Exploring the Practical Challenges of Creating Positive Change in Development
Parker Mitchell, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Engineers Without Borders, Canada

Roberta Balstad: I think something is happening here. The focus on this session is on challenging human behavior and perspectives, and obviously people are coming up from the audience and wanting to take part. So that's a good thing.

For our fourth speaker in this panel we're very fortunate to have Parker Mitchell with us. He is co-founder and CEO of Engineers Without Borders in Canada. This is Canada's fast growing international development organization which was founded a brief five and a half years ago, and since then has sent over 150 volunteers to work between four and thirty-six months with partner organizations in Africa. The Engineers Without Borders Canada has a network of 17,000 members dedicated to helping to eradicate global poverty. Parker Mitchell has two bachelors degrees, one in engineering and one is arts, and has a masters degree in international development from the University of Cambridge. Prior to his work with Engineers Without Borders he was a consultant with McKinsey and Company and worked with Magna, an auto parts manufacturer. He was featured by Time magazine as one of Canada's next generation social leaders. Parker Mitchell.

Parker Mitchell: Well thank you very much, Roberta, and another heartfelt congratulations to everyone here at the Earth Institute who's just done a terrific job with the conference.

It's a great pleasure for me to have a chance to share some thoughts with you today. Normally I spend my time crisscrossing Canada talking to a lot of enthusiastic young people and trying to share with them the passion that I have about the problems in the world, but more importantly that solutions that are out there, and the opportunity that each and every one of us has to make a difference. And obviously because I spend all my time doing this I'm an optimist. But at the same time I recognize that the actual implementation of the enthusiasm, particularly among a new generation of people who are trying to get involved in development, that implementation challenge is a real challenge, and so that's what I want to focus my remarks upon today.

These remarks basically are derived from the experience of our volunteers. As Roberta mentioned we had 170 volunteers overseas. They've worked with partner organizations that range from the World Bank all the way down to a tiny community organization, or many tiny community organizations in different countries, so we've had a range of experiences with actually implementing projects.

So what I'd like to talk about today is understanding the importance of defining the problem. To me the central problem isn't about the existence of poverty, it's about why poverty reduction isn't happening more quickly. And we hear lots about the need for more money. We hear about the need for more ideas, for a different perspective, basically some smart people coming up with new technical solutions, and both of those are absolutely critical and needed. But what I'm here to share with you today is the need to potentially shift our focus, to have a better understanding of what happens on the ground, a better understanding of how project ideas actually become impact. I'll term this implementation.

Basically implementation is the difficulty of translating ideas and money into impact. This implementation is not necessarily very sexy. It's about overwhelming the nitty-gritty details, for example, trying to figure out how farmers can use existing farming techniques to improve their yields in sub-Saharan Africa, it's about how to ensure that a community group in Burkina Faso, a woman's association, actually can buy and run a food processing machine for their community, it's about how to ensure that an entrepreneur can successfully offer technical services to their community. So implementation might not be sexy, but it's also not very easy. It's usually location-specific, which means that a project that might work in say northern Ghana won't work a few kilometers away in southern Burkina Faso. It's usually dynamic, meaning that it has to change as the circumstances change, even in one particular area. And so because of that there's no recipe that can be handed down from a headquarters to a field office to implement. It inherently involves understanding each community's particularities, and incorporating those particularities into a project design and project implementation. So when I talk about implementation I don't mean taking an idea and just implementing it willy-nilly on the ground, I'm talking about the difficulties facing the hundreds of thousands of development workers who are at the field level as they try and take good ideas and they try and take money and translate that into positive change.

So you might be asking yourselves how does this tie into the theme of the panel? Well, development is about promoting positive change, obviously. We also know that change is happening all the time on the ground, and it's our contention that the central idea behind change is understanding how people's behaviors change. Individuals' behaviors are driven by any number of factors, but ultimately the process of development either involves or, as we would argue, is driven by people changing their behaviors. In our experience in these 170 different projects that we've worked on if we don't sufficiently understand how behavior changes then the project tends to fail, or the results tend to be not as positive as they could be.

