Why Trust (not Money, Data, Evidence, Argument, Credentials) is the Currency of Change

Salimah Samji Welcome to our Building State Capability Talk series. Today we have Rakesh Rajani with us here. And he is the President of JustSystems, which seeks to strengthen and support infrastructure to make public systems effective, inclusive and dignity affirming in the Global South. He brings 25 years of experience in starting and running civil society organizations and nine years in philanthropy. He was the first vice president of programs at Co-Impact and led its conceptualization of systems change, and the Director of Civic Engagement and Government at the Ford Foundation in New York. Previously, Professor Rajani founded and served as the head of Twaweza East Africa, an organization that advances citizen agency and open government, and established Uwezo, Africa’s largest program to assess basic literacy and numeracy. He has also co-founded and led HakiElimu, Tanzania’s largest citizen engagement and education advocacy organization, as well as Kuleana Center for Children’s Rights, which is now defunct. Rakesh is a founding member and past co-chair of the Open Government Partnership, and has been a long time fellow of the Center for Global Development. He has also served on several nonprofit boards including the Hewlett Foundation, Illuminate, IBP, and IPA. He presently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We’re really delighted to have you, Rakesh. Welcome.

Rakesh Rajani Thank you Salimah and thank you all for coming. It’s a real treat to have you here. I’ll share some thoughts and then I’m really looking forward to the conversation. You know, I’m sure you’ve heard that people say you learn more from failure than success. And I was trying to figure out why? I think it’s probably because if you plan to do something and it succeeds, it just kind of confirms what you know. But if you plan to do something and it fails, then your knowledge has to be stretched because what you knew didn’t work. So what I’m going to try to do is to start off by sharing two stories of failure, or perhaps success which in fact brought failure, and then try to share some of the findings from the research that we’ve been doing together with Carolina who is there and part of JustSystems, and and see if we can put them together. And then let’s have a conversation. So one of the first things I did at the university back home in Tanzania is to work as an activist to try to reduce the debt load that countries like Tanzania have. At that point, we were paying 42% of all of our revenue in servicing debt, not even paying back. And one of the things we showed is that you are spending three times as much on debt servicing as we were spending on education in a country that desperately needed to invest in education. Thanks to that, we contributed to something called HIPC. As you’re probably familiar with the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, that was a deal where if a country made a plan or how they were going to use that debt savings, that debt would be forgiven and that money would be then channeled to good things. In fact, the first time I engaged on it with President Mkapa who was the President of Tanzania then was right here at the Kennedy School. There’s a guy called Jeff Sachs you may have heard of who was supporting him on making Tanzania’s plan. So it was funny that Tanzania’s plan of what to do was being made at Harvard rather than Dar es Salaam. But I got a chance to spend three days, working. I was meeting with people on the side, but it was still heady days. Thanks to that, when I went back home, we worked on the education component. It was called the Primary Education Development Plan, and then a secondary education plan, and had huge influence. And we were able to get school fees abolished because we showed that the amount of money coming in for school fees was tiny, something like 8 to $12 billion a year, but it was keeping out at least 2 million kids. So it was a thing where you charge something and brought you very little but its negative impact was to leave lots of kids out. We abolished school fees. We focused on making sure money got to schools through something called the capitation grant, because we knew that you needed funding at the school level if you wanted quality. We strengthened school governance. So, you know, the governance is really important, by setting up school committees that are more democratically elected, we even made sure students were represented. One boy, one girl was on a school committee. And we also knew that this huge program would need good communication. So we persuaded the planning to have a good kind of communication program so that everybody, citizens, government leaders would all be aware of what this program is, its key features. And. How they could be part. So by any subtle objective measures, you could say that was a huge amount of policy and programmatic influence. Now, of course, in implementation problems started happening. And the first was the communication stuff, where there was a $2 million budget for it out of 600 million. It was relatively small, but the people who were designing it in the Ministry of Education basically wanted to get a whole bunch of t shirts and boring posters, and we tried to persuade them that that’s not a good idea, and they didn’t listen probably because there was also maybe a little kickback in the t shirt procurement, because each t shirt cost $6. When we did some quick check and we realized you could probably get them for less than two. But because we didn’t persuade them then that the kind of big meeting, multisectoral meeting where you have lots of government people, some civil society and the donors who are funding