Understanding the motivations and roles of national development experts in Ghana: ‘We do all the donkey work and they take the glory’

Abstract

National development experts (NDEs) play unique roles as knowledge brokers, translators and gatekeepers between governments, intended beneficiaries and donors on various development policies and practices. Due to their local contextual knowledge, they influence development activities at national levels by engaging in formulation and implementation of development policies. However, discussion of their motivations and roles has been particularly limited in the existing development literature. Drawing on 25 semi-structured interviews with the local staff of donor agencies and non-governmental organisations, independent consultants, civil servants and academics in Ghana, this article presents findings on their motivations and roles within Ghana’s development landscape. We argue that while the motivations and roles of NDEs are similar in many ways to those of Western development experts, except their contextual understanding of national development issues, their contributions to development are so far excluded within the development literature. This article contributes to the emerging aid ethnography literature by providing a more comprehensive perspective on NDEs and deepens the scholarship by asking whether the exclusion of this group is a deliberate choice or unintended mistake. The article further highlights the perspectives of NDEs on their engagement with foreign experts and its implications for national development and future research.

Keywords:

• National development experts (NDEs)
• development
• aid ethnography
• white gaze
• inequality
• Ghana

Acknowledgements

We thank Victor Essel for his support towards the conduction of the fieldwork in Ghana. We are also grateful to the respondents for their participation in this research.

Disclosure statement

We declare that we have no potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1 In this article, we follow Kamruzzaman (2017, 42) in defining NDEs as ‘people whose main income is derived from working as self-employed consultants or from being employed by the government, non-governmental and external agencies specifically to formulate, implement and assess development policies, programmes and projects in their country of residence’. NDEs comprise academics, bureaucrats, civil society workers, consultants, former United Nations staff, think tank representatives and researchers (for a detailed discussion of NDEs, see Kamruzzaman 2017). However, while this conceptualisation provides useful insights, in the context of Ghana it does not capture the full range of actors we consider to be NDEs. For this reason, we include politicians, mid-senior government officials working in ministries, agencies and departments, and the staff of policy-oriented private-sector organisations. In doing so, our conceptualisation focuses not only on local aid workers but on the full range of stakeholders involved in policy formulation and implementation aimed at promoting Ghana’s development.

2 Although comprehensive data on the number of NDEs in Ghana is lacking, it is believed that majority of the workforce in the development sector is recruited locally. For example, according to the Ghana Statistical Service 2015 Labour Force Report, 124,817; 34,070; and 9517 Ghanaians were employed, respectively, in the civil service, NGOs and international organisations (Ghana Statistical Service 2016).

3 As the empirical evidence highlights, it is their contextual understanding of local realities of poverty and underdevelopment that infuses their personal moral commitment to helping the poor. This demonstrates the significance of moral labour (ie people’s desire to help others) as a motivating factor for the engagement of NDEs in development work (Fechter 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emmanuel Kumi

Emmanuel Kumi is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Policy Studies of the University of Ghana. He is particularly interested in the political economy of development with regards to aid relations, local aid workers, NGOs and sustainability. He is additionally interested in civic space, civil society advocacy, sustainable development and African philanthropy.

Palash Kamruzzaman

Palash Kamruzzaman is a Senior Lecturer in social policy at the University of South Wales, UK. He is the author of Poverty Reduction Strategies in Bangladesh – Rethinking Participation in Policy-making (2014) and Dollarisation of Poverty – Rethinking Poverty beyond 2015 (2015), and the editor of Civil Society in the Global South (2019). He has also published in the areas of approaches to development, participation in policymaking, aid ethnographies, global development goals (eg SDGs, MDGs), civil society and extreme poverty.