In 2001, in the remote village of Wimbe, Malawi, a teenage tinkerer put together bicycle parts, scrap metal, branches from blue gum trees and materials from rubber tyres to create Wimbe’s first windmill amid a devastating countrywide famine. Beyond starving families, the Malawi famine of the early 2000s caused children to drop out of school and significant political unrest stemming from undelivered promises from local politicians. The light of young William Kamkwamba’s innovation flickered through the tension to give hope to his family, powering household appliances and later, using more renewable energy in the form of solar-powered pumps to provide Wimbe’s first drinking water. The energy from William’s innovations eventually enabled irrigation across Wimbe’s farmland, creating a reason to celebrate on a path that almost led to hundreds of famine-related deaths and violence. Innovation and infrastructure brought Wimbe together for the better, weeks away from certain devastation.
As a result, William got to stay in school. He eventually furthered his undergraduate education in Engineering at Dartmouth College, a member of the Ivy League. William’s story inspired both the young and old. The international community in particular was deeply moved, and many organizations moved to help Malawi in their plight for water. Multilateral organizations, NGOs, faith-based organizations and other institutions across the developed world came together and dug wells for Malawi. Many took part in mission trips and fundraising to dig wells, showing solidarity and communicating the impact the wells had in providing drinking water to hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of villagers. Over the next two decades, groundwater became Malawi’s dominant water source: serving millions with most wells dug by non-governmental organizations primarily from the West. However, as is the case with mission trips and similar programs, none of these groups stayed. In this case, they dug wells whose water they did not drink. While the planning for these projects indicated positive intent, closer inspection over the long term showed a concerning picture in overall effectiveness. Wells became a crutch in an environment that had historically suffered high water risk and climate vulnerability. Despite the increasing depths of the boreholes, this mode of water supply could not provide a stable foundation for a resilient water distribution system. Across 75,000+ boreholes (estimates range from 60,000 to 90,000) in Malawi at an approximate construction cost of $5,000 each (costs quoted range from $3,000 to $10,000), borehole installation alone has consumed about $375 million before accounting for maintenance and re-drilling costs.
As we moved into the 2010s, the core idea of innovation from the multilateral organizations and NGOs leading these projects was to mechanize borehole drilling, moving from hand-dug wells. They also gave basic training to community members to become well administrators. To date, about 92 percent of Malawi’s population relies on rainfall-dependent water sources.
Wells dry up, and Malawi has been experiencing more intense temperatures and rainfall. This has led to water quickly drying up after cycles of flooding and water contamination in wells through sediments. These sediments often carry bacteria from garbage, manure/fertilizer and chemicals. The most significant pollutant in rural, unimproved water sources is fecal matter, and estimates for water quality test failure rates range from 57.2 percent to over 80 percent. 2015 data on Malawi’s sanitation showed that close to two-thirds of people in rural areas lacked access to improved latrines.
It took me a decade and a half to realize what I had grown up in was Midwestern values with Southern hospitality. They don’t call it that in Central Kenya - the culture is still learning branding. But reading about Buffett and Munger, Sam Walmart and J. Paul Getty, there was the feeling that outside the wealth, these were people I faintly saw hints of growing up. I couldn’t help but compare Bob Kierlin to the local owner of a hardware store, who ran a tight ship, watched their costs and treated suppliers, customers and employees as much more than spreadsheet line items; more than revenue, cost of goods sold and operating expenses.
None of this data is newly-discovered, so why didn’t any of this capital, at least $375 million, go into constructing even a test, small-scale water storage, purification, distribution and sewerage system? I have already mentioned one compelling reason - that none of the project implementers drank water from the wells they dug over the long-term. They simply had no skin in the game, and no skin in the game meant mismatched incentives.
