Problems with international development II

In an earlier post here, I examined the reasons for the international development community's obsession with new ideas and innovations and the neglect of regular development interventions. 

In this post, I'll question the belief that there is a well-spring of ideas on development that are waiting to be tapped. In fact, if we look closely enough at the development sectors and the new ideas themselves, we'll realise that there are very few ideas with the potential to make a significant impact. 

I'm of course keeping aside technological products and services. So, for example, pharmaceutical drugs or farm crop varieties or equipment (say, combined harvesters), or digital technology solutions (say, monitoring dashboards, Edtech, fintech etc.) are not being considered. However, such innovations on the services side (like digital solutions) struggle in their implementation. This issue has been addressed in the earlier post. Here, however, I think fintech (only in the limited objective of financial inclusion) has been an unqualified success. 

Consider the list of what can be called significantly impactful and universal enough development interventions that have become mainstream in the development landscape in the last five decades:

1. Self Help Groups (women SHGs, farmers groups, farmer producer organisations etc.) and microfinance or micro-credit (thrift activity, revolving funds, micro-credit)

2. Health insurance 

3. Cash transfers (conditional and unconditional)

4. Use of financial incentives to improve service delivery (perhaps related to cash transfers)

5. Remedial instruction for lagging students (TaRL, after-school teaching, peer-learning, additional teachers or volunteers, etc.)

6. Short-term skill development interventions

7. Nudges

8. Information Education Campaigns (community awareness creation, provision of information, right to information, etc.)

9. Rights-based public services delivery (citizen's charter with service levels, statutory commitments, etc.)

10. What else???

In the area of implementation, I can think of only two significantly impactful innovations - management information systems (and Dashboards), and project monitoring/management units. The use of management consultants in development has, I believe, on the net been a negative. 

Then there is the host of ideas and innovations that the international development community is obsessed with like clean cookstoves, hand pumps that lift water and also generate electricity, soccket balls that harness energy, clean drinking water dispensers, decentralised electricity microgrids, solar lights, project delivery units, etc. These are at best palliatives or transitional solutions and at worst condescending and distortionary solutions. Their impacts are largely marginal, even tiny, as to be insignificant even in the specific area of development they serve. For perspective, how many developed countries of today have adopted any of these innovative solutions?

In contrast, consider the staple ingredients of development interventions in a few areas

1. School buildings, teachers, trainings, textbooks, teaching materials, etc

2. Hospitals (with beds, diagnostic facilities), nurses and doctors, referral system, trainings etc

3. Pre- and post-harvest management systems, extension services, farm mechanisation opportunities, some form of insulation against the vagaries of farm produce prices etc

4. Some form of social safety net that targets the poor and the old disabled who are poor, food security system etc

5. Police stations, personnel, patrolling systems, traffic lights etc

In all these cases, the challenge is about first provisioning the ingredients and then bringing them together by following a very standard and well-known recipe (underpinned by the respective statutory/regulatory and enabling legal regimes). Provisioning is constrained by fiscal limits and this is a hard reality across developing countries. The process of bringing together has at least three important dimensions - access,  uptake, and quality (of delivery). Uptake where delivery is market-based hinges on affordability. While some developing countries have managed provisioning, access, and uptake, they tend to struggle with quality, whereas low-income countries are still struggling with even provisioning. 

This process of bringing them together is commonly assessed in terms of the state's capability to execute, supervise, and monitor. They lie in the realm of good governance. The ingredients of good governance are capable and motivated officials, good frontline supervision and higher-level monitoring, and administrative discipline. 

The historical development trajectory of today's developed countries informs us that these ingredients (and no more) are both necessary and sufficient to achieve the desired outcomes. There's little by way of technology and innovations that can help leap-frog or substitute for these ingredients. Technology can, at best (and we have seen this is itself a big challenge), help bring together the ingredients by overcoming some capability constraints. 

In the circumstances, there's nothing surprising about the absence of meaningful enough innovative solutions and new ideas in development. It's in the nature of the problems that form the development landscape. If we carefully disaggregate and examine education or healthcare or agriculture or nutrition or gender equality or livelihoods or governance, we'll realise that, conditional on the availability of the ingredients, the outcomes on these are all about quality - learning outcomes, public health, agriculture productivity, healthy child/adult, women's empowerment, skilled workers, good governance. 

The realisation of these quality-based outcomes depends critically on the quality of human engagement. At the cutting edge, they depend on the manner in which frontline functionaries engage in their work and the stakeholders interact with each other. These engagements are dictated by state capability, cultural norms, social contexts, historical legacies, political economy etc. None of these are amenable to innovations and ideas, even those of a technological nature.