Although it is said that humans are social animals — which presumably means that they love to talk and hang out with each other — it is rather striking how often they (ahem…we) mangle basic communication. I find the issue of poor communication, which extends all the to no communication, comes up as a problem in many of the projects I evaluate. The problem can arise between the implementer and project beneficiaries, between the funder and the implementer, between management levels at the same organization. And, of course, at times team members also have their own internal communication problems.
Poor communication can result in all sorts of unpleasant outcomes: people stop cooperating, stop doing what they’re supposed to, misunderstand or distrust each other, get frustrated, get angry. Generally, whatever the cause of the miscommunication, it leaves people unhappy. The situation is unstable; there are dynamics which are pushing it to change.
For example, on a recent evaluation I worked on (whose details I can’t divulge), the project counterparts complained that the consultants who were advising them would disappear for months at a time. They wouldn’t hear from them. They didn’t like being kept in the dark, and when they saw the recommendations the consultants produced, they weren’t very happy. There had been almost no consultation, no input. In short, bad communication.
In another evaluation, the donor organized monthly meetings so the different project leaders could share information. However, communication was reduced to presenting progress reports, which most attendees found terribly boring and not very useful. There was no substantive discussion, no back and forth.
I have also been on projects where the team leader simply would not respond to emails, leaving us in the dark.
Why does communication come up so often as an issue in one form or another? Does it not occur to people that it’s helpful to keep others informed, or to check in with them? Are people just too busy? Or perhaps, do people deliberately withhold information, whether out of an abundance of caution or in order to get some advantage? Really, it could be any of these reasons. Take your pick.
It is
inevitable that when two parties sit down to talk, to work something out, each will
have its own interests. These interests may overlap, but they rarely coincide. This
is particularly true at the policy level, when one, or both, parties are
unhappy with their current situation and want it to improve.
Is talking
really necessary? If one party decides to change a situation unilaterally,
without talking to other stakeholders, in all likelihood this would require
coercion and could lead to an unstable new status quo.
I would argue that, as a rule, it is easier, and less costly, to get the other party to agree to a change by taking their interests into account, as opposed to forcing them to comply with a new policy. It may not always be possible, and opposing interests may lead to full-blown conflict, but it is always worth the attempt.
When is the optimum time to sit down and talk?
Let me propose that a situation is ripe for parties to hold talks when things are veering out of balance, out of equilibrium, and it is in at least in one party’s interest to seek a change. Of course, both parties may be interested in talking, or it could be just the one. In the latter case, it try to might persuade, or even force, the other to engage. The broader objective of talking between stakeholders with different interests is to effect a change.
The new governments of Algeria and Sudan — which replaced those of their ousted leaders, Bouteflika and al Bashir, respectively — may be facing this choice. They will either need to be so strong and ruthless that they force the populace to give in (as many Arab Spring governments in the Middle East have done), or they will need to sit down with opposition leaders and negotiate until a new political system is put into place that everyone can live with. The more powerful the interim governments feel, and the more money and support they get, say, from sympathetic countries, the less they will feel compelled to meet with protesters to address their demands and concerns. In that case, expect the new status quo to be unstable.
Refusing to
talk to others signals that you don’t want to see a change, and/or that you
anticipate losing something as a result.
Of course, there are times when communication may be difficult or impossible, due to language or physical barriers. Although such factors may not be of primary importance, they do also illustrate the value of communication.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma –
communication and cooperation
We can consider the “prisoner’s dilemma” game to illustrate an extreme case — how the failure to communicate leads to sub-optimal outcomes. The prisoner’s dilemma presents a scenario — drawn from game theory — which is based on an inability to communicate and reveals the negative consequences that ensue. Without being able to talk to each other, two prisoners, apprehended for the same violation or crime, will struggle to cooperate. Depending upon the decisions they make, this inability to communicate, can end up hurting both of them.
The dilemma arises because, unable to talk to each other, each prisoner fears the other will betray him or her, and may make a decision which could negatively affect his release.
There are
many variations and applications of the prisoner’s dilemma, including using it for
strategies of cooperating or not cooperating in order to come out ahead in a
game, a competition (in business, for example), or a conflict, and also for
when the game is expanded beyond two parties.
