Two Million Villages

First published in Britain and the World in the Seventies: A Collection of Fabian Essays, edited by George Cunningham, published by George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., London, 1970.

The results of the second development decade will be no better than those of the first unless there is a conscious and determined shift of emphasis from foods to people. Indeed, without such a shift the results of aid will become increasingly destructive.

If we talk of promoting development, what have we in mind – goods or people? If it is people – which particular people? Who are they? Where are they? Why do they need help?

If they cannot get on without help, what, precisely, is the help they need? How do we communicate with them? Concern with people raises countless questions like these. Goods, on the other hand, do not raise so many questions. Particularly when econometricians and statisticians deal with them, goods even cease to be anything identifiable, and become GNP, imports, exports, savings, investment, infrastructure, or what not. Impressive models can be built out of these abstractions, and it is a rarity for them to leave any room for actual people.

Of course, ‘populations’ may figure in them, but as nothing more than a mere quantity to be used as a divisor after the dividend, i.e. the quantity of available goods, has been determined. The model then shows that ‘development’ that is, the growth of the dividend, is held back and frustrated if the divisor grows as well.

It is much easier to deal with goods than with people – if only because goods have no minds of their own and raise no problems of communication. When !he emphasis is on people, communications problems become paramount. Why are the helpers and who are those to be helped? The helpers, by and large, are rich, educated (in a somewhat specialised sense), and town-based. Those who most need help are poor, uneducated, and rurally based. This means that three tremendous gulfs separate the former from the latter: the gulf between rich and poor; the gulf between educated and uneducated; and the gulf between city-men and country-folk, which includes that between industry and agriculture. The first problem of development aid is bow to bridge these three gulfs. A great effort of imagination, study, and compassion is needed to do so. The methods of production, the patterns of consumption, the systems of ideas and of values that suit relatively affluent and educated city people are unlikely to suit poor, semi-illiterate peasants. Poor peasants cannot suddenly acquire the outlook and habits of sophisticated city people. If the people cannot adapt themselves to the methods, then the methods must be adapted to the people. This is the whole crux of the matter.

There are, moreover, many features of the rich man’s economy which are so questionable in themselves and, in any case, so inappropriate for poor communities that successful adaptation of the people to these features would spell ruin. If the nature of change is such that nothing is left for the fathers to teach their sons, or for the sons to accept from their fathers, family life collapses. The life, work, and happiness of all societies depend on certain ‘psychological structures’ which are infinitely precious and highly vulnerable. Social cohesion, co-operation, mutual respect and above all self-respect, courage in the face of adversity, and the ability to bear hardship – all this and much else disintegrates and disappears when these ‘psychological structures’ are gravely damaged. A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness. No amount of economic growth can compensate for such losses – though this may be an idle reflection, since economic growth is normally inhibited by them.

None of these awesome problems figure noticeably in the cosy theories of most of our development economists. The failure of the first development decade is attributed simply to an insufficiency of aid appropriations or, worse still, to certain alleged defects inherent in the societies and populations of the developing countries. A study of the current literature could lead one to suppose that the decisive question was whether aid was dispensed multilaterally or bilaterally, or that an improvement in the terms of trade for primary commodities, a removal of trade barriers, guarantees for private investors, or the effective introduction of birth control, were the only things that really mattered.

Now, I am far from suggesting that any of these items are irrelevant, but they do not seem to go to the heart of the matter, and there is in any case precious little constructive action flowing from the innumerable discussions which concentrate on them. The heart of the matter, as I see it, is the stark fact that world poverty is primarily a problem of two million villages, and thus a problem of two thousand million villagers. The solution cannot be found in the cities of the Door countries. Unless life in the hinterland can be made tolerable, the problem of world poverty is in- soluble and will inevitably get worse.

All important insights are missed if we continue to think of development mainly in quantitative terms and in those vast abstractions – like GNP, investment, savings, etc. – which have their usefulness in the study of developed countries but have virtually no relevance to development problems as such. (Nor did they play the slightest part in the actual development of the rich countries!) Aid can be considered successful only if it helps to mobilise the labour-power of the masses in the receiving country and raises productivity without ‘saving’ labour. The common criterion of success, namely the growth of GNP, is utterly misleading and, in fact, must of necessity lead to phenomena which can only be de- scribed as neocolonialism.

