How Matters has an interesting post about learning to embrace one’s own biases and positionality as an aid/development worker. However, the title of the post, “Confessions of a Recovering Neocolonialist on Martin Luther King Day“, is pretty misleading – it isn’t about neocolonialism at all, as best I can tell. Basically, the post picks up on the idea that aid/development workers are neocolonialists because a Zimbabwean staff member once dropped this blanket label on the expat staff of an aid agency. The problem is that the author of the post takes what might have actually been an interesting, trenchant comment about the role of aid/development, and those of us engaged in it, in the creation and perpetuation of a contemporary global political economy that results in patterns of advantage and disadvantage that are quite similar to those once seen under colonialism (hence the term neocolonialism – a “new colonialism” enforced by things like trade rules, aid conditionality, etc.) and turns it into a discussion about ethnocentrism and myopia among aid/development workers.
Now, I am not decrying any discussion of either ethnocentrism or myopia in the aid and development community – it is there. We all know it. And being reminded of that – and being critically aware of that tendency in ourselves and others – is both important and valuable. But this post misses the point of the Zimbabwean comment because it does not address how our work in this endeavor perpetuates the relationships of inequality that are often root causes of the symptoms we find ourselves addressing in the field. This is hard to do – it not only requires self-awareness, but the time, effort and interest to trace the effects, intended and otherwise, that radiate out from our efforts. This is the only way to discern whether our efforts are neocolonial or not.
Tag: development
From the aid/development divide to the climate change/development divide
I’ve been going on quite a bit about how we envision the relationship between aid and development – or perhaps more appropriately, how we do not really envision that transition, but assume that it simply happens – quite a bit lately. But pressing on my mind during my work life is the relationship between climate change and development – how do mitigation and adaptation efforts relate to development? The answer, of course, is that they relate to development in many different ways. For example, mitigation efforts include things like land use, which can impact existing agricultural practices, and constrain (or sometimes enable) the options available to the designers of agricultural development projects. Adaptation efforts emphasize the prevention of negative outcomes, a form of coping, but unless this relationship is explicitly considered they do not necessarily rhyme with development projects that seek to build on existing resources and capacity to improve people’s situations.
(I confess that I am deeply concerned that development is rapidly being subsumed under adaptation in some quarters, which is a real problem as they have two different missions. To refocus development projects on adaptation is to shift from an effort to improve someone’s situation to an effort to help them hang on to what little they might have. But this is a post for a different day.)
There is a danger, in this era of enhanced attention and funding toward climate change, of using climate change funds to continue doing the same development work as we were doing before, only under a new label (i.e. calling agricultural development “agricultural adaptation”, then using climate change funds to support that program even though nothing about it has really changed). It is an annoying habit of people in agencies, who are often cash- and personnel-strapped, to try to use new initiatives to support their existing projects. There is also a danger, in places where climate change has a greater emphasis than development, that development dollars aimed at particular challenges will be repurposed to the end of addressing climate change, thus negatively impacting the original development goal. A year ago, Bill Gates wrote warned against just such an outcome in his 2010 Annual Letter as co-chair of the Gates Foundation. On first read, it is a reasonable argument – and one that I largely agree with. We live in a world of finite donors, and new dollars to address climate change often have to come from some other pot of money funding another project or issue. These are difficult choices, and Gates has every right to argue that his pet interest, global health, should not lose funding in favor of climate change related efforts. However, his argument sets up a needless dichotomy between development/aid (in the form of public health funding) and efforts to address the impacts of climate change:
The final communiqué of the Copenhagen Summit, held last December, talks about mobilizing $10 billion per year in the next three years and $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries, which is over three quarters of all foreign aid now given by the richest countries.
I am concerned that some of this money will come from reducing other categories of foreign aid, especially health. If just 1 percent of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases. In the long run, not spending on health is a bad deal for the environment because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment.
Well, sort of. I could make a pretty brutal counterargument – not spending on health, such as HIV/AIDS leads to a lot of deaths in the productive segment of the population pyramid, leaving a lot of fallow land to recover its nonagricultural ecological functions. This sort of land use change is actually visible in places like Swaziland, but very hard to quantify because the studies aren’t there yet – nobody wants to be seen as potentially supporting this sort of nightmarish conservation argument. I certainly don’t – but that is not my point. My point was that Gates’ argument is pretty thin.