However, the personal legend of most participants in this system of multilateral organizations and NGOs involves a positive intent to help the communities they engage with. Many Peace Corps volunteers, UN staff and board directors discussing impact, monitoring, evaluation and development in general want to see a better world. Yet regardless of ideology or affiliation, they have incentives. Digging deeper, we see that incentives come from culture as practiced both in social and organizational settings. These cultural differences help in pointing us to how and why these incentives are misaligned. They can also help us in re-orienting towards an environment where incentives lead to win-win development outcomes. Given that the majority of donor funds come from the West and that the West hosts the majority of multilateral headquarters, we will center this exploration on Western and African cultural differences and incentives and how these have shaped development in practice.
First, is the culture of standardized cycles as convention in Western organizational settings. Yearly, sometimes even quarterly employee performance reviews. Quarterly earnings. Annual monitoring and evaluation reports. Cycles have great merit as a management standard - they facilitate regular reporting to ensure the organization is still working towards shared goals across all levels: the individual, the team and the institution as a whole. Cycles ensure a convening at regular intervals where teams can exchange feedback, realign, and sometimes, even redefine the greater mission. Teams can then translate the mission into goals and metrics across the organization.
Cycles as a concept are incredibly helpful. African countries and civilizations across the ages have understood cycles intuitively for a long time through the lens of seasons. Both farming and nomadic communities understand that there is a time to plant and a time to harvest, a time to rest in the land and a time to move, all depending on the goals and incentives at hand. Similarly, economies understand seasons: times of austerity and times of broad investment, times to focus outward and times to be insular. Cycles and seasons are understood broadly across cultures. With this in mind, the focus becomes how these cycles are interpreted and what they have incentivized culturally across Western development organizations.
The seeds of many key Western development institutions were planted earlier than the independence of the majority of African countries. The United Nations, World Bank and IMF are all about 80 years old. Over 95 percent of colonized African countries gained independence after 1960, meaning most have been countries for about 65 years now. As often happens with old institutions, the incentive becomes to maintain stability, which leads to an incentive to do things as they have been done before. Moreover, the approach to what was done before depends on the goal. Originally, these three organizations - the UN, World Bank and IMF - were centered on maintaining peace and rebuilding Europe after World War II. This was their focus for at least two decades before African countries even began becoming an agenda item, at a time when African countries were viewed from a purely extractive lens. This does not mean these institutions have side-stepped efforts targeting development outcomes. They have deployed billions of dollars in capital and have given countries in the global South a voice - South Africa and the African Union are now part of the G20, for example. However, try as we may, trees grow their branches in the direction that receives the most sun, even if some fruit manages to show elsewhere. The focus here is on incentives seeded and incubated in the culture these organizations operate in, and how those incentives have shaped institutional inertia over time.
The innovator’s dilemma is rearing its head across multilateral institutions as we reimagine development. This has spurned initiatives like UN 2.0. However, development outcomes face a significant hurdle in the form of what I term the waltz, a cultural nursery bed that has seeded Western development practices. Dancing the waltz has happened for centuries across ballrooms, school dances and country homes across the West for centuries. The regularity and familiarity of the repeated steps in ¾ time in a counter-clockwise cycle mirrors what we see in development institutions today: cut-and-dried programming that may solve some issues on the surface but where tangible, long-term impact is unincentivized and root causes often remain unaddressed.
Are we dancing to the music playing or do we waltz everywhere?
African countries have different rhythms, differing across both communities and nations. Traditionally, dances have varied depending on community, festival, age group and season. This variety stretches beyond Africa’s borders and is also present in other regions such as Asia, the Middle East, and even in the United States. Square dancers in Appalachia and B-Boys on urban streets definitely vary from the movements of the waltz. This variety mirrors the differences in regulatory regimes, resources, strategic development priorities and technical capabilities across African regions. Consequently, the solutions required in each region for positive, long-term impact towards development outcomes will vary. So why was every organization in Malawi waltzing when it came to wells for the water supply? Why didn’t even one organization choose to move towards establishing a small water storage, distribution and sewerage system, even as an experiment?
The answer lies within the incentives baked into the individual and organizational cultures at development institutions, and how these incentives are interpreted. At the individual level, a consultant, analyst, project manager and team lead each have project metrics aligned with their success within the institution. Here, success most directly translates to career progression, which is distinct from the long-term development of the target region of the project. While these two objectives can and are hopefully often aligned, they are genuinely distinct.