Now I'm not suggesting that this is a wildly different approach from what's been going on before, what I'm suggesting is that this is an important addition, this real deep understanding of local situations and local behavior change would really help improve the success of projects. A lot of the projects that we've heard about today this doesn't seem to apply to because there is a deep connection on the ground, but I can tell you as a practitioner there's a whole bunch of projects that come planned from the capitals, the Western capitals, or even the developing country capitals, that don't seem to be relevant to the actual communities when you work with them. So I hope this illustrate this main theme with some examples from the field around three big ideas that I want to share with you.

The first is that low capital technologies and techniques are available as viable solutions. The second, a very important point, is that non what I'll call economically rational influences are big drivers of behavior change, and we need to understand those. And third, and this is a bit of a debatable issue, that behavior change actually leads and doesn't lag development.

So let me talk about the first example. I'm just going to focus on the question of water. We've heard about how difficult it is to get access to water for irrigation. I'm going to focus on water for drinking. We know that 1.1 billion people don't have access to clean water, but what we might not realize is how easily affordable some solutions are. Let's take solar pasteurization. This is nothing more complicated than taking water in a bottle like this and leaving it out in the sun for three days. The time temperature curve is enough to kill off all the pathogens that will cause disease. This is not an investment that people can't afford to make, this is a behavior change but not one that is widespread at all.

Another example, you see here someone promoting in Zambia what's called the Clorin. It's a simple bottle of chlorine solution people can buy for about twenty cents, and they can purify all the household drinking water for their family for a couple of months on this twenty cents. Again, a simple solution, not even enough money to constitute an investment, it's more a behavior change, and it's not spread.

So I had a couple of more examples on farming habits, but I think Frank covered them well yesterday, so I'm going to focus more on just summarizing that it's not enough to have a good idea, one must make sure that that good idea spreads.

So let's look at some of the particular challenges to how good ideas can spread. In the course of understanding the motivations that lead to behavior change, our volunteers have noticed in the project planning process a trend of underestimating the non-rational influences that drive behavior change. And the illustration that I'm going to use is on conservation farming, which is slightly different from conservation agriculture that Johann mentioned. Conservation farming is a simple technique designed to increase food security in southern Africa. The idea is deceptively simple. By digging basins, which you can see illustrated up there, and planting in those basins, as well as some small changes on inputs that you use and timing for the planting, you can have massive yield increases. Experimental farmers also showed tremendous potential. And so when I was out in the field in Zambia about eight months ago it was surprising to talk to extension officers saying this technology, or this technique, wasn't being adopted by farmers. And the question that I asked myself was why? One clue came when I was talking to the person who was the director of the conservation farming promotion unit at the local agricultural station. He has a farm, and so I asked him if he used conservation farming on his own farm, and he laughed and said, “Oh, I tried it, but of course I don't, it's way too difficult.” The problem is that this is backbreaking work. The farmers are encouraged to dig the basins before the rains come when the soils are very hard, and it's extremely difficult. So in theory this technique overcomes it because the basins are dug in the same space every year, and so the soil gets looser and it becomes easier for the farmers to dig. But it's very difficult to explain this to a farmer if you're an extension officer, to explain that you just need to do the exact same thing that you did last year, dig the basin, but actually it's going to be easier this year than next year. [He meant to say “last year.”] So this illustrates that a better understanding of how the local farmers will perceive the labor difficulties might be able to overcome a challenge.

There's a lot of other examples that some of these extension officers mentioned. The second was that there's a high perceived risk. Small holder farmers in Africa Farmers, because they are living right on the edge, have a very low risk tolerance. This might be surprising but they are basically so dependent on food if they try a new technique that fails they've basically lost enough of their harvest that might be what's important to carry them through the last couple of months before the next harvest comes, so they have a very low risk tolerance, and the change from digging in rows, which is traditional farming, to digging in basins is a big difference, it's a big perceived risk, and therefore people don't adopt it, or are more hesitant to adopt it.

The second challenge is that it's a fairly complex technology and it requires getting a series of techniques correct, and the timing has to be right as well. And so if you don't have that degree of precision the yields can be less than expected. So there's a high rate of farmers who will try it but won't quite get it right, and therefore will de-adopt it.