In making a political point, Gates is being a bit selective about the relationship between climate change and health. What he is completely ignoring is the fact that mitigation efforts might limit the future range of disease vectors for any number of illnesses, thus saving tremendous numbers of lives. This is especially true for diseases, like malaria, where a vaccine has proven elusive. Further, he ignores the ways in which coherent, participatory adaptation programs might address health issues (by managing everything from nutrition to sanitation) in an effective manner. While I am not arguing that mitigation and adaptation efforts could completely address the impacts caused by the loss of $1 billion in vaccination funding, his argument for 700,000 extra deaths* rests upon the assumption that nothing in the climate change portfolio will address the causes of such deaths through other means. He’s creating an either/or that does not exist.
Again, Gates is making a political point here – which is his right. But that political point sets up a false dichotomy between aid/development and efforts to address climate change that even Bjorn Lomborg has abandoned at this point. We can argue in the interest of our agencies and organizations all we want, but the problems we are trying to address are deeply interlinked, and in the end creating these false dichotomies, and claiming that one issue is THE issue that must be addressed, shortchanges the very constituencies we claim to be working with and working for.
*I must admit I loathe this sort of quantification – it is always based on horribly fuzzy math that, at best, is grounded in loose correlations between an action and a health outcome. I raise this issue and take it apart at length in my book . . .
Poverty reduction and development: it's not either/or
A piece on the Guardian‘s Poverty Matters Blog today sets up one of the oddest, and most pointless, dichotomies I’ve seen in a discussion of development. To summarize, the post by Rick Rowden argues that a focus on aid effectiveness and poverty reduction
perpetuates a bloated aid industry that doles out millions of dollars each year to legions of contractors and NGOs to carry out projects in dozens of poor countries.
What it does not do, apparently, is work toward any definition of development
In recent decades, earlier notions of development economics have been replaced with meeting the MDGs. But poverty reduction is not development. We seem to have suffered collective amnesia about the history of development, which used to be widely understood as industrialisation – in which poor countries undergo a transformative process out of primary agriculture and extractive industries into manufacturing and services industries with higher value-added over time.
First, this is an absurdly reductionist definition of development. If Rowden wants to talk down to his readers about the history of development, he’d do well to note that his particular take fell out of currency in the late 1960s because IT DIDN’T WORK. There is a reason modernization/big push theories fell out of favor (unless you are Jeff Sachs, and then you are forever reviving the corpse of the big push at the community level via the MVP. Then again, Sachs doesn’t seem to read development history, either). In short, the borrowing required for industrial ramp-ups almost never paid off with enough revenue to pay off the loans. To understand why this happened is to understand the country-specific interplay of three key factors. First, there were (and still are) structural issues in world trade that locked much of the developing world out of key markets. Second, these policies failed because markets were dominated by large corporate entities operating with very small margins because of their huge economies of scale, basically undercutting any new competitors on price because they had the advantage of a huge head start provided by colonialism. Third, massive corruption within countries drained the productive capital out of these loans, dooming the projects there were meant to fund. Countries had to address either two or three of these factors, in varying ratios, at different times. Modernization theories pushing industrialization had little to offer in addressing them. This is why we eventually saw the rise of an attention to institutions and governance in development – not just at the level of the state, but also in markets and broader trade arenas. It is also why so many countries in the Global South found themselves saddled with crushing debt at the end of the last century – many of those debts were the original loans and continued accumulation of interest tied to these failed policies.
The other issue is that industrialization requires resources (to make products) and consumption (to sell them). At a time when our demand on the natural environment is already beginning to overshoot its capacity to serve our needs, asking countries to take on even more unsustainable activities is an absurdity that will end in failure. There is nothing sustainable in this pathway – and if you look at the post, you will see that the entire argument is framed in an unlimited world, where the only constraint on development is growth:
If countries are unable to use the industrial policies they will need to transform their domestic industries, diversify their economies and build up their own tax bases over time, how will they ever get off the foreign aid bandwagon? Here the “poverty reduction” discourse is misleading; it neglects to ask how countries are supposed develop without industrialising.