What’s good for the society vs what’s good for the story
The waltz around career progression in large corporate organizations involves performance reviews and promotion committees. While performance reviews tend to lean towards meeting, failing to meet or exceeding expectations when it comes to a number of objectives and metrics, promotion committees usually involve one’s manager and other executives meeting and discussing who within their respective teams or departments will get promoted. This could seem relatively straightforward, but any middle manager, executive or LinkedIn career advice consumer will tell you that narrative and visibility contribute significantly to each promotion decision, sometimes even more than numbers. This similarly applies to the corporate corridors of humanitarian and development organizations. When considering the move from analyst to senior analyst, team lead, program manager or even Head of Mission, the individual has to demonstrate success at their current level. This could include, for example, demonstrating the successful completion of a project(s), reporting a sufficiently high number of lives impacted or successfully stringing together high-visibility partnerships for the organization. A project failure or reported impact that misses the mark might lead to career stalling or worse. For passionate development professionals, there is only a narrow scope of options to pivot outside of the humanitarian space.
To thrive, a development professional, like other professionals, first has to survive. This often means doing what’s good for the story. A well in Malawi is quite good for the story. First, one well can provide water for an average of 1,000 people daily. Using an average household size of four, launching one well could be confidently reported as creating water access for 250 households. Secondly, digging a well typically takes one to five days, with the entire process including pump installation, plumbing and testing taking one to two weeks to be fully functional. Relating this back to cycles, one could confidently oversee the launch and reported provision of water to 1000 households in a quarter with a month to spare - enough time for photos with local government and community members, media relations such as news outlets, company blog posts and, of course, a stellar quarter of “overseeing programs from ideation to launch which created water access to 1000+ households”. Not bad for an analyst, and certainly not bad for a team lead who can report that the team is on track to provide water to over 10,000 people by the end of the year. If we take an average of 1,000 people per village, that’s about 10 villages with clean water access in a year. These figures demonstrate convincing impact on paper, and are easily weaved into an even better story once details such as the distance previously walked by community members to access water are included, with special emphasis to how that has now changed. At the executive level, the story is just as compelling as donors and government partners receive polished monitoring and evaluation reports that show these numbers with mentions of efficient funding use and a defensible figure for the stated return on investment on aid.
From the perspective of the project management, operations and procurement professionals in the development organization, wells are just as valid. Their timelines are predictable and the processes are regular, meaning those pesky gantt charts actually work and the project is “delivered on time and within budget”. It’s a great waltz. Even where most of the professionals might have international relations, anthropology, policy or other non-technical backgrounds, there is a deep well of external engineering consultants with well-drilling expertise. Suffering equipment delays is unlikely, and if a project is late, that might just mean a delay of several days to a week. The risk is palatable. For an organization incentivized to maintain stability and donor relationships, wells are great for the impact story, the aid story and the individual career stories of the development professionals involved.
The problem, as we have seen, is that the majority of these wells, particularly in Malawi, fail water quality tests. Ironically, the increase in reported water access has coincided with Malawi’s worst cholera outbreak in recorded history. At the same time, poor water and sanitation are estimated to account for over 50 percent of Malawi’s disease burden. With climate change’s sombre song in the distance and getting closer, a steadily depleting water table and rising temperatures could also mean a lack of access to clean water that is more permanent than Malawi’s current state.
On the other hand, a water treatment and distribution system would be better for Malawi’s societies across both rural and urban environments. But this would require movement that isn’t the waltz. It would require entirely new steps and timing: new domestic technical capacity, supply sourcing involving more than ten parts, and timelines certainly longer than a quarterly cycle for impact metrics. All the same, this is what is good for Malawi’s society. Over the long-term, it would also be the best development story and would align with compelling career stories for the development professionals involved. Locals, tourists and development professionals alike would also drink the water more often, especially if it came out of a tap in their homes or hotel rooms.
