According to the United Nations (specifically, according to the UNDP Human Development Concept), human development is...
about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accordance with their needs and interests. People are the real wealth of nations. ... It is thus about much more than economic growth, which is only a means—if a very important one—of enlarging people's choices.
That is the definition that EWB Canada uses to guide the focus of their work; in particular, EWB Canada holds that a fundamentally important part of creating such an environment is the building of human capacity.
Yesterday afternoon, the group that I'm doing pre-departure training with participated in a group workshop aptly titled "what is development?" As part of the exercise, we each had to come up with a personal definition of human development and then work together to point out some common and contradicting themes or keywords in our definitions.
My definition was...
(Human) development in the international context is increasing the human capacity to manage vulnerabilities in order to maximize the ability to attain & maintain a good quality of life (with some subsequent brainstorming on what exactly I meant by "good quality of life").
Here's a fun graphic outlining some of the concepts we touched on while sharing/discussing the different definitions that showed up (kudos to Ryan, one of the people in my sending group, for hooking us up with wordle)
Coming from political science land, it was interesting to me that words like "system," "global reality," "economic," "security," and "justice" didn't come up more often (even from me). Discussions about international development (not quite the same as human development, but in the same semantical galaxy, anyway), that I've had in the past have usually resulted in much more diverse connotations (usually in the form of a more explicit focus on access to markets, prosperity, or good governance as a key condition of successful development). As a group, our unit of analysis was definitely at the individual level - we're all about choices and personal growth on Day 3 of training. Community and national capacity weren't really brought up at all.
We also didn't get much into measuring human development; that was probably because the workshop was supposed to be about what it is more than about how it's quantified, and it's an important question that I think we'll get to later (I think that EWB might see that as more of a skill than a fundamental concept in terms of training).
So what is this human development thing, exactly? How do you do it? How do we know when we're doing a good job of it?
Good questions - and exactly where this gets tricky. While creating an environment where people can live up to their full potential is all well and good on paper, what does that look like, really? Does it mean literacy? Mobility? Who does the creating? For which people?
We certainly didn't come up with a nice, sound-bytey answer, and I don't think that the international community has either.
But even if we don't really know exactly what human development is, we sure can measure it!
The international standard for measuring this vague, complex and often contradictory notion of human development is the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI is a composite index of normalized indicators (statistics collected, usually at the national level) that are used to calculate whether a country is classified as developed, developing or underdeveloped. The first HDI report was released in 1990, and has had some pretty far-reaching implications for development ever since (it's used regularly by the United Nations & other bodies to assess all kinds of things).
Using statistics like literacy, infant mortality, GDP per capita, life expectancy, etc., the HDI ranks 177 countries by aggregate score. This sending group of EWB-Canada volunteers are going to Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Malawi. According to the 2007/08 HDI Report [.pdf], these three countries rank 135 (up from the last report), 176 (down from the last report), 164 (up from the last report) respectively. Ghana is classified as developing; Burkina Faso & Malawi are categorized as underdeveloped.
It will be interesting to get into some of the strengths & weaknesses of the HDI with this group of volunteers (and share those discussions here) later in the month as well as to see what "underdeveloped" looks like on the ground once I touch down in Lilongwe.
If you're interested in learning a bit more about the HDI (or like pictures better than long reports), here's an interesting map to get you started.
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2 comments:
On the divisiveness you've encountered in the past regarding international development, I think the relevant distinction here isn't international development v. human development. Rather it's a question of whether you're discussing desired end outcomes (humans being able to maximize their potential and pursue their interests) or the means of achieving those desired outcomes (government reform, economic reform, opening markets, etc.)
A second reason why this might arise is that in a political science class you're trying to design political responses which are generally system-wide. With EWB, you're making a much smaller scale, targeted response that focuses on a single community within that system. With EWB, you're not focused on the traditional flashpoints of policy since that's not on what you're focusing.
Just my two cents.
- Mustafa Hirji
A good two cents, as ever Mustafa.
With your second point, that was the general explanation I was leaning towards as well. I didn't get into it in much detail because I first want to ponder how policy solutions and on-the-ground interventions are/should/can be linked.
With regards to the first - I hadn't thought of it that way. Thanks for the insight.
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