Well, that isn’t totally true unless you take a very, very narrow reading of the poverty reduction discourse. A lot of us are working in this space to imagine alternatives. Indeed, there are community level projects that, while not elevating people to the standards of living seen in the Global North, have created sustainable, substantive changes in the quality of residents’ lives. The examples are out there if people want to look.
Beyond all of this, though, is the larger issue – Rowden clearly has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to development when he dichotomizes poverty reduction and development. Even if we saw economic growth as the be-all, end-all of development, there is a lot of work out there arguing that endemic poverty is a huge drag on economic growth and therefore has to be addressed as part of a growth package (see the OECD Observer here). So even in a fairly reductionist view of development, you need poverty reduction . . . and I don’t know anyone who believes that growth adequately addresses poverty. Not even at USAID. Really.
So poverty reduction and development are not an either/or proposition, from any reasonable perspective on development. Rowden’s piece would have been interesting . . . in 1960. I have no idea what the point was in publishing it today.
Development isn't impossible, just hard to understand
A few comments on the blog related to some earlier posts on a Grand Challenge for Development have gotten me thinking a bit about development (the concept and the project) and if it is achievable. There are those who would argue it is not, that development is an ill-conceived idea that invokes pathways of change that are now closed due to the changing global political economy, and treats life in the advanced economies as the apotheosis of human existence toward which everyone else is (and should be) marching. To the extent development is taken to mean this sort of change, I agree completely – development is unattainable and meaningless. There are not enough resources on Earth to allow everyone to live the way we do in the advanced economies, so the idea of a march toward that standard of living as a goal is gone regardless of how one might feel about it morally/ethically/etc.
But that does not mean that change cannot happen, that things cannot improve in a manner that is appreciated by people living in particular places. Certainly, a shift from a post-subsistence income of $1 a day to $5 a day is a huge change that, in many parts of the world, would enable very different standards of health, education and well-being. Surely this is worth striving for – and certainly, the people with whom I have worked in Ghana and Malawi would take that kind of a change over no change at all – and they would much rather than kind of change, than endless, pride-killing aid dependence. There is no doubt that this sort of change can be attained in many, if not most places. Indeed, it has been accomplished. Further, there are places where life expectancy has risen dramatically, infant mortality has fallen, nutrition and education levels have improved, and by any qualitative measure the quality of life has improved as a direct result of aid interventions (often termed development, but this should only count as development if the changes are sustained after the aid ends). The real question at hand is not if it can be done, but why the results of our aid/development efforts are so erratic.
You see, for every case of improved life expectancy, there is the falling expectancies in Southern Africa. For every case of improved nutrition and food availability, there are cases of increasing malnutrition and food insecurity (such that in sub-Saharan Africa, the balance has tipped toward less food availability per capita than two decades ago), and so on. What works in one place often fails in another. And the fact is that we don’t understand why this is in a systematic way. I am a geographer and an anthropologist, so I am quite sympathetic to the argument that the local specificity of culture and society have a lot to do with the efficacy of particular interventions, and therefore explain a lot of the variability we see in project outcomes. However, “local specificity” isn’t an answer, it is a blanket explanation that isn’t actionable in a specific way. We persist in this answer because it pushes development (and aid) failure into the realm of the qualitative, the idiosyncratic. And this attitude absolves us, the development community, from blame when things don’t work out. Your project failed? Ah, well, who could have known that local land tenure rules would prevent the successful adoption of tree crops by women? Subtly, we blame the victims with this mentality.
What it comes down to, I think, is a need to admit that we have at best a shaky idea of what works because in many areas (both geographic and technical) we really don’t understand what it is we are trying to transform when we engage in aid and development work. We are better in some areas (health) because, frankly, they do a better job of gathering data and analyzing it than we do in, say, rural development (hey, don’t take my word for it – read some Robert Chambers, for heaven’s sake!). But, in the end, we are driven by our myths about how markets and globalization work, how development/aid is linked to change, and how the problems we claim to address through development and aid came about in the first place. This argument is the heart of my book (Amazon link here) – and I spend the first half using the story of two villages in Ghana to lay out how our assumptions about the world and how it works are mostly wrong, the next quarter explaining why this is a major problem for everything from economics to the environment, and the last quarter thinking about how to change things.
My take is but one take – and a partial one at that. We need more people to think about our assumptions when we identify development challenges, design programs, and implement projects. We need to replace assumptions with evidence. And we need to be a lot more humble about our assumptions AND our evidence – so we stay open to new ideas and evidence as they inevitably flow in.
