To Profit or Not to Profit?

I know, I know - I'm supposed to be writing about what I'm doing. Bear with me awhile longer - this one is about something that got me thinking.

This article in the New York Times has caused a bit of a stir in some corners of the development blogosphere (I stumbled upon it here and followed up with some additional interesting reading here).

The gist of the question floating around is this: should people/organizations/CEOs who do development work be able to make money "helping?" How about a lot of money?

I don't have an answer to either, but they are interesting questions.

In trying to come up with an answer, I've come across the following additional questions and observations.

-Most people don't like it when other people make more money than they do. This stigma needs to be avoided by NGOs (who rely on donations from 'most people' either directly or through taxes) to function. It also needs to be ignored entirely when discussing whether or not it's ethical for NGO CEOs to make big salaries.

-The discussion on whether or not NGOs and the people who work for them tends conflate the question of whether or not aid staff should make a living wage with the question of whether or not they should be allowed or encouraged to make A LOT of money. They're two different questions. The answer to the first one is a resounding YES as far as I'm concerned. People who aren't making a living wage doing development work aren't maximizing their impact: they're learning a lot about the conditions they're trying to change via first-hand experience, but at the expense of being able to focus on and innovate in the work of changing them. I am fortunate enough to work/volunteer with an organization that provides me a stipend that I count as a living wage. While I can't live forever/start an RRSP with the stipend I get for being an EWB Canada volunteer, I can live comfortably in Malawi, and that helps me do (or at least try to do) better development work.

-The question of whether or not development professionals should make A LOT of money is trickier. One school of thought holds that a good way to improve development work is to reward good work and/or to use material incentives to attract talented people (aka pay people more) while another camp firmly holds that development work should be a reward in and of itself and that people who are attracted to such work for the money are simply the wrong sort of people to be doing it. I don't know enough about what "talented people" in development look like to declare whether or not money is the answer to unlocking their true potential, and I'm 100% convinced that, either way, the definition of "good work" needs a pretty serious overhaul before we can say that more money in the form of salaries will encourage it.

-On the "good work" point: an argument in favour of higher salaries is the meritocracy effect. Reward people for good work and the good work being done experiences a net increase. Kristof highlights the point in the example of Dan Pallotta, businessman-turned-pariah. I don't disagree with the logic: it seems to work in sales. I worry though about whether or not the targeted outputs of development work
a) exist in any sort of useful, form; and
b) lend themselves to the creation of salary brackets.
Outside of fundraising, how do you quantify whether an organization or a CEO or an individual field-level staffer is doing "good work"? By number of beneficiaries reached? Number of committees trained? Money spent on projects? Community members who feel they were "helped" by the organization when asked on a survey?

-I get the feeling that this discussion is about expats who are based in developed countries and go do development work in developing countries and largely being conducted by those expats and the people living in the developed countries that they're based out of.Do the terms of the discussion change when we're talking about local NGO staff? Should the Malawian Head of Malawi Fresh Water (this guy's partner organization) be subject to whatever moral consensus we reach? How do we involve such people in the discussion? (I'm going to ask around at my office next time I have the chance - knowing what Malawian development workers collecting pretty decent salaries think about this whole mess would, I think, be rather interesting).

-I have serious reservations about the implications of thinking about aid as an industry. These reservations need some more thinking (they're even more half-formed than my thoughts about NGO salaries), but I raise them because the question of whether or not aid is and should be an industry, with experts, careers, pensions and bottom lines is a thorny one that directly relates to how the sector's employees should think of themselves and be treated. My knee-jerk reaction is to rail against industrializing aid - I am motivated to be here by the (vain, perhaps) hope that I can work myself out of a job, and anything that lends more permanence to development infrastructure than is minimally necessary makes me nervous. On the other hand, 'industry' and the private sector more broadly have pretty good track records in solving some of the problems that hamper the work of development agencies. Areas of best practice like staff retention, professional development, organizational efficiency and output quality control might benefit from a more 'industrial' touch than the one currently being administered by us starry-eyed idealists.

-In case you're a data type, the Canadian government graciously hosts a database detailing the tax documentation filed by registered charities. The salaries of EWB's CEOs are quite modest, by the way.

That's all the food for thought I have for now.

Not Business as Usual: TED moment 1

For those of you who haven't discovered ted.com, I highly recommend you get around to discovering it. It a collection of recorded "ideas worth sharing" (mostly in English) on a mind-boggling array of topics.

One of the more popular TED moments on poverty & development is Hans Rosling's sharing of insights on poverty. Watch the whole thing. If you can't stream it on your connection, download it or leave a note for me and I'll email you the download. Professor Rosling has done a truly amazing job of taking the dizzying array of statistics we use to measure poverty & development and make them 'real' and easy to see.

Human Development - Know it, Love it, Measure it

Awhile ago, I touched on the concept of human development. The time has come for me to touch on the idea properly, and ruminate (in the form of a blog post, as it happens) on some selected complexities.

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.