Quality of Life vs. Economic Progress

Most of the other volunteers have had to put up with complaining about being isolated in my district. In a way, this is a personal challenge that I have had to deal with but in terms of where I stand on development it seems to have changed everything for me.

I have tended to define development as an increase in quality of life. I could take or leave economic progress, since to me it was just one of many potential means of helping the poor. It even seemed like one of the least efficient! The trickle down is such a long, laboured, and loss-filled process that I tended to question the value of focusing any foreign aid efforts on economies.

Now that I am here I am beginning to see that I was skipping a step with that mentality. There are government and NGO workers all over Ghana working to improve the lives of the poor. They are trying to implement projects that increase food security, access to credit and other services. They work in offices that need electricity, they have to write proposals to get funding and submit reports to keep it. They need resources to support extension and aid projects and often they need to travel to get it.

As EWBers we see ourselves as frontline or ground-level development workers. We want our work to be people-focused so we take this sort of grassroots approach. But if we really want to be people focused, we also need to focus on THESE people. Working with extension agents to help farmer groups has driven this point home for me. They have a huge coverage area and are getting some great results when they equipped with a program that is appropriate for the number of resources they have. Enabling these workers is probably the most effective point of action for improving quality of life.

For many districts that are not so isolated this support can come from changes in training services like those that our APS are working on. My district, however, would benefit less from these types of things. We have five staff and all intend to keep their jobs for some time. With such a low rate of turnover it will be decades before Bunkpurugu Yunyoo sees the benefit of improved training at the agric colleges.

Decentralization is the one big one that has potential to really improve operations for us. Currently any application for funding has to go up the ladder through the regional office to MoFA National. With no access to internet (or fax) things need to go by post or they need to be taken to the regional office in Tamale. It’s the same for reporting or any other communication that needs to go between the different levels.

It’s a three hour drive to Walawale, where the road becomes bearable, then another forty minutes or so until Tamale. Because of this pain, anyone who goes to Tamale for one reason or another wants to delay there for a few days before returning. I think it has been nearly two months since we’ve had a day where everyone was in the office. In the past month I think this is the third time I have had power for a whole day. Many days the electricity will fail around nine in the morning and not return until four or five. That is a whole day of productivity lost and it is anything but uncommon.

So how do you enable development workers to be productive? Pave the roads. Get more busses running from the area. Get more transformers in town (there are two for a population of 2-3000). Get internet for the office. Get reliable cell phone service. The thing is every decision has to be made at national to satisfy everyone in the districts, and any district-level decision has to satisfy all the tribes.

There is a patch of paved road in the middle of the long and rocky stretch from Bunkpurugu to Walawale. When I came I thought this was the strangest thing in the world, but in Ghana it makes sense. Road maintenance falls under national jurisdiction. National has only allocated a certain portion of its budget to roads and there is clearly not enough in this budget to pave all the roads that need paving. Rather than distributing the funding by assessing the relative need of each proposed paving job, they just decided to pave the worst patch of multiple roads so that no one would complain of being neglected.
This decision was meant to save some political face at the expense of effective planning. No problem was solved - every one of these roads is still terrible! This kind of problem is extended to most types of decision making here, so it becomes a little depressing to rely on the government to provide the required infrastructure to start thinking about people-focused development.

If we zoom out to infrastructure and services that can be distributed by the private sector, there is a slight amount of hope in this. One of the big successes that I see is that nearly everyone here has a cell phone. The service itself is terrible, partially because there is no high-performance competitor and partially because the towers are somewhat dependant on an unreliable electrical grid. There is a decent amount competition with respect to prices, though, and for that reason most people can actually afford to use the services.

It seems it took a small amount of innovation to bypass the severe resource restrictions of Northern Ghana. This sort of innovation is by necessity based on a capitalist western economy. Publicly traded companies like Vodafone have to show increases in their profits each year. Eventually this means accessing new markets ,and at one point I’m sure Bunkpurugu had been pretty inaccessible. It was geographically isolated with a small population, so physically connecting any physical network would be unwise. In addition, people here have unreliable incomes and a history of defaulting on payment plans. By choosing to exclusively provide pay-as-you go cell service they have been able to earn profit despite those challenges.

Though they were certainly not out to improve lives, the effect of their presence is an increase in both productivity and quality of life. So why aren’t we seeing the same kind of innovation in other areas? Unfortunately you don’t see a lot of the innovative spirit in publicly administered services (electricity, WatSan, etc.) which are not transparent enough to be held fully accountable to those who use them.

It seems I have dug myself into a place where I would argue to encourage privatization of essential services. Investment and competition from multinationals would mean that they would be more efficiently distributed and a side-effect would be increased resources for those who are working with the poor. The government could play a more hands-off role of providing incentives for the required investment from the private sector.

This is still very far from what I believe, but the arguments against this kind of thought are harder to articulate and perhaps this is why they have so much influence. If the private sector is allowed to drive development, though, then development is driven not by need but by potential markets. Project managers are not asking “What do people need?” but “What will people pay for?” You could argue it doesn’t matter what motivates something which is benefiting a country/economy, but here is huge danger in allowing a necessarily amoral body to control essential resources. We always talk about how inequality grows with privatization because the buying power of the poor who buy least will decrease even more. Private development best serves those who area well positioned to consume.

I have absolutely no experience in economics, so I would love input from people who know what they’re talking about. There is something in me that wants to remain anti-globalization, but I am not entirely sure what it is. I am a little annoyed that somehow I’ve been driven from my old ideal but have been given no new one I can be satisfied with. Any thoughts?