I have started all of these posts more than once, and I never seem to get them fully written up. Therefore, some half-baked ideas for your consideration.
1. How I learned to love the MDGs
I used to think the Millennium Development Goals were a cruel cheat. I thought that since they were set too high to actually achieve, they were dooming developing country governments to failure and disillusionment. It turns out, though, that governments are used to missing their targets. And the MDGs make sure that everyone is aiming for really good targets. So I take it all back. The MDGs are pure genius.
2. Why I don’t hire development studies majors
Because the degree doesn’t leave you with any actual skills – maybe it would be useful for someone who’s been working in development and needs a frame. But it is not preparation for international development work. Learning a whole chunk of development theory has remarkably little to do with the actual work of improving lives and creating better opportunity.
3. All volunteers are not the same
Whether or not you get paid has nothing to do with your skill set. Volunteers are capable of doing vital work extremely well. However, they may also be unskilled, unqualified, and damaging to the programs and communities that take them on. It is very hard to use volunteers well because they tend to want a short-term commitment so you lose a lot of time training and integrating them, and because often people with relevant skills get paid jobs in development. Long-term volunteers are more likely to be useful than short-term volunteers. Volunteering has more impact the closer to home it gets, because the learning curve gets shorter and shorter.
4. International development is difficult
It’s hard, it’s expensive, and we have trouble knowing what works. We make the same mistakes over and over. I have seen individual projects that actually succeeded but I honestly don’t know what theory of development is most likely to be true. (Though I do think people believe anything they see in a soap opera. Is that a development theory?) This field feels sometimes like medicine back in the age of leeches and bloodletting and I have no idea if Jeff Sachs, Paul Collier, or Bill Easterly is going to turn out to be Louis Pasteur or Linus Pauling.
5. The official list of crushes on development thinkers, as confessed to on Twitter:
- Hans Rosling
- Mohammad Yunus
- Amartya Sen
- Ruth Levine
- Robert Chambers
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Photo credit: Wikipedia – Doesn’t Linus Pauling look handsome and idealistic? No clue at all he’d turn into a Vitamin C quack at the end of an illustrious career.
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Sure, development studies does not teach you how to be an M&E officer or a programme manager or anything else for that matter. No course alone can turn you into a professional. But I think your stance is a little harsh. I see value in getting to grips with development theory as being able to appreciate the origins of ‘international development’ as a discipline makes one much more reflexive and critical, and better equipped to deal with the many ethical questions that development constantly poses. Most courses now also contain specialist technical elements and more applied and even field based components. So yes, maybe if by the work of improving lives you mean someone who can drill wells the theories of development are not important, but if its a well-rounded development professional you want who is able to understand the bigger picture, then that’s where the further education in development studies comes in. (Not to mention that it separates applicants from the many well-meaning people who want to dabble in aid work).
Okay, that’s a fair point. I may be unfairly characterizing development studies programs. I haven’t looked at them seriously since I was applying for grad school twelve years ago.
Alanna,
Perhaps you could write a post about how the grad school opportunities align with different career paths in international development. I know a few folks who I think made a mistake going to law school, and I myself struggled with questions of business school versus an MPA program. Obviously, IDEV is a big world, but perhaps you could shed some light on some of the different treks and the most useful skills to pick up?
Publius – I will do my best. In the meantime, this is a great resource for that kind of information: http://humanitarianjobs.wordpress.com/
From the outset: I did a masters in Development Management at the LSE. I hated it, but I believe that it was a necessary evil which combined with 2 stints of very long-term volunteering has allowed me to finally establish myself in the sector. Why?
A course in International Development is one part of preparation of preparing for international development work. I had a conversation with a friend the other day from the UN who was telling me about this wonderful method that he had discovered in his community workshop called “participation”, which I find completely amateur. There is a clear difference between those development workers (in their 1st or 2nd contracted post) who have a development qualification and those that don’t, in that the latter fail to grasp the basic assumptions that are required for the work, and that impacts on their work. Its the kind of approach that gives (certainly the NGO sector) such a bad name, and needless to say my friend had never heard of Robert Chambers.
Like Tomafg says, it’s incredibly valuable in order to be able to place the work you are doing within the larger context, to be clear on where the development sector is and where it is coming from, and to be able to more rapidly detect the shifts which help to improve the way we approach and do our work. I work for an NGO in South Asia with an office full of 50 year olds who have been doing this work for 20+ years. They are still discussing whether human rights is a suitable approach to follow in programming which I find pretty depressing.
In my opinion, if you refuse to hire someone with an academic qualification then you will fail to hire anyone under 30. Its the basic requirement to get into the sector now.
As I was trying (and failing) to tweet with Alanna, I don’t really understand why people are down on specialist degrees – and if you’re not going to go for someone with a development degree for a development job, exactly what you (ie those in development in general) are really looking for.
It strikes me that there is a catch-22 in play – someone goes to do a specialist degree or postgrad in the hope that it will be something of an assistance to get onto the career ladder. They then find it is not (maybe due to the level of experience expected even for an entry position) and cannot find any relevant local work with which to build up experience because the degree is too specialised.
Also, presumably, the people Max describes above do not have these kinds of degrees (or do they?). Would they be employed if they showed up today with the CV they had when they started?
After some more thought in response to these really interesting comments – I think it depends on where you are in the food chain. If you’re working for a donor, then general knowledge of development as a field is useful, since you are handling a big range of large things.
