Depth over Breadth in Development: My Experiences from Visiting Ethiopia and Kenya
I recently spoke with a highly successful businessperson interested in development. They asked me, “if you were not resource constrained, what project would you start or support?”
The question set me back. I spend a good part of everyday thinking, reading or otherwise engaging with the Development Sector but I did not have a clear and coherent answer. I shared a few quick thoughts, “education technology and socio-emotional learning for young children, antenatal and postnatal care for underprivileged women, fortification of staple food items and unconditional cash transfers,” but I was not persuaded by my own answer. Each of these programs aim to drive impact by breadth, working to improve the lives of millions with a single intervention.
In July and August 2022, I visited two incredible organizations, Project Mercy in Ethiopia and SHOFCO (Shining Hope for Communities) in Kenya. These two organizations are trailblazers in an innovative form of development. Development that embraces the complexity of local communities and the interrelated struggles that people face as they seek economic empowerment and dignity. These organizations exploit the power of depth and economies of scope to deliver a wide range of interventions. Rather than doing one thing for many millions, they seek to support a community from a variety of angles from health to education to women’s empowerment and infrastructure.
After visiting these organizations, I have recalibrated my views on what may be the most effective way to support those in poverty. I think greater focus should be placed on organizations that go deep in a single community. Let me tell you more about these organizations and why I have a new answer to the question that was posed to me, “if you were not resource constrained, what project would you start or support?”
I had the distinct privilege to visit Yetebon, a remote village in southern Ethiopia, where Project Mercy set up their first on-ground program in 1993. At the outset, Project Mercy worked with local elders and community leaders to understand the needs of the community — a school and a clinic.
Project Mercy now provides a range of support to the community, including a hospital with 80 staff, a fulltime surgeon and two general practitioners, a high school, graduate training college, poultry farm that provides food for the primary school with 1,900 students, and much more. It is very impressive to see in person. Project Mercy has also expanded its reach, and now works with several communities around Ethiopia.
I was most inspired by witnessing the adult literacy training program. This is a program where top students from the school go into the local community and teach adults basic literacy skills in Amharic (the Ethiopian language and possibly the most unique language script I have seen). We walked around the local village from 6am to 8am on a Friday morning visiting more than 6 local households. In each household we found a group of adults learning the Amharic alphabet under the diligent tutelage of young men and women.
Kibera slum in Nairobi, the largest slum in Kenya and one of the largest in Africa, is where I witnessed SHOFCO’s activities in person. The setting is radically different to Project Mercy, yet the underlying model is very similar. SHOFCO seeks to work directly with the community to meet their needs through a wide range of programs and support.
The story behind SHOFCO is laid out in “Find Me Unafraid” (my review here). It is a story built on the strength and struggle of Kennedy and his wife Jessica who sought to support those who were underprivileged in their slum community.
While visiting Kibera is an overwhelming sensory experience, there was one sight that was unlike anything I have seen in any other slum I have visited. Across the slum I could see large blue tanks that seemingly hovered over the slum skyline. These tanks hold purified water that is distributed around the slum through a series of overhead pipes. This water sanitation and distribution system provides clean, cheap water to members of the community. To see these towering beacons of infrastructural development are a testament to the innovation and scale at which SHOFCO operates within the community.
The water sanitation program is only one of the many programs that SHOFCO deploys. I visited the girl’s school, library, sustainable livelihoods center, computer lab and gender empowerment department. I had the chance to speak with many of the program leaders who are local community members, deeply passionate about improving the lives of the people (especially women and children) in their community.
Core Elements to Depth-Based Programs
Both Project Mercy and SHOFCO share many similarities, even though they seek to support very different community members. I believe that these similarities uncover some of the core elements of a successful organization that aims to improve lives at a deep level, including:
● Starting with questions: these organizations hold engagement with the community as a core value. In SHOFCO there is the SUN network, which is a group of democratically elected community members who inform programmatic implementation and decision-making. In Project Mercy, leadership deeply engages with local community leaders and government.
● Transferring ownership: local community members own and run the activities of these organization. I perceive this as being critically important, especially as the organizations branch out into a range of programs that percolate across the whole community, potentially supplanting many of the pre-existing systems. For example, in SHOFCO there are existing water distribution systems, but they are broken (both literally and metaphorically). The community has a vested interest in maintaining the above ground water system and this has led to internalized ownership of this infrastructure.
