The Future of Development is Stuck on Semantics

In the last few weeks, I’ve read so many reports on the state of philanthropy and so-called development, and spoiler alert: everyone is panicking.

Human rights funders are uncertain about the future of human rights civil society, and democracy funders are sounding the alarm about the future of rights, governance and peacebuilding.  Disasters are more disastrous and pandemics are more dangerous than ever, but funding cuts abound. Philanthropy is frozen in uncertainty of where and how to fill gaps.

‘We can’t replace the $64 billion that USAID was giving’, shout the funders. This always puzzles me; is the assumption that this $64 billion was doled out in Majority World countries? Do they not know that most of that money went back to the US in procurement and personnel costs?

Let’s be honest. There is not less money flowing through the world than there was six months ago. Nor is there less wealth that could transform lives.

There is only a dismantling of the West’s dominance of narratives that define the Majority World.

As a result, the neat categories like human rights, leadership, or education, or humanitarian emergencies that funders use to define their pathways to change are no longer so neat. And that semantic challenge is causing funder paralysis.

‍Get comfortable with abstraction

In a recent LinkedIn post, Gautam John argued that funders cling to the illusion of control and certainty:

Funders often yearn for certainty, with clear models, predictable outcomes, and tidy causal stories. Yet the practice [of philanthropy] is more about holding ambiguity, sitting with contradictions, and choosing anyway, knowing how provisional our judgments will look in hindsight.”

This is where funders’ obsession with categorizing the world’s problems comes from. I understand that funding categories are safe and predictable for funders. But when I am asked, ‘What can funders do?’, my answer is very similar to Gautam’s point; live in abstraction.

Funders: impact is not yours to define. And if you insist on emulating your financial sector counterparts, then be braver and let go of your perception of risks, and your misguided ideas about what people are capable of. 

Case in point: the development industry has estimated that the cost of ending human suffering is somewhere around four trillion dollars. Naturally, even this estimate gets broken down into neat SDG buckets – a master spreadsheet of human suffering.

The problem with relying on these defined categories is that it creates barriers to actually getting work done. It drives up costs and demands more and more outside personnel fluent in the terminology and operational methods of this system.

I can’t even conceive of what four trillion dollars looks like. But I can guarantee that a significant portion of it is spent on outsiders brought in to do the work, and the price tag of that model with only international personnel is astonishing when you consider what local leaders could do with a fraction of it. 

I’ve seen the salaries and the benefits for international development; the R&R packages, the hazard pay, the travel costs, the equipment and material costs. I remain deeply unimpressed by this exorbitant expertise. With a third of the money that a single UN or World Bank foreign employee receives in my country, we could solve several challenges in a neighborhood or town. 

It took me two weeks to map out the assets for a peacebuilding vision that a UN agency spent years looking for. It took a few days and a few thousand dollars for locals to mobilize a community for an aid agency’s best recorded aid distribution in a conflict zone.

Meanwhile, Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms are proving every day that people living within funders’ “issue areas” can solve their own problems without labels and with a fraction of what the West deems is “needed”. 

Stop overthinking things

As I listen to so many conversations about the impending end of the world, I. Call. Bullshit.

For years now I have been observing the shape of conversations around localization, shifting power, decoloniality and community-led all the things.

The conversations have been exhausting. All the vetting and risk-assessment hoops – the endless questions about bank accounts, paperwork, and whether communities “qualify” – it can be maddening.

We can quibble about policies and procedures but in a real conversation about power, we must talk about will. Not just political will, but personal, individual will.

In Kreyòl we have a saying, se anvi bay ki bay. It is wanting to give that gives. 

This applies in individual giving, philanthropy, and development. I have seen all of these stakeholders make baseless assumptions about communities, or ask about impact in the same way they ask about returns on investments. I have listened to the scuttlebut and water cooler talks of INGOs and seen the effects of individual biases and perceptions, both positive and negative.

Inequity is not one thing, nor is it a taxonomy of human suffering that can be estimated in dollars. 

Funders – people – have to stop assessing risks in frameworks that do not apply in countries like mine, or Palestine, or Sudan, or Myanmar. Stop funding countable outcomes and fund wellbeing. Western wellbeing and self help rhetoric is all about cultivating joy and peace. Believe it or not, this is not a western aspiration, it is a human one. You can help people cultivate joy once you let go of your need for control. 

The world does not need funding gaps to be filled, it needs justice. For those who want to support that:, learn from and with Majority World practitioners, who will show you what is truly possible for less than $64 billion. 

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