If you’re working for an NGO or a company or anyone actually trying to implement a development project, then no project is going to be about “development.” It’s going to be about health, or education, or empowerment, or whatever. And to do that, you need to understand the technical topic. A development degree does not give you what you need to run, say, an agriculture project. Of course, an ag degree alone doesn’t do that either. You need some knowledge of both.
@Alanna: I worked for 2 years with an NGO that worked on the reform of the Temporary Isolation Centre (about 3 minutes walk from Marian’s cafe) as part of the larger reform of the Tajik juvenile justice system. Over that time I was required to effectively manage a partnership government institutions that were equally reliant on centralised decision-making as they were on UN funding and local NGO assistance. Its true, a lot of the JJ issues I learnt on the job, but the basic principles of how to ensure that the tripartite relationship did not fundamentally undermine the role of the state in upholding the rights of the kids that came into the system was gained through my masters.
@Joe: The people I am talking about do not have masters or any such qualification. They have “experience”. My problem is that unless you are conscientious agent and willing to pro-actively keep up with the changes in the system, or pay to have an introduction through an academic course, you can only implement what you know which in the case that I see is too often early-1990s development approaches from when the person first came into the sector. And also employing who you know, which is often their colleagues who came through the system with them and are equally clueless.
Max – I have walked by that center many times; I work out of the office in the back room of LGD when my consulting gigs are remote. And your anecdote is convincing – I am starting to thing that there is a lot more value to these degrees than I thought…
Interesting comments to be sure, but I perhaps take exception to the generalisations some commentors are making from their own personal experiences.
I know dozens and dozens of very good people working in various angles of development with and without development degrees. But I think Alanna’s initial critique is a fair one that a development degree does not necessarily prepare you really for any real world experience. It can help, as one commentor said, but I really don’t think it holds you back with one. Especially because breaking in, with those 2 long-volunteer experiences, is all-so-often necessary. Once you’ve done all that time, the degree – whatever degree – can be very secondary. This is double because “development”, as Alanna says, is such a vast, vast field and because all the positions within development are even more specialised – programme management, monitoring, fundraising, programme design, agriculture specialists, water specialists, doctors, financiers and microfinance bankers, social workers, trainers, etc. Maybe we need someone who can crunch MS Excel budgets like a wizard and not an expertise in human rights approaches. Or maybe we need someone with a serious public health background or someone who can do logistics. Or someone who knows business plans and can teach people that. Maybe we need a monitoring officer, but maybe that person also needs to be able to do social media marketing. It gets complicated quickly.
Another food for thought: my Indian colleagues almost universally don’t have development degrees in our Indian office. Many are social workers, because that is the schooling pathway there, some are from business. We have journalists and several technical people and some with economics backgrounds, all passionate about their work and skilled in their ways. In our London office we have a lawyer, a geneticist and an engineer by schooling among our staff. With a good organisational structure and mission, you can bring all those views to the goal of helping the poor.
So take a development degree, or don’t. The more the merrier! It probably can’t hurt, but don’t expect to run to the front of the line without significant experience.
As an outsider looking in, reading this commentary is exhilarating! Seeing the give and take between you and your readers, I feel a bit like an eavesdropper, but it gives me much hope to witness a conversation in which the participants listen and learn from one another without apparent attachment to their original views. Those of us in the non-development sector could take lessons from you.
I’m with you on the MDGs – grew to love them when I began to see them as the only real attempt to benchmark and then track global progress against agreed indicators. They give us something to point to when our new government begins to reinvest all our ODA into ‘economic development opportunities for private/public partnerships’ also known as helping NZ businesses establish themselves in the economies of our Pacific neighbours.
You’re probably a little tired of reading defenses of International Development degrees, but I’m going to go ahead and add my two cents worth anyway (but keep in mind that I’m biased, as I am currently a student in an ID master’s program… and this is probably also an attempt to make myself feel ok about pursuing this degree!):
I think very few people believe that earning a degree is the only thing required to be a professional of any sort. Education AND work experience is necessary in order to be a good lawyer, doctor, businessman/woman, educator, engineer, etc. ID professionals, as far as I see, are not so different.
It’s probably also fair to say that ID programs have come a long way in the past decade. The program I’m currently in is focused more heavily on practice than on theory. Most courses are taught by ID practitioners, each student is required to choose a specialty area, meet a foreign language requirement, and complete courses in management, policy, and methods.
I am not going to defend development studies, but I do have an observation about all this: exactly the same critiques were originally levelled by clinical scientists and practitioners against… public health studies.
I agree with McKay that someone from any academic background can be an excellent development worker, and that your formal university education becomes less relevant the longer you spend in the field (incidentally, I also found on my last work trip to India I also found that a lot of the (young and female) staff were also trained as social workers. Incidentally my bachelors degree was in political science.
My issue that is that the idea that staff develop and specialise further in the field only applies for those who are conscientious enough to remain committed to the development sector and its goals, and not those who are in the sector for a career. A development degree or masters I think is an excellent filter for identifying the former over the latter. An article doing the rounds this week in Dhaka I think highlights my point well: http://www.maximobo.com/2010/07/confessions-of-development-practitioner.html
On the MDGs topic, I share the common worries about unreachable targets, etc; but love that it galvanized the sector to adopt more or less a common taxonomy.
[…] curriculars. There are also masters degrees in global development (DESTIN at LSE comes to mind), which aren't for everyone, etc. Also, of course, look at Ag Econ and Applied Econ programs, which often send more graduates […]
[…] moments when you see that Alanna was dead on when she wrote (several times, actually) about how projects work, while grand theories and ivory tower pontification and abstracted debates.. er, not so […]