The Role of the Private Sector in Development

Yesterday I had the privilege to see Jeff Seabright, VP Environment and Water Resources, Coca-Cola, speak on campus. According to him, "business is and can be a tremendous driver of real change on the planet," and not by throwing money at the problem through philanthropy, but by pursuing a shared value (public goods) through their business model. It was an interesting perspective I hadn't had much cause to contemplate before hearing him speak. If businesses don't look after the long term, they won't have a company. Take Coke for instance: water is essential to their product, and watersheds are essentially the first line of production in their supply chains. If Coke doesn't "get smarter on watersheds," and work with local partners to sustainably manage watersheds, what is the future of their business, and their product, 100 years down the line?

It was very exciting to hear about the potential to do in the private sector, not just to think or prescribe policy. In one example, Mr. Seabright pointed out that Coke is the world's largest buyer of refrigeration equipment, which often involve hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in their mechanisms. Even though there was no government regulation at the time requiring HFC phase out, Coke felt it was an important step to take, and have spent $100 million to develop HFC alternatives in refrigeration units, and are now using nearly 1 million HFC-free units in their supply chain.

Industry can and will be a driver of development in the future, especially in the context of the environment and natural resources, which aren't inexhaustible. If companies have a vision of selling their products far into the future, they have to think about what that future looks like and how to get there, starting now. If pineapples are needed in the supply chain, helping farmers produce more high quality pineapples doesn't just help them, it helps the business as well (an example Mr. Seabright cited from Coke's operation in Ghana). If women control 70% of purchasing decisions, it is prudent to help more women entrepreneurs enter into the value chain. That's not philanthropy, it's growing the business.

Never before in history has the disparity between rich and poor been so vast. Never before has it been so clear that our resources are finite. It's a terribly important yet exciting time we live in. Where there are huge complex challenges facing ours and future generations, there are also new and innovative ideas for how best to address these challenges, including the role business can play in solving these problems. I look forward to seeing more exciting guest speakers on campus this year and next!

Why I got into this

Friday night my class had an overnight ethics retreat. 'Is this an oxymoron or a test?' I wondered to myself before the events began. It was a really nice moment to think about and share with each other why we are here, studying to be development professionals (or development practitioners, or developmentalists), as well as an opportunity to discuss various ethical concerns we will face in our careers.

So, why am I here? I thought about my involvement with the LGBT(QQIA) community as an apt metaphor for why I care about poor people. You can't care about people whom you don't know or haven't seen. It's easier to condemn 'the gays' as an entire group when you don't know any personally, but more difficult to make the argument against marriage equality when you're talking about Luke or Michael or Justin, actual people you actually know and love. I wrote a paper as an undergraduate about same sex marriage and came to the conclusion (9 years ago, man I'm getting old!) that the civil institution of marriage, with all the rights and responsibilities that go with it, should be open and available to any two consenting adults crazy enough to sign up for it, no matter what their sex or gender or sexual orientation. It's taking some people longer to figure this out, but the tide of history is in our favor, and soon same sex couples will be able to get married in Oregon and all over the country.

Similarly, I can't un-see what I saw while in the Peace Corps in Niger and Malawi. There are very poor people in this world, and in these days of so much opportunity, so much wealth, so much technology, so much growth, it should be absolutely appalling to everyone that some children still die of diarrhea and some people still die of malaria and malnutrition. Before joining the Peace Corps I was planning on going to graduate school for international relations, imagining a career in diplomacy. Now, I can't imagine devoting my life to anything other than poverty reduction, though exactly where and how, in what organizations and in which capacities I will be doing that work remains to be seen.