this. We essentially exposed that this was a crappy idea and maybe the money was being not well spent, and that’s coupled. So we saw that as a success. Stop money being wasted across a not so smart communications program. The money that was meant by policy to get to the schools through capitation grant. It’s a nice idea. Anecdotally, we could see that the money wasn’t getting there. So we managed to commission a study called the Public Expenditure Tracking Study. That was one of the first big tent studies in education, certainly in Tanzania. And it showed what we felt was true, which was that the money was not kind of boggled up at the central levels and the best at the the district level but it was not. This kind of wonky technical report. We made sure it had wings. We made sure we publicized it, made in popular. We did a simple version of it for media, but not only did the kind of few policy bureaucrats and donors know it, the whole country kind of knew it, and we used unlike those boring posters, we used TV adverts and ways of using  humor to kind of point out the hypocrisy here. We also showed that the school governance was working, cherry picking, if you will, the best examples of accountability in the school where parents, sometimes even students, were showing how their principles that, you know, the head teachers as well as the district level officials. Why do we have all kinds of procurement rounds, cement, you know, for classroom building or desks at inflated rates. And we ridiculed them. And it was this  was a super; there was a lot of humor. People joked about it and it kind of was rooting for the little guy right there. The ordinary parents, the students. And we were making sure that those pompous government officials couldn’t get away with it. And we did this other series where we showed up, the kind of hypocrisy of how everybody, all of us who are making these decisions, we send our kids to private school, which are very different than these public schools. And so come on, we kind of pointed out that we were quite happy for other people’s children to have these crappy conditions because we could opt out and have better conditions. And that had a huge impact  to this day. This is more than 20 years later. You go and people still remember this happened. I, I personally at the organizations I was part of got huge credit where we were seen as, you know, speaking truth to power, showing what the problems were with government, puncturing a kind of pompous balloon, puncturing the kind of, lies, if you will, or the rosy stories that the government was telling. Obviously, the government didn’t like this. First, they just try to ignore us and sideline us from the policymaking process. So where we had been very influential at the beginning to shape what the policy would be now, we were kind of put to the side then after ignoring us, but because we kept going, they started attacking us, criticizing us, telling us that, you know, our data had no basis. We were making things up, we had no credibility. But we persisted. We can we showed that, in fact, the data we were using was largely government data. And we, you know, our evidence was second to none. And we kept quietly pointing that out quietly as a, not with a shrill voice, but very effectively. And that was always in the public domain, so that the whole idea was that people know what’s going on. They will make sure that they  put pressure on government to do the right thing. It’s got so bad as far as the government is concerned. There was a time when that same President Mkapa, who I worked with here at the Kennedy School for a few days, went on national television in and publicly attacked the organization, and publicly attacked me in some very undiplomatic language and the headlines in the newspapers the next day were final nail in HakiElimu’s coffin, which was the organization I was leading. The cartoons with my head through a noose, and things of that sort. I got lots of praise as to how courageous I was, how brave, principled. And , and the country knew there was a survey document that showed that 79%, nationally representative survey, including rural areas, remote rural areas, showing that 79% of Tanzanians view what HakiElimu was what it stood for. So by multiple measures. This was a huge success. We had stood up to a big government. We had pointed out what was not working. Stood our ground and kept saying what was needed. We focused on many different things. And by the way, the donors loved us. Lots of money kept coming. We had more money than you know. We had more offers of money than we could accept. Now let’s look at this story just from a slightly different window. Remember, we started this work because we wanted kids to be in school, showing up to school and learning. So what happened to those outcomes during this time of our success? Schools. They want kids enrolled. Names on a list while actually showing up to school attendance. No. We had put that in the system that attendance should be measured, not just enrollment. But that system was not working. And where the children actually learning, we did some other survey work based on what’s called ASER in India and  Uwezo in East Africa that showed kids are not learning. And even though that data was out there, things didn’t change. Did the money from the capitation grant reache the schools. No it didn’t. The problems persisted. What about the effect it had on government whose practice of pressure was meant to improve our very effective use of data and evidence, and public communication had the impact of humiliating the government. Whether you are a district level official or whether you are the president of the country and everybody complained – were humiliated people were laughing at them