Those who can't, snark
I’ve had a post or two referencing the role of celebrity in development recently, triggered by Bill Easterly’s recent Washington Post op-ed. I was surprised to see Easterly take such heat for pointing out that celebrity engagement with development can be problematic – most of the folks I know largely agree with the op-ed. My only intervention was to suggest that Easterly (and others who raise issues with celebrity and development) focus more on the people who feed the celebs their ideas and talking points. Sometimes really well-meaning people can be led astray by one loud voice . . .
Having watched/been part of this conversation for a few days, though, I see the need for an intervention. On his twitter feed, Bill Easterly has promoted a commenter who felt s/he had to remove a post critical of Bono because “Bono gives big money to my organization, and they thought that pissing off Bono could cause another Sunday Bloody Sunday.” At first glance, this paints Bono as terribly thin-skinned, and suggests that he is unwilling to take on criticism of his efforts. Perhaps this is true, but I see little evidence for it here – basically, you have an overly-cautious organization afraid of pissing off a celebrity, but no suggestion that Bono demanded its removal.
More telling, though, is the URL the “censored” poster left at the end of their comment – http://bonowithafricans.wordpress.com/ Oh look, let’s take a bunch of random pictures of Bono in Africa, divorce them from all context, and then stick snarky comments after them. How clever! And juvenile, boring, etc. All this does is suggest to me that the commenter has a larger issue with Bono, and has used Easterly’s blog as a platform to promote them.
I pride myself on taking my work very seriously, without taking myself very seriously. I have my foibles (too numerous to list here), and I am well aware that at least some of my grad students can do a credible impression of me (which I actually take as something of a warped complement) – but I find this sort of thing funny. Hell, we can play the snark game with any number of pictures of me:
“Community meetings would be easier without the community”
“This garland is way outside of my color wheel”
“They told me there would be bourbon. This . . . is not bourbon”
See, now wasn’t that fun?
The point here is that criticism really needs to be constructive, and anchored in something. I’ve been known to lose my temper – for example at the end of the post here – but even my rants are anchored in solid analysis. My extended frustration with Sachs is well-documented, even in the peer-reviewed literature. I have substantive issues with his theories, and how they lead to inappropriate interventions. I sat through what I can best describe as a horribly embarrassing lecture by Sachs at the 2008 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Boston, where he evoked a total lack of awareness of geography, the fact anyone else in the world addresses development issues, and revived the long-buried corpse of environmental determinism – all around me there were hundreds of geographers staring at him in open-mouthed shock. The man is a disaster for development. However, I can train a monkey to rip something down – as I tell my students, if you want to impress me, put it back together in an interesting way. In my writing on the Millennium Village Project I have offered alternatives and suggestions. I do the same in my forthcoming book. Snark does nothing constructive, and makes it hard for the criticized to see through the personal attack to the useful ideas that might lead to more productive engagement.
Focus on substance, and being constructive, people. To modify the old adage about teaching . . . Those who can’t, snark.
Saving Chilean miners, saving development
Well, they pulled all 33 miners out of the hole. This is an absolutely staggering feat – first, finding the miners nearly a half mile underground in the first place, and then drilling a precision shaft all the way down to them that was straight enough to accommodate a rescue capsule – which then worked flawlessly 33 times. It never got old watching the miners come out of the ground. And certainly the Chileans have a lot to be proud of these days.
AP Photo/Jose Manuel de la Maza, Chilean presidential press office
But this whole experience has caused me to think again about development and our persistent inability to get things done in a consistent manner for the world’s poorest people. This rescue was, in many ways, everything that modern development is not. The Chileans never asked about the cost – in fact, nobody knows what this cost, besides a hell of a lot. The government didn’t parse options and try to pick the most cost-effective rescue – they ran three plans at once, to see which would work best. It was expensive, but saved time and probably saved some lives. In short, the Chilean government didn’t even try to assess the value of a human life here – by any economic measure, they’ve probably spent a lot more saving these men than the miners will ever earn or spend in the Chilean economy, so the rescue was an economic loser all along – the government decided that saving these men was necessary at any cost, that the value of their lives was not calculable.
