A guest post by Jose Javier Lanza
We were to construct so-called “improved ovens” for a small village atop a mountain in an area called Ojojona.
This was one of our assignments in a Habitat for Humanity program that I participated in my home country of Honduras a few years ago. The cookstoves were designed to reduce smoke inhalation, and therefore the local population’s propensity to pulmonary diseases. This particular assignment was performed in coordination with the U.S. Peace Corp volunteers posted in the area because of their “familiarity with the local community’s needs.”
After hauling hundreds of bricks up the slender mountain paths, we spent several hours constructing five ovens. None of us volunteers possessed any significant construction experience.
As we were about to finish one of the ovens, one of the community’s inhabitants desperately warned us that the bricks had not been laid properly and that the oven would probably fall apart if it was not reassembled before the mortar dried.
Would you know how to build one of these? Photo from Trees, Water & People http://bit.ly/1yN2yER
To our surprise, one of the Peace Corp volunteers insisted that we leave the oven as it was, arguing that the locals would remain in misery with or without properly constructed ovens. Every single person in the group felt demoralized and offended at the fact that the Peace Corp volunteer seemed to be in our country only for the purpose of checking a box on his resume. Our trip was a failure, resources were wasted, and members of the local community were left frustrated and without help.
My story of this day sheds light on several key issues in development: organizational leadership is disconnected from the realities and challenges of people that are performing work on the ground; communication between collaborating parties is inadequate: and the input of people on the receiving end of aid is not taken into account in the formulation and execution of programs. The lack of accountability and down-up communication channels in the development sphere is perpetuating a vicious cycle that does little to improve the lives of the global poor.
That’s why it’s time to consider “customer satisfaction” in the development field, and the need to introduce communication mechanisms and cultural sensitivity into strategy and policy design.
For obvious reasons, gauging customer satisfaction in the international development sphere is a topic that is largely still avoided since organizations constantly fail to implement strategies that incorporate the manifest demands of impoverished communities. Doing so would interfere with the first world objectives of these organizations, including but not limited to their staff compositions, organizational missions, contract and supply structures, budgetary commitments to donors, etc.
The latter also implies that development aid inherently promotes the agendas of wealthy countries. Given their prosperity, these countries know what is best, and they therefore try to replicate the experience of their own democratic and economic development without considering the specific circumstances that exist in the places they are trying to help. As Nobel Prize winner Douglas North explains in his book Violence and Social Orders:
“To the extent that institutions are forced onto societies by international or domestic pressure but do not conform to the existing beliefs about economic, politic, and cultural systems, the new institutions are likely to work less well than the ones they replace. Worse, if these institutions undermine the political arrangements maintaining political stability, these new institutions may unleash disorder, making the society significantly worse off.”
The developed world asks itself why it has to upset a perfectly good business model that creates an abundance of jobs and business. Authorities and institutions also adopt a narrow development vision based on the notion that if something worked for wealthy nations in the past, it should work for emerging nations in the present.
The consequences of this short-sighted vision will manifest themselves in the measure that global inequalities translate into global tensions, violence, and conflict. A lot of this is happening in the world already.
How many more times does the development worker have to ignore the needs of the people he/she is helping? How much longer before we recognize the moral responsibility to ourselves and to humanity of making development a transparent and communicative process?
How many more new “improved ovens” will just end up falling apart?
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Jose Lanza, a Honduran national, is an economist and is currently pursuing his master’s degree in Public Relations and Corporate Communications at Georgetown University. He has previously worked in business and political consulting for Latin American clients in the US.
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