Queen Elizabeth II recently passed away after ruling Britain for over 70 years. While the late Queen heralded a post-colonial era and, indeed, embraced that new role for the Crown wholeheartedly, not all the vestiges of colonialism have yet faded into the halls of history. In the development sector in particular, colonial mentality is still, sadly, alive and well.
In the colonial era, the self-explanatory phrase “White Man’s Burden” referred to the “noble” duty of European colonialists to spread “civilization” to other “backward” parts of the world. This ostensible noble-ness belied the underlying biases and prejudices against distant people, and assumed that the white man knew better.
Even today, development carries the legacy of the white man’s burden, as we development practitioners -- not just white men but also privileged urban do-gooders from Dhaka with very little experience outside our own bubbles -- ride our SUVs or fancy boats into the Rohingya camps or remote Char areas to “serve” or “give back.”
The problem with this, similar to colonial times, is that the warm fuzzy feelings this act of service gives us blinds us to the imbalance of power and privilege between us and the beneficiaries. Underneath our virtuous intentions and inexhaustible jargons often lies a hidden belief that we know what is best for the people we are trying to serve. While this may not be expressed explicitly, the structures in day-to-day development practice expose this attitude quite unequivocally.
Next time you encounter a development project, ask yourself these questions: Was the project designed primarily based on inputs from people with lived experience of the problem, or by flown-in experts with very limited local and cultural context? Are the project implementers accountable to the beneficiaries, or to the donors who fronted the cash? If something is not working with the project, are the beneficiaries empowered enough to provide feedback and get it fixed? If the project fails to achieve its goals, is the implementer held accountable or able to continue on to the next project as if nothing had happened?
If your answers are mostly in the negative, congratulations! You can now finally see the implicit and invisible assumption in development that beneficiaries do not deserve a material say in how projects are designed, modified, scaled up, or shut down, although it is their lives and livelihoods that are most materially impacted by the project.
It is this fundamental power imbalance -- typified by the very term “beneficiary” -- that prevents us from truly “decolonizing” development (for the remainder of this article, I will use the alternative and more empowering term “client” instead).
The reason for this is simple: Donors pay for projects, clients don’t. In contrast, in a business, customers can vote with their wallets. Sales figures create a simple and immediate yardstick to assess the success of executives and staff in meeting the needs and demands of the clients. In development, there is no comparable indicator that makes performance visible and helps donors stay aligned with how the clients are perceiving the program.
The solution to this is complex and manifold, and unfortunately, there are no silver bullets. It starts from the need for humility and patience in listening to people while carefully debiasing observations from preexisting notions. This must be done at each stage of a project, from design to conclusion.
Secondly, new tools (many borrowed from the business sector) such as human-centered design, rapid prototyping, and A/B experiments that enable rapid feedback loops are important to iterate and improve projects at a low cost and maximize the returns from every dollar, while also giving a voice to the clients.
Nominal pricing for products and services, and pricing proxies such as vouchers, can also help replicate a real-time indicator for “program-market” fit. This can help reverse the accountability dynamics and make it highly visible to donors when a project is not delivering an acceptable solution to the problem their clients face.
Thirdly, donors need to design more flexible structures, which allow program designs to change based on feedback, and budgets to change based on results, instead of being fixed ex-ante in five-year chunks. Digital technologies can play a supportive role in upgrading these learning and accountability systems.
Finally, donors must directly tune into the end users and clients through appropriate data and stories, hold implementers accountable for results, and guarantee the continuity of impactful programs.
Thankfully, much of this is beginning to change. Many NGOs are ditching the term “beneficiary” for “clients” or “customers.” BRAC and its late founder Sir Abed left an inspiring example by always following the problem, building its programs based on its clients’ needs and aspirations, and developing independent revenue sources that unshackle it from complete donor dependence and hence influence (no wonder it has been so successful).
Accountability and learning have been introduced as new dimensions along which programs must orient and evaluate themselves. Donors themselves are trying their best to become more flexible.
Yet, the road ahead to complete the decolonization process is still long and arduous. If we congratulate ourselves prematurely with superficial changes, we will only do ourselves and our positive intentions a deep disservice. Only when we are able to look at ourselves critically and objectively, and rid ourselves of all the layers of biases and inaccurate assumptions built over hundreds of years of living in a deeply unequal world, will Queen Elizabeth’s passing also mark the end of the post-colonial era, and herald the age of true equality and partnership.
Rubayat Khan is a social entrepreneur and development practitioner from Dhaka, and woefully realizes after 15 years and numerous failed attempts in the sector that he still knows pretty much nothing about the lives of the people he is trying to serve. This article is a summary of a chapter he wrote for a recent Aspen Institute book called “Decolonizing Development in South Asia”. He can be reached at [email protected].
