Thoughts on development
Friday August 3-6, 2012
All of my thoughts on the different approaches and philosophies of development have come and gone, lighting up sporadically in my head throughout the day, and so I feel that I must type them out to grasp and collect all that I've gathered through my work and experiences here, and everything else that I've read or heard or thought about on my own. The hands-on work that we are doing here is very much different from the overarching theories on development that we've studied at the GESI pre-departure summit, and what I've read about social enterprise and development. Some of the knowledge I've gotten from previous reading has helped inform my analysis of the different social and power structures in the village and the wider conditions that might have caused them, but don't give any advice on how to create change on a small scale. A lot of conflicts and dilemmas arise from trying to adapt to local conditions and the restrictions of our time, money and skills here. Of course, it's unrealistic to expect to start up a profit-generating business that will be up and running by the time we leave, let alone a sustainable social enterprise. What we can do is plant the seeds as carefully as possible to maximise future impact, and ensure that they will have the support and resources needed to grow.
First up: what is our mission here? Is it to create a social enterprise or business, to create a mindshift in the community, or just to address a challenge that the community is facing? All three options may be similar but entail slightly different priorities and outcomes. Taking the strictly for-profit version of a social enterprise (since we're only allowed to use resources from inside the community, this rules out any enterprise that is dependent on external funds or donations and makes a for-profit route necessary for sustainability), the first would mean that any business we create has to have a clearly defined social impact from the start, and that this impact would be closely aligned with the primary operations of the business. This is the ideal social enterprise and a state that is very difficult to achieve even by established social enterprises: VisionSpring relies on donations to increase its reach, meaning that it prioritizes its social impact over being a fully profit-based and self-sufficient social enterprise. And ThinkImpact relies on the fees paid by American students to sustain its operations, even though it probably can create more impact by working with local university students in South Africa and relying less on flying people over from the US. Creating a conventional business in the rural communities that we are placed in is already a difficult task, as almost all the small businesses here are run by individuals or family members - the only business I've heard of that hires other workers here is a small home-building group. Creating a social enterprise that can utilize local assets to directly tackle social challenges in the community is a task that is much more difficult on many levels. Take the idea of building a library to increase literacy, for example. This requires an inflow of cash to buy books, since almost nobody owns storybooks or fiction of any kind in the village - the small amount of books that people have are mostly textbooks (on loan from the government), self-help books and the Bible and related texts. Other than a risky and insanely creative idea that somehow uses the skills and resources in the village to directly create books and build a library, there needs to be an income-generating business to pay for the library, which will be a public good. The asset-based approach to solving problems is a very helpful way to think about community work, but is not a panacea and shouldn't put money considerations out of the picture. Sometimes, trying to set up a business with a stated social goal from the start might undermine its chances of success by diluting its focus from the primary goal of making a profit to ensure its survival. Creating a social enterprise at the start with the restrictions we have creates too big an expectation that is unlikely to be reached, and is also unneccessarily limiting to other non-social enterprise projects that could create a larger social impact by fulfilling different needs in the community or leveraging on existing government and NGO resources to kickstart change.
The second goal, to create a mindshift, is vague and unmeasurable by any specific yardstick - how can you attribute the decision to start a business, to take a risk or to embark on a rare opportunity to any specific event like the Innovation Institute? What kind of mindshift do we want here - is it thinking in a more entrepreneurial manner, or identifying assets instead of relying on external support, or being willing to take chances? ThinkImpact states that its intended goal is to increase "the adopting of high impact behaviors within the cultural context", and these behaviors are broken down into three parts: taking responsibility for one's future, risk taking and a mindset of opportunity instead of deficiency. These are all good behaviors to follow, but its difficult to make people adopt them just by talking to them and creating a project idea and action plan. It makes no sense to say that our primary focus here is the mindshift and the projects are just a by-product of creating that, unless we can be sure that the mindshift alone creates a greater good than what a successful project can bring. Mindshift is inseparable from the success of a project - and success here can be broadly defined to even just a small part of the project like getting people to create signs and prepare stands to sell food. Without something tangible to show for all the work the design teams have done and to push them onwards to continue, what reason do they have for adopting those new ways of doing things? How can community members learn risk-taking without being given a chance to act out on that risk and see its benefits? It seems too idealistic a hope to say that three weeks of talking to these people and writing on sheets of paper with them, but having no tangible outcome before we leave will equip them with the skills, mindsets and confidence to begin new enterprises or organizations on their own. I firmly believe in the importance of learning by doing, and only working on a project that has real relevance to people's lives and motivations will allow them to see the value of all the new ideologies that we'e trying to teach them. If there isn't enough time to fully explore and cover those ideologies, then simplify them to the most relevant and important concepts, and immediately apply them to a small actual project (not just a thought experiment), because theory is always very much different from reality, and we want to show people how they can change their own realities. Showing them a new way of thinking about things isn't good enough if they don't know what they can do with it.
