Economically Sustainable Development

Practical Models for Long-Term NGO Viability

Raif Shwayri

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800437760
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Development projects, nearly always all hope and optimism at their inception, have often failed to maintain their impetus and impact in the long run. This is usually because they have failed from the outset to account for how imbalances of power, legacies of colonialism and global wealth inequalities can hamper their staying power. These hurdles have only become greater in the wake of Covid-19.
Drawing on over twenty-seven years of experience on both the front lines and the corporate and business sides of international development, Raif Shwayri offers practical models for navigating the major structural and strategic problems currently facing the workers and organizations who strive to make significant, long-lasting changes in developing countries. Shwayri's new models emerge from his unique insights into the limitations of common approaches to structuring and monitoring initiatives, and they emphasize the crucial importance of vocational education, collaboration with business, and higher education and research for keeping an organization fresh and focussed.
For its combination of industry-level analysis with insights gained from a wealth of personal professional experience, Economically Sustainable Development is a must-read not only for researchers in international development, but also for policymakers and practitioners struggling to come to terms with the state of an industry in a time of global economic crisis.

1

Rely on the Locals

1. Question Your Incentives. Appreciate Complexities and Traditions

Bonjour, Blanc!, he said. We were in December 2018, and I was hopping on the elevator at the Ministry of Interior in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on my way to meet the Minister with a delegation from the State University of New York. The personnel of the Ministry, alerted of the important delegation coming, halted the elevator, invited the crowd inside to vacate at a snap of a finger, ushered us in and escorted us to the upper floor. A Haitian man in a full business suit, clearly a close aide of the Minister, remained standing in one corner of the cabin. He looked me over with daunting eyes as I saluted him, and acknowledged me with “Hello, white (man).” The statement was full of significance. It spoke of 300 years of painful history, and it triggered a conversation in French:

• You called me white? My worth is in the color of my skin?
• You are white, and whites are colonialists.
• What if I told you that I, myself, was subjected to colonization, just like you?
• …
• Well, I come from Lebanon. Have you heard of it? My country, like yours, was appropriated by the French for a long time!
• …
• And worse, the French came after 400 years of Turkish rule! So, what do you say?

The eyes of my conversationalist went from empathic to rolling, then to inquisitive, and ended with sympathy as I got to my floor. As we parted, we greeted one another as brothers-in-arms, equal victims of colonization. The color of our skin mattered less after the two-minute ride.

People are proud, that’s a given. Whether in Barcelona or Brazzaville, wealthy, less fortunate, or very poor, people hold their heritage as sacred. And they don’t like to be bullied, much less by those they hold in contempt for having bullied their forefathers. And people think in binary codes: with us or against us, big or small, rich or poor, good or bad, black or white. Complexity is not the norm for most people and subtleties are the thing of the few, of the academics. He is white, then he belongs to the camp that abused our people, there is nothing more to it.

Besides, the operatives and social workers who invade the airliners and five-star hotels in the capital cities of developing countries certainly produce this feeling in the minds of the locals. Their behavior is seen, if not as provocative, at least as irreverent. They all come wearing the same attire and speaking the same language: shorts or safari pants and T-Shirts bearing the names and institutional logos of their organizations, usually with taglines that include words like food, and education, and health, and most of the time, poor. Perceived as Victorian by the locals, the attitude has brought more harm than good to them by setting a tone: that of a dichotomy, a deep divide that recognizes a helper and a beneficiary, a wealthy and a dependent, a capable and an incompetent.

I have always wondered what motivates people who devote time and money to development work. A feeling of sympathy and solidarity, one would say, and I tend to agree. Yet, in my long years at this, I have come to see the other side of the coin.

When the Syrian administration showed signs of losing balance during the populist surge of the Arab Spring and in the early days of the Islamic State, I was contacted by a French organization that wanted to partner with me. I was in Lebanon at the time and the country had become the obvious retreat for all development operatives in the Middle East. The envoys were three medical practitioners: a Frenchman and two Eastern Europeans. We met for two hours in my office at AlKafaat University (AKU), the university I had started under the Al-Kafaàt Foundation in Lebanon. They had an impressive supply of medications in their keeping, full containers ready to take to sea, and they wanted to organize an operations room, a location where they could prepare to enter Syria when the time came. At the early days of the Syrian crisis, everybody thought the change of regime would be swift, and that Syria would become the new hot spot for development work. Hunting season was coming, and international organizations were jockeying for position. I say hunting season purposely. The incentive for helping the Syrians was to be found far from the benevolent actions of a few medical practitioners from Europe. In the case of my visitors, the objective was to outdo the premiere medical humanitarian aid organization, and to dump a large quantity of surplus medications, thereby gaining a foothold in the region for certain pharmaceutical companies. It also meant extending funding for their own overheads from public sources, from their own governments as well as the European Commission. The funding for their previous program had evaporated along with the pains and agonies of the Kosovars.

