I haven’t blogged for a long time–longer than I care to admit. But I have been roused from hibernation by some truly compelling ideas shared by Esther Duflo. (I’d started to wonder if spring had left me behind, which is embarrassing given how late and timid its arrival has been.) In any case, I just watched Duflo deliver the 6th annual Richard H. Sabot lecture entitled “Policies and Plitics: Can Evidence Play a Role in the Fight Against Poverty?” at the Center for Global Development (CGD). I was not disappointed; she continues to pose and answer questions that totally tickle the brain.
Esther’s primary contention was that institutions are not as immutable as they seem. In f act, significant policy changes can be made at the margin, even when the “politics” and the policy environment are poor. This insight strikes me as incredibly important given the dichotomous nature of the debate around the power of government institutions to make change. On one side, it’s government vs. corporation. On the other, and I contend that this perspective is more useful, the private sector, NGOs and government all have roles to play. In any case, Duflo’s point of view gives us a reason to escape unilateral thinking with respect to government’s role in development.
What really blew me away though, was Duflo’s response to the query posed by Nancy Birdsall, Founding President of CGD, as a follow-up to Duflo’s formal remarks. Nancy took the opportunity to couch Esther’s micro-level work in the context of a macro-level debate about the efficacy of aid. The response made my lazy little neurons crackle with delight. “Whether aid is good or bad is not the most important question,” Esther asserted. “Given that aid is a small percentage of capital flows, the more important consideration is how we make policy work; make aid more effective; and spend it in a way that maximizes its ability to teach us something.”
For me this is hugely ironic, although appropriately so. When I first started the struggle to find my vocational “true north”, one of the first questions I posed to myself centered on aid effectiveness. Why? Because quite selfishly, I didn’t want to devote my time and energy to pursuing useless interventions. Eight years later I am happy to report that this was probably the wrong way to frame the problem. As a gentleman from USAID aptly expressed it, “VCs can be successful even if large numbers of interventions fail.” Had I been in the room, I would have asked the congregation for a resounding “Amen!” It is truly exciting to consider that the “right answer” may in fact be searching for it…the right answer that is. Were this underlying principle to be put in place, imagine the impact on the struggle against fear of failure, and arguably, accountability, in the development community?
If nothing else, this perspective helps de-emphasize the “conflation of opinion” that happens when aid is summarily declared good or evil. Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid illustrates the tone of that discourse.
It got even better when Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director of the World Bank and Nigeria’s first female Finance Minister, supported Duflo’s perspective, indicating that “the aid debate is a bit passe”, because people are starting to focus on developing effective programs and policies in order to catalyze and/or scale change. Two words: L-O-V-E it.
Equally as interesting is the notion, again espoused by the USAID representative, that aid-based financing can be used to align incentives (in addition to catalyzing and scaling change) at the margin. Perhaps rather conveniently, this reminds me of the Acumen Fund’s use of philanthropic dollars as risk capital to fund business models that would not have seen the light of day. I like the idea of aid money being leveraged in a similar way.
Happily, Duflo’s talk concluded with a comment that addressed a fundamental question in the debate about when and how to evaluate. Essentially, she argued that it’s better to conduct a select number of high-quality evaluations when doing so will tell you something that you really want to know. Otherwise, spend the rest of the money on smaller, process-based assessments. Now doesn’t that sound sensible? Yup, I thought so too.
Thank you to Esther Duflo for inspiring me to write again, and encouraging all of us to think just a bit differently.