I hesitate to use this term because it has a nasty sound and appears to imply a deliberate intention on the part of the aid- givers. Is there such an intention? On the whole, I think, there is not. But this makes the problem greater instead of smaller. Unintentional neo-colonialism is far more insidious and infinitely more difficult to combat than neo-colonialism intentionally pursued. It results from the mere drift of things, supported by the best intentions. Methods of production, standards of consumption, criteria of success or failure, systems of values. and behaviour patterns establish themselves in poor countries which, being (doubtfully) appropriate only to conditions of affluence already achieved, fix the poor countries ever more inescapably in a condition of utter dependence on the rich. The most obvious example and symptom is increasing indebtedness. This is widely recognised, and well- meaning people draw the simple conclusion that grants are better than loans, and cheap loans better than dear ones. True enough. But increasing indebtedness is not the most serious matter. After all, if a debtor cannot pay he ceases to pay – a risk the creditor must always have had in mind.

Far more serious is the dependence created when a poor country fails for the production and consumption patterns of the rich. A textile mill I recently visited in Africa provides a telling example. The manager showed me with considerable pride that his factory was at the highest technological level to be found anywhere in the world Why was it so highly automated? ‘Because.’ he said, ‘African labour, unused to industrial work, would make mistakes, whereas automated machinery does not make mistakes. The quality standards demanded today.’ he explained, ‘are such that my product must be perfect to be able to find a market.’ He summed up his policy by saying: ‘Surely, my task is to eliminate the human factor.’ Nor is this all. Because of inappropriate quality standards, all his equipment had to be imported from the most advanced countries; the sophisticated equipment demanded that all higher management and maintenance personnel had to be imported. Even the raw materials had to be imported because the locally grown cotton was too short for top quality yarn and the postulated standards demanded the use of a high percentage of man-made fibres. This is not an untypical case. Anyone who has taken the trouble to look systematically at actual ‘development’ projects – instead of merely studying development plans and econometric models – knows of countless such cases: soap factories producing luxury soap by such sensitive processes that only highly refined materials can be used, which must be imported at high prices while the local raw materials are exported at low prices; food-processing plants; packing stations; motorisation, and so on – all on the rich man’s pattern. In many cases, local fruit goes to waste because the consumer allegedly demands quality standards which relate solely to eye-appeal and can be met only by fruit imported from Australia or California where the application of an immense science and a fantastic technology ensures that every apple is of the same size and without the slightest visible blemish. The examples could be multiplied without end. Poor countries slip – and are pushed – into the adaptation of production methods and consumption standards which destroy the possibilities of self-reliance and self-help. The results are unintentional neo-colonialism and hopelessness for the poor.

How, then, is it possible to help these two million villages? First, the quantitative aspect. If we take the total of western aid after eliminating certain items which have nothing to do with development, and divide it by the number of people living in the developing countries, we arrive at a per-head figure of rather less than Pounds 2 a year. Considered as an income supplement, this is, of course, negligible and derisory. Many people therefore plead that the rich countries ought to make a much bigger financial effort – and it would be perverse to refuse to support this plea, But what is it that one could reasonably expect to achieve? A per-head figure of Pounds 3 a year, or Pounds 4 a year? As a subsidy, a sort of ‘public assistance’ payment, even Pounds 4 a year is hardly less derisory than the present figure.

To illustrate the problem further, we may consider the case of a small group of developing countries which receive supplementary income on a truly magnificent scale – the oil producing countries of the Middle East, Libya, and Venezuela. Their tax and royalty income from the oil companies in 1968 reached Pounds 2,349 million, or roughly Pounds 50 per head of their populations. Is this input of funds producing healthy and stable societies, contented populations, the progressive elimination of rural poverty, a flourishing agriculture, and widespread industrialisation? In spite of some very limited successes, the answer is certainly no. Money alone does not do the trick. The quantitative aspect is quite secondary to the qualitative aspect. If the policy is wrong, money will not make it right; and if the policy is right, money may not, in fact, present an unduly difficult problem.

