Another Cup: follow-up on Greg Mortenson post

Three articles have caught my eye in the months since my first post about Greg Mortenson and the accusations of wrongdoing within his Central Asia Institute (CAI).  Unsurprisingly, they drew my attention in part because they pick up on two main themes of my post: the difficulty of verifying development dollars on the ground (which works in Mortenson’s immediate defense) and the uneconomical/unsustainable nature of the CAI solution (a longer term but also more damning critique).

We’ll start with the good: a February report by 16 education aid agencies currently working in Afghanistan offers two vindications for the CAI, (the Guardian also provides a nice summary). The report and article both contribute an arbitrating neutrality, having been published before the CAI news broke.  Two key points as they pertain to the Mortenson story:

First, the report points out the overall impressive gains in female education that have taken place in Afghanistan since 2001.  On paper, $1.9 billion has been spent on education, 2,281 schools have been built, and female enrollment has jumped from 5,000 to 2.4 million.

Secondly, the report simultaneously draws attention to the fact that these gains are significantly inflated on paper.  Potentially 22% of those new students are classified as “long-term absentees”.  A shocking 47% of the 2,281 “schools built” have no physical building, and school closure due to insecurity remains a chronic problem.

For CAI, the first piece of news is certainly a positive indicator that their efforts have been having some effect – they have been part of that collective school building campaign.  Let’s not forget we’re talking about one of the least developed countries in the world that is still battling some very repressive views towards female education.  In such a context, those gains really are impressive, and CAI is part of that story.

The second vindication is more bittersweet in that it demonstrates that many of the 60 Minutes’ claims regarding the schools themselves – the claims that suggested far less on the ground success than CAI claims on paper – are in fact not at all unique to the CAI.  Given those statistics above, in fact, CAI may be having far more than the average success in getting schools open in Afghanistan.

The second article takes up this issue at a more theoretical level, taking a look at the decade long project by Transparency International (TI) to rate countries’ performance on corruption by surveying locals.  In short, the article examines the disconnect between citizens’ perceptions and the reality regarding corruption in their country.  This echoes my point from April about the extent to which citizens are often poorly informed regarding the sources of project financing.  I’ve heard my host mother casually accuse our mayor of a million dollar corruption scandal over tea without batting an eye.  Yes, that is millions, and yes she meant dollars, in our tiny rural village.  When I ask how she knows, her response was the convincing “I just know.”  This is a relatively well educated woman, so I’d hate to think of an international outsider trying to verify development money spent simply by driving around town and asking those even less informed than her.

Again, this is a mark in favor of CAI, as this effectively seems to be what 60 Minutes did.  It’s also another sign of how tricky development is.  The fact is one can probably dig up stories of misspent funds on just about any project, especially if outsiders parachute in without any understanding of local alliances.  As I mentioned last post, it’s simply impossible to achieve “developed” country accounting standards.  Dealing with a certain level of uncertainty is an inherent risk in development; it can be mitigated, but never eliminated.  That story is a lot harder to sell to the public, but those of us in the business do ourselves no favors when we try to sugarcoat it.

Finally, as the Oxfam report points out, the worst builder of schools in Afghanistan seems to have been the military. Again, unsurprising.  I wouldn’t think to try to do the military’s job, and their strengths aren’t necessarily conducive to doing mine.  The Provincial Reconstruction Teams poor performance seems to partially stem from the fact that their very involvement makes a school a security target and thus un-attendable for students.  However, to some extent this is true for any Western organization.  Again in defense of CAI, this offers support for their low profile approach.  It’s a catch twenty-two for CAI because the approach breeds local confusion about who is funding schools, which in turn fuels 60 Minutes’ style sensationalism.

Now for the more important bad news: the World Bank recently released a new education strategy, as for that matter did USAID (once again, for brevity see this nice summary by the Center for Global Development).  The strategies distill half a century of development experience down into a few key goals, and come to very similar conclusions.  Unsurprisingly, what matters most in development is not building schools nor even necessarily getting kids in the seats, but rather incentivizing actors (students, parents, educators, administrators, and politicians) to perform, and most of all ensuring the quality of the education that goes on within the classroom.  In shorter words, the key goal in education should be the achievement of learning. If that conclusion somehow seems less than illuminating, the banal bureaucratic language of the strategies obscures the fact that for four decades the World Bank spent its efforts focused almost entirely on building schools and training teachers.

The development community has been learning, and we now see the resulting shift from focusing on inputs to an emphasis on outcomes in agencies’ program design.  Not even two decades old, it’s unsurprising that the CAI still betrays this older input focused approach, albeit at a much more grass roots level approach.

Both of these arguments confirm my initial comments regarding the CAI “scandal” a couple months ago.  On the one hand, development is messy and following the money trail on the ground is exceedingly difficult.  Greg Mortenson’s detractors seem to have a very poor understanding of this in their efforts to verify his foundation’s work.  On the other hand, much of the development community long remained unimpressed by Greg Mortenson because it knew the dirty secret he was still learning – building schools is a less than sufficient solution to a very complicated problem.  Good story, cosmetic fix, poor solution.

From my understanding, domestically the news has been much more focused on the inaccuracies in his personal stories as well as the “using CAI as a personal ATM” line.  I’m curious to hear from readers if they feel this is accurate.  Meanwhile, I’ll leave that debate to the courts, for as I’m sure Mortenson would agree, the bigger issue is not the finances of one small NGO, but the billion dollar education of the world’s most economically vulnerable children.