because we pointed out that their rhetoric was empty and not so powerful. But what did it make them feel like, capability? What did that humiliation do? It made them big on the defensive, they they strengthened the muscle of how to defend themselves, whether it was done credibly or not is a different issue. But their energy went into being defensive, and being able to show what they were doing was great, or try to undermine what we had told. The energy was now not focused on kids being at school. Everyone was focused on defending their record. Remember, this is also coming up to elections. So concerns about much more than education, the concerns around how are they going to win the next term. The reformers inside government that we had worked with to do some of these positive changes now had much less space to operate because this became: We are under siege. There are these people out there attacking us. So whose side are you on? Are you with those outsiders? Are you with us? And there was a kind of allegiance that they had to swear they could do very little, because if they tried to do the sorts of things we were talking about, they would be seen as traitors, and perhaps in the long term, and most insidiously, what our success did was kind of reinforce the idea that you heard in the Western media, often racist media, and what some of the more neocolonial minded funders in our country were also having, which is that, you know, when it comes down to it, this African government is corrupt, bureaucratic, ineffective, not to be trusted. You need to keep them on a short leash. Look, after all, we can see all the ways in which they operate. These lessons that I’m sharing with you. Now, this second perspective is not something that I focused on 25 years ago. This is with the benefit of hindsight. So the story I tell you is one of great success. Many mentions. Great record. When you look at it in terms of what are the outcomes. What is the difference between what is the capability of the government to be able to drive that meaningful change? In fact, what we do is probably undermine. Let me tell you one more story of failure, and then I’ll get to some of the lessons from our research. This other story also starts in the US. I thought I’d share lessons, but since I’m speaking, we do that through a set of lucky accidents. That includes your new dean. Jeremy Weinstein was at the white House when Obama became president, and he wanted a kind of signature global development initiative. George Bush had PEPFAR, and he wanted to do this. We came up. Some of us were involved in that process, and we came up with the idea of something called the Open Government Partnership, which I think is actually a terrific platform. It doesn’t get the attention I think it deserves but it achieves a lot. So basically, Obama asked his people to come up with ideas, and this is the idea that was chosen by Obama. It was launched by him, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly early on in his term. And it was this small gathering of heads of state. And, you know, those are heady days. Remember the early days of Obama? Everybody was so excited, particularly in Global South. And I was lucky enough to be able to sit at the same table close to him. There were only like seven speeches, Obama, six other heads of state, and me. And, you know, just like this, I’ve reached my pinnacle. Everything else after that is going to go down. And, my president, Kikwete, who by the way, is speaking here at 6 p.m. today. At that time, he was also very excited, was kind of surprised that I was getting this far. But he was very excited. I remember when the thing ended, President Obama was like, kind of came over to be. And he quickly inserted himself, and he claimed me as one of his own, like, you know, you know he’s from Tanzania. Do you know what twaweza means? It mean, means we, you know, we can make it happen a little bit like the Obama slogan. And then when we went back, I got President Kikwete got us to join the Open Government Partnership. He invited me inside cabinet. So I spoke at two cabinet meetings to explain what the OGP is, how it works, how we made a plan. I ended up kind of essentially being the main architect of that plan, because the way OGP works is you make a plan, you make commitments to co-create that plan, and then you work on it and report on progress. And it’s also independent. So I got to rub shoulders with President Obama. I get to address cabinet in Tanzania. We get to make a plan that has some really amazing features. The plan focused on two major things. Transparency. How can government be transparent about what it does and what real situations? How much money is going where? And all of those sorts of things. And the second part involved public participation. How can citizens actually be involved in everyday governance because governments work. Again. I was very proud of that work. Very proud of what we did. And it was in the plan. In practice, though, even though, you know, the president behind me and, you know, he launched it, but there was also ribbon cutting and lots of good stuff. It didn’t quite go so well. Now, because of time, I’ll cut through a lot of other parts. But the short kind of conclusion is that transparency had the effect of, again, making the government look bad. We went straight to transparency without working on strengthening the capability of government systems to because we focus on the right things, not like were these kids were enrolled? But were they actually learning? The kids were not learning. So as soon as you made the data transparent, you’ve made government look bad. So many people in government understood this wonderful effort as essentially a way of making, exposing their weaknesses