There's a fourth component, which was mentioned by Johann as well, which is that it's only in years of low rainfall that this technology shows the greatest yield benefits. Usually it's the year after the lowest rainfall that people are interested in adopting this, and statistically there's no more or less of a chance of the next year being a low rainfall year, and in a normal rainfall year it's hard for the farmer who's just adopted this technique to see that there are advantages greater than the farmer who's planted in rows. So there's an issue that the relative advantage isn't as obvious to the farmer.

The fifth and final point I think is actually even more important, and that is the motivations that farmers have to change their behavior. One issue is that conservation farming is not prestigious in the areas where we work. The idea that farmers are trying to pursue is to farm with an ox, it's much easier and that's their goal. Farming by digging basins is so far from farming by an ox there's no similarities and so people don't have a tendency to want to engage in it or to try it.

I thought a particularly good excerpt to illustrate this point came from a Zambian farmer magazine that I picked up when I was in Zambia, and it had a letters page, and this letter came from a farmer, and he was talking about conservation farming. And this is what he wrote as his first impressions. “Initially I took the man promoting conservation farming as a bad joker who should not be allowed to take us for a ride in our land without water. But finally, after years of no rain, I decided to take his bad joke seriously. My fellow villagers that there was something wrong with me to dig holes in my maize field in the middle of the dry season. I tried to explain to that them, but they mistook me for a hard hashish smoker. Even now my fellow villagers still believe my successful harvest is by some witchcraft.” Now I'm not saying that farmers are not rational. While a number of farmers' decisions might seem initially from an outsider's perspective not to make sense, they usually on further understanding seem to be very wise decisions. But as anyone in the field can tell you, there are a lot of nonscientific explanations that farmers have about how farming works and about how explanations for what happens to them in their lives, and it's important to keep these in mind, and to keep in mind that adoption is not as simple and trial and observation, that there are other influences behind that.

So therefore we feel that the innovation of conservation farming, which is a terrific idea, in order for it to become widespread will require a lot of individual field implementors, conservation officers or field extension officers, in many different regions to take some of the ideas and to adapt them to the local understandings and the local realities.

Let me try and give you an example of a program that we worked on that incorporates this. Many agronomists have promoted sorghum as a better crop than maize for southern African farmers, and rationally it is. On a labor analysis, yield analysis, nutrition analysis, and more importantly susceptibility to drought analysis, sorghum is probably the best crop out there. And there have been a lot of programs trying to support and grow sorghum. They usually involve free inputs and extension work, and unfortunately they don't involve in many cases farmers growing sorghum. So we decided to take a different approach. One of our volunteers and partner organizations instead started off by asking the communities what their current goals were. They asked them why they weren't growing sorghum, did they know about sorghum, and if so why they wouldn't want to adopt it? They uncovered a couple of interesting facts. The first is a stigma associated with sorghum. Maize has been promoted as the national crop, and sorghum was considered the poor person's crop. And so it's very difficult to tell someone you should grow sorghum if they consider that the poor person's crop. This is exacerbated by the fact that many of the farmers who receive food aid during years when the rains fall are targeted highly vulnerable and poorer farmers, and usually that food aid comes with conditionality of growing sorghum because it's a better crop, and so this exacerbates the perception that sorghum is for poor people who don't know to farm well enough to grow maize. So that was one example, a non-rational potentially behavior change understanding that's important to incorporate.

A second interesting characteristic was that all the farmers mentioned that what they liked about maize was there was a deep market to sell the maize. Now this might be surprising, because these farmers are clearly subsistence farmers that we would consider under $1 a day. However, if they grow a surplus they would like to be able to know that they can market that surplus. So we decided instead to turn the traditional sorghum growing on its head. Rather than promoting sorghum as a staple crop, we, us and our partner, promoted it as a cash crop. The idea was to help them sorghum and to create a market so they could sell sorghum and that would make them comfortable with growing sorghum. Now the program has so far been a great success, sorghum has proved to be much more resilient in those conditions than the maize. This picture was taken about four and a half weeks ago, so it was about three-quarters of the way through the rainy season in southern Zambia. The idea is once they've sold sorghum for a couple of seasons we'll then start promoting the idea of sorghum as a staple crop which will hopefully lead to farmers growing and eating sorghum because we'll have overcome the stigma and increased their comfort level.

