Happy Birthday DevRoast Plus a Big Announcement

A year ago this week, The Development Roast made its first appearance in the blogosphere. Twelve months, 40 posts, 187 comments, 102 Blog and 725 Facebook followers, dozens of very lively discussions on LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media, and an incredible 11,906 unique views later, it is still going strong.

And a real adventure it has been. Myself and other writers have explored a rich tapestry of topics, including: taking a ground-up look at the trials and tribulations of providing education in Guatemala; shedding a spotlight on Columbia’s forgotten land-mine victims; pointing to the environmental conditions contributing to the obesity and eating disorder epidemics; highlighting what developing countries have to teach the 99% about democracy; provocatively asking ‘Is it me or is Communism everywhere?‘; elucidating the magic effect of metaphor in public opinion forming; introducing alternative shopping concepts to bring to the fore important social and environmental issues; producing fun awareness raising educationwater and burger inforgraphics; roasting not one, but two development books; illuminating the omnipresence of corn in industrial diets and introducing a new concept of The Cornavore’s Dilemma; arguing that effecting change starts with the community; and even dabbling in comedy through a humourous and positive spoof of the 2011 news round-up.

All in all, it has been a huge success and The Development Roast is forever indebted to the people who helped bring it together through their contributions. A big roast thank you for their pieces to Aliza Amlani, Thomas Hart, James Belgrave and Noah Marwil. And of course, The Roast would not be here had it not been for its loyal followers and readers. We are glad to have you with us and look forward to another great year together.

As The Development Roasts turns one, we have a big announcement to make. As from June 2012, The Development Roast will become the official newsletter/blog of The Institute of Advanced Development Studies, an economic, environmental and social think tank based in La Paz, Bolivia. This news is incredible as the institutional backing will allow us to take the Roast to new and hopefully great heights. We look forward to working with Dr Lykke Andersen, Osvaldo Nina, Luis Carlos Jemio and many others at the Institute.

This does not mean that the Development Roast will change significantly, but we do have several ideas of how to bring you even more fantastic news, analyses and opinions of international development topics. So stick with us through the next year and don’t forget to share you thoughts!

Ioulia Fenton (Founder)

Cows, Showers and Burgers: Encouraging Diet-Based Water Conservation

Passing up just one beef burger saves the water equivalent of 40 low flow showers. Find out more at www.unwater.org and www.waterfootprint.org

How much water do you eat? A beef burger takes 2,400 litres of water to produce, compared to 170 litres for a vegetarian burger.

Want to save water? Choosing a vegetarian alternative to a beef burger can save enough water for 40 low flow showers.


Has Peace Corps Central America Consolidation Affected You or Your Organisation?

Some interviewees quoted in last week’s Americas Quarterly piece on the consolidation of US Peace Corps operations in the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras raised the point that there are likely ripple effects that will be felt beyond the organisation itself:

In the medium term, effects will ripple out to the aid and tourism industries, since the current Peace Corps decisions are reinforcing the negative security image from which the three countries already suffer. A case in point is the all-volunteer International Health Service of Minnesota. “Some people [who would have volunteered] for our medical brigade may have decided not to participate for that reason,” said Barbara Joe, a 74-year-old former health volunteer in Honduras who returns annually to work in outlying villages with the service.

As a follow up, I’d love to hear what, if any, effect Peace Corps decisions in the region and the media coverage that followed had on you personally or the organisation you work for:

  • Have you had to review and toughen up your own security operations?
  • Have your volunteer numbers or tourism business suffered?
  • Has it affected your decision to visit or volunteer in the region?
  • Any other thoughts on the matter?

Whatever your experience, direct or indirect, please share it in the comments box below.

Is it Me or is Communism Everywhere?

Ah, the sea of red that must be flooding your imagination: images of red flags intercepted by golden stars, shining hammers, crossing sickles, mixed in with flashes of Mao, Stalin, Che, Castro, bread queues and cold wars. Communism has become a hugely loaded word, most widely associated with political ideologies and regimes that we (UK, Europe, US and beyond) deem to be communist countries of Russia, China and Cuba.