Let us turn then to the qualitative aspect. If we have learnt anything from the last ten or twenty years of development effort. it is that the problem presents an enormous intellectual challenge. The aid-givers – rich, educated, town-based – know how to do things in their own way: but do they know how to assist self-help among two million villages, ‘among two thousand million villagers – poor, uneducated, country-based? They know how to do a few big things in big towns; but do they know how to do thousands of small things in rural areas? They know how to do things with lots of capital: but do they know how to do them with lots of labour – initially untrained labour at that?

On the whole, they do not know; but there are many experienced people who do know, each of them in their own limited field of experience. In other words, the necessary knowledge, by and large, exists; but it does not exist in an organised, readily accessible form. It is scattered, unsystematic, unorganised and no doubt also incomplete.

The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge. A gift of knowledge is infinitely preferable to a gift of material things. There are many reasons for this. Nothing becomes truly ‘one’s own’ except on the basis of some genuine effort or sacrifice. A gift of material goods can be appropriated by the recipient without effort or sacrifice; it therefore rarely becomes ‘his own’ and is all too frequently and easily treated as a mere windfall. A gift of intellectual goods, a gift of knowledge, is a very different matter. Without a genuine effort of appropriation on the part of the recipient there is no gift. To appropriate the gift and to make it one’s own is the same thing, and ’neither moth nor rust doth corrupt’. The gift of material goods makes people dependent, but the gift of knowledge makes them free -provided it is the right kind of knowledge, of course. The gift of knowledge also has far more lasting effects and is far more closely relevant to the concept of ‘development’. Give a man a fish, as the saying goes, and you are helping him a little bit for a very short while; teach him the art of fishing, and he can help himself all his life. On a higher level: supply him with fishing tackle; this will cost you a good deal of money, and the result remains doubtful; but even if fruitful, the man’s continuing livelihood will still be dependent upon you for replacements. But teach him to make his own fishing tackle and you have helped him to become not only self-supporting, but also self-reliant and independent.

This, then, should become the ever-increasing preoccupation of aid programmes – to make men self-reliant and independent by the generous supply of the appropriate intellectual gifts, gifts of relevant knowledge on the methods of self-help. This approach, incidentally, also has the advantage of being relatively cheap, that is to say, of making money go a very long way. For Pounds 100 you may be able to equip one man with certain means Of production; but for the same money you may well be able to teach a hundred men to equip themselves. Perhaps a little ‘pump-priming’ by way of material goods will in some cases be helpful to speed the process; but this would be purely incidental and secondary, and if the goods are rightly chosen. those who need them can probably pay

A fundamental reorientation of aid in the direction I advocate would require only a marginal reallocation of funds. If Britain is currently giving aid to the tune of about Pounds 250 million a year, the diversion of merely one per cent of this sum to the organisation and mobilisation of ‘gifts of knowledge’ would, I am certain, change all prospects and open a new and much more hopeful era in the history of ‘development’. One per cent, after all, is about E2t million – a sum of money which would go a very, very long way for this purpose if intelligently employed. And it might make the other ninety-nine per cent immensely more fruitful,

Once we see the task of aid as primarily one of supplying relevant knowledge, experience, know-how, etc. – that is to say, intellectual rather than material goods – it is clear that the present organisation of the overseas development effort is far from adequate. This is natural as long as the main task is seen as one of making funds available for a variety of needs and projects proposed by the recipient country, the availability of the knowledge factor being more or less taken for granted. What I am saying is simply that this availability cannot be taken for granted, that it is precisely this knowledge factor which is conspicuously lacking, that this is the gap, the ‘missing link’, in the whole enterprise. I am not saying that no knowledge is currently being supplied: this would be ridiculous. No, there is a plentiful flow of know-how, but it is based on the implicit assumption that what is good for the rich must obviously be good for the poor. As I have argued above, this assumption is wrong, or at least only very partially right and preponderantly wrong.