So that's an example of how important it is that you can't necessarily design a project far away in a capital and assume it's going to take place, but that you need to ensure that the people on the ground, the implementors, have an opportunity to adjust the project to the local realities, even though the same end goal is what both of you are aiming for.

Now the third idea that I'd like to share with you is a bit of a controversial idea, and it's a bit of a question mark in my mind, whether behavior change leads or lags development. Obviously many development practitioners would agree that behavior change is a phenomenon of development. But whether it leads or lags is important, because if we believe that behavior change lags this process of development, we can focus on a capital increasing strategy of development in which an outsider will provide free inputs, like education, water, seeds, and fertilizer and assume that with those inputs behavior change will follow. But if we feel that behavior change doesn't necessarily follow from this input increasing strategy then we might need to look at different approaches.

Our feeling from our projects at Engineers Without Borders Canada is that the closer one to an issue of production, like growing a crop for a farmer, as opposed to healthcare or education which is more service delivery from the state or from an outside provider, the more careful one needs to be about providing free inputs. And I'm going to share three cautionary notes, not to say that it's a bad idea but just things to keep in mind in the implementation. The first is the challenge of actually getting implementation right at scale. So how do you make sure those inputs get to the right people? It works very well in pilot projects because there's lots of outsiders coming in and playing that oversight role, but what we've seen it being scaled up through national level ministries, usually it's very difficult to ensure that the free inputs trickle all the way down to the poorest farmers.

A second example is that it's also very easy to overlook the education component that's necessary to improve yields, that free inputs, as everyone knows, is not enough, they need to be used correctly, but sometimes free input programs it's the free input component that overrides the difficulties of actually doing the true extension work.

I'll give you an example. In southern Zambia there's a lot of programs that try to promote conservation farming, and usually they tie free fertilizer and free hybrid matrices into conservation farming. So if you attend four or five different seminars and you say you're going to use conservation farming techniques then they are more than happy to give you the free inputs. Now most of these farmers go back and use the same old farming techniques. This is still pretty new, so maybe it takes four or five years, but just to throw a cautionary note out there.

A second issue that we wanted to talk about was does behavior actually translate in behavior change if people increase their incomes does this actually translate into investment? And there's a study that we felt captured what we'd seen, which is that depending on if the income increase goes into women's hands or males hands it's used differently. When women have increases in income the expenditures that they use tend to be more invested-related, so ensuring that more of their children spend more days in school, that there's better healthcare, whereas when the men have increases in income more of the funding goes to consumables such as alcohol and tobacco. So this was a study done by Judith Tendler in Guinea, and it's important, I mean I don't want to generalize completely and say women's money is good, men's money is bad, but it's important to keep this in mind.

The third case that I think the point is a little bit more complex is does outside intervention create a culture of dependency? And the question for us is that if a person or household in a developing community feels that their path to success depends or depended on someone coming in and giving them something for free, how does that affect their self initiative? Will a farmer buy fertilizer if they got the fertilizer for free the year before, or will a neighboring farmer or a neighboring community buy fertilizer if they know their neighbors got fertilizer for free the year before? So these are important questions about how to get the implementation right.

So in conclusion, I just wanted to hope that those examples illustrated some of the challenges as we try and get the implementation correct in development. And now I'm not saying that all development needs is behavior change programs, but I do feel that understanding behavior change, especially at the projects planning level, could improve some of the results that we see on the ground.

A couple of quick suggestions. I'm first going to talk about the field connections, the idea of making sure that everyone who plans a development project spends some time in a community not asking specific questions, but just one week fully immersed in a community, having time to ask questions. A second time I wrote this up as a joke, kind of a new journal that's actually about development failures. I would call it Damn, This Isn't Working, because there's not enough honest discussion about projects that aren't working in development. The final suggestion I would make is that we need a new generation of practitioners, both Western and local, who are going to be sensitive to and comfortable with the realistic pace of development work, and who are going to bring a powerful intellectual pragmatism to trying to solve some of the challenges of implementation. So for the young people who are interested in development here, my advice to you is to get out in the field and understand the field.

So I'll just end with a final quote. “In theory there might be no difference between theory and practice, but unfortunately in practice there is.” And our challenge is to get that right.