10 years ago, the World Development Report (WDR) 2004 entitled Making Services Work for Poor People, marked a watershed moment in the development agenda. It recognized that politics and accountability are crucial to improving services. Furthermore, it shifted the focus from measuring inputs to outputs.
Earlier this month, ODI and the World Bank jointly organized a 10th year anniversary conference to celebrate the achievements over the last decade and to discuss what remains to be done.
In the opening plenary, Shanta Devarajan stated that the WDR 2004 changed the nature of the conversation by recognizing that: (i) services fail poor people, (ii) money is not the solution, and (iii) “the solution” is not the solution.
What have we learned?
- Context Matters: We got better at describing service delivery problems but not at improving services. Ruth Levine in her interview acknowledged that we have learned how to measure how significant the problem is and to unpack the dimensions of service delivery quality. But we have not learned anything generalizable because context matters.
- Politics Matters: Marta Foresti noted that ‘politics is not just a problem it’s also part of the solution.’ Working around politics rather than with it, does not work.
- Connections Matter: In her reflections, Leni Wild wrote – we are dealing with systems and networks through which a much wider set of stakeholders are connected. So the nature of the connections matters, in terms of power balances, incentives and norms. This is similar to what Matt Andrews calls multi-agent leadership.
- Motivating actors to do the right thing is much harder in practice, said Rakesh Rajani in his interview.
- Individual capacity ≠ organizational capability: Lant Pritchett explained the difference in his interview.
So what will it take to deliver services for the poor?
- Experimentation: Ruth Levine stressed the need to focus on organizations, individuals embedded in local circumstances/context and enabling local providers to experiment and learn what works in their context. She added, “it is a long complicated road.”
- Humility, Curiosity and Openness: Rakesh Rajani stated that we have to be able to know we don’t have all the answers. It is unlikely to work the first time and so we need to have the courage to tweak, listen to others and to learn from failure. Asking questions, trying, iterating, struggling and learning, rather than having solutions, is key.
- Commitment at every level, political, organizational and individual.
- Willingness to acknowledge and learn from failure.
These sound a lot like PDIA principles …
Image reproduced from a blog on writing and inspiration: http://inkspirationalmessages.com/2012/02/10371/