While the game, and the math behind it can get complex, and quite hypothetical in terms of the different outcomes – the larger point is that if the two prisoners could communicate, it is more likely that they would cooperate on an optimal strategy for both, which is generally what it takes to identify solutions that satisfy everyone involved. (Of course, even after agreeing on a strategy, one could still betray the other). Studies have found that, indeed, the ability to communicate reduces the rate of non-cooperation (or “defection” as the academic literature puts).
What I want to draw attention to is the critical factor of communication. Of knowing vs. not knowing what another person’s intentions are. It makes it hard to come to the “right” decision, since you don’t know what the other person wants, what they are thinking. You don’t know where they stand, what they are willing to accept, where they are willing to compromise. Without being able to communicate, the optimal outcome of mutual consensus is out of reach, and both are confined, as it were, to a bad status quo, or “low level equilibrium” (a stable situation that isn’t very good for anyone) as game theorists refer to it. Communication doesn’t automatically erase distrust – the other person may not be sincere, or not keep their word – but it can reduce it.
To return to the context of development work, whether you are in the field, or operating out of headquarters, the inability to communicate with partners, stakeholders or adversaries puts you in a metaphorical prison cell, solitary confinement, only able to guess the other’s intentions. Establishing better communication, breaking out of the metaphorical prison cell, may be the best way of breaking free, and getting to a better, and more stable, equilibrium.
The year is 2016. I’m sitting on the cement floor of a
home in a village outside of Tulajpur, deep in the Indian state of Maharashtra.
I’m surrounded by more than a dozen women entrepreneurs taking part in a focus
group.
My American colleague “Lisa” and I are here conducting
a USAID evaluation, as we crisscross India to assess similar projects, along
with other team members. We’ve come to this place to ask entrepreneurs to share
their experience with an innovative program that promotes the use of cheap and
affordable solar-powered lamps, as well as other solar-powered gadgets. These savvy
women, who run small shops built into the front of their houses, are a key link
in the supply chain that helps off-the-grid rural Indians light their homes. The
focus group discussion was animated and friendly, with any cultural barriers
fading to insignificance.
Two things struck me. First, all of them had
smartphones, which they were using to snap photos of us. Normally, it is the evaluators who photograph focus group
members, so you could ask, who was observing whom? Although it was a relatively
poor village, the women in our group clearly had above-average income levels.
In 2016, only about one in six Indians owned a smartphone, and most of them were
in urban areas.
The second notable thing was the latrine situation –
there was none. When our meeting ended, Lisa asked if she could use the toilet.
She didn’t get a clear answer. After she asked again (the meeting had lasted three
hours, after all), the woman hosting the meeting then reluctantly showed Lisa an
empty room at the back of the house, which had a sink, but no running water,
and a small hole in the floor. This was not a Turkish-style squat toilet with
the ceramic footholds flanking a hole, either. Lisa said the room looked
nothing like a bathroom, and she was not about to repurpose it. When she inquired
where the women did their business, the homeowner sheepishly indicated an
empty, rubbish strewn lot next door. That
was the toilet, so to speak.
The incongruity of people leapfrogging to smart
phones, while still practicing what in development circles is called open
defecation, was striking. Although I spend a good bit of every year in
developing countries, it still took me aback. The Tulajpur women were
simultaneously stuck in the past – a noxious, undignified and unhealthy past –
and yet benefiting from a high technology “future,” one which would have seemed
like science fiction to their parents.
As this insightful article in National
Geographic on the topic of latrines and open defecation makes clear,
the problem of persuading people to build or use latrines is complex. Open
defecation is still how 1.2 billion people on the planet relieve themselves,
and almost half of those live in India. The practice comes with serious health implications
as it raises the risk of infection, disease and death, especially for children.
The issue isn’t the availability of the actual
physical object. Many latrines have been built, but remain unused. A complex
array of factors come into play: tradition (historically, of course, all of
humanity lacked toilets), to the still-extant caste system which makes it a
disgrace to clean out latrine pits for anyone but the Dalits (formerly known as
untouchables), to lack of sewerage systems, to a supposed aversion to enclosed
spaces while defecating. Getting families or villages to build just a pit
latrine – or even use one that is
built for them – remains difficult. A lot of outhouses have fallen into disuse,
or have been repurposed as storage sheds.
This is not to single out India, which has made
tremendous strides on many socio-economic indicators, such as lowering its birth
rate to 2.1 children per woman – definitely a modern phenomenon. I bring up open
defecation and smartphones as examples of how governments and donors sometimes have
very different priorities from the population. Getting people to use a toilet has
major positive health impact. Almost no one argues for “cultural sensitivity”
and just letting people get on with it in this case.
