Give a man a fish and he can feed himself for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and he can feed himself and his family for ever. Amen. If development had a Bible this would probably be on the front cover. The old mantra is well known, even to those who know nothing about development. Indeed, development itself has become such a powerful idea, and effects so many people that some could argue that it is a kind of religion. Now despite what I’m about to say I remain a priest, as it were, of this modern church. However, I am a rather troubled new convert and the catechisms of ‘gender mainstreaming’ and ‘rights based development’ don’t rest easily on my mind. It’s like I’m back at school singing hymns in assembly. Some around me are singing with complete conviction while I mouth the words half-heartedly, shuffling from one foot to the other, sniggering quietly with my friends. In short, I just don’t buy it.
My opinions are not formed on the basis of books; they are taken from my admittedly brief (5 month) stay in Bangladesh. I can’t speak about what I don’t know, development may be a very different thing in other countries but here it’s a bit – how shall I say – it’s a bit warped. To explain I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a dry, but hopefully quick, crash course in how development works here so bear with me.
Right, first you have poor people. Now this lot are really important. You might assume that because they don’t have TVs and shower gel and things like that they’d be quite a demanding bunch. Well let me tell you they’re not really. You see we tend to shout quite loudly when we think we’re missing something but that’s because we think we have a right to it. This is really the thing here, the crux of the matter: rights. There are millions, literally millions of people in Bangladesh who don’t have any concepts of human rights, or the rights of the citizen, or the rights of the child, or any of those other things that Geldof and his monkey side-kick Bono carp on about. This means that they are just passive recipients of aid. This, of course, is far from ideal. To go back to that tired phrase; if a man or woman doesn’t realise that they have a right to a fishing rod then they’ll be bloody happy with a fish. And so what happens here is that lots of NGOs and donors, who I’ll come to later, have been throwing (not literally) latrines, and tube wells, and anything else they feel that the ‘poor’ need. In turn the Bangladeshis take what they’re given, whether they actually need it or not, and go about their business. The problem is that nothing actually changes. You get a few short term benefits but the people stay poor.
Now here comes ‘rights base development’. This is a very new and shiny idea with cool words like ‘duty bearers’. What it basically says is that until people are aware of their rights and are organised enough to demand them collectively then no real development can take place. Why? Because people need to be empowered so that they can develop themselves. They must become active citizens rather than passive recipients otherwise the body politic will whither and die. The social contract of the Enlightenment must be restored. You see? Lovely isn’t it.
So what’s this got to do with Bangladesh? Well as you may know the government here ranks as one of the most corrupt on the planet and doesn’t really function in any real sense to provide its’ citizens with the services they have a right to like healthcare and a clean water supply and a fair trial. So what in theory is happening is that NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) are trying to work with the people and the government to ensure that the former can advocate for their rights and the latter can deliver on those rights. Fair enough. Where does the money come from? The donors; who are quite and eclectic bunch. They include big multinational organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank, they include the UN, they include the developmental arms of various governments from Canada, Britain, and the EU, pretty much anyone. They also include familiar names such as Oxfam, and Save the Children. If you want to develop a country you have to have serious amounts of cash. Oxfam et al. have serious amounts of cash. And this is really where the problem lies. You can talk about rights based development all you want but the problem is that you need money, or at least control over money, before you can have rights. The situation in Bangladesh now is that development is led completely by the donors. This is hardly empowering to the people.
Let me explain. If an NGO wants to do a project, for example, a women’s education project in ten communities, it needs money. What it does is it goes to the donor with a funding proposal detailing what it wants to do and how much it’ll cost. The donor then says yes or no. It sounds simple but actually what it creates is a bidding war. There are thousands of NGOs, employing hundreds of thousands of people who are all competing for the lucrative contracts with big donors. Each donor has its’ own policies and approaches and so what the NGOs end up doing is proposing programmes that they know the donor wants to hear. And what voice does the community have in all of this? Effectively none. They have no money and so usually a cursory study is taken to canvass their opinions, just to make the project look legit. Each programme is short term, usually for no more than a few years, and so all of these NGOs are effectively free-lancing. There is no job security and so they frantically create new programmes and, when trying to monitor the effectiveness of their performance, i.e. how much they’re actually helping the poor, they twist and bend the evidence until it comes out positive because they’re terrified that a failing project will lead to the funding being cut. And funding is cut here all the time. The thing is that there are no formal, legally binding contracts between NGOs and donors and so donors can effectively break deals on a whim, with no legal repercussions or compensation to be paid.
I fear this is becoming a rant. Am I losing you? Are you getting bored? There is a lot more to say but I realise I’m probably a lot more interested in this than you are so I’ll try and wrap this up. What we have here is a kind of blurring between what is a government and what isn’t. Bangladesh has become so saturated by development that it’s utterly changed the political and economic make-up of the country. All of the money, all of the services, are coming from outside. There are some exceptions but they are few and far between and merely serve to prove the rule. If we’re serious about development we have to rethink our entire approach in this country. Giving a man a fishing rod is fine, but we’re also supplying the fish.
