In editing Development in Practice, we review many hundreds of submitted articles. Some common issues are consistently raised, and one can see the regular repetition of failures coming through the contributions we receive, despite many years of development experiences. Below we share a few of these.
1. Poor levels of participation, although most programmes at least superficially and indeed genuinely try to engage with and involve their clients or beneficiaries (the terms used vary enormously and in themselves can indicate how development professionals regard those they work with), which can itself provide some insights. However, often programme managers fail to align the expectations, needs, and objectives of different stakeholders through misjudging the actual or required levels of engagement and participation. Often the problem seems to originate from the imposition of externally designed monitoring and evaluation schemes which overrule whatever the locally agreed or discussed issues were. The push towards global indicators, logical frameworks, results-based management, and so on also moves away from local participative methods towards technocratic and donor, or government-led, standardised approaches to development.
2. The assumption that communities are homogenous is another common error which emerges, such that one-size-fits-all programmes are aimed at, for example, rural populations, which assume all rural inhabitants are farmers and all farmers are the same. This assumption goes against clear evidence that some rural inhabitants will be full-time commercial farmers, others are growing for family consumption, and many will have a mix of on- and off-farm income streams. Therefore, interventions may serve only a small percentage of the population which happens to fit an assumed but misleading profile.
3. A short-term view of change, transformation and development. Despite evidence and experience seeming to show that for real change to happen we need to take a longer-term view, so many programmes are still based on a year’s or at best a few years’ horizon. Political, bureaucratic, and other factors always push us to the short-term perspective, and often unrealistic goals, through a desire for quick results. Sadly, too much research and evaluative material is also based on short-term data collection and analysis. Very few have a view of change over much more than a few years, whereas we can see that change may take generations, and that programmes set up many years ago may pay off decades later. Logically we know, for example, that the impacts of education, health, or nutrition on infants will show up throughout their lifetime, but programmes still take a short-term view of development, ignoring both common sense and the research evidence.
4. Most of the programmes reviewed by DIP authors now have an improved view of gender differences, although they are still not perfect, not least in also differentiating populations by gender and generation, or gender and class. Too many programmes still assume that they have covered gender by focusing on women, rather than taking the positions of women and men as a set of relationships which are dynamic and changing. The problems with the short-term approach of many agencies and programmes can be writ large when looking at what is required in transforming gender relationships.
5. The absence of the political is also common failing in much development work, with political power dynamics often missing from the initial analysis of problems and solutions regarding potential or actual development interventions. For example, in much agricultural work we do not see analysis of who gains from the status quo, who manages the access to land and other resources, who controls local markets, and who is in debt to who (financially or socially). On issues of governance, many programmes seem to ignore these, at their own peril, for it means they are ignoring many of the factors which may lead to the success or failure of their work.
Several of this issue’s contributions ask questions around the poor performance of development programmes, even where on some levels they seem to be working well. Ilaria Schnyder von Wartensee has reviewed a university community engagement programme in rural Uganda. The article focuses on the attempt to follow a participative methodology as a way to enhance the empowerment of the local populace. It concludes that despite some programme successes, the use of participatory and other methods were inconsistent and often imperfect, weakening the potential of the participatory approach; for example, different stakeholders had very different understandings of what the programme was about and what it could offer.
Onjaherilanto Razanakoto, Rolland Razafindraibe, Andry Andriamananjara, Marie-Paule Razafimanantsoa, Tovohery Rakotoson, Erik Smolders, and Lilia Rabeharisoa consider why so many agricultural development programmes seem to fail or at least not live up to expectations. Their study of fertiliser use in Madagascar shows the complexities of farmers’ decision-making; although many willingly entered the trials to show the impact of different fertilisers on their rice, longer-term adoption is hard to achieve even where the advantages of new innovations are demonstrated.
Unity Chipfupa and Edilegnaw Wale question the relatively low success rates of so much agricultural development in South Africa and beyond. Their starting point is that traditional livelihoods analysis often fails to differentiate between what are relatively heterogeneous populations involved, using a case involving irrigated farming. Their approach is to explore psychological capital (self-esteem, self-confidence, and so on) as a way of understanding why some farmers succeed and others do not flourish.
The study by Anne Moorhead shows the sometime unintended consequences of a programme, through providing an interesting long-term study of the impact of programmes initially carried out in the 1980s and 1990s in the Philippines, Samoa, and Fiji. These initiatives were intended to provide livelihood supplements for local people by encouraging the farming of giant clams. At the time, initial evaluations seemed to show that very little immediate impact was achieved. However, recent research indicates that many of these programmes survived, and the article explores why the programmes have had long-term effects despite apparently not reaching their original goals. It concludes that the local population found the programmes to be positive in ways not envisaged by the original project designers and managers.
Emily Warren, Ethel Nankya, Janet Seeley, Sarah Nakamanya, Gershim Asiki, Victoria Simms, Alex Karabarinde, and Heidi Larson have studied the use of an accessible tablet-based app in health facilities in Uganda to assess patient satisfaction with the treatment they received. As a simple way of improving accountability even within a population with low literacy levels, it seemed that the app also helped to improve the services provided, as shown by the mixed methods review adopted by the evaluation team.
Sidney Schuler, Samuel Field, and Alissa Bernholc provide a study of women’s empowerment in Bangladeshi villages. They were concerned that earlier studies seemed to show a positive relationship between increased empowerment leading to increased intimate violence against women. Their more recent study found that this trend had slowly changed, with empowered women now less likely to suffer from violence in the home.
Moruf Alabi and Abdulateef Bako are critical of what they call the “gatekeepers” who constrain urban housing in Nigeria. Their article outlines the planning system and notes that far more contravention orders are passed annually than building permits. This discrepancy clearly indicates a problem with the system, if it leads to more people building illegally than legally.
Joseph Boniface Ajefu has calculated the effects of shocks, mainly rainfall, on household consumption over time, using data from Nigeria. He notes the impact of gender and location on the severity of the shocks, including that male-headed rural households seem to suffer most from changes in rainfall.
Sandeep Tambe, Sarika Pradhan, Pema Donka, and Pragya Singh provide a detailed and valuable review of post-earthquake reconstruction in Sikkim, a mountainous area in north-eastern India. The programme utilised different approaches, therefore the evaluation was able to compare them in terms of efficiency of delivering new homes and homeowners’ satisfaction with the approaches.
Chimaraoke O. Izugbara, Tizta Tilahun, and Hilda Owii discuss the potential demographic dividend in Africa, with a projected large rise in the younger population in coming years. They provide a word of caution that such a dividend cannot be assumed to have a positive impact, due to poor governance and development policies in many parts of the continent. One solution proposed is to work more within the positive aspects of traditional political cultures which stress investing in the future, and stewardship of current resources for future generations.
Abdur Rehman Cheema, Abid Mehmood, and Fazal Ali Khan describe the experiences of two large-scale surveys in the Sindh area of Pakistan, noting lessons learnt around the use of different languages, the problems of training and retaining enumerators, and external problems such as adverse weather restricting the value of data collected. Overall these provide a useful checklist of issues for those intending to carry out large surveys in areas with low literacy and difficult climatic and other conditions.