Shahana Siddiqui runs a critical eye over the do-gooding industry
Yet another meeting, yet another round of completely pointless discussion. Each session sounds the same: a model project, awareness campaign, broad national agenda, working with the government -- but no funding, no project; no one at the meeting can actually guarantee any funds -- must check with supervisor to see if funds are available; but this project is crucial for further empowerment, community mobilisation, strengthening institutions … so it goes.
Same old cha-nashta. Two pathetic pieces of apple stare at me with cheap biscuits to add to the palette. The cost-saving lemon tea gets cold while I listen to yet another soap-box monologue in a strange Bangla-English concoction, filled with clichés and development jargon.
Blankly facing the over-enthusiastic program officer from yet another terribly acronym-ed organisation, I start thinking of the e-mails I have to send, the friends I have to meet, and the groceries I have to buy.
Shahana's attention has left the meeting!
The monologue stops. Everyone is impressed because he used the terms "strategic planning," "consultations," "stakeholder engagement," and my personal favourite, "capacity building" here and there. The last 10 minutes gave no direction, no sense of what this organisation wants, needs, and can do. Yet, they have the audacity to ask for money.
Worse yet, there are people who are even considering giving them funds!
Welcome to a typical non-profit development sector meeting, oops, sorry, "consultation" -- where nothing really gets done but people love to hear themselves talk. We use every term in development lexicon, seriously believing that verbal diarrhea will end world poverty.
An entire industry has grown out of poverty in Bangladesh
All to often, I stare at many of such soap-box preaching program officers and wonder about their paths that brought us to yet another time wasting meeting.
Thank God for poverty
The development sector is in many waysBangladesh
The development sector is in many ways
We have successfully created a social science laboratory out of extreme poverty, violence against women and children, disaster (and now of course climate change), and overall lack of opportunities to a decent, respectful life of the millions who continue to live in horrible realities.
And we term this as "social science lab" with great pride. Along with the ethical contentions the term raises, what is more objectionable are the "scientists" who are carrying out these social experiments.
How many of these "scientists" are in fact trained in the ethics of social science? How many development practitioners are aware of how their programmatic interventions actually change people's lives and social fabric? How many of the development practitioners in every level, entered this sector with heart and not as a second choice to a government or corporate position?
The flip-side to these questions can very easily be, is it a pre-requisite for development practitioners to have the passion, the heart? Can this sector be treated like any other and hence the roles viewed like any other job? Is it time to change the entire attitude towards the development sector and approach it as "social business"?
The development sector, especially NGOs, is only recently being seen as a career path by the second and third generation of development practitioners.
The first generation of practitioners entering the sector had the spirit of the post-war reconstruction. Nationals secured positions in international agencies thanks to the disasters, death, and deluge of early 1970s that created positions to be filled by the country's educated class. Others created their own organisations working mainly on reconstruction and economic empowerment.
The "old-schoolers" always say that they stumbled upon this path. There was certainly a general socialist approach to development, the conviction to do something about the extreme poverty. But it was not a career any of them dreamed of.
In many ways, they are the ones who created this sector, gave us the likes of Brac, Proshika, Gonoshastro Kendra, Grameen Trust, and retained the national operations of the international organisations such as Save the Children Alliance, Care, Concern, Oxfam and of course, the global giants like the Word Bank and the UN.
The second generation is in many ways the worst of the lot. They neither had the aspirations of the first generation to reconstruct Bangladesh
NGOs of that time provided employment for many of the graduates of that era. Coming from various disciplines, they did not have the formal or professional training to work in the fields or at the policy level.
And now, with the third generation, my generation, development sector has become a career choice.
Public and private university students know more about the development sector and are able to make informed decisions on their career paths. Internship programs are now popular among all university students, both studying in Bangladesh
The aim, however, is always for that LSE, SOAS, Sussex Bangladesh
So, we take upon the "NGO look" (cotton sari, teep for the women and khadis for the men) during office hours and attend the "intellectual" gatherings at night. We are the coffee club debating, fusion music loving, Facebooking, Foucault- and Nietzsche-quoting, procession and art gallery attending, all-that-is-ethnic-is-beautiful generation.
