Author: Alanna Shaikh

The Field

By Alanna Shaikh | | 37 Comments |

man in a corn field

Recently, the IPA blog and the Ghana Diary blog brought up an interesting discussion about the term “in the field.” They questioned its appropriateness. The core of the argument was that the phrase creates a sense of otherness. Specifically, if you’re a local partner in a development project, how do you feel when your own home is referred to as “the field”? What does that say about the true nature of your partnership?

I think I agree with Noompa at Ghana Diary. It’s hard to disagree with the scenario that he lays out: it is alienating in the word’s truest sense to hear your own territory referred to as the intimidating unknown.

It has always seemed silly to me when people refer to my own “field experience.” I’ve spent eight out of the last ten years of my life living in Central Asian capitals. I’ve spent more of my adult life in Tashkent than any other city. And let me stress that I have been living in capitals. I’ve been in houses and apartments, often nicer than anything I lived in as a grad student. I’ve had heat, hot water, and even air conditioning on a mostly-regular basis. DC felt a whole lot more like roughing it than Central Asia ever has.

Calling time in the developing world “field time” implies two things to me: that it is temporary, and that it is difficult. Both of those are often false.

But  is “the field” a problematic term that serves a useful purpose? Are there other, better ways to convey the idea? I think there are. I suspect it’s one of those catch-all terms that serves less purpose than we think.

I mentioned a while ago that I no longer use the word “beneficiaries” unless I am contractually obligated to do it. It has been a hard transition, as a writer. There’s no real synonym for beneficiaries.  Instead, every time I am writing, I have to stop and think about who the person or group I am referring to really is. Someone who has benefited from an intervention? Partner NGO? A physician we trained? It takes time, but I think the thought and effort has made me better at what I do.

Dumping the term “field” might work the same way. Julian Jamison’s field research in North Gulu has nothing to do with my cushy life in Dushanbe or Ashagabat. Lumping the two things together is intellectually lazy. Doing the work to think of better vocabulary wouldn’t hurt.

So, for me, it comes down to this question: is there a non-lazy use for the term “in the field”? If so, what is it?

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(photo credit: Diva Eva)

Chosen because it’s a field, and it’s in upstate New York, where I grew up.

Me in Other Places

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

dollar bills and vicodin

I’ve done a lot of writing lately, and I wanted to highlight a few pieces I’m especially proud of.

I guest-posted on the Results for Development Institute blog, about how we can encourage drug companies to develop medicines for the poor, not just the rich. Most of my writing for the last few months has been technical documents and reporting for my day job, and short, snappy blog pieces. It was nice to sink my teeth into something a little longer and more thoughtful, and it made me envy all the CGD folks who get to think for a living.

Over at UN Dispatch, I offered unsolicited advice to the soon-to-be-established South African aid agency.

Finally, in my weekly post at End the Neglect, I talked about corruption and transparency in global health.

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(photo credit: bryan_chan)

Are we making it all up?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 16 Comments |

Note: I had to restore my site from an old backup to solve a link injection problem. I had to republish this post, and lost all the great comments. I’m sorry!

A subscriber to the International Development Careers List asked me a question that really wasn’t about jobs the other day. I figured I’d answer it here, on the blog, instead of on the list. He asked me

“Reading on to all the writing around how we “don’t know” how to solve / what works for global poverty/issues and that to some degree a lot of the agencies are just trying out methods?”

If I parse the question correctly, he wants to know – are development organizations just making all this up? If we don’t know what works, then why are we doing it?

This is where I stop to point out that I am not a development economist. I am not an economist at all. I took four college-level classes in econ as an undergrad, and I’ve spent the last decade and a bit working for development projects. So all I have is a gut feeling and a resume.  That being said, I do think about this stuff. As does almost everyone I know who works in this field.

I don’t think that anyone is making their programs up. I think that sometimes we delude ourselves about the quality of our evidence. We are so sure we have the right approach that we start mistaking all our intermediate results for actual impact. So a lot of programs end up based on doubtful evidence. Especially big, broad-based programs intended to reduce poverty or achieve some other massive societal goal.