when they didn’t have the resources and the capability to do that and the kind of wherewithal to change. The other thing was around public participation. We went from a kind of super authoritarian government post-independence and pre-independence which was just used to being very top down to insert an innovation that was all about bottom-up and citizen engagement without ever building the mindsets. And so in practice, people in charge felt this was a challenge to their authority. We talk about kind of a patriarchal world, ageist world, where people who are older are kind of used to just having the same question. And now we are having students question because that’s what we do. So I share these stories, as a way of what I have learned, is that you may think you are doing great work, but in fact you can end up having the opposite. A lot of these lessons were recently confirmed when we did a piece of work over 6 to 8 months that involved reviewing 53 initiatives on state capability and systems change and kind of, having 130 long, unhurried conversations with people in government and outside government around: What does it actually take to get government to work better for people? So if we can go to those slides, Kathryn. The are only three slides that go over several points. I’ll just walk you through them. So you write up hundreds of pages of work. Most civil society organizations, philanthropies and consultancies. You know, whether you are a McKinsey or one of the more boutique firms, don’t really understand what makes government tick. They understand the official roles. They understand the laws. What does the actual political economy of democracy and political psychology look like? And both civil society organizations and government. They demonstrate very little curiosity to understand. We are very comfortable in our silence. Those were not, you know, and I’m an activist out there. We we like to lampoon government. But similarly, people in government also, all those people just make a lot of noise. They shout. They’re donor funded. So we, we, we kind of, wallow in our stereotypes of each other. The second part is, and again, a lot of this, you guys are in the Kennedy School. You know this. Politics is the biggest determinant of systems change. It’s kind of both small p and capital P politics advice. But many of us are trained when we think about global development to keep away from politics. We don’t, you know, India elections. No no no, you can’t touch that. And what that means is when we shirk it, we don’t understand how accountability would work in practice. Next one. Inclusion. Everybody says it’s important, especially gender equality or women in leadership. We all have the data. We know how patriarchal our systems are. But when you scratch the surface, there’s some attention to numbers, but very little work on the kind of underlying drivers of discrimination they’re not getting addressed, as well as the deeper manifestations of how does agency, how do girls and women feel agency when they are in school or when they are running for office? There is often great work. There are many feminist organizations doing some incredibly good work, but it really has work at scale. So it’s almost like exceptions to the rule that kind of show that the rule can be changed. Fourth one is a kind of very simple point, but and this is the work when we did, for example, the work of Carolina did on on looking at the many efforts, there’s a lot of attention on activities and inputs and even outputs, but very, very little focus on actual outcomes of these, the kind of activities are fetishized rather than how is that leading to difference? So lots of leadership programs where you it’s very hard. You know, we talk to people who run leadership programs for 20 plus years. Okay. As a result of that, can you tell us how people’s lives have changed. So they struggle to answer that question. And in this we also saw that there was very little prioritization. We have a kind of epidemic of good stuff happening that actually doesn’t add up. Where, you know, I think lots of good stuff is probably the enemy of two good things. Next. And this, I think about. I’m curious what you think about this. Capacity is very much thought of as individuals, like so many fellowship programs, like, let’s give them the skills and the connections rather than trying to understand how does a system either create or erode capacity? How does capability get created? How do the incentives and the motivations of a system get ordinary people and make them really capable and give them agency as opposed… And so what happens is you get often very talented, skilled, capable people who go into a system that kind of strips them of that capability. And then all we do is we find those people and give them more skills, but they could go back to the system. The system erodes, disincentivizes them. And this idea of how do you get the bureaucracy? I use that word deliberately. How do you get a bureaucracy to be able to think, motivated to think and function with confidence is a question that gets very difficult. Next. This is a really important point. Lant Pritchett and others make it is that if you think of a lot of the problems that government have been solving for a while, how do you get teachers deployed? How do you get people paid? How do you get classrooms built, you know, and so on. Those are really important problems, right? They need to be fixed and replaced but the nature of the problems. The really big problems we face now are around climate change or around, you know, you can get the teacher trained, but what will make her wake up every day and do a good job? How do you solve that problem and scale. That takes deep work, but we don’t know how to do the