Yet, as Anthropologist David Graeber points out in his recent book Debt: The First 5,000 years*, even the leaders and ruling parties of these nations never actually called their arrangements communist. Rather, they see themselves as socialist, with communism representing a distant, utopian, stateless ideal.

This distinction is crucial as the word “communism”‘s bad rap is perhaps underserved and if we really look at our lives, cultures and societies, we begin to realise that, in fact, communism is everywhere. It can be seen to be the basis of all human relations and systems of being, including capitalism itself.

As just mentioned, communism, the way most of us see it, is in fact more accurately described as socialism, that is: a system where goods are owned by the state or the public and the created pool of wealth is redistributed equally to everyone. Compare that to capitalism, which is a system where goods are produced socially (i.e. it takes the work of hundreds, thousands or even millions of people to produce the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the daily necessities of our lives), but which are appropriated and owned privately by individuals; moreover, where everyone works for his own individual wealth. Whereas capitalism  is founded on the belief that competition brings out the best in people, socialism, on the other hand, believes that cooperation is the best way for people to coexist.

Image from trrweekly.com

So if we stop to redefine communism away from its laden political economy definition of essentially an ideology or a tried and failed utopian, state directed socialist society, then what does it mean? Let’s take David Graeber’s definition** of communism as:

“Any human relationship that operates on the principles of  ’from each [giving] according to their abilities, to each [receiving] according to their needs’”.

Communism is thus a concept not centred on property rights (who owns what and how), but a way of conducting affairs. Whether we like to admit it or not, this principle exists to some degree in every society*** and even if two people interact in this way, then communism can be said to be present. This is Dr Graeber’s argument as a challenge to the economics view of human relations as primarily rooted in exchange (economic or otherwise).

Take family life, for instance. Although much of a child’s life is rather authoritarianly directed by her parents, bringing a family up is very much a communistic activity. Parents generally would not pitch their kids against each other in competition for survival, but allow them to develop their skills wherever they lie and provide them what they need to get there (food, shelter, clothing). Nor do parents compete with their kids for resources or expect all their investments to be paid back.

In the same light, schools and education systems, in principle, work best when they are very communistic; that is pay attention to each child’s abilities and provide them with whatever they will need to realise those abilities in a classroom setting.

Image Credit: www.atlanta-ala.com

More and more, communistic relations of cooperation and collaboration (in line with needs and abilities) are even seen as the way to drive success in partnering organisations, whether they be private corporations in one off partnerships or non-profit organisations in joint ventures for good; having different organisations bring their unique skills, abilities or capacities to collaborative projects and using the resources they need to actualise them being the main point.

In addition it can be said that communistic principles form the very foundations of well functioning businesses themselves. That is, in a work setting, rarely would bosses expect results beyond the capabilities of individual workers and they will always strive to provide them with the tools they need to achieve maximum results. Meanwhile, everyone’s contribution to a final work project is not made on the basis of presumed gain and exchange:

“If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, ‘Hand me the wrench’, his coworker will not, generally speaking, say, “And what do I get for it?”, that is if hey actually want it to be fixed. ”This is true even if they happened to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup”, wrote Graeber in an essay in his 2008 book Revolutions in Reverse.

The reason for all this? According to Dr Graeber in Debt, simple efficiency:

[Corporations] apply the principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that ‘communism just doesn’t work’): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them”.

He further argues that a sort of baseline communism**** underpins all human relations, whether they are mediated through exchange (capitalist-market or otherwise) or not:

“This is why in the immediate wake of great disasters—a flood, a blackout, a revolution or economic collapse—people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a kind of rough-and-ready communism. Hierarchies, markets and the like become luxuries that no one can really afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to the way strangers become sisters and brothers, and human society itself seems to be reborn.”

In essence, you know that you are in a communistic situation when no one is keeping score, as they would in a situation of exchange (e.g. keeping track of who owes what to whom), and, moreover, when it would seem ridiculous to be doing so. This goes for much of the interaction between family, friends and colleagues, and between strangers in situations of need:

“We are not just talking about cooperation. Communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It makes society possible”.