While we partake in all that is "Bangali," we are also the best negotiators for the higher pay and better positions at the leading development organisations. Of course, we deserve the high pay irrespective of our limited experiences and even more limited access to the local communities. After all, we are English-speaking and Bengali-thinking -- the bridge between the East and the West -- the generation who will take Bangladesh
Making a big difference
Every year, NGOs employ thousands of project managers, field officers, researchers, evaluators, and other made-up titles that usually do not really mean anything, who are unable to think beyond their specific projects and intervention sites.
Every year, NGOs employ thousands of project managers, field officers, researchers, evaluators, and other made-up titles that usually do not really mean anything, who are unable to think beyond their specific projects and intervention sites.
From my own experience working with a range of agencies in the development sector, only a handful of the middle-managers are able to look beyond their specific projects and interventions.
Many of them, through their experiences in the fields, develop a strong sense of ethical questioning of whether all these fund pumping and project drafting and evaluating are, in fact, improving the lives of the people.
Changes in project -- additions, eliminations, alterations, no matter how big or small -- can have a significant impact on the beneficiaries. But how many practitioners understand the programs and their changes trickling down from some international consultant who typically spends three working days in Bangladesh
A consultant wrote it, so it must be true, it must be right. And if it isn't, we can always hire another international consultant two years into the project for an "external evaluation," and another one for a "progress report."
Not that the national consultants are any better.
Anyone with somewhat decent English writing and speaking skills can pose as some kind of expert, on violence against women today to investment climate tomorrow, to indigenous rights the day after. What is your development flavour of the month?
If we are not running after foreign consultants or trying to make quick bucks from our own consultancies, we are looking out for new positions in some other institution.
There is a saying in this sector: There are no goodbyes -- will see you at another organisation in about two years!
Professionals hit the ceilings too fast without any provisions for upward movement. The typical career trajectory is: two years at a local, unknown NGO, then two more with a project office of any of the leading international organisations; if performance is strong, a short-term contract with the funding organisation; and then after over four years of hard work, low pay and mediocre management of a project, the ultimate entry onto the World Bank or UN gravy train!
Once there, we forget about the years of complaining about the two big brothers (especially boro dada World Bank); we forget about the anti-post-Washington Consensus papers written during the masters program, and articles in The Daily Star blasting the neo-liberal institutions.
That was once upon an ideal time. We didn't know much then. We didn't know any better, we didn't know about the salary structure and the fringe benefits!
Somewhere between job changing in the name of career building, doing consultancies in the name of becoming an expert, and acquiring the second postgraduate degree (with elaborate titles with "development" neatly inserted somewhere) from a "foreign" university, and all the sitting, eating, meeting, over a decade goes by, and ideals and beliefs disappear. We want to believe we still do this for the people, for those brown faces we put up in our reports and slideshows, but truth be told, it stopped being about them a long time ago.
Everything written above is a testimony of everything I am today. I still try to remember what did that 18 year-old think when she held the slum children with boils everywhere and came home and cried to her mother?
The tears, the fire, the impatience, the determination, the conviction to make a change, to make it happen: where did it all go? How did we become so desensitised? When did it become about a career based on the people but no longer about the people? When did we learn to trick ourselves to believe that we were in fact doing good, developing our nation?
Shahana Siddiqui is a "Development Practitioner".
Shahana Siddiqui is a "Development Practitioner".
Yeah, it's good to see a thoughtful reflection of work in the development field, and of course, this is applicable in countries other than Bangladesh.
ReplyDeleteBut it's also important to note that what's written above doesn't apply only to the development field. Most of us, no matter what field we go into, are idealistic and enthusiastic when we head to college at 18 and into the workforce in our early 20s. And most of us get disillusioned somewhere along the way - salary and advancement does become important, because you have a family and bills to pay and real responsibilities. So, when you reach that point, while looking back on your youthful self, it's also important to think - would I be doing much better if I was doing something else? Are those on the career track in the oil industry making humanity better? In banking? Entertainment? Retail? Even education?