Even if you’re committed to making all decisions based on evidence, it’s hard to measure if that kind of program works. We can end up using proxy measurements that may or may not be accurate.

Next, I think we have evidence for a lot of smaller, targeted programs. We know how to improve child survival. We know how to improve school attendance. We know how to improve the agricultural productivity of small farms. We know quite clearly what it takes to do specific things that we hope will then reduce poverty. We just don’t know that these kinds of specific things actually do reduce poverty.

In the end, I am not sure it matters. While we shouldn’t fund poverty reduction programs if they don’t actually reduce poverty, that argument doesn’t hold true for, say, bringing down the maternal mortality rate. Fewer dead mothers is an inherent good. I don’t really care if it also helps with poverty reduction.

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(photo credit: fdecomite)

Jargon of the Whatever

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |

It’s been a long time since I did a jargon of the day post. Years, maybe. Today, though, I offer you a list of useful geographic slang for international development concepts. That doesn’t really make sense, I know. Just skip to the list; you’ll see what I mean:

Geneva Conventions: Govern international law on the treatment of victims of war.

Warsaw Convention: Protects your luggage during air travel, or more accurately, protects airlines from liability for your luggage.

Vienna Convention: Treatment of diplomatic representatives while overseas – aka why USAID cars can’t be stopped by the police unless they want to be.

Copenhagen Convention: 2009 UN agreement on climate change.

Copenhagen consensus: A list of efficient ways to spend development aid, produced by a think-tank in Copenhagen.

Paris declaration: Widely ignored agreement on better donor coordination of aid.

Cairo: The program of action agreed to at the 1994 international conference on population and development. Represented a major shift from thinking about population numbers to thinking about reproductive health.

Alma-Ata: 1978 conference that produced the Alma-Ata declaration which affirmed the importance of primary health care in achieving “health for all.”

Accra Accord: 2008 commitment to promoting south-south trade among developing countries.

Accra Agenda for Action: Widely ignored follow-up to the Paris declaration.

Mexico City Policy: Also known as the global gag rule, an intermittent US government policy that forbade any entity getting US funding from promoting, providing, or even discussing abortion.

Kyoto:  The Kyoto Protocol adopted by the UN in 1997 and intended to fight global warming.

So, I’m an aid worker

By Alanna Shaikh | | 11 Comments |

george clooney in a safari vest

I’ve spent a long time arguing that I’m not an aid worker. I do my job in an office; I’m not on any kind of front line. I am not an emergency responder, and I don’t put my life at risk for my job. I’ve always said that I work in international development. I have never thought of myself as someone who “works in aid.” I work in global health, on health systems strengthening. When I’m not doing donor reporting, I don’t think all that much about the source of the funds for my work.

But the fact is, it’s kind of presumptuous to say that I work in international development. As Lee Crawfurd pointed out in response to my last blog post, aid and projects implemented with aid funding are one part of international development. Economic and trade policy are other, more important parts. You can, and do, get development without aid. I’m pretty sure you don’t get it without economic growth.

Lee elaborated on his point in an email to me:

“Policy reforms by the US and UK governments on non-aid issues could have substantially bigger impacts upon the lives of the global poor than all of the aid in the world. We should not be content with just doing aid well, and we should not be giving the impression to the public that they can just donate something and then forget about it.”

So, since I work on aid-funded projects, in my own little corner of trying to promote international development, there’s no real way around it: I am, in fact, an aid worker. When you work exclusively in aid, it’s easy to forget what a small part of the whole you are. (I decided not to edit the last post to fix my language, because if I am going to make sloppy mistakes in public, the least I can do is leave them out there so other people can avoid repeating them.)

Another useful thing that came up in my last post: Matthew Greenall reminded us that there are actually two metastories about aid, not just one. I was writing about the positive metastory. There is also the negative frame: aid doesn’t work, aid can never work, either because everything is too screwed up for any intervention of any kind to make a difference or because all the actors providing aid are stupid and incompetent. We’ve seen that metastory a lot about Haiti.

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photo credit

The Story

By Alanna Shaikh | | 22 Comments |

I just figured out why people call me controversial, when I hold the same opinions as pretty much everyone else who works in international development. (I’ve written about this before; I am just the one who writes this all down.)