In closing, here's the quote that will define the arc of my career, (from a fellow Oregonian no less!):

"We stand by as children starve by the millions because we lack the will to eliminate hunger. Yet we have found the will to develop missiles capable of flying over the polar cap and landing within a few feet of their target. This is not innovation. It is a profound distortion of humanity's purpose on earth." -Mark Hatfield

Poor Economics Changed my Life

I remember the day clearly: for some special reason I had made the 2-hour journey to Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi from my small rural village, for probably only the second or third time since I’d landed in the country. It must have been sometime in summer 2011 and I’d arrived in Malawi in January. Already I had a routine: every time I made it to the Peace Corps office I would hungrily comb the bookshelves for anything new or interesting. There it was: the May 17, 2010 copy of The New Yorker. A year-old hand-me-down New Yorker may not sound like much, but to someone who had been in the African bush for much of that time, it was like gold. I greedily snatched it up and took it back to my site. There, alone in my hut, I read an article about Esther Duflo that changed my life. This amazing little Frenchwoman at MIT was doing something called development economics, a field I’d never heard of but which sounded so cool and exciting and applicable to work in the development field. Her work really resonated with me. The idea of being so methodical in the assessment of development interventions, using randomized control tests (RCTs) seemed to me so obvious yet groundbreaking. One study cited was conducted in Kenya, and involved the question of the efficacy of bed nets, and whether they would be more likely to be taken up if sold or given away for free. I assisted with an USAID-funded bed net distribution in my village and I saw not only the willingness of villagers to take a freely offered good, but that the good was not always used in the way the donor intended. In this instance, living only 12 kilometers from Lake Malawi, many bed nets became fishing nets, which are arguably useful tools to generate income, but clearly not doing much to prevent malaria, as was USAID’s original goal.

I couldn’t stop talking about “The Poverty Lab: A new method for development economics” to anyone who would listen. The article mentioned that Esther Duflo was about to publish a book and by the next time I found the internet I saw that it had already been published. I quickly emailed my mom, adding copies of Poor Economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty by Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, and More than Good Intentions: How a new economics is helping to solve global poverty, by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel, to the top of the list of things she must bring when she came to visit me the following September. From then, the rest is history. I voraciously read the books and visited the J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab) and IPA (Innovations for Poverty Action, the organization founded by Dean Karlan) websites frequently, even applying for research assistant positions without ever having heard of STATA. I love the idea of frank evaluation of poverty interventions as they are implemented. What’s working? What’s not? Why? How can we improve? Can this be replicated somewhere else? These are important questions to ask if we as development practitioners care about actually, measurably improving the lives of the poor, and not just pleasing the donors and ourselves by appealing to their pet issues and projects, or focusing on the amount (of money) spent as opposed to the amount (of change) accomplished.

It was Esther Duflo and her work which first got me excited about the hard, analytic, data-driven practical side of development work. Yes we know that education and health are “good,” but what is the best way to deliver these goods to people in the developing world, and once delivered, are they effectively improving peoples’ lives? How can it be better? How can we ensure there are even fewer people living in extreme poverty next year as opposed to last year? My perseverance as a Peace Corps volunteer (evacuated from Niger, living without electricity, bucket bathing) proved to myself that I had both the heart and the grit to survive and thrive in development work. But I didn’t have the technical background to really do any of the things that I saw clearly needed done, so in early 2013 when I received a J-PAL email update announcing 14.73x, The Challenges of Global Poverty, an MIT-hosted MOOC, I immediately signed up. It was a pretty amazing experience to be one of roughly 35,000 students from all over the world, watching Professors Duflo and Banerjee lecture on their research and then engaging with each other on the discussion boards, bringing our varied experiences into the debate. I’m sure in a small way I can even credit Duflo and her work with my initial attraction to the GHD program. I want to walk out of this program as a competent technician. I want to understand the research she and her colleagues are doing in order to implement the programs and changes to programs her data suggests. 

GHD in DC

Hi I'm Annette and I'm studying 'Global Human Development' (just a fancy way of saying 'international development') in Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. I'm creating this blog to chronicle my thoughts on development as I take interesting courses over the next 2 years, participate in exciting internships, and collaborate with brilliant students, professors, professionals, and community members on group projects, papers and discussions. What is international development, anyways? What do I hope to accomplish in a career in international development? In which areas do I want to focus my energies and talents? Join me on this journey; I'm so excited!