The challenge of getting rural villagers to use
toilets is not that they are living in a sort of isolated, antediluvian Eden,
in harmony with nature, as the solar lamps and cell phones, not to mention
plastic trash strewn everywhere, make clear. I would argue that it encapsulates
three problems common to many development efforts.
First, the preferences of the state do not always
coincide with those of society. To paraphrase an old saying, the state
proposes, but (wo)man disposes. There may be excellent, scientifically-grounded
economic and health reasons to pull people into the modern world, but it turns
out that people have their own preferences, or priorities, such as smartphones.
Indeed, social behavior change has become a field of study in its own right. It
is one thing to build something, but getting people to use it is another
matter.
Second, having a vested interest is a powerful motivator. As every landlord and tenant has no doubt observed, a different attitude comes into play when you own something compared with just using it. That is why many programs that build infrastructure for communities focus on “ownership” as a concept. They require communities to contribute in kind or in cash. Yet often the cost is so high that the community contribution is not more than 5 percent, or less, and that feeling of ownership is concomitantly weak.
Three, when poor countries aspire to the public goods
available in richer countries, they often end up building or buying things that
they can’t afford to use. In a lot of cases, infrastructure, from the most
basic latrines, to enormous projects such as hydroelectric dams, is being built in countries where they lack the
technical and financial resources to maintain and operate them. Funds need to
be accessed and set aside, and procedures introduced.
Unfortunately, we
didn’t get into a discussion with our focus group women on these issues. That
was not why we were there. However, I’m sure they would have given us a valid
reason for their choices, at least from their perspective.
In this post, I’m going to tell you five ways in which evaluation questions can help evaluators.
Like ship
captains of yore, program evaluators rely on the stars to get where they’re
going. Well, not stars, exactly, but a few key questions. Both serve pretty
much the same purpose — they help you navigate, help you to
get where you’re going. In an ocean of data, where you can find yourself
submersed in too many choices, these key questions, commonly referred to as
“evaluation questions,” are your lodestars.
Good evaluation
questions will guide you in making decisions, ensuring that you are heading in
the right direction. After over 15 years of conducting evaluations, this has
become a truism I swear by. Now, to see how far we can stretch this metaphor
before it snaps, imagine that the ship, the crew and the navigational
instruments represent the resources and methods the evaluation team has to work
with. The evaluation questions are what guide the team.
Who determines the evaluation questions?
With most
evaluations, evaluators are hired to address a pre-determined set of queries.
These are normally provided by the client and embody what the client wants to
know about the program, the intervention, the project, the policy, or whatever needs
examining.
When the
work is done, the analysis conducted and report is submitted, what people will
want to know is “What are the answers to the questions we gave you?” Even if
you don’t like the questions, you need to find a way of answering them.
If the
client hasn’t developed the evaluation questions already, then the evaluator
can propose them, based on the client’s objectives. Sometimes the questions are
not clearly thought-out, or maybe they are difficult to answer. That applies
particularly to questions regarding a program’s sustainability. How can you
answer that in circumstances when the program is far from completed?
Evaluation questions are not the same
as interview questions
Evaluation
questions are not the same as interview
questions, which are what evaluators use when interviewing people, such as
beneficiaries, key informants, program implementers and so on. Interview questions, for example, might be
those asked by a police officer investigating a murder. The police might ask the suspect: Who is the
murderer? Why did he do it? And, Where is the weapon? Evaluators don’t ask the people involved in,
or benefiting from, the agriculture project, “Was the project effective?”
Interview questions are more specific, a way of collecting multiple data points
which will inform the body of evidence.
In
contracts, evaluation questions tend to be more along the lines of: Are
stakeholders satisfied with the program? Is it sustainable? How effective is it
at achieving its objectives?
Nevertheless,
for both cops and evaluators, it comes down to asking the right questions in
order to collect the evidence they need.
Questions should drill down from the
evaluation objectives
The evaluation
questions should not only embody the evaluation
objectives, they should drill down into those objectives. They need to be specific.
