Development as knowledge
Over the past few days, I have had the privilege of spending several hours with Prof. Calestous Juma. He’s a professor at Harvard with expertise in the area of innovation and development, and he has been talking with those of us working on Canadian foreign policy on Africa.
Among many perceptive remarks, one idea stuck with me. Juma repeatedly remarked that development is not about money, and innovation is not about science and technology. Development, he said, is the process of building competencies to do things. This means that enabling information sharing, expanding novel systems of education, and discovering new ways to build knowledge. Achieving welfare development objectives requires equipping people with the knowledge and skills to innovate in the face of difficult problems. Building infrastructure means training engineers, not just funding time-bound projects. And creating employment means educating people to start businesses, not just to maintain them as middle management.
Juma’s vision is exciting because it gets to the heart of what development is about: the creation and application of knowledge. Development is not the funding, targets, effectiveness, or results. It’s what results when people acquire expertise from others and then apply it in novel ways in the context of local problems and opportunities.
Ultimately, Juma’s sense from his many meetings with African leaders is that this is what is wanted more than development assistance: the knowledge of Asia and the west, with the freedom to adapt it to their own needs. The cell phone in Africa is being applied to banking, remittances, health, education, and other exciting areas far beyond our limited uses of them. The possibilities for innovation are as great as access to technologies and the competencies to use them. That may be the future of development.
It would be interesting to hear Prof. Juma’s take on the World Bank and bilateral aid agendas that now focus on ‘capacity development’. In my placement report in Ghana I wrote that the theory behind ‘capacity development’ was a sound step in the right direction for the development community, but that most development actors were struggling to step outside of their old frames of reference. Implementing capacity development projects in a truly equal partnership, with a genuine offer of knowledge, is unfortunately not the norm in my experience.
That’s really interesting, Andrew. I found it significant that I never heard Juma mention ‘capacity’ in our conversations. He always talked about competence and about innovation — often in relation to the acquisition of practical knowledge and technical skills. I think that much work done in the name of capacity building actually builds very little capacity because it is too short-term and often focuses on abstract managerial or organizational capacities. Juma is talking about training programs, expert accompaniment, and the like. He referred to recent experiments where ICT universities were taken out of a ministry of education and put under the ministry of telecoms — making an immediate connection between training and practice. He also referred to Chinese experiments of bringing hundreds of African post-doctoral scientists to work in Chinese science parks for a year and then sending them back with $20,000 worth of equipment. These indicate more significant forms of knowledge development than your average NGO capacity workshop.
That is certainly a much deeper form of capacity development than I witnessed, yes. However, one exception to this is Engineers Without Borders. I’m not sure what you have heard about Lita’s brother’s experience so far, but what they do is pretty cool. We will have to talk about it at Xmas, as they are a group I am very enamored with.