In the good old days, before we in the industry were inconvenienced by the knowledge of our impending doom, we had the luxury of being able to do some nice direct delivery work that we can collectively refer to as “charity”. There is nothing more satisfying than the direct transfer of money, material or knowledge to a person in need, seeing their gratitude and following up later to see how it has alleviated their suffering. It is a warm, cosy, satisfying feeling, and one which many of us entered the business for. But it is a luxury we can no longer afford.
Having witnessed at first hand the way the development industry works over the past decade, I am frequently struck by the lack of ambition that it has in design and execution. When I read the proposals and rhetoric of donors and implementers, and see how they operate on the ground, I can’t help thinking: is this it? Is this really the way that we solve global poverty amidst these challenges? Because if it is, it is a pretty inefficient and mediocre way of doing it.
I am often astounded when I see projects directly deliver services to the poor without any regard for their effectiveness, efficiency or sustainability, often undermining local market actors who could be delivering them for the long-term. Projects buying inputs from companies then giving them out when those same companies express a wish to trade in the area but don’t, because NGOs make their job far too easy, buying in bulk and paying in cash. Projects delivering extension services to smallholders temporarily and not building capacity among market actors to do so permanently. Projects delivering business services to SMEs at several times the price that the market would ever support.
Being a part of the development industry, we are all charged with the shared responsibility – given that we are paid to do it – of eradicating global poverty. We also have to achieve this in the face of momentous challenges such as climate change, rising population combined with shifting demographics and consumption patterns, depletion of the natural resource base, soil erosion, peak oil (although perhaps we will fry before this occurs), the global financial crisis, the threat of global pandemics and natural disasters, to name but a few. Given that we share this responsibility with the private and public sector, could we perform our role better, spending tax payers’ money more efficiently and actually delivering upon the changes we seek in the world?
In order to fix these vast systemic problems, we need to think big, act strategically and act courageously. However the problem with the current mechanism of development, as pointed out by Kanier & Kramer (2011) , is that funders set “competitions”, and implementers compete to “win the prize” of funding to implement their big idea. These ideas rarely involve the very actors who are directly involved in or affected by the problem or, importantly, those who might offer a lasting solution to those problems. When evaluating their impact, projects endeavour to isolate their input to the exclusion of everything else that has been done by other projects or endeavours of local actors, or other externalities like a good rainfall! When implementers do come together, it is rarely to collaborate, and has more to do with coordinating temporary relationships to carve up a prize that they couldn’t win on their own. If projects are successful, they are simply scaled-up and repeated. This isolated impact approach will not fix complex systemic problems.
Systemic approaches (such as M4P) have at their heart the ambition to address the root causes of problems that face the poor and seek to act upon the weak system, rather than the symptoms of its underperformance. They also aim to act efficiently and at large scale with the absolute intention of creating large spill-overs that positively impact other interconnected systems. However in order to act systemically we require a fundamental change in the way the industry operates, to encourage collective impact. This means developing a common, shared understanding of the problem and an agenda to fix it. It means developing effective coordination mechanisms among committed partners who each have mutually reinforcing roles and effective, open and honest communication to build trust and drive quality. And it means a commitment to measuring genuine impact.
Here are three simple questions that can be asked of initiatives to see whether they are being systemic:
- Is the project doing things that others could or should be doing?
- Is it treating symptoms or causes?
- Does the cost of scaling-up the project from impacting a few poor people, to fixing the whole problem for the entire poor target group, mean an increase in economies of scale in terms of costs per poor person impacted?
An interesting example of a systemic approach and collective impact at work (although it was never branded as either) is the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). This initiative was born out of recognition of the harmful social and environmental impact of the palm oil industry in Southeast Asia: NGOs and consumers had been applying pressure on producers, and a few responded by making an important decision to change. What began as an informal collaboration between a few companies such as Unilever and WWF in 2002 has grown into an effective, self-sustaining backbone organisation with a small staff that coordinates the development of standards and certification of sustainable palm oil among its 1,100 plus members. Today, certified sustainable palm oil accounts for 14% of global production, with many major companies making firm commitments to convert solely to this in the medium-term. Thus, the RSPO has come about as a result of collective action to create systemic change in the palm oil sector.
Nobel prize winner Al Gore said that “fundamental systemic change is always going to arouse vitriolic opposition” and many dodge the systemic challenge. Some say that it is too early to say whether systemic approaches achieve results. I say that direct-delivery, linear, isolated impact projects have had long enough to prove theirs. Others say that it is not within their remit, is too difficult, requires skills that they don’t have or is a “nice to have but not essential” to achieving their linear task. I would argue that in order to fix the problems that face us, it is absolutely vital: a moral imperative. If we are not ambitious, and following through with balanced action, we are not doing our job of achieving our development goal of poverty reduction. Initiatives that do not create tangible and sustainable benefits far exceeding their true costs are merely paying salaries and having a bit of fun along the way.