Beyond the comfort in the stability and familiarity of the waltz and the misaligned incentives around what’s beneficial for the development organization and its participants versus what’s good over the long-term for the society, mimetic behavior and short-term thinking also contribute to reasons why the majority of funds have gone into digging wells over water treatment and distribution systems. Put simply, humans like to copy each other and many also tend to think in short-term horizons. While these last two factors aren’t unique to Western culture, there is something to be said about development organizations headquartered in Western countries where economic health traces its pulse to quarterly earnings reports and the greater Wall Street ecosystem. When a company reports reduced margins following increased capacity or R&D investments, share prices tend to dip signaling a decrease in investor confidence. At the same time, when the popular sentiment across Wall Street about a particular stock is to buy, the majority do so often because others are buying. The stock then rallies, defying gravity regardless of fundamental benefit to customers. It is not implausible to consider that this line of thinking also spreads into the humanitarian sector via budgets, short-term assignments for perceived efficiency, funding decisions and ROI evaluations. There is often the need to demonstrate ROI as quickly as possible regardless of core, long-term community needs. Many initiatives therefore remain in quick-win cages with escalators to status whereas the real substance of development outcomes lies out in the landscape of experimentation with long-term community focus.
Notably, Wall Street has skin in the game while development organizations do not. The latter can simply pack up and go home, where infrastructure is centuries old and therefore taken for granted, and where capital is more patient for critical infrastructure. Some might say that leadership in countries like Malawi should be proactive in asking for water treatment and distribution systems rather than wells. While there is merit to this perspective, we should also note that while the story between donors and development organizations tends to focus on development and impact, the story between local leadership and development organizations tends to center on aid and how helpful the development organization is. As a result, local leaders are often willing to accept the terms of what they are offered rather than being labeled uncooperative, consequently harming ties with implementation countries and receiving nothing.
So how do development organizations move beyond the Waltz? First, there is the need to acknowledge the variety of dances beyond this. Differences in regulatory regimes, resource availability, technology access and national priorities mean that implementation methods for development programs will be different across countries. We must resist the temptation to copy the familiar and focus on reasoning about each country from first-principles. This would yield different entry points across value chains and consequently, different development trajectories. Each country will then be pre-disposed to making the best use of what they have with an inclination towards what’s best for society rather than what is simply a cosmetically good story. Even where gaps in infrastructure are common across countries, varying country interests could result in sequencing solutions and infrastructure differently across jurisdictions.
Secondly, we need to prioritize both quality and long-term benefits. We need to accept that long-term quality, including efficient maintenance and therefore durability, will require in-depth investments into the domestic human capital of each country beyond short-term skill-building programs. While these are beneficial and easily reportable, they might not translate to the deep expertise required to, for example, scale a water treatment, distribution and storage system from one village to an entire state or province.
Finally, we need stronger data feedback loops with incentives for experimentation and nurturing healthy local institutions. Completed, well-documented experiments need to be encouraged and viewed as a success in themselves, even when the experiment did not yield the desired results. This is doubly true for experiments involving local innovation, with successful experiments scaled further. Metrics across development organizations need to be broadened to include the successful implementation of key phases for long-term projects rather than just their completion. Data capacity across local institutions, especially local statistical organizations, needs to be strengthened over the conventional reliance on external organizations to present official statistics for developing regions. These statistics can then be the bedrock for downstream experimentation, development planning and capacity building initiatives with capital acting as a lever.
I wholeheartedly believe there are more development successes in the future than have occurred in the recent past, but only if we learn to dance beyond the waltz. While I’ve used the waltz as a western reference in this writing, more developing countries are trying to waltz in spaces where the music and rhythm requires an entirely different form of movement. There might be the need to waltz one day, perhaps even in the current age from time to time, but we need to listen to what music is playing locally. It might be a fast-paced original composition or a remix to a familiar song. It might also be a DJ mix with cuts from a few classics like working roads and water treatment and distribution systems set to tropical grooves or afrobeats.