It’s because my views don’t match the media narrative about development – the metastory. And unless you’re done an unusually pragmatic course on international development, or actually worked in this field, the only story you have about international development is that one you learn from the media.

Nick Kristof is the most prominent example of the typical media narrative: whites in shining armor, helpless poor people in need of our charity, simple programs with immediate, long-term impact. Basically, international development is easy if you just care enough and are ready to spend some money. Good solutions are right around the corner!

Nobody who actually works in this field believes the metastory any more. But the media keep looking for that story, because it’s the one that the reporters all know. A few journalists – Glenna Gordon, Jina Moore, and Stephanie Strom come to mind – have been writing about development long enough that they know they field, too. They write different stories.

But the others, the ones working international affairs or disasters or whatever – they come looking for the same old story and they find it. (Penelope Trunk has a good take on this phenomenon.) I do a lot more media than ever gets published; no one ever wants my quotes because they don’t match the metastory.

Three of the topics no one wants my opinion on:

1.       Innovation – to use a deeply American sports metaphor, focusing exclusively on innovation is like throwing a Hail Mary pass when we ought to just use our running game. [1] Spend too much time chasing innovation, and you run the risk of failing to support the boring programs that are proven to work.

2.       Crowdsourcing – I think it’s just one more way of collecting data. And the problem with data has never been getting enough of it – the problem has always been getting the right data and then knowing how to use it. A new data collection method doesn’t solve the problem of what to do with it once collected.

3.       The future of international development – It’s not mobile technology, social entrepreneurship, or heat stable vaccines. It’s partnership, where donors and recipients recognize that both gain from the process. It will mean businesses getting involved in development because they’ll benefit from it, and the slow erosion of exploitative fundraising efforts because the communities who benefit will help to design the campaigns. This isn’t going to happen overnight, but it is what the future will look like.

Those aren’t exactly radical, contrarian opinions. Everyone I work with would agree with me, as would almost every development professional I know. But they’re not the story.

[1] Random aside: I grew up watching American football with my dad. We lived in Syracuse but cheered for the Dallas Cowboys because it was the 80s, he was an immigrant, and the Cowboys were America’s team. By the time my brother hit elementary school, we discovered Central New Yorkers supported the Buffalo Bills and switched allegiances.

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photo credit: wili_hybrid

A few disjointed thoughts

By Alanna Shaikh | | 7 Comments |

Some disjointed thoughts that won’t quite grow into blog posts. In no particular order or relationship to each other.

1.       I spent my lunch time in our office kitchen, eating some kind of meat soup, potatoes, and carrots. I listened to my colleagues chat in Russian about minor domestic topics. I finished my meal with black tea and sour Russian bread. I’ve spent the last decade of lunches like this. I will spend 2011 the same way.

2.       People need narrative to make sense of their lives. If you don’t have a story, your life is just a series of disconnected events. If you help someone find the right story, their life will change. Religious people know this, even if that is not how they see things.

3.       I worry about inequality, all the time. I worry that income inequality, in particular, is going to destroy everything good that human beings have managed to build. But I am a health professional, so I focus on inequalities in health and access to health care. It’s what I can do. It is not enough, but it is something.

4.       My brother and his wife are visiting from the US for the holidays. I have lost the knack of relating to non-expatriate Americans and I keep forgetting to give them information. They want to know stuff all the time. What’s for dinner? Who will be at the party we’re going to tonight? Expats just assume that either no one knows or it doesn’t matter that much. You don’t really have to tell them anything except the time of the next scheduled event. I am pretty sure my brother and his wife are the normal ones in this situation.

5.       I worry about water all the time. We are clearly using up and destroying all of our clean water. What happens next?

6.       Some Excel tricks: If you’re dealing with a big spreadsheet full of text, like a workplan or a logframe, it’s always easier to review column by column than line by line. I wish I had learned this years ago. Also, you can spellcheck an excel spreadsheet. And if it has any text in it, you should.

7.       Is everything getting worse now that it has been before, or is it just that we have more information about all the bad stuff? Aside from climate change, which is clearly getting worse.

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photo credit: stagewhisper