So it's good to be self-critical and reflective. But also good to maintain some perspective. Not all development projects are wasteful, not all "capacity building" is only in a donor report. It's important to focus on what one oneself can do to make sure your projects are achieving the changes they're meant to, but in relative terms, the development field is doing less harm than many others. As a career choice, it's good that young, ambitious and intelligent people are entering the field. Better they think about how to develop professionally by improving people's lives than, say, how to get more fossil fuels out of the earth. It's all relative.
Of course there is a degree of disillusionment, and as you say this is part of ageing and occurs in any career. But does the situation that is referred to here reflect something deeper: that actually the problem is that many of the staff that are in the sector feel no disillusionment precisely because there is less idealism and enthusiasm in the development sector, and salary and advancement has been their priority from the outset?
ReplyDeleteWhether or not you can do be doing "better" things inside or outside of the development sector is very hard to judge: what is important to consider is that if you are in the oil, banking, entertainment etc. there is a clear accountability to shareholders and performance is monitored by profits and dividends. Against that you can clearly judge your performance and advance up the career scale accordingly with the associated perks. In the development sector accountability ultimately is to beneficiaries, but it is self-monitored and regulated process. Therefore staff need to maintain the responsibility to serve beneficiaries alongside any personal ambitions that they may have, and staff's commitment and career advancement should be relative to the former. However, the lack of regulation in the sector exposes it to potentially allowing that the latter be the main driver.
Of course there is a degree of disillusionment, and as you say this is part of ageing and occurs in any career. But does the situation that is referred to here reflect something deeper: that actually the problem is that many of the staff that are in the sector feel no disillusionment precisely because there is less idealism and enthusiasm in the development sector, and salary and advancement has been their priority from the outset?
ReplyDeleteWhether or not you can do be doing "better" things inside or outside of the development sector is very hard to judge: what is important to consider is that if you are in the oil, banking, entertainment etc. there is a clear accountability to shareholders and performance is monitored by profits and dividends. Against that you can clearly judge your performance and advance up the career scale accordingly with the associated perks. In the development sector accountability ultimately is to beneficiaries, but it is self-monitored and regulated process. Therefore staff need to maintain the responsibility to serve beneficiaries alongside any personal ambitions that they may have, and staff's commitment and career advancement should be relative to the former. However, the lack of regulation in the sector exposes it to potentially allowing that the latter be the main driver.
Gotta agree with Shahana here. And Max, might I add that like most expats, you're being just a tad naive? Let me explain my categorical generalization:
ReplyDeleteOn paper, it sounds great when you say staff need to maintain the responsibility to serve beneficiaries bla bla but what happens when the wall between beneficiary and staff is permeable and completely artificial?
I cut my teeth in development by working at one of the biggest ngos in bd, and in a very short span of time, I was more bothered by the plight of field level staff than the beneficiaries they were serving.
Most of my colleagues worked around 16 hours a day, earned less than 80 bucks a month, had fewer than a week of paid leave, lived far from their nearest family members (I had one colleague who hadn't seen his wife in two years), and had little or no recourse to career advancement in the organization. One guy had worked for my ngo for 8 years and had accumulated a whopper of a salary increase amounting to 20 bucks. All this in the nation's (world's?) premier ngo, after working her butt of getting a second master's degree from dhaka university and doing ten years of field work in fuckin nilfamari.
Obviously, in my little world, I'm not really clear as to who the "primary" beneficiaries are of the project or why we should feel chagrin at the notion that in a country where unemployment is almost 70%, a "development" worker thinks of his own ass first rather then glow with pleasure at how his little micro credit loan is going to change the face of poverty in bd.
I think anonymous above summed it up best when she said ngos do "less harm" than an oil company. When i first signed up for this gig, it seemed that's the least ngos should be doing. Now in my dotage, i really don't think it's true.