Looking at it this way begs the question: is it me or is communism everywhere? Perhaps it is time to give the term, defined as a process of human interaction and not an ideology or a system of governing a country’s resources, a bit of credit.

Others who liked this article, also enjoyed:

99% Democracy: Lessons from the Developing World

From Average to Exceptional: Why Outliers Matter

You Can’t Fire Your Land”: How the Humble Farmer Dethrones Free Market Economics

* I highly recommend David Graeber’s work, it is an enlightening reappraisal of the basis of human relations and the origins of debt from a brilliant mind who is arguably the best anthropological theorist of our time. It is available on Kindle from Amazon UK.

** The slogan of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was coined and first used by socialist movements in eighteenth century France and later popularised by Karl Marx.

*** This is not to suggest, as Graeber points out, that there is or could be a society that operates purely on the principle of communism, nor that this should even be a goal of all of society at all. 

**** Apart from communistic relations, Graeber argues that there are also two other types: those of exchange and hierarchy, you can read an essay on this here.

From Average to Exceptional: Why Outliers Matter

“If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average”

Psychologist Shawn Achor in a hillarious and wildly inspiring TED talk.

Walking into the shady classroom of the second school we visited last friday, we were disappointed to find only a handful of young, primary school students, one teacher and a parent inside. The two-classroom school in the community of El Terrero, adorned in blue and white colours of the Nicaraguan national flag, as all of the country’s schools are, was recently built as a joint project between Pencils of Promise and Seeds of Learning – two NGOs working to improve education and promote community cohesion in the Matagalpa region of Ciudad Dario.

The surface reason seemed to be that the teacher had fallen ill in the last few days and while the kids were welcome to return to school by now, this news had not yet reached most parents. You see, here, in the rural, dusty part of Nicaragua, people don’t have Blackberries and IPhones to keep them connected around the clock to their friends, social networks and school directors. Here, where fresh water, electricity and concrete walls are more rare than a Republican pro-abortion rally, even mobile phone coverage for those who do possess an early brick-style version of a Nokia or Siemens rip off, is hard to come by. Here, news of a school reopening travels Chinese whispers style, from home to home and mouth to mouth.

Much of the instigation of just such a message is done by Eddie, the quarter decade in service Director of the national Nuclear Rural Schools program Núcleo Educativo Rural (NER). He is in charge of a total of eleven primary and secondary schools in the Ciudad Dario Matagalpa region.

Slow communication channels were not the only reason that the El Terrero school sat all but empty on the scorching hot, dry-season day. Our visit happened to be in the late morning and, although the Nicaraguan government is said to be against afternoon education, partly because they prefer kids to come to school ready, clean and fed from home, not sweaty and tired from the fields, this community prefers to send their kids to school later in the day.

“Hmm, that is pretty unusual in my experience. Many parents we’ve spoken to like the early morning as the kids can come back later in the day to help out with household chores”, was the reaction of one NGO worker.

We should pay more attention to well performing schools

This may be so, but according to Eddie, this just is not the case in El Terrero. What’s really surprising is the effect that this outlier has on the kids’ education. Eddie does not know exactly why, but he can attest to the fact that this community outshines all others. Not only do they send the most kids through to secondary school, a privilege that only reaches 35% of the kids in the country,  but those who do make it outperform even the brightest of sparks from their neighbouring communities.

We discussed this anomaly with a USAID Team Lader for Health and Education in Nicaragua the next day and speculated on the possible reasons for this alleged performance. Perhaps the parents are happier because their kids finish their work in the morning, easing the adults’ burden earlier in the day and the children’s anxiety later in the afternoon. Perhaps the morning toiling is not tiring, but, instead, the early exercise kickstarts the children’s day, so they concentrate better when they do get to school. Perhaps the teachers focus better in the afternoon without knowing it themselves. It may well be a combination of all these factors or it could be none of them.

