I Am Because You Are by Jacob Lief

Author:Jacob Lief
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2015-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

Around this time, I began attending development conferences all over the world. It was a way to raise our profile—just being there signals that you are important enough, savvy enough, to be taken seriously—but I also hoped that we could find new ideas and new strategies through the many discussions and presentations. I met a lot of thought-provoking, dedicated, high-powered people at these conferences. One year, at a World Economic Forum regional conference in Cape Town, I attended a panel discussion that included William Easterly, the New York University economist. His frank assessments of some of the big players in the development world—including, famously, his skepticism of the large-scale interventions promoted by Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who acts as a special advisor to the United Nations on its Millennium Development Goals—thrilled me. This guy was speaking my language. He neatly defined two broad camps in the development world, one of which I’d noticed in my own work. As he writes in his excellent book The White Man’s Burden:

In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied.

And, he adds, “The right plan is to have no plan”: In many ways, that could be Ubuntu’s motto.

Still, much of the time I left these conferences thinking, What is being accomplished here? The focus often seems to be on pure numbers—how many people you reach, how many regions you are in, how low is your overhead—without seriously asking how great an impact these programs have on an individual’s life. I saw a lot of organizations caught up in their own cycle of trying to reach more people, to tout higher numbers, to impress more donors, to get more money—forgetting that all these numbers represent real people, with real problems. And I became frustrated by the obsession with finding a silver-bullet solution when it was so clear to me that what works is age-old, commonsense, and simple.

I started being invited to sit on panels. (Another, perhaps necessary, issue I have with these conferences is that they always place me out front: It feels false to be positioned as the face of Ubuntu. By this time, all the important thinking about our work was being done by a “we,” not an “I.” Banks, Gcobani, Jordan, Jana, Qondakele, and I needed each other; not one of us would have moved Ubuntu forward in the way that all of us together did.) At one conference on postconflict education, there were nearly a hundred people in the room, including some of the most respected names in philanthropy and education.

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