When I see that attitude, with this amazing result, I am appalled by the piles of monitoring and evaluation red tape that development organizations must wade through to justify their activities – was that the lowest bid? The most cost-effective intervention? All of that accounting misses the point – there is no such thing as a good intervention that leaves people behind in the name of efficiency or cost-effectiveness. Human lives cannot, and should not, be valued that way.
Second, this rescue was innovative and risk-taking. They ran three plans at once. Nobody had ever done any of them at this sort of depth. There were huge risks of failure. And they plowed forward anyway – two of them did not work out, but the third (actually, plan B) saved 33 lives. There are so many of us in development who carry around the desire to try innovative things, to risk failure, learn and try again . . . but the culture of development with its budgeting and monitoring chokes off these sorts of efforts for interventions that produce easily measured results. When we take risks and fail, the accountants take the money away. So we go for easy, safe results, even when those results have little meaning for the people at the receiving end of the intervention. What does it mean to say that this year we trained 25 judges in country X? Have we really improved the judicial system, or the standard of living for those subject to it? That number does nothing to help us understand if what we are doing matters at all . . . but we keep working on this sort of project because it is a measurable outcome that is of relatively low risk.
Contrary to what Jeffrey Sachs (see my impolitic rant here) keeps preaching, we DO NOT know what works in development. If we did, there would be a hell of a lot less suffering in the world today. We do know, however, what produces measurable results that look good, and we keep pounding away at that sort of work because we can rejustify our budgets each year. Development is pathetically risk-averse, from the top down, and those that would take risks cannot find the funding or support to do so.
Chile just pulled 33 men out of a hole in the ground a half-mile deep. They did it with help from mining and drilling experts from more than a dozen countries and with advice from NASA specialists on living in isolated conditions (if there were any doubt of the value of a human spaceflight program, here is yet another spinoff value that we have gained. NASA’s unique expertise in this area surely contributed to the safe recovery of many of these men). This was an international partnership to try to do the impossible, making it up as they went along. And they did it.
Surely we can reimagine development in the same way, and with the same spirit. But with much more urgency. There are a lot more than 33 people down this hole.
C'mon, Wired . . . really?
Dammit, Wired, I do like you . . . but why must you guys always assume that new stuff (ok, sometimes pretty cool stuff) will fix all our problems? There are situations where a new device or good might be important and useful . . . but to argue that a viable development path might be constructed on improving access to cheap consumer goods worldwide fails to acknowledge the reality of the world today. Even worse, they are not the first to fall into this fallacy – see the Product (RED) trainwreck (or as I like to call it, the buy-your-way-out-of-your-guilt plan), which came at this from the side of providing aid from rich countries.
Why am I so pissy about these sorts of feel-good ideas? Because perhaps the central challenge that faces us in addressing the intersection of development and environment is the problem that there is simply not enough stuff in the world to allow everyone to consume at the same level as Americans – not even close. We’d need between 2 and 3 more Earths. Or, if some Cal Santa Cruz astronomers are correct and they’ve actually found another potentially habitable planet, maybe only 1-2 more Earths. Hey, it’s progress . . . oh wait, its 20 light years away and we have no way of getting there. Right, 2-3 more Earths, then.
Under these circumstances, arguing for more consumption makes absolutely no sense at all – instead, it pushes us ever closer toward a zero-sum world, where the only way to improve one’s own material situation is to take away from someone else’s. I’d argue that this describes the current situation anyway, as we here can only live at our standard because so many do not – but that is a rant for another day.
This is not to say that the global poor should stay that way. Interestingly, Wired‘s examples of products they like are largely development interventions (irrigation, water filters, rural lighting, etc.) by a different name. I have no objection to these interventions – they are rather small in terms of consumption footprint, but have tremendous positive effects. However, the larger message of the piece seems to be that making cheap stuff for these markets is, in the end, good for them. No. This rests on the idea that the only products people want are as practical as irrigation – a very bad assumption. Most of the folks I work with in rural Ghana would love a TV, though I can personally attest that Ghanaian television will not improve their quality of life. Or anyone else’s for that matter. Making cheap TVs that people can afford is not going to help us out of the global hole in which we are located – it will just take up more resources faster.