Thus I believe that our true mission here should simply be to address a challenge in the community and thus improve it in the most impactful way possible. This treats the first two goals as means to the ultimate outcome of a better society, and gives more flexibility on how this can be achieved. Social enterprises might not work in communities that don't have a good environment for setting up businesses, or where the money base is too small to pay for both operating costs and doing good (which are often separate things - e.g. a cooking school that donates part of its profits to feed orphans). Creating a mindshift might also not be the most pressing need of a community, and is also a very risky endeavor because its benefits, if any, can only be seen in the long future. The mindshift should be a positive side effect of the project, but the actual impact of the project itself should be the main goal - if this is maximized, the mindshift will naturally follow as long as the project is self-sufficient within the community. Yet in prioritizing the improvement of the community, one should consider both long term and short term effects of decisions such as bringing external funds in versus using existing community assets, and of creating a pure business versus one with an explicit social mission. Making decisions on the behalf of the team and telling them what to do might help a project go along faster, and might even do things much more efficiently, but lowers the chances of community members taking responsibility and continuing on after you leave. Thus it is important to emphasize that the goal is not the completion of the project, but the community's improvement in the long run. This also means that one must know when to step in and stop things from going wrong, because we're here to guide and push our teams, but not give them all the answers.
What I've said is probably slightly influenced by having read Atlas Shrugged, which argues strongly for self-reliance and the self-made man as the ultimate good to society, as opposed to altruism and people who rely on others and take more than they give. The utopian paradise presented in the book is a place where every individual produces goods and services according to their skills and abilities, and sells them for gold as an absolute measure of value, free from the interference of government so that they can be absolutely sure that every piece of gold they carry is a true measure of their worth. Thus I would reject projects that have clear social goals but don't give their beneficiaries the dignity of being able to support themselves and to contribute to society. While I was interning in a school for autistic children, the school founder's oft-stated goal was this: for her students to grow up and work and earn enough to be able to pay income tax - to be able to give their own share to government instead of taking from it. Similarly, an anecdote from Jacqueline Novogratz's The Blue Sweater, a book about her founding of the impact investing firm Acumen Fund comes to mind: there was a bakery for single mothers in Rwanda that was funded by charities and operating at a loss: the women would have triple their incomes if the money was just handed to them. Jacquline was told that giving the women the dignity of a job was more important than creating profits, but the real reason was that the women weren't expected to operate a succesful enterprise. Instead, they were seen as needy receivers, and the project a showcase of goodwill by the government. Jacqueline later turned the bakery around by applying her business skills, pushing them to do more than they thought they could, and in the process of increasing profits, she created a mindshift in the women that made them proud of the bakery and of their work. This is the same reason why Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged refuses to allow his unemployed brother to work in his steel plant in any capacity, simply because he knows that his brother is unable to add to his business in any way. Individual need is pushed aside in favor of productive capability as the only factor to consider, in this rather extreme example. There are always going to be people who absolutely need help and assistance to be able to survive, but the current way in which development is done takes too broad a criteria for choosing these people, and greatly underestimates their productive abilty. Economic inefficiencies and externalities still make subsidies and government control necessary if one wants to create a fair and equitable world, and so the best methods of creating social impact might sometimes not be profitable, but still they have to make the best use of the assets that are involved - the women baking bread were obviously not being used to their full capacity and potential at first. True dignity stems from a human being having the freedom of realizing all that he is able to offer the world - Amartya Sen's capabilities approach in a nutshell. This can't be bought or given, except through creating environments that do not restrict the individual.
All these thoughts bring me back to what I'm actually doing here - working with four community members and one other scholar to set up a car wash in the village. At first, we only planned on having a standard car wash, pure and simple with no added social goals. After, all, adding a car wash in the village would redirect money spent on car washes in nearby towns back into the village economy, and provide a few more jobs and inspiration to people to set up their own businesses, right? Turns out that the business we start has to take care of both the bottom line as well as social goals, according to the ThinkImpact guidelines. So we decided to limit our workers to people from age 20 to 30 who weren't able to find a job, with special focus on those who didn't matriculate from high school and teenage mothers. Other additions we might consider are adding HIV/AIDS and other health-related posters at the car wash, making it a strictly drug and alcohol-free place so that people would feel safe to hang out there, and also inviting and encouraging other people to start their own businesses next to it, like food stands or a hair salon. I still think the primary focus of our project is to create a car wash though, because only with a well-operated and sustainable car wash business can we fulfil the other secondary social functions that I listed, though it is admittedly important to plant those social goals early in the process so that they don't get sidelined and abandoned. Its also important that the business fulfils a pressing need in the community - Kyle brought up a point that a new bakery might drive the existing mothers who sell fatcakes in school as well as the people who sell bread from the shop and from their homes out of business, or hurt their profits. While that may be true, if the business is viable it means (ideally) that it produces something of value to the community, and if that is true then the decrease in others' profits would drive them to improve their services and also share the wealth from profits more equally in the community. I know that doesn't always work out in reality, but it seems more likely than not that any new profitable business created in the community would be beneficial to it (excluding businesses that deal in goods with negative externalities, like cigarettes or alcohol).
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