Work and Life in Development

Linda A. Dove

July 28, 2012.

I was born on a Saturday. And you probably all know the ditty? Saturday’s child works hard for a living.

This morning I’m going to talk about my work and ask you to share about yours.

I owe much of who I am today to the different types of work I’ve done in my life.

After many other jobs, I was a World Bank official in international aid for 19 years. I’ll use just that job as an example of my theme.

In your OOS, there’s a brief (if simplistic) guide to the main facts about the World Bank.

Let me give you a feel for the grassroots efforts the World Bank makes in developing countries—work that doesn’t often get into the media.

And then I’ll share with you how my Bank work helped me affirm what values I wanted to live by.

I’ll tell you a bit about just one little project in Bangladesh when I was a new recruit in the Bank.

I’ve chosen a project in education since you’ve all been to school, many of you have worked in education, and some of you know firsthand the desperate conditions in very poor countries.

Like so many others, I was in the international aid field through a wish to make some difference in the world. But any naïve idea I had about having lots of personal power to do this in the short-term was quickly blown away by reality.

You all know how controversial international aid is, and that’s a whole other discussion.

Today, I want to emphasize the complexity of the path from hard work to results—

from designing a project to actually improving people’s lives.

In the 1970s, the Bank began changing its priorities from huge engineering projects to meeting the needs of the poorest.

In the late 1980s I joined in the very first universal primary education project in Bangladesh that the Bank financed.

The economic preparation and project design had already been done, but people with my qualifications and experience were in short supply—public education and health, and social and economic development policy.

I’d worked in Bangladesh before and I knew it was tough. It was the third poorest country in the world. As former East Pakistan it’d been devastated by civil war. It was now an independent, mainly Muslim, country, but with an unstable government (we had a military coup during my time there). It had few natural resources, labor unrest, and high adult illiteracy. The population was expanding fast and the habitable land was already scarce. Investment in human resources—the youth—was the best hope for the future.

However, most children didn’t go to school and so the aim of the project was to get them all into school—including the girls.

The Bank was financing construction of primary schools all over the country—no mean feat since most of the land is only 3-6 feet above sea-level in the DRY season.

Most existing teachers were older men with no training. And 58,000 extra teachers were needed.

So, the Ministry of Education began hiring women as teachers. The project called for a complicated low-cost, inservice teacher training system. Basically trainers would travel to the schools once a month to train the teachers IN the schools.

My role was to help the Ministry get the teacher training going. I could see we had a challenge and that’s an understatement!

Our first problem came early on.I sat with the ministry staff who eagerly wrote an action plan. But nothing happened—and it wasn’t even the Ramadan fasting month. A senior finance official, explained to me that, according to the Koran, the Word is absolute and Allah is absolutely in charge of action. A Hindu college professor friend, explained: in Islam fatalism prevents action. The people are traumatized by war, poverty, disease, and floods. So tomorrow may never come. Best leave everything to Allah. Now I knew why people ended almost every remark with “Inshalah”, “God Willing”. I’m pretty sure these explanations were too simplistic. Low wages were probably important too.

Anyway, schools eventually got built and the trainers were trained. But we had to speed up the teacher training. So my team and I travelled with the ministry staff by road and boat into remote villages. Here are just a few of the things our travels taught us that the project design had ignored.

First lesson: where the schools were built mattered a lot.

• Access to school was difficult because paved roads were rare. Walking and canoeing were a bit more feasible than driving. But footpaths and bridges flooded in the rainy season.
• We had a map with the sites of new schools. But I remember one hot day trudging along a dried-up river bed with an embarrassed school inspector who couldn’t find the school I wanted to visit. We were lost for hours.
• And sometimes a local bigwig would use his influence to get the school built on his own land—just for the prestige—whether or not it was convenient for the teachers and children.

Second lesson: building schools was the easy part.

• Rural schools often had no toilets or clean running water. The men and boys managed. But women teachers and girls? And the irony was the new curriculum included health and hygiene! One of the first topics, I remember, was “Washing Our Hands”.
• A hope for the project was to train the teachers in modern teaching methods. But the old Pakistan textbooks in Urdu had been burned and the new ones in Bengali weren’t ready. And if the teacher could afford chalk and the children had slates, they were lucky.
• To make more space an afternoon shift had been added to the school day. But the afternoons were hot and sticky, and very unpopular. And that was when teachers earned extra cash in private coaching for rich people. So often there would be 100 children crowded into one class. Under these conditions, impossible to do much but traditional chanting and rote memorization.

Third lesson: enrollment statistics meant little.

