Development Work: When the Solution becomes the Problem

Two months of being in Ghana certainly does not make me an expert in this topic, and there are many people much smarter than I who have published extensively on the issue. This post is simply about some of my observations on a certain type of development work that I witness aimed at the District level governments in efforts to improve civil service and governance.

“Through Sensitization and Education Workshops, we will Build their Capacity”
Sensitization, capacity building, and capacity development are all buzz phrases which I have developed a strong distaste for. They make me cringe every time I hear them thrown around. Not because I disagree with the concept of increasing someone’s ability to help themselves. This is a great concept, and the reason these phrases have become so popular. My problem with the phrases is that in the context of district operations, the workshops are not only often ineffective, but they can actually be counter productive as well.

The Problems with Workshops
Let me place another caveat on this post by saying that not all workshops fit this description, and that there are some workshops that actually seem to be valuable. Unfortunately, many more seem to fit under the category of ‘Well-intentioned-but-poorly-implemented-development-work’.

Problems:
Awareness does not necessarily result in behavior change. This is a topic that EWB discusses often. Awareness is relatively easy to achieve, whereas behavior change can be complex. There are many factors influencing the behavior of an individual or a community. For example, I know that flying around the globe emits massive amounts of harmful carbon emissions, and yet I do so without spending the extra cash to purchase any sort of carbon offset. Holding a workshop for civil servants on a transparent tender evaluation process does not necessarily mean that this process will be disseminated to all of the districts with representatives attending the workshop. Too often, workshops are not designed in a way that considers the complexities of behavior change and it is assumed that the knowledge gained at the workshop will result in drastic behavior changes.

Too many workshops! This is a bad thing because the same people are often invited to the workshops. These people are generally senior officers whose job it is to make things happen at their districts. If they’re at a workshop in a city 4 hours away from their district, they’re not able to do their job to develop the district. As an example, I am working with the District Planning Officer to facilitate a two day meeting in our district to discuss the next four year development plan with all of the heads of departments. The meeting was originally scheduled for September 30th and October 1st. Unfortunately, a workshop we were attending on September 29th ran over schedule from one day to three (imagine leaving town for a workshop that you expected to last for one day and you would be home that night, only to find the meeting would actually take three days!). So our meeting at our district would need to be rescheduled. Unfortunately, there is no suitable date in the next three weeks because of workshop conflicts outside of the district. So our work is literally on hold for about a month while we wait for schedules to align. My fingers are crossed that no more workshops will pop up which will delay us even longer!

Lack of coordination between development partners holding these workshops is often low and times and topics may overlap. Not a good use of senior district officer time. For many reasons, communication about the workshops to the districts is often delayed and so officers may get only a day’s notice that they are to attend a workshop.

Workshop quality. This seems to be more variable, and some workshops are run by very good and experienced facilitators that engage all of the attendees. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen some run by facilitators who are unprepared, unaware of realities of district operations, and who are outright dull. This means that no matter how valuable the information being delivered is, it’s likely not reaching the audience and so it doesn’t even result in awareness, let alone behavior change. I realize this is a fact of life for workshops in both the developing and developed world, but here it makes me especially angry because the consequence of failing to deliver a message and wasting the time of the district officer is that those in extreme poverty will be deprived of essential services for even longer.

It’s not all Doom and Gloom

One of my pet peeves is people who complain about their situation but don’t do anything to change it. So what is EWB doing to address the problems I’ve indicated above?

On the job training: one of the huge value adds of our work with the District Assemblies is that we show up day after day to provide on the job training that is relevant and responsive to the realities that the district officers face, and doesn’t pull officers away from their jobs. This means skills that we teach are much more likely to result in behavior change. Unfortunately this model is resource intensive (i.e., there are 170 districts in Ghana so it’s very difficult to supply each district with a volunteer).

Development Partner Influence: our work with the districts gives us a unique perspective into realities and challenges. EWB sits on some Development Partner meeting groups and shares these realities to try and influence how Development Partner work is conducted. We also share district realities with the Regional Offices who have authority over the districts. The Regional Office can share our successes with districts which do not have an EWB volunteer (e.g., a water point siting tool is being scaled up for use in several more districts). EWB’s critical thought process is unfortunately not a norm in the world of development I’ve seen.

So Now What?

I don’t believe that all westerners should immediately pack up and abandon Africa for Africans to sort it out on their own. I do believe there is a place for westerners in development work, but there is much room for improving the way it is delivered. Saying development is complex feels like an understatement. I certainly don’t have all the answers for exactly how to make it better, but asking hard questions and quickly learning from failure is a behavior that needs to be adopted by the entire development industry if we truly have people at heart.