Evaluation
objectives can be broad, and open-ended. They are useful for explaining why the
evaluation needs to be conducted, but not as useful for developing a
methodology. For example, if the evaluation objectives are “To assess the
project’s effectiveness” or “To draw lessons about the project,” evaluation
questions should be much more specific. They should ask, for example, “Are
women farmers using the new technology as intended?” or “Do stakeholders
consider the hands-on technical assistance they receive to be effective?” However
the questions are formulated, evaluators almost always have an opportunity to
review them and propose modifications. I recommend doing this as early as
possible in the process.
How do evaluation questions help the
evaluator?
There is
plenty of material out there providing guidance on developing and selecting
good evaluation questions. That is not the subject of this post. Instead, I’d
like to point out that there are multiple
ways in which questions, once decided upon, can be extremely useful to the evaluator.
Evaluation questions
are crucial to keeping you on track and staying relevant to your topic. Sometimes
there is a temptation, while in the field, to go off on a tangent. For example,
the substantive or technical aspects of a project are often very interesting in
and of themselves. You or your colleagues may get caught up in discussions on different
types of irrigation water pumps, the political roots of the disparities between
northern and southern regions, or some other issue. That’s all good to know for
context, but such lines of inquiry shouldn’t distract from your main purpose.
That’s not what is being asked of the evaluator.
Regardless
of how the questions are generated, once agreed upon, they become your guide, serving
your effort in a number of valuable ways. The questions should help you with these
five aspects of your evaluation:
What issues to focus on
What evaluation methods to use
Where and whom
to collect the data from
What interview questions to ask people
How to structure and draft the final report
So, keep the
questions close at hand, and check in with them regularly. Use them to guide
you and help make decisions.
Conducting an evaluation is far from being a gentle
boat ride down the river. (If it were that boring, I would have bailed out long
ago). No, it is often difficult, sometimes treacherous, and (predictably) full
of uncertainties. Almost inevitably there is someone or something — on the client side, among the program
stakeholders, or even on your team — that
will make your life a challenge. Don’t let that distract you. Factor those
challenges into your work. With your evaluation
questions to help you navigate, you’ll know where to set your course and be
able to focus from there.
Sometimes, at the tail end of another 20 or 30-hour trip, say, to conduct fieldwork for an evaluation, and after crossing as many 11 time zones and spending two nights on airplanes, I ask myself – why? What is the point of traveling, 7,000 miles? Couldn’t we have just had a few phone calls? In this day and age of instant communication, skype and other video chat applications, is it really necessary to be physically present for a meeting? Just think about the time and money spent on business travel. The Global Business Travel Association estimates that global spending on business travel topped $1 trillion about 5 years ago and has been expanding ever since. That amount represents, give or take, 1% of the entire global economy. That is a lot – roughly the size of the Mexico’s GDP. Basically, you can think of it as the marginal value, to the public and private sectors, of face-to-face meetings vs. phone, skype or videoconferencing.
I was stimulated to write this blog post by the latest issue of New Directions in Evaluation (Winter 2017). The entire volume, edited by Randi Nelson and Denise Roseland is devoted to field visits – how and why they are a key element of conducting evaluations, among other things – a somewhat neglected issue in the evaluation literature. The discussions and articles have caused me to reflect a bit on the importance of going to the field (i.e. being physically present in the area where the program is being implemented) in my own work in international development.
There are two main aspects to field visits, which in the field of evaluation, are defined as going to the place where the program or project is being implemented. There might not even be any physical thing to see, such as a new school, equipment, newly installed energy efficient boilers, or what have you. You need to be there to meet with people in their own environment. And long trips and jet lag are actually the least of it. Field trips within countries can involve long car trips to remote rural areas along terrible roads in countries where road safety is somewhat of an afterthought, if not a downright inconvenience. (Auto fatalities pose a real risk to international development professionals. A few years ago I was involved in an incident in which the car I was driving in spun and flipped over on a country road in southern Malawi. I was lucky. I escaped with minor bruises. (Use that seat belt, folks.)
Yet, if you ask me whether I’d rather to do all my analysis from the comfort of my own home, based only on phone interviews or a desk review, I would respond…well, sure, but don’t expect the same depth of analysis or the same quality of information. It is much easier to get a sense of a project when meeting people – implementers, beneficiaries, other stakeholders. Doing a focus group by phone or video? Forget it. Take a look at the photo below, from a field trip I was on in Tajikistan in 2011. Imagine talking to those people from the village by video-conference.
There is also a very practical reason for preferring face to face meetings. When you can see the other people in the room, you can avoid the awkward pauses and people speaking over each other.
Conducting many types of analysis is not just about collecting information. A key factor in getting people to open up to you, and reveal their thoughts, is trust. And when you have never met the person, you can’t look them in the eye, you can’t read their body language. When people get a measure of you (the evaluator, researcher, entrepreneur, etc.) as a person, they tend to talk more. Until you see someone in the flesh, both of you are quite literally disembodied, and not quite real. Who hasn’t in the online dating scene hasn’t had such an experience? Before you met the person they may have seemed terrific, almost perfect, but once you meet them, you have a completely different (and often disappointing) impression? The digital world, the world of two dimensions still doesn’t hold a candle to the world of flesh and blood! Whether you’re evaluating a project or a potential mate, you gotta get yourself up off the sofa, and get out there. For whatever reason, being physically present is a big step in getting closer to that ever elusive truth.
The title of this blog is probably a bit abstruse, and not quite as dramatic as King Kong vs. Godzilla. Bear with me while I explain.
In writing, there is a temptation to focus on problems, on challenges on things that aren’t working. These are all conflicts of one sort or another and conflict is grist for the mill. Conflict grabs our attention. Why else do we exchange gossip, follow sports, watch the news, read history, go to the theater, and slow down to gawk at car accidents? Every one of these “leisure” activities revolves around conflict of one sort or another.
Fundamentally, conflict is one of the cornerstones of the dramatic arts – drama, tragedy, and yes, even comedy. “Conflict creates comedy”, as the HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin summed it up. (On a side note, I spent my twenties pursuing an acting career. I moved on when the conflict between the dream and the realization that I wasn’t good enough became too severe. I have no regrets.) I would go so far as to argue that it is human nature to revel in conflicts, their escalation and resolution.
However, for most people conflict is something to avoid in your own life, the current US President being a stark exception. We prefer to watch from the sidelines, from the safety of our living rooms and mobile devices.
This theme can obviously be taken in all kinds of directions. In line with this blog’s main focus, I’m going to talk about evaluation. The ‘temptation of conflict’, by which I mean the temptation to focus on conflict, can in fact creep into evaluation work. There is, always potential for tension to arise between the evaluator and the evaluated. The former is looking for what works and what doesn’t, and there is always something that doesn’t in this complex world. It can take experience and diplomacy to put a client at ease, to avoid losing their cooperation, and help everybody get the most out of the evaluation.
The temptation to focus on conflict can also come into play during the writing process. In my own experience, writing up an evaluation report is generally easier when a project or program has gone badly rather than when it has mostly gone swimmingly. There is more to say, more to analyze, and more to recommend. If we consider the term conflict to encompass disconnects, tensions, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, then it not difficult to uncover conflicts between what was planned and what was implemented, between stakeholders, between donors and government, between expectations and reality and on and on.
Thus, I have found that when conducting a project evaluation , there is a natural tendency to zero in on what doesn’t work. If you are so unlucky as to review a project that is splendid in every way, and have nothing to say in your report, whoever commissioned the evaluation will think you didn’t do a thorough job.
While projects should indeed be analyzed and accompanied by well thought out recommendations, the final evaluation report needs to strike the right balance. For example, If the overall assessment of a project is, let’s say, moderately satisfactory, the substance and tone of the report should reflect that.
I was once on a team evaluating a US government development project. Multiple agencies were involved in providing technical assistance to countries in three different continents, and it the coordination they achieved was quite remarkable. We, the evaluation team, agreed that it was an example of an effective, well designed and well implemented project. We noted numerous accomplishments, along with a few weaknesses. However, the tenor of our report, which methodically addressed each question in turn, was rather negative (As is customary the client who commissions an evaluation provides the questions they’d like evaluators to answer). For each question, we were able to identify some weakness, even while acknowledging the achievements. No one is perfect, after all. Upon reading the report, the project implementers were somewhat bemused. They, justifiably, expressed concerns that we had made the project sound, well, kind of mediocre. This was not our intention. Simply put, there was a lot more to say about the problems (i.e. the conflicts), even if they were modest, than about what had gone well! There was more to analyze and there were more factors to unpack for the negatives than for the positives. We did cover the good stuff, but not at the same level of depth. There were fewer issues to dig into, and not many recommendations linked to them.