Making development interventions cheap is good. Further, introducing them through markets, instead of through proscribed programming that is not sensitive to local context, is often good (sometimes markets fail, though). But assuming that we can generalize from these examples to a wider statement about markets and human well-being doesn’t fly. We’re not going to buy and sell our way to a more just, sustainable world.
Now, if someone was to get on revolutionizing the generation of electricity such that it is so cheap as to be effectively free, and we could talk about how to really revolutionize development, as this might address the resource shortage problem. When, for example, recycling becomes super-cheap (a huge percentage of the cost is energy), and we can reuse what we already have instead of constantly digging up more, this equation might change . . .
Dead on
Blogger Ansel has written a wonderful post that will probably get attention for the pointed way in which it lays out the formulaic, and therefore ultimately useless, character of the vast majority of reporting on post-earthquake Haiti. I find it interesting because it screams out for one of my pet projects – the need to connect the global poor to one another and to those in wealthier countries in an unfiltered manner. Nearly-useless journalism is a huge problem if it is the only source of information emerging from a given place. The impact of this same problematic journalism, however, can be greatly lessened by the presence of many voices reporting from many angles on the same subject. At this time, despite the various platitudes about the wonders of mobile phone technology and the internet that are repeated in development circles, the enormous potential of these tools has yet to be realized. We need to be more honest about this, lest it sound like the technology is there and the only problem is the backward people who won’t use it.
I wonder, though, how comfortable the development industry will be with the gradual, inevitable emergence of many voices through these technologies. What will we do when the people in whose names we are ostensibly working start telling us no and begin to call out our failures – and do so in a public forum?
Yes, cell phones can make a difference in development
Via Mashable: How Mobile Technology is a Game Changer for Developing Africa.
There are a lot of initiatives out there that engage with mobile phones for development. The most impressive I have seen is Lifelines India, in part coordinated by some friends and colleagues at Development Alternatives. Volunteers bring the phones to villages, and for a small fee they can call a number and record their questions. Each farmer receives a reference number for the query and can call back in a day and use that reference number to access the reply. The project promised and delivered rapid replies to queries (less than twenty-four hours) and provided information of great value to farmers. Today it reaches around 150,000 farmers in four Indian states.
This is but one of many initiatives. The Global Adaptation Information Network project I have been part of for the past four years is heavily predicated on using mobile phones to connect communities throughout the Global South. And Mickey Glantz has toyed with the idea of expanding Sparetime University to mobile platforms to expand access,
What this article failed to recognize, though, is the interesting boom in cell phone app development in Africa right now – app developers in Kenya are recognized as some of the best in the world at designing lightweight apps for low bandwidth networks. For those who are fed up with lazy, bloated coding of software here in the US (why your programs run so slowly, even on new computers and fast internet connections), it may be that Africa is the future . . .
Development is not the same thing as adaptation
One of the most interesting and distressing trends in recent development thought has been the convergence of adaptation to global change (I use global change as a catch-all which includes environmental and economic change) and development. Development agencies increasingly take on the idea of adaptation as a key component of their missions – which they should, if they intend to build projects with enduring value. However, it is one thing to incorporate the idea of adaptation into development programming. It is entirely another to collapse the two into the same mission.
Simply put, development and adaptation have two different goals. In general, development is about improving the conditions of life for the global poor in some form or other. Adaptation implicitly suggests an effort to maintain what exists without letting it get worse . . . which sounds great until you think about the conditions of life in places like rural sub-Saharan Africa, where things are often very bad right now. A colleague of mine at USAID, in the context of a conversation about disaster relief and development, said it best: the mandate of disaster relief is to put things back to the way they were before the disaster. In a place like Haiti, that isn’t much of a mandate.
All of this becomes pretty self-evident after a moment of thought. Why, then, do we see the collapse of these two efforts into a single program in the world of development practice? For example, what does it mean when food security projects and programs start to define themselves in terms of adaptation? It seems to me that the goal shifts for these programs – from improvement to the maintenance of existing situations. If a development agency was there in the first place, the existing situation is likely unacceptable. To me, this means that this subtle shift in mission is also unacceptable.
Why am I going on about this? I am about to take up a job as the Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance. In this job, I will have to negotiate this very convergence at the program level. How we work out this convergence over the next few years will have tremendous implications for development efforts for decades to come – and therefore huge implications for billions of people around the world. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers . . . but I will think out loud in this space as we go.