So we get back to our two million villages and have to see how we can make relevant knowledge available to them. To do so, we must first possess this knowledge ourselves. Before we can talk about giving aid, we must have something to give. We do not have thousands of poverty-stricken villages in our country; so what do we know about effective methods of self-help in such circumstances? The beginning of wisdom is the admission of one’s own lack of knowledge. As long as we think we know, when in fact we do not, we shall continue to go to the poor and demonstrate to them all the marvellous things they could do if they were already rich. This has been the main failure of aid to date.

But we do know something about the organisation and systematisation of knowledge and experience: we do have facilities to do almost any job, provided only that we clearly understand what it is. If the job is, for instance, to assemble an effective guide to methods and materials for low-cost building in tropical countries, and, with the aid of such a guide. to train local builders in developing countries in the appropriate technologies and methodologies, there is no doubt we can do this, or – to say the least – that we can immediately take the steps which will enable us to do this in two or three years’ time. Similarly, if we clearly understand that one of the basic needs in many developing countries is water, and that millions of villagers would benefit enormously from the availability of systematic knowledge on low-cost, self-help methods of water-storage, protection, transport, and so on – if this is clearly understood and brought into focus, there is no doubt that we have the ability and resources to assemble, organise and communicate the required information,

As I have said already, poor people have relatively simple needs, and it is primarily with regard to their basic requirements and activities that they want assistance. If they were not capable of self-help and self-reliance, they would not survive today. But their own methods are all too frequently too primitive, too inefficient and ineffective; these methods require up-grading by the input of new knowledge, new to them, but not altogether new to every- body. It is quite wrong to assume that poor people are generally unwilling to change; but the proposed change must stand in some organic relationship to what they are doing already, and they are rightly suspicious of, and resistant to, radical changes proposed by town-based and office-bound innovators who approach them in the spirit of: ‘You just get out of my way and I shall show you how useless you are and how splendidly the job can be done with a lot of foreign money and outlandish equipment.’

Because the needs of poor people are relatively simple, the range of studies to be undertaken is fairly limited. It is a perfectly manageable task to tackle systematically. but it requires a different organisational set-up from what we have at present (a set-up primarily geared to the disbursement of funds). At present, the development effort is mainly carried on by government officials, both in the donor and in the recipient country; in other words, by administrators. They are not. by training and experience, either entrepreneurs or innovators, nor do they possess specific technical knowledge of productive processes, commercial requirements, or communication problems. Assuredly, they have an essential role to play, and one could not – and would not – attempt to proceed without them. But they can do nothing by themselves alone. They must be closely associated with other social groups, with people in industry and commerce, who are trained in the ‘discipline of viability’ – if they cannot pay their wages on Friday$ they are out! – and with professional people, academics, research workers, journalists, educators, and so on, who have time, facilities, ability, and inclination to think, write, and communicate. Development work is far too difficult to be done successfully by any one of these three groups working in isolation. Both in the donor countries and in the recipient countries it is necessary to achieve what I call the A-B-C combination, where A stands for administrators; B stands for businessmen; and C stands for communicators -that is intellectual workers, professionals of various descriptions. It is only when the A-B-C combination is effectively achieved that a real impact on the appallingly difficult problems of development can be made.

In the rich countries, there are thousands of able people in all these walks of life who would like to be involved and make a contribution to the fight against world poverty, a contribution that goes beyond forking out a bit of money; but there are not many outlets for them. And in the poor countries, the educated people, a highly privileged minority, all too often follow the fashions set by the rich societies – another aspect of unintentional neocolonialism – and attend to any problem except those directly concerned with the poverty of their fellow-countrymen. They need to be given strong guidance and inspiration to deal with the urgent problems of their own societies.

