How to Foster Sustainability
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12284 |
| Date | 01 May 2016 |
| Published date | 01 May 2016 |
| Author | Jindra Cekan |
How to Foster Sustainability
Jindra Cekan
Valuing Voices
I feel myself standing in the village, the NGO trucks have
just left. Space and time telescope for a minute and I am
her. I am that woman, Aminata, in a village in central Mali,
living on millet and goat’s milk, walking two hours for water
each day. I look through her eyes and see fields and mud
banco walls around her thatched hut. It is late afternoon
and the dust is settling.
I also see development projects that she has participated
in, which have come and gone. I feel her calm acceptance
that life will continue somehow. I am surprised she is not feel-
ing hopeless, given how little she has.
I am not her, but I work to help her.
Coming back to myself sitting at my kitchen counter, my
thoughts return to international development projects that I
have technically designed and written proposals for, others
that I have monitored and evaluated. Having been in and
out of villages for implementers across Africa and Latin
America and donor offices in Europe and the US, I know we
want to leave behind resilient livelihoods, vibrant health,
and good lives for Aminata and her family. We want tax-
payer and donor money well spent. We want supportive
policies and laws. We may hope she looks around with satis-
faction, hope and certainty that her children’s lives will be
better because we came.
Yet our development professionals’imaginations rarely
reach far enough because we only see the horizon of our
projects (see Figure 1). For we are not standing in dusty vil-
lages with NGO trucks long gone. We are sitting at our lap-
tops somewhere in the world working on current projects.
My PhD anthropology professor praised the lessons from
‘dusty ankles’, yet Aminata’s are permanently dusty. Her situ-
ation is what we are sequentially striving to change with
road building and water projects, with reforestation and gar-
dening projects. This is what our funders pay us to ‘solve’,
yet we all know projects start, run and end, start, run and
end, and so on. We will not be there after they end, we will
not be tasked with continuing to grow food, go to market,
fetch water or raise our children there, with only memories
of what was taught, with aging equipment, with different
demands and inputs. We development experts have the lux-
ury of finite expectations for the work we do: one, three,
five years and next!Each equally pressing, funding never
enough, needs always growing.
Do you wonder too how any project activities are working
out now as I do? Are you, too, wondering if any national
partners continue to help ‘your’projects? Do NGOs newly
arrived at her village know the good we did, to build on it?
Or not?
Has Aminata’s life appreciably improved and if yes, how?
Do we have data to tell our taxpayers and contributors if all
their money was spent on activities that villagers can con-
tinue on their own?
While the US government spends less than 1 per cent of
its budget on foreign assistance, it has added up. Since
2000, the US government has spent more than $280 billion
on bilateral and multilateral assistance; the EU has spent
$1.4 trillion. In 2011 alone, citizens worldwide spent another
$56 billion on foreign donations, which is three times more
than the US government. And while most taxpayers believe
that this spending supports ‘sustainable development,’our
Valuing Voices research shows that 99 per cent of projects
these funds paid for are not evaluated after the funding
stopped. Unfortunately, this continues: in 2014 alone, the US
government spent $20 billion and the EU spent $80 billion
on program assistance without any plan for post-project eval-
uations. This does not mean the projects are not sustainable;
we simply do not know.
In fact, the US Agency for International Development
(USAID) was once considered the leader in post-project eval-
uations assessing relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and sus-
tainability, including commissioning a study in 1980 about
the needs for an ex-post evaluation system for the agency.
Yet times and administrators changed and while projected
impact studies abound, USAID has managed only one post-
project evaluation in 30 years (due later this year). The World
Bank has done 12,000 projects yet we found that only 33
post-project evaluations had consulted with participants,
and only three evaluations had clear methods showing us
community sustainability feedback. And although thousands
of documents appear on multilateral and bilateral donor
database searches as ex-post evaluations, the vast majority
Figure 1. Locating Sustainability in Project Evaluation.
Note: There is usually quite reliable monitoring and evaluation during
project implementation (red) and evaluation at start-mid-end (green),
but virtually no one returns afterwards (blue).
Global Policy (2016) 7:2 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12284 ©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 7 . Issue 2 . May 2016 293
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