Keeping the lights on is an expression I have heard throughout my professional life. When a project receives approval from an awarding body, the award being here a substantial sum of money to implement, organizations recruit and form specific task forces for their funded projects. This entails organizing remotely, either starting a local organization to manage on the ground or working in partnership with a standing organization that serves the same mission. Either way, structural change is plotted, and the annual budget is enlarged to accommodate the incoming task force. Part of that budget increase is also for overheads, an elastic markup that donor agencies approve, and which can go extremely high. I have seen overheads as high as 24% of the total project cost written into budgets. This translates to a quarter of each budget dollar allocated to cover what are called indirect costs: labor costs for staff at the home office and the time of managers and accountants who will supposedly devote some attention to the project (trickle-down development at its best). Then, a few years and some extensions later, when the project is concluded and the building built (or the medications distributed and the clinics organized), when the time has come to turn the lights off and disband the task forces, organizations choke on the mere idea of losing budgets and reducing their scale. CEOs don’t take well to the idea of showing reduced operating budgets to their leadership, their trustees, or their shareholders. Now that the machine is built and it has taken on a life of its own, it cannot simply go extinct. Yet, with the conclusion of the initial project, the money has dried up. To compensate, new projects need to flow, projects that are not always necessary, that are sometimes little needed, and that are all too often irrelevant to the locals.

The locals are always sidelined, and will continue to be, unless they themselves own the development initiative. In countries where civil society is active, the locals have borne the responsibility well. They were the ones who carried the torch, from understanding the needs, conceptualizing the program solutions, and implementing them. They shopped around for expertise when they didn’t have it; they sought after funding when money was needed. In Medellin, Colombia, a unique organization known as ACTUAR was able to create jobs for hundreds of thousands of Colombians over the last 20 years by lending business support and seed capital to microentrepreneurs.¹ Expertise and some funding came from the Belgian Development Agency through the fine European organization ACTEC,² yet the leaders of the program were Colombians. The Belgians were instrumental, but the quest for betterment was masterminded through and through by the locals. On the opposite side of the spectrum, in countries where civil society is disrupted or disconnected for any number of reasons and where government structures are faltering, there is no gatekeeper. Poverty is the rule, as is dependence on foreign aid. With an open door and a state of powerlessness, many countries across Africa, Central and Southeast Asia, and the Americas are highly dependent on aid. They look at the promise that travels in the backpacks of foreign social workers and fall prey to a cycle that perpetuates itself. For rather than empowering the locals to build their own communities, countries, and futures, international aid has set in stone a state of total dependency. Despite all good intentions, international organizations have simply not listened and learned. Instead, they listen to themselves and replicate what they know. After hearing experts talk in meetings of “giving them empty shipping containers for homes” and “building them a primary school and a health center”, without considering who would manage the ensuing school and center and, more importantly, who would cover the annual cost of operations, I’ve given this a name: Packaged Development Solutions. Empty schools and health centers and decaying bare buildings dot the landscape today of many countries, while the people lack the education, the health services, and the homes that those solutions were intended to deliver.

Then there is the power of global media, one of the determinants of foreign aid allocations as Douglas Van Belle argues In Media, Bureaucracies and Foreign Aid, that relays our world events by the minute. The wrath of nature in Sri Lanka that destroys parts of the country and ends with a shocking toll of casualties commands the interests of agencies and NGOs and garners their undivided attention. I have seen funding shift from one country to the other, from one use to another, totally repurposed and funneled to echo such moments. Organizations are like people; they follow the spotlights. With spotlights come new policies, those announced by administrations. These are always translated by development agencies into budget lines, to serve this mission or another, depending on the statements made by whoever holds office at a given time. Organizations line up wherever CNN drops anchor: in Beirut in 1982, in Colombo in 2004, in Port-au-Prince in 2010, and in Beirut again, in 2020, after a tragic explosion destroyed a large part of the capital and wrecked the homes of hundreds of thousands of families. These are the same organizations I touched on earlier, the task forces having completed programs going in search of another project to justify their own existence. The reality is that budgets dictate the next undertaking of most organizations, not always an elevated love of mankind.