• The local imams—respected authority figures—ran the Koranic schools. They saw the new public primary schools as competitors. They viewed literacy for the masses as a danger to social stability, and a secular curriculum as a threat to Islam. They often bullied families who enrolled their sons in primary school and ostracized parents who sent their daughters.
• On one visit, the school was bustling with far more children than population records showed. It turned out that all the principals in the nearby town had lent their pupils for the day. The show was just to impress us.
• Rural families were mostly subsistence farmers or fishermen. Many children came to school hungry after working hard from before dawn. They were undernourished and tiny for their age. I remember a little boy who proudly told me he was 14, but he looked like 7. Later, the project started a school lunch program.
• Parents often enrolled their girls in school but they came irregularly. Girls were critical labor for housework, baby-sitting, food preparation, and gardening. Besides, they had no suitable clothes. Later the project provided school uniforms.

All this field-work led the Ministry to change parts of the project.

• The shift system was changed.
• The government recruited teachers from local villages near the schools, even if they hadn’t graduated from high school.
• The project developed simple teaching leaflets with lessons on single topics.
• The project built toilets in outhouses. Later we found many schools didn’t maintain them and instead stored hay for their cows inside.

So what was achieved? Well, it was a start. Over the project’s life, enrollments did go up. By 2005, girls outnumbered boys. Today, 9 in 10 children enroll and 6 in 10 attend school regularly. But a quarter still drop out altogether. And teachers remain undereducated and undertrained. Also, the percent of public expenditure on education in Bangladesh
is the lowest in S. Asia]. In 2011, as part of poverty reduction in Bangladesh, the Bank approved a 3RD Primary Education project.

Since those early days, the Bank has moved from individual projects to large, complex poverty reduction programs. These deal with economic growth, with health, education, small business, micro-loans, water, and agriculture. They support better legal systems, trade policies, capacity building in government and reducing corruption.

Now, to change tack. Here are a few things from that project that helped me grow as a person. My experience helps me appreciate why the UU principles felt just the right fit for me when I came across UU here just three years ago.

• I learned how dangerous my perceived authority as a World Bank official could be. Remember, in very poor countries, aid officials are seen as money-bags. It’s sensible to treat them with deference and say “yes” to everything they suggest.I had to insulate myself from flattery and false pride, reminding myself that getting it right was important because children’s life-chances were at stake. By an accident of birth place, I was privileged to enjoy a great education myself and I want to see universal literacy because empowers people and supports the UU vision of a world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.
• I learned to value partnership, not just with officials, but with local people. Illiterate folk have sound commonsense to offer in designing projects that affect them. The UU principle of respect for the dignity and worth of every person is critical to partnership.
• To get a viable project going, we had to understand the different interests of everyone involved. And we had to find compromises that worked for all. I learned to respect local political processes that operated at every level. And I saw that people liked it when my team showed fairness in maing difficult decisions and explained to them the reasons why. The UU principle of justice, equity and compassion in human relations underlies all this.
• I was inspired often by the principled Bangladeshis at every level who were committed to their communities and country. They worked hard so hard. But they were in such demand, with so many pressures on them, that they often fell ill with stress and burn out.

• I feel sad to hear our own politicians lament that we don’t keep talented students from developing countries in the US once they graduate. As I see it, their own countries need their leadership and expertise so much. We too would benefit if these young leaders helped their countries get more stable and prosperous. Respect for principle of the interdependent web of all existence is very relevant in a global economy.
• As you know, in any job there’s pressure to meet deadlines and produce results. But human development reforms are not like building bridges or roads. They’re investments for long-term results. I learned how important it was to make a good case for taking it slowly in education, health and community development projects. I had to become an articulate and persuasive sense-maker and advocate for human development projects.

Looking back, I didn’t plan it, but all my jobs somehow drew me to do work that’s focused on trying to make a better world for everyone. I had a passion for it. I’m not the first to appreciate that vocations are the kind of work in which we discover and express our true selves. I tell myself the story that when I was born my soul decided that she was going to find me lots of hard work where she could live by UU values and principles.

I so get what Krishna taught in the Bhagavad Gita when Arjuna asked him how he should live. To oversimplify, Krishna said, just figure out, discern, your duty, your obligation, and then get on with it as best you can, without concern for results. You are in control of your own conduct but you are not in charge of the outcomes.

I could go on and on, but you’ve got the idea.

Now, let’s turn to your stories. What does work mean to you, whether it’s a paid job, volunteering, yardwork, child-care, whatever?Have you found yourself drawn to your work, is it a passion, are you addicted, or is it a necessary burden. Have you some lessons from your work experience that have resonated with your true self?