deep work. What we knew how to do is shallow work and that’s what gets rewarded and recognized. The last gap we found is this is all the kind of philanthropic funders side is that, lots of funding. What it does is it creates hundreds, thousands of projects. Labs. Ideas, experiments. All kinds of stuff. Well-meaning, often good ideas. But the sum effect of that is essentially just creating more noise and distraction from the causes and if anything, because it kind of distracts, because it kind of takes kind of scattered fragments your thinking and fragments the institutional structure, it may actually undermine the systems change that you see. And that kind of also further cynicism, because you come up with all these ideas and then they don’t get traction. So it kind of reinforces that, you know, these people are not interested. There’s no capability. Nothing is going to change. So it’s actually an effect that is quite serious. Now I want to just focus on five things in the next slide that when we spoke to leaders both in government and civil society, they said these are particularly missing. And this will kind of echo some of what you’ve seen. So first one is getting the technical part right of course matters. If you want to teach kids, you need to know how to use the right kind of question. But the major constraints are political and institutional, not technical. So people get trained to come up with technical solutions, when in fact the problem is not technical anymore, it’s political, etc.. Next one is that good design of course matters. So everybody who is smart knows how to do, you know, focuses on strategy and policymaking. That’s probably what you guys all get trained to do, right? But while that matters, the crux of the issue is effective implementation. It’s implementation where the rubber hits the road, where lives actually change. And implementation isn’t simply a kind of mindless following of the good policy. Implementation needs huge amount of thinking in real time in practice, as you need to adapt and pivot all the time. Those muscles are not well trained. We don’t know how to do that. All the smart people just kind of fetishize strategy policymaking and stay on that side where 90% of the work is missing. Third: delivery, of course, matters, right? You want to have the blah blah actually make a difference in people’s lives. So they should be a focus on delivery. But it’s not only deliver… It turns out, and Lily Tsai at MIT and others have made this point. How people experience public systems really matters. So you go to your health clinic. They don’t have medicines because the government has run out of money. It’ll make a huge difference whether that patient is told. Get the hell out of here. Or just like, why are you bothering us? There’s no medicine, get lost. Or whether they are treated in a respectful manner where they explain, look, we don’t have medicine. But look, let’s think together what we can do. Experience of that people have with government matters not only to be treated well. Nobody likes to be treated like shit. But it matters also in terms of how much trust and energy are you going to put into fixing the government system? Fourth. Oh, okay. Leaders struggle with isolation. You would think that leaders are surrounded by people all the time. Like, last thing you know, they feel is: What do you mean, isolation? They’re with people all the time. But as I’m sure you’ve heard, it’s very lonely. Especially if you are a reformer. Especially if you try to do something that’s different. What they crave more than money and policy ideas. Or, you know, smart papers that you published. They just want trust. They want a community of people who understand that they can talk with, be open, be vulnerable, and engage and be challenged and trust in that and the civil society side, in the government side, but particularly on the government side. And then again, the funding is linked to the distraction point. Money tends to focus on, like if you think of like a lot of West Coast philanthropy in particular it’s like, how can I get the biggest bang for this money? So they kind of thinking, you know, I have $10 million to spend $100 million or whatever. What can I do with that amount of money? And that thinking means you focus so much on what 10 million can do that you’re not paying attention to the 5 billion that the government has already spent. And how that can be put to better use. How your 10 million perhaps can focus not on the Best Buy, but what it can do to help the 5 billion be put to better use. Because even if you can take if you can influence 5% of that five billion, it’s going to be much more than what you’re going to be able to do. So this is a real problem where I think a lot of well-meaning philanthropy actually does harm by causing lots of noise outside with their money rather than. And it’s also just not very smart. All right. Last slide. And then we get into the discussion how you when we said what should be done. We did have a kind of one for one like okay, this problem, fix it like this. Instead what people said is that what you need is a kind of way of thinking that’s different. So don’t play whac-a-mole and fix each problem, right. We need to kind of think of how we think about this. So the first phase of this is the DSC event. So you’ll probably like this is focused on state capability, culture and practice to get things done well instead of pushing your solution. We talked to a IAS administrative service officer in India who said, you know, this is my day. I wake up in the morning early and there are files, and there’s a line of really smart NGOs, researchers, RCT people and, you know, management specialists lining up trying to sell me their idea. Each idea is good. I still