As I am writing this, my professional life is about to evolve, as my employment as a salaried member of an international organization is concluding.
The ending of this chapter of my employment is bittersweet, because it coincides with a time when we are witnessing and living big changes worldwide. The Covid-19 health crisis and the civil right movements uprisings are making us question our individual and common foundations. What do we want for ourselves as individuals, for our societies, for our children?
Those questions relate to my professional and personal life as I, as an African woman working in the development field, am wondering if the project I am working with has achieved what it had set to achieve. At the end of the day, did we make real impact? Over the days, my questioning has become: is international development really working? Since this my personal journal and I am talking to myself, I can be honest and share the resounding NO coming out of my gut.
And I think I can articulate some of the reasons why (for the purpose of those specific musings, I am putting aside humanitarian aid brought by natural catastrophes).
The concept of development implies moving from an incomplete state to a more evolved state. It implies progress from a perceived negative space to a perceived more positive one.
The concept of international in this context, implies that the perceived development is universal.
International development is thus an effort from countries that declared themselves advanced, to put less advanced countries in the path of what we all consider progress. The universal goal here, is to reach Western style industrialization. It suggests that some people need help and others are providing that help. Some people have less, and other have more. It suggests that those who have less are supposed to want more. The base of international development is perceived inequality.
The logical process when one party decides to help another one into attaining a better state, is that the benefitting party at some point, does not need help anymore. Right?
Unfortunately, in my opinion, international development is a never-ending circle of human, material and financial resources thrown at “less advanced countries”, without the needle ever moving to the positive side in a significant way. The “less advanced countries” have stayed mostly “underdeveloped” since they have been granted their “independence” from their colonizers. Sometimes, their economic situation has even gotten worse.
So, what is the use of “international development”?
To be frank, we often (conveniently) forget that the field “international development” is a legacy of centuries of colonization, where a euro-centric view of the world was violently imposed on populations of thousands of people. To support their process of industrialization and to satisfy their expansionist tendencies, Western powers enslaved, colonized, and assimilated Asian and African populations. In the fifties and sixties, a semblance of independence was granted by colonizing countries to colonized civilizations. By that time, Western countries’ industrialization was advanced, and their form of progress was universally “adopted”. Euro-centered religions, philosophy, way of life, cosmology became the standard for the rest of the world. The rest of the world, whose organic growth and evolution was interrupted when the first clergymen set foot on their territories, then had to play catch-up to industrially advanced countries, in order to reach the euro-centered goals of “progress” and “development”. Of course, they would not be left alone in their efforts to become advanced. Of course not! Who better than the colonizers to show them the way?
That is how the field of “international cooperation and development” was born. It was a way for colonizers to keep expanding their influence, in countries where they could not do it through physical violence anymore.
What do we expect from relationships that are based on such inequalities? The people I have been working with, are mainly persons of good faith, who genuinely believe they are helping and are genuinely willing to give their best, so that population from less advanced countries could one day maybe get there.
I do not believe however that the way things are done right now will help them achieve that purpose in the long term, for multiple reasons.
1) They put themselves as the subject of their projects. It is about them “doing good”, and the way they see things. As stated above, international development is based on values and point of views that are exogeneous to most cultures in which the development is brought. The doing, the action is theirs. They are usually the ones providing the help, implementing programs, working on activities. When you look at international organizations’ websites, they all speak to what they did, what they accomplished, making themselves the center and the subject of the projects, and the recipients, even though their pictures are plastered all over the websites, are like an afterthought. Shouldn't it be about the recipients? Moreover, when one is always put in the position of being the endless receiver, it can bring a sense of powerlessness that often translates in apathy and non-action. As long as African populations will feel like they must conform to the standards, norms and indicators dictated by the West, the programs and projects created in Brussels or Washington will not acquire the profound and long term buy-in necessary to have positive long term impact. I personally have witnessed different international assistance projects focusing on building things like schools, small hospitals and or toilets in remote villages in my country. The thing that usually happens after Aid workers are gone, three months, a year, five year after they are gone, is that what they have built has stayed unused, not maintained, or left to crumble. Why?
2) They do not question the assumption that people need their help, nor the assumption that they have the solutions. Often, there are chances that local solutions have been thought of or developed. In general, locals know what they are missing, and they have solutions on how to solve those issues. For example, we all agree that education is important and necessary, but is western style schooling the necessary answer in a rural village in North Cameroon? How will the access to books and other school material be resolved? How long is the school going to have teachers before they decide to move to a bigger city? Hospitals have been built, electricity has been installed in remote areas, but what about maintenance? Those issues stem from the fact that we all live in different planes of consciousness. I am acutely aware of that when I travel from the US, to France, To Tunisia, To Cameroon. I often feel like I move from one world to another every time I travel. Why do we somehow expect that a solution that has been cooked out in one world, in one reality, will work in another reality? When thoughts, representations, and projections are exogenous, implementing programs with the hope that they will sustain the test of time is in my opinion at best naively optimistic, and at worst a symptom of bad faith. When international institutions create projects, activities, programs with little to insignificant input from the people who will be receiving the aid, then I believe hoping for long term success is useless, because once the program is implemented on the field, there is no buy in and no ownership. Like many other industries, the international development field suffer from lack of representation of the people receiving the aid, in decision making positions and spaces. Most of the time, donors from international organizations decide where the issue is (whether it be demographical, economical; political, etc.) and how the issue should be handled, and when the receiving populations are represented at a high level, their representatives are usually puppet like figures, either because of personal greed or because they have little choice in how things are proceeding.
3) They do not use a holistic approach when creating solutions. In my opinion, one of the key reasons why international development programs fail is because the donating forces have failed to understand the people they are looking to bring aid to. They try to understand systems and the reasons why different systems fail, and try to come up with good solutions that at the end, will just act as band aid because like with a blind spot, they do not often have the “whole picture” approach. A key to being aware of those blind spots is empathy, human connection. I have read many political economy analyses written by “experts”, that are supposed to steer development programs. Programs with indicators that do not consider the cultural, historical, and psychological context in which they would like to operate. Including psychological and cultural factors in analysis could help apprehend issues such as corruption, which is often what international organizations consider a big hindrance to their work. This would help understand the complexities and paradoxes of the countries they work in. Economists and other experts may tell me that those factors do not matter, or that they do not have a space in their calculations. My question is, how do you expect to make an economic and political difference if you do not know the people you are seeking to impact? If you do not know what they feel, think, want, aspire to? We tend to create the same static goals or indicators for everyone when we all have different dynamic histories. How can development be “international”? This means that the field of international development tries to get every country into a normative system, disregarding the subjective experience of the humanity within the spaces it works in. In a world where the concept of universal progress has been imposed, African societies have not had the chance to imagine and reinvent an organic and distinct model of being and participating in the world.
I feel lucky that traveling around the world has brought me to the place I am today. I feel like I can acutely apprehend the different paradigms I have lived in, in countries I have spent a few years in. So, I have recently been thinking about my African paradigm, different from the Western one we are all living in.
Maybe I am naive and utopian. Maybe I am dreaming about a world where my perspective as an African woman would be leveraged better.
Sometimes I wonder, what would happen if there were no international development projects coming from the West:
Will children receive an education if western schools are not built? What would an education based on African values, culture and cosmology look like?
Who will be our healers, if we did not have sanitary and health assistance from the West?
What would our economy, our politics look like, if there were not mirroring almost exactly western systems and views of modernity and progress? What if we take away the modernity lenses, modernity being the equivalent of what is considered the current Western state of industrialization?