● Programmatic experimentation: the organizations have tried many different types of interventions which often require radically different skillsets. Yet one thing remains at the core, and that is the deep understanding, involvement, and collaborations with the communities which these programs aim to serve.
● Playing the translating role: both SHOFCO and Project Mercy do a remarkable job of tapping external expertise and contextualizing this knowledge to local needs. Unlike many ‘conventional’ interventions in the development sector that are tightly programmatized, these organizations are willing to mold best practices to what their communities need.
● Leading with infrastructure, embedding with knowledge: the infrastructure that I observed in both Kenya and Ethiopia was impressive. In Yetebon, the midwife training facilities took me aback because I thought that the inanimate bodies lying in the beds were real humans (they were training dummies). In Kibera, the Reverse Osmosis machinery that purifies the water distributed via the blue tanks, could have come straight from a factory in Germany. However, the infrastructure is just the glossy façade to what drives both programs, and that is the formal and informal education of community members.
Advantages of Depth-Based Models
I am bullish on depth-based, community-driven interventions such as those deployed by SHOFCO and Project Mercy. I suspect that there is an under-investment in these types of programs. The following are some of the key reasons I have updated my beliefs in this direction:
● Needs first: effective, depth-based programs start with the needs of their community members. There is no prescription or paternalistic imposition of interventions that may not meet the innate demands of those within a community.
● Flexibility: these organizations have the scope to experiment with not just the implementation of their programs but also the actual programs themselves. Change can be rapid; it can be triggered by external factors such as political change or climate or internal factors such as health outcome and education level improvements. Communities are not static, and neither are their needs. A depth-based approach to development has the capability of dynamically updating its programmatic offering to meet community members where they are at any point in time.
● Leveraging contextual knowledge: local community members are the experts of their own lives and the needs of their community. Furthermore, there is often a wealth of experience and knowledge that sits within communities that go untapped. Examples of such knowledge include agronomic wisdom, cultural context, and political savvy. Depth-based programs can leverage this knowledge to set up programs that are more likely to reach their objectives. As those who work in the development sector know, programs can look amazing on paper, but impact happens through implementation.
● Long-term community buy-in: sustainable impact requires community buy-in. In the long-term it is hard to sustain a model where external organizations enter communities, receive funding from external sources, and implement programs on the ground with limited community engagement. Programs require true ownership and buy-in from those who are the ‘beneficiaries’. Depth-based programs, by necessity, must gain buy-in to expand the scope of services that they provide within communities. I argue that this leads to a greater likelihood for long-term success.
Challenges to Depth-Based Models
There are some distinct challenges that this type of model faces. Some of these key challenges include:
● Scalability: each community is unique and multidimensional. Each community has its own unique power structures in place, political contexts, geographic and agronomic conditions and more. It is difficult to pick up the programs that may work in Yetebon and transpose them to a rural village in Uganda. What is scalable though is the mindset, values, and processes that these programs use to drive deep impact. It would be great to synthesize these learnings and share them with locally embedded entrepreneurs around the world.
● Accountability: successful depth-based programs end up providing a range of services and support that have the potential of supplanting government services. These organizations provide high-quality schooling, social safety net food programs, water, sanitation and more. While both SHOFCO and Project Mercy have done an admirable job at engaging the community, they do not operate within the same power constraints that governments and other elected bodies do. Consequently, there is a risk that there may be a lack of accountability to the community. I urge organizations that pursue a depth-based model to implement strong accountability measures. These will help to ensure that they are responsive to the needs of the whole community.
● Measurement and communication of impact: it is extremely hard to the measure the effectiveness, let alone the impact of depth-based programs that provide a range of services within their communities. The theory of change for these programs may as well be a spaghetti and meatballs, modern art installation.
In economics, we like to control the environment so that we can tease out the effect a program on a population (preferable with a randomized controlled trial or other form of impact evaluation). However, these tools are largely ineffective when there are so many confounding factors. This then leads to uncertainties around the quantifiable effectiveness and overall impact of the work these organizations are doing.
The challenge of measuring impact can make it difficult to communicate the effectiveness of a program to funders. It can also lead to poor decision making based on intuition as opposed to data.
“If you were not resource constrained, what project would you start or support?”
So, I’ll come back to the question that was posed to me a few months ago. If I were asked this question today, I would undoubtedly respond that there is an under-investment in community-led, depth-based organizations. As I sit today, I would not say that it supplants many of the highly cost-effective, rigorously tested interventions that exist. However, I do believe that much greater emphasis and experimentation should go into programs that seek to drive impact through depth over breadth.