haven’t responded to the 50 ideas that came yesterday. My life is full of salesmen trying to sell me the shiniest gadget What I need. Nobody is interested in where. What am I dealing with right now? And I have to view it. Stuff. Sometimes stupid stuff like my chief minister is where he wants to go in this meeting. Or there’s a scandal about to break in the newspapers that I need to respond to. It’s about a small thing, but it’s a scandal. If I don’t address it, I’ll be fired. And the salesman selling me the shiny things don’t. So don’t start with your policy idea, please. When you leave the Kennedy School, don’t start selling policy ideas. Focus on the focus on state. What matters is a methodology, right? Not a particular idea is like essentially a set of questions, a way of thinking and approach rooted in values and purpose. But those really matter. It’s not just strategy grounding in values on inclusion, for example, purpose, the work that rides on education again rather than your policy position. Next. Real systems change takes deep work but our environment rewards shallow work. And one of the. When we asked leaders what made them successful despite all these challenges. Invariably many of them said the ability to just stop. Remember, these are incredibly busy people who have long to do lists and what they’re telling us. The most important thing that have the ability to stop and step back, quiet and kind of cut out the noise and focus on the one of the goals. This can sound like a kind of, slightly new-agey private practice. And yet what we heard is that this was what they attributed their public success to is the ability to do this. It’s. If we and our friends were able to make this change happen, we probably would have done it right. Yeah, we are friends. We speak the same language. We hang out, we get together. Most of the big challenges that we have, we are not going to be able to solve with like minded people, like the phrase like minded has become one of my least favorite terms. Essentially says we’re going to just stay in our naval gazing club. And that’s important, especially as our world become more polarized, like like this country that many others. So we need to be able to, to be able to speak across difference and create winning coalitions, not because we like each other, we even agree on a lot of things, but because we realize we need each other to achieve something that we identify as important and  develop not only the kind of shared purpose, but also the relationships to get three more points. I hope we can discuss this a lot. We need to reimagine accountability from adversarial. The kind of thing that I peddled it for many years. You know, pointing out the failures of government, to not saying, let’s get rid of the captain. The purpose of government is people. But how can you reimagine accountability as relational with Dan Honig, for example, talks about in his mission-driven bureaucrats book which I highly encourage you to read, as shared responsibility between people and people in government for change. Sixth. Well, this is kind of an interesting point around, you know, what does it take to make change happen? And we realize that it may not be a Kennedy School degree or your master’s or money, or something else. It’s maybe something about sensibilities that we have. You have a slight … what kinds of sensibilities you need a kind of grounding in purpose? Values, a purpose, an open mind, any fundamentalism, whether you’re a religious fundamentalist or a human rights fundamentalist. I think any fundamentalist does not help you do this work, because that means you are so sure you have an answer, perhaps like I was when I told you those initial stories that do not open to questions and finally generate money. You need the right kind of funding. A lot of the money, whether it’s the World Bank or a foundation, so it’s so undermining of systems change and it’s so not focused on how existing much larger resources, both people and money can be better spent and to take time to do that. And in fact, it just kind of just creates a lot of footnotes on the side. And the mainstream story doesn’t change. I want to end by just one reflection. When India became independent. There was a great deal of energy in the 60s, for example, in Tanzania, and many other African countries, because we felt we could now run our country instead of colonial powers. So there was a sense that government is ours. We’re gonna to run. I’m not going to be a bunch of white people from London running it. We’re going to run our countries. What has happened now is you don’t have that sense. You have a sense that government is there. People are here. There’s this kind of othering of government, and there is whether it’s on the left or the right. I think it’s across the ideological spectrum. There’s this kind of distrust and a suspicion of government and a sense that government is going to do bad unless you kind of watch out for it or you cut it down to size. So when if you are on the right, you say, let’s strip government of money, lower taxes, smaller government. If you’re on the left, it’s like, oh, you can’t trust government there. You know, put all kinds of constraints on it. But the sum effect is this othering of government, has, I think, a deeply insidious effect of taking the very institution people need to be able to do good things and other it and make it suspicious and have suspicion of it and make it small. And I think what we did to really question in ways that I certainly wasn’t in the first 20 or 30 years of my professional life, it’s really questioned what conceptions we have of government, what effect it has in terms of how we imagine policy practice. Thank you very much. I hope that was useful. Over to you.