The irony is in the narrative. Seldom have I seen an organization that did not speak of “putting the interests of the local community first.” Such assertions are voiced at practically every reunion and in every conference. Yet I have always wondered, after seeing the actions on the ground and knowing the background I discussed earlier, whether talking about “community engagement” and making this vocabulary resonate loud and clear actually makes it so. My answer is a flat “No,” and worse, such behavior makes the divide clearer, imbuing the local communities with the sense of dependency I referred to earlier.

A World Bank paper concludes that being a former colony attracts more aid than having good policies (1998). There is another explanation for the surge among NGOs and agencies to extend goodwill to the local communities in developing countries. I can summarize it in two concepts: history and bad conscience. Most countries in the northern hemisphere, those we refer to as industrial countries today, have a history of usurping the resources of other countries in the southern hemisphere, those we refer to for our convenience, as developing. Belgium had Congo, Italy had Libya, England the countries of the Commonwealth, France a number of dominions from Vietnam and India to the Americas, Spain equal swaths of lands where “the sun never set” (as was said of the Empire of Charles V). Slave trading became a byproduct of the race to develop plantations in the colonies, ruining communities altogether and stepping over cultures, erasing identities, and sometimes suppressing a whole population while idealizing the conquests in epic stories told to children. I grew up on stories of Hernán Cortés and the fabulous treasures he took from the “barbarian” Montezuma, and the conquest of the American West by heroic cowboys who fought the “monstrous” Indians. Colonization stripped from people their right to exist and imposed on them burdens from which they would never recover. Even later, when emancipation became the norm, it was mostly triggered by the urge on the part of the colonizers to regroup during world wars. The delineation of borders and identity building of modern countries were made abruptly, reflecting the interests of the colonizers there, not the aspirations of the local people. The establishment of many of the modern countries of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Central and South America came at a high price. The price paid, however, did not provide a national platform to support cultural, political, or economic maturity. The notion of failed states is proper to many such countries, a notion bestowed on them by colonizers of a previous era. With the passing of time, as the countries settled on their courses and the divide between colonizers and locals grew larger, the bad conscience phenomenon, the philosophy elaborated by Nietzsche, came calling. Air travel has become synonymous with crossing divides in a race to undo the mistakes of the past. The thing is, however, that what took centuries to carve out, cannot instill a new culture overnight, even with a synthetic phraseology that upholds such notions as the rights of people to choose in dignity. Especially when most of the time these words don’t translate into actual deeds.

Ironically, this same bad conscience phenomenon that haunts some has given wings to others to come back with an unspoken form of resentment. Taking from the language of Nietzsche, the man of ressentiment cannot tolerate a good initiative that is not their own, especially if it originated from the same group that was responsible for the wrongdoings of yesteryears against their ancestors.

My career history has taken me down this path of thinking. I sat at the helm of a local foundation in Lebanon, a community-driven organization that was on the implementing end of the development spectrum for the first part of my professional life. There, I was the recipient of international expertise and aid, launching programs and projects with international agencies and organizations when I needed expertise or funding. I called the shots, planned the programs, served “my” people and community, evaluated the actions, recalibrated, and took other shots accordingly. Upon changing careers mid-life and standing on the other side of the spectrum, that of the donor-organization, holder of the expertise and the money, I never lost sight of the ground. As I went to Morocco or Jordan in the shoes of a European consultant, to the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, to Colombia or Haiti, with the means of an international agency, I found the exact same vibes. The very first lesson that I learned is that irrespective of location, wherever in the world, despite cultural differences and the weight of history, communities have the same needs, wants, and aspirations. Know one, and you know them all. Identify with one and you identify with them all. It doesn’t matter if you are the Blanc in the elevator, you will be closer to the hearts of the local community when you relate to their needs, wants, and aspirations. Not in the pedantic vocabulary which they have heard time and again from the incessant travelers, but in the deeds.

Let us draw two conclusions here. The first is to understand the real motivations of the endeavor you want to undertake, and those of the organization you work for. What is the real mission? The real incentive? And second, learn to know the local communities: they are the doers and the owners of the initiatives. They do development, not us.

2. Make Sense of Industrial Relations

Industrial Relations was the name of a course I took at Cardiff Business School at the University of Wales when I was studying for an MBA in 1991. The lecturer, a celebrated author who wrote extensively on the topic, was Michael Poole. We studied from his book and his lectures were breathtaking, and like many others, I enjoyed every minute of them throughout the program. England has a long history of labor disputes, most notably in the coal and automotive industries. Both were important sectors and highly prized for the large numbers of jobs they provided. Coal was the rudimentary commodity for heating which bore an inelastic demand, while automotive took a surge because of the growing number of foreign manufacturers who located their European construction plants in England. One can only imagine the harshness of the working conditions in the mines or at the plant...