, are to be gained by maintaining your reputation in the UK with a public that seldom sees or hears what goes on the ground.
It’s time to get real. Most people in the global south get on and get by with or without us.
Don’t get me wrong, we have a valuable job to do in pushing for change and providing examples of how it can happen. But for too long we have allowed the perception that helping people in the south is necessarily good to be perpetuated in the north to keep us ‘in the money’. In doing so, we do a great disservice to the south, allowing it to continue to be perceived as dependent and in need of our pity.
For me, the quality and effectiveness debates are a chance to transcend this. We need to ask questions about how we are perceived by people from the south, as well as focusing on the preparation of monitoring reports and newsletters for the north.
We also need to go beyond the assertion that measuring the quality of relationships is enough in itself. Put simply, we need a whole range of good relationships but we also need to feel able to be honest when those relationships break down or are overpowered or transformed by factors beyond our control. To do this requires some humility on our part; international development agencies have a significant role to play as a catalyst for change but are often caught up in complex local realities which make the logframes from head quarters feel absurd and the challenge of addressing poverty an uphill struggle.
Thank goodness! We should celebrate this. Communities and people in the south cannot be simplified and explained with the tools of our trade. It’s time we were more open about what we cannot achieve and more honest about the realities of the complex contexts in which we work.
Read: Joni Hillman’s article, How can the sector prove its effectiveness?
Mary Ann Mhina is Executive Director of AbleChildAfrica and a member of the Steering Committee of the BOND Quality Standards Group
Email: MaryAnn@ablechildafrica.org.uk
Photo Credit: Geoffrey Namema