Turning Development Upside Down
Chapter 4
Ways Forward

This chapter shows there are ways forward. The proposition is that there are new ways to think of development in terms of the four components: people, resources, process and information. The theme of the chapter is to think of people as being both the beneficiary and the driver of development, to think of resources as being abundant but needing mobilization, to think of process as a way to achieve economic value adding and information as a way to improve development performance, to measure performance and provide a new level of accountability in development.

Is Success Possible ... Absolutely

The human spirit is powerful ... but it needs to have opportunity and there needs to be motivation and incentive. To have success, the problems that constrained success in the past must be avoided. New approaches and ways of doing things have to be adopted. Development must be approached as a process that has linkages with many complex interrelated elements.

This way of looking at development sets the stage for practical solutions to the global development crisis. This way forward is a coherent whole, and can be the foundation for successful economic and social progress in the SOUTH. The way forward explicitly addresses some issues about the enabling environment for success that people in the NORTH now take for granted.

Nothing in the way forward requires difficult reform. Everything in this way forward can be done, and in a modest way is already being done. But there has to be a deep appreciation of the problems, and an understanding and respect for people of different backgrounds and experience and capabilities.

The goal or purpose of development

What is the goal or purpose of development? It is about socio-economic progress, and improving people's quality of life and standard of living. A big part of this depends on the culture, perceptions and priorities of the community ... a value construct that has a big element of subjectivity.

It is rare for the primary goal of development to be to get the maximum economic activity for the benefit of a few ... though it is common for this to be the investment goal for a profit maximizing enterprise. The difference between the goals of society and the goals of a PME, or many PMEs is something that has to be reconciled.

For society, the purpose of development includes giving a lot more people an opportunity to live a life that has a lot more dignity and be a lot more secure and further away from death. There are a lot of fancy ways to describe the goals of development, but a simple one is that poor people should have a better chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

At the individual person level, and at the family level, development is easy to understand. I wrote the following more than 20 years ago in South Sudan. The area had its own civil war and was also hosting refugees from neighboring countries. A situation that has been all too common in the past decades all over the world.

Priority List

• Families do not want to be killed because there is war and insecurity all around them.
• Families do not want to die because there is no food and water for the family members.
• Families do not want to suffer and possibly die because there is not enough clothing and inadequate shelter from the elements
• And when the issue of today’s survival is taken care of, the next priority is the survival of the family and procreation into the next generation. The survival of the children. The feeding and the nutrition and health of the children.
• And then the education of the children
• A taking care of the elderly and sick in the family
• And jobs for the family members
• And social responsibility for the community
• And a role in the spiritual life of the community

• People centric ... community centric

  The focus of development is about people who are both beneficiaries and the instruments of development, either individually or through some form of organization. There is a need to envision development from the perspective of the people who are failing and hopeless under the prevailing development paradigm and optimize development from that perspective.

  From a perspective of development that is people centric, people have got to be taken into consideration in every aspect of the analysis, planning and doing of development.

  But people centric is difficult to organize and optimize ... rather this is better achieved by a focus at the community level. At the community level there can be impact from individual enterprise, as well as impact from team work and collaborative initiatives of all sorts. Community is society ... and people can be individual and collective ... with the totality better the sum of the parts!

• Resources – make best use of what is available.

  The resources are people, natural resources, infrastructure, material and equipment, financial resources and knowledge. For resources to get committed to development purposes there must be value adding and there must be a “return” to the owners of the resource.

  And while there are massive pools of resources in the world, in fact resources are very much underutilized on a global basis, the SOUTH is short of critical resources.

  Planning for development can improve outcomes by making optimum use of the resources that are available. The simplistic idea that more money will produce more development is wrong ... totally wrong. A better idea is that an optimized deployment of resources will produce more development ... and a part of this is for the available resources, especially human resources and natural resources to be used in much better ways.

• Continuum of Progress ... economic activities ... net value adding ... avoiding value destruction

  Value adding makes progress possible. Value destruction negates progress. Some activities are value adding ... some produce value destruction. The process of development is a mix of all of these ... and successful development is when everything is arranged so that there is a maximum of value adding.

  It is process that assesses needs and opportunities, mobilizes resources, allocates them to value adding development activities, uses them effectively and provides an accounting and feedback of performance. The elements all fit together as a coherent whole, and build on the success in economic and social progress that countries in the NORTH now take for granted. The failure of development is much more about process than about people. Most people will do the right thing when they have the chance, and incidentally know that if they do the wrong thing they will get caught. But in the prevailing paradigm for development, the process just does not work.

• Information ... measure critical elements of progress and performance

  Information needs to be useful, independent, reliable and universal. The data to understand needs and opportunities, to optimize allocation of resources, use of resources and performance of development. A system to make these data understandable and useful. An Internet based secure distributed relational database makes it possible to manage the allocation and use of resources, track fund flows and use of funds and give excellent accounting and accountability and performance reporting to investors. And while there are lots and lots of data about development, there is very little information organized for performance analysis that is useful for the management of development resources.

There is a huge challenge. But all the possibilities for success are at hand. The way forward to development success must be something different from what we have seen before. It cannot be more of the same. What has been done up to now has failed ... and more of the same will fail some more.

I am reminded that technology has become more capable in the past 50 years, and there is no technical reason why all of the material problems of society cannot solved with good management of resources ... the problem is that people do not know how to do this, and some who do, are determined not to let what can be done be done unless they are able to profit from it.