The mobilisation of relevant knowledge to help the poor to help themselves, through the mobilisation of the willing helpers who exist everywhere, both here and overseas, and the tying together of these helpers in ‘A-B-C-Groups’, is a task that requires some money, but not very much. As I said, a mere one per cent of the British aid programme would be enough – more than enough – to give such an approach all the financial strength it could possibly require for quite a long time to come. There is therefore no question of turning the aid programmes upside down or inside out. It is the thinking that has to be changed and also the method of operating. It is not enough merely to have a new policy: new methods of organisation are required, because the policy is in the implementation

To implement the approach here advocated, action groups need to be formed not only in the donor countries but also, and this is most important, in the developing countries themselves. These action groups, on the A-B-C pattern. should ideally be outside the government machine, in other words they should be non- government voluntary agencies. They may well be set up by voluntary agencies already engaged in development work.

There are many such agencies, both religious and secular, with large numbers of workers at the ‘grass roots level’, and they have not been slow in recognising that ‘intermediate technology’ is precisely what they have been trying to practise in numerous in- stances, but that they are lacking any organised technical backing to this end. Conferences have been held in many countries to discuss their common problems, and it has become ever more apparent that even the most self-sacrificing efforts of the voluntary workers cannot bear proper fruit unless there is a systematic organisation of knowledge and an equally systematic organisation of communications – in other words, unless there is something that might be called an ‘intellectual infrastructure’. Attempts are being made to create such an infrastructure, and they should receive the fullest support from governments and from the voluntary fund-raising organisations. At least four main functions have to be fulfilled:

The function of communications – to enable each field worker or group of field workers to know what other work is going on in the geographical or ‘functional’ territory in which they are engaged, so as to facilitate the direct exchange of information.

The function of information brokerage – to assemble on a systematic basis and to disseminate relevant information on appropriate technologies for developing countries, particularly on low-cost methods relating to building, water and power, crop- storage and processing, small-scale manufacturing, health ser- vices, transportation and so forth. Here the essence of the matter is not to hold all the information in one centre but to hold ‘information on information’ or ‘know-how on know- how’. The function of ‘feed-back’, that is to sag’, the transmission of technical problems from the field workers in developing countries to those places in the advanced countries where suitable facilities for their solution exist.

The function of creating and co-ordinating ‘sub-structures’. that is to say, action groups and verification centres in the developing countries themselves.

These are matters which can be fully clarified only by trial and error. In all this one does not have to begin from scratch – a great deal exists already, but it now wants to be pulled together and systematically developed. The future success of development aid will depend on the organisation and communication of the right kind of knowledge – a task that is manageable, definite, and wholly within the available resources.

Why is it so difficult for the rich to help the poor? The all- pervading disease of the modern world is the total imbalance between city and countryside, an imbalance in terms of wealth. power, culture, attraction, and hope. The former has become over-extended and the latter has atrophied. The city has become the universal magnet, while rural life has lost its savour. Yet it remains an unalterable truth that, just as a sound mind depends on a sound body, so the health of the cities depends on the health of the rural areas. The cities, with all their wealth, are merely secondary producers, while primary production, the precondition of all economic life, takes place in the countryside. The prevailing lack of balance, based on the age-old exploitation of countryman and raw material producer, today threatens all countries through- out the world, the rich even more than the poor. To restore a proper balance between city and rural life is perhaps the greatest task in front of modern man. It is not simply-a matter of raising agricultural yields so as to avoid world hunger. There is no answer to the evils of mass unemployment and mass migration into cities, unless the whole level of rural life can be raised, and this requires the development of an agro-industrial culture, so that each district. each community, can offer a colourful variety of occupations to its members.

The crucial task of this decade, therefore, is to make the development effort appropriate and thereby more effective, so that it will reach down to the heartland of world poverty, to two million villages. If the disintegration of rural life continues, there is no way out – no matter how much money is being spent. But if the rural people of the developing countries are helped to help them- selves, I have no doubt that a genuine development will ensue, without vast shanty towns and misery belts around every big city and without the cruel frustrations of bloody revolution. The task is formidable indeed, but the resources that are waiting to be mobilised are also formidable.

Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organisation, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance. It cannot be ‘produced’ by skilful grafting operations carried out by foreign technicians or an indigenous