Bottom line is, we just don’t know. Yet, If Eddie’s statistics are correct, they illustrate how important local factors are in education and its outcomes. In that case, shouldn’t getting to the bottom of this positive aberration of superior performance be a priority? I mean, nation-wide and regional stats used by most governments, donor agencies and NGOs that tend to measure average enrolment, attendance and graduation rates, are useful to an extent. But outliers such as El Terrero, should not be simply swallowed up and normalised within a large database. Instead, they need to be qualitatively investigated and used as case studies on which to design policies that build not average communities, average schools and average students, but exceptional ones.

I would love to hear from you if you have witnessed anything similar where you are? Have you had experiences with local level project or community data that challenges widespread accepted wisdoms in policy and social circles and outperform the designed systems? This can be in education, health, community development or any other sector. Please write your comments below.

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*Photo Credit: Chris Battaglia, Videographer, Pencils of Promise

Crowd Sourcing Solutions to Poverty: What Do You Think?

Over the last two days I have been involved in a global experiment – a 48 hour brainstorming session between 1,600 people, from 50 countries who identified the barriers to solving poverty and put forward ideas for solutions.

The experiment was set up in a form of a game called Catalysts for Change. The more you contributed by putting down your thoughts, critiques, questions and ideas in less than 140 character soundbites, the more points you collected. In the end, the two short days yielded over 18,600 soundbite playing cards covering a range of topics from improving education to challenging capitalism itself.

It was fun and definitely educational with some ideas providing serious food for thought and generating lengthy discussions:

Some controversial:

Others were bordering on the offensive and possibly immoral:

Some of the Development Roast’s plays included:

Throughout, the ‘game-makers’ kept up a blog and gave out awards for the most interesting, innovative and controversial cards (no prizes, just kudos). Dr Lykke Andersen of Bolivia’s Institute of Advanced Development Studies scooped up the Youth Spirit Award for her contribution to re-imagining education:

A list of Celebrity awards, mainly related to technological solutions, will be handed out shortly.

Now that the game has ended, a call to arms has been announced to have statisticians, mathematicians, researchers, analysts and others with relevant skills to analyse the enormity of the data generated. You can view all threads and ideas for yourself on the Game Dashboard. I will update you once any conclusions have been drawn.

In the mean time, what are your thoughts on something like this: the crowd sourcing of ideas? Is this just a waste of time or a pilot for much more collaborative forms of knowledge generation, development and sharing? Share your thoughts in the comments box below.

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Dropping The Burger Water Bomb

March 22nd saw this year’s World Water Day kick off a series of upcoming events organised by the UN and other organisations to highlight global water issues.

Luckily, there is lots of good news, like the fact that half of the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goal on safe drinking water and sanitation has been met ahead of schedule. According to a joint report by the World Health Organisation and UNICEF:

“Since 1990, more than 2 billion people have gained access to improved drinking water sources.”

This is great news, but almost 800 mn people still live without such access.

The real food for thought comes from the fact that 70% of the world’s fresh water resources are used in agriculture and many developing countries use a substantial portion of their arable land to produce crops for export to other countries.

The most water intensive foods to produce are those of animal origin because animals such as cows, pigs and chickens are typically fed much of the aforementioned agricultural produce. In the end, to produce a typical beef burger sold in the United States requires 2,700 litres of water. Therefore, passing up just one burger a month can save more water than you use in taking 40 showers.

In this sense few people realise that water shortages and other problems in the developing world are deeply intertwined with the behaviour of people living in more fortunate nations.

The info graphic* at the top of this post is designed to highlight exactly this connection and help raise awareness of our actions. Love it, share it and spread the word.

Find out more about your and your diet’s water footprint at www.WaterFootPrint.org and more general water awareness information at www.UNWater.org.

*Original Image designed by ServicePlan, Hamburg, Germany and produced for the 2009 UNICEF Dirty Water Bomb Campaign. It is used with permission to re-conceptualise and highlight the high water intensity of meat production for EU’s Drop by Drop competition.

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