This book is a very interesting reflection on why so many well-intended aid efforts to do good still fall short. The author, William Easterly, is a development economist who has been involved in global poverty issues for his whole professional life. He is a professor of economics at New York University and amongst many positions around the world he has been a senior research economist at the World Bank for more than 16 years. The main question he raises (and tries to answer) is why, after more than fifty years and $2.3 trillion in aid to the "have nots", there is so shockingly little to show for it.
There are of course several explanations, but Easterly specifically points to one key reason. It is the simple difference between being a planner and a searcher. In brief, Easterly says that a planner thinks he already knows the answers; a planner thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors. A searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.
This rhymes completely with our mission to provide mechanisms for reaching tangible outcomes in civil society and development efforts. The need for a new approach to solving poverty goes for most issues we address in development and philanthropic initiatives. To create any institutional or societal change we normally face a set of factors that are interrelated in such a way that is very unlikely to be successful with a one, or even two, effort hit. And even when one starts to finally understand some of the relations between inputs and outcomes, they often fluctuate and change over time. This begs the need for a strategic learning component – or trial and error experimentation as Easterly describes it. We usually say that to become the kind of searcher that Easterly would like to see more of, we need society developers, in both grantee and grant maker roles, to see themselves as innovators. We want to help society developers to become innovators and act accordingly: to set focus on the actual issue and not inputs, and learn more and more about that issue as milestones are gradually reached and tangible outcomes are achieved. This is not rocket science, but it does require a certain mindset and some simple, but powerful, tools.
If you are interested learning more about the quest for achieving tangible outcomes in complex global development initiatives, White Man's Burden is healthy, inspiring (and at times a bit grim) reading. It's helped our thinking on how to better support our partners.