One lesson I’ve taken from this and other evaluations is that you must make an effort to balance positives and negatives. While problems (and remedies) should be highlighted, the overall tone of the report should reflect the overall assessment of the project. If you find a few twisted or dead trees, do not portray the whole forest as if it were damaged. Of course, you should not neglect or avoid detailing any negative aspects in your findings. But don’t give them more importance – or less, of course – than is warranted. Be objective, rely on evidence, and be fair.
Summer is in full swing. Before it’s over, I’d like to make some book recommendations. These are for anyone interested in international development but who might find the subject a bit heavy to delve into while at the beach. I think that’s pretty much everyone, myself included! None of these books are new, but each is compelling and even entertaining.
The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (2013) by Nina Munk will no doubt appeal to the cynics who believe development aid is a waste of money. Munk describes Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages initiative to inject funds into several villages in Africa. This is part of Sachs’ effort to demonstrate that the fundamental problem is one of investments, i.e. that there are not enough being made. Sachs is a well-known economist who has called for a doubling of aid and he should be commended for putting his money where his mouth is (well, not his money, but funds raised from various donors). The results are not, by and large, happy. For anyone, myself included, who thinks the problem with aid is not so much the lack of financing, but cultural and institutional challenges that arise when you try to give shovel money into a place which lacks the enabling environment. It isn’t the quantity of aid financing, but about the quality. This book supports that argument, while describing what, at the time of writing looked like a lost cause. Highly readable and thought provoking.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity(2012) by Katherine Boo is not, strictly speaking, about development aid. I include it here because of the richly detailed descriptions of life among the poorest of the poor, especially their interactions with, and dependence on the world outside their slum. Looming large is the Mumbai International airport, the very reason for the slum’s existence, and a direct or indirect source of livelihood for most of its residents. Although a work of journalism, it reads like fiction, as Boo uses a very close narrative voice to relate what is going on inside the heads of a number of characters. This level of intimacy was achieved by conducting interviews with 168 people over a period of several years.
Adventures in Dystopia(2013) by Daniel Sellen, is an all-too believable and highly enjoyable fictional account of six connected characters, three from the West, three from developing countries. The Westerners are in the business, so to speak, of helping the poor, for a variety of motives. On the other side, the three characters – from Columbia, India and Cameroon – each have their own agenda, which doesn’t necessarily coincide with what the aid workers have in mind. Sellen, a World Bank staff, clearly draws on his own extensive professional and personal experiences to depict a world alternating between comedy and tragedy, and the chemical reactions that can and do occur when people from rich and poor societies encroach on each other’s territory, so to speak.
Don’t be put off by the somewhat hyperbolic title or fooled into thinking that this is an instruction manual. In How to Change the World(2007) David Bornstein describes the work done by social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship differs from straightforward entrepreneurship in that its goals that encompass social, environmental or other common good problems. Bornstein devotes each chapter to a different Ashoka fellows (as well as the founder of Ashoka, one of the original promoters of social entrepreneurship) who, in various ways, have changed the lives of many, many people through creatively tackling problems in their communities. Issues they have addressed include promoting reading, self-employment for women, etc. These are a far cry from Silicon Valley apps which seek to make life slightly more convenient for the urban middle class. They are inspiring stories of how a little assistance can go a long way, and a welcome antidote to the cynicism that can come from seeing insurmountable problems everywhere.
From different perspectives all four books highlight the cultural barriers between rich and poor, between the citizens of Western and developing countries. It turns out – surprise, surprise! – that people in developing countries have agency. They are not a mass of abject, aid-dependent sufferers, but many are hard-working and entrepreneurial with their own rich and complex inner lives. They inhabit worlds every bit as complicated, hierarchical, and full of joys and sorrows, as we in developed countries do. They are not passive recipients, not the ‘meek who will inherit the earth’. They will succeed (if they succeed) because they are entrepreneurial, on the lookout for an opportunity. They are likely to be as morally upright as they are devious or corrupt. In many ways they are not unlike everyone else on the socioeconomic ladder, from the poorest of the poor to the billionaire elites.
What hinders the majority of people in poorer countries from doing better are systemic issues. Country institutions often work against their people, who must deal with arbitrary justice, antagonistic rule of law, and entrenched networks which keep them from finding opportunities to thrive. In this respect, let us hope that developing countries converge with the West, and not the other way around!
