A few months ago, massive rains hit Hanoi and flooded most of the city. In my neighborhood, the streets were not flooded but West Lake had risen nearly over its banks, threatening to submerge the whole area. Everyone was a bit nervous, except for the fisherman. On every pole on the fence lining the lake near my house was perched a fisherman with a long bamboo pole, line attached to a multi-prong fish hook. The hook had no bait; these guys were jigging for carp, a fish that won’t bite on a baited hook.
Due to the floods, the lake was suddenly full of big, fat carp. Where did they come from? I don’t know for sure, but the best I can figure is that they escaped from nearby fishponds that had overflowed their banks. As I walked along Lane 12 one day when the rain was merely heavy and not torrential, the street was full of fish recently caught by the fishermen. On a normal day, each of these guys might pull in one or two tough urban fish – street fish, I think. That day, each cast seemed to reel in a nice, juicy fresh-off-the farm carp.
As I walked, I ruminated on the saying, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
I’ve always hated that saying. For one thing, as is well known by many a long-suffering wife or girlfriend, teaching a man to fish is a guarantee that he will be spending long hours away from home with his buddies, drinking beer and generally wasting time. I’ve been recreational fishing and I know – the only endeavor that remotely compares to the colossal squandering of otherwise perfectly usable daylight hours is golf.
More seriously, the idea that teaching or training is what is most necessary in development work is, I think, flawed.
Imagine this scenario: A poor man aching to feed his family for a lifetime is hanging out alongside West Lake in Hanoi. Along comes a well-meaning development worker from World Save the Visionary Heifers (VSVH) or a similar organization. Seeing the opportunity (lake full of fish) and the need (guy over here has no idea how to catch the fish) the development worker springs into action. He or she, seeing the need to act quickly, convenes a meeting of the fundraising staff. They do some research, analyze the problem, hire an international consultant to come do a site visit, figure out the obligatory gender and environmental aspects, produce a logframe and other necessary ingredients, and fire off a proposal to a likely funder.
Impressed with the precise rendering of outcomes to inputs and the steel-trap logic of the argument, the funder provides a few hundred thousand dollars to do “fisherman training and capacity building.” WSVH rounds up the likely candidates (perhaps paying them a daily per-diem to improve attendance at the training) and then subjects them to a two-week barrage of powerpoint presentations, lectures, slide shows, small-group discussions, empowerment sessions and so on.
An evaluation conducted at the end of the training proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the training was successful – the attendees now know more about fishing and gender then any other comparable group of untrained people in the area.
Work done, the earnest development works head off to the next challenge. Meanwhile the “fishermen” visit the lake, staring wistfully at the surface, knowing that under there somewhere are a bunch of finny dinners composed entirely of high-quality protein. Lacking any means to catch, them, however, the fishermen can only hope for the day when somebody provides them with a fishing pole, some string and a hook – or the money to buy this gear.
In my opinion, all too often development work falls short of success due to a lack of attention to what really works – which, in my view, is a combination of education, appropriate technology and long-term follow-up. Many well-meaning donors provide one of the ingredients, which may be a necessary part of the solution but is by no means sufficient. In the clinical setting, for example, it seems so obvious to many well-meaning donors and development practitioners that there exists a great opportunity in used medical equipment.
In the west, hospitals are constantly upgrading – discarding older, perfectly usable (and very expensive) medical equipment and buying new technologies that offer doctors better medical tools to treat patients. Meanwhile, hospitals in poor countries lack almost everything, and certainly lack good medical equipment. Why not ship over some of that functioning recently-discarded equipment to a hospital in Hanoi or Katmandu?
Unfortunately, for a lot of reasons, this usually does not work. Many of the hospitals in the developing world I’ve visited have big rooms full of donated equipment that nobody in the hospital knows how to use, maintain or repair.
Equipment alone is not the answer, and neither is training on its own. For good results, the two things need to be combined into a program that is constantly monitored to make sure that the training is effective, the equipment is appropriate and is being used, and the results are being achieved. Far too often, organizations pick one aspect or another (deliver technology, or deliver training) and don’t put enough attention on the other, and at the same time neglect the constant long-term monitoring required to ensure that the desired results are being achieved.
In the case of the fishermen, for example, the desired outcome is that that families are better nourished – fishing is just a means to an end. This is what has to be observed and measured. The development worker may believe that the missing ingredient is training, but this may not be the case. It might just be that the guy can’t afford fishing equipment. And sometimes, giving somebody a fish is the better option; maybe the added nutrition will provide enough energy so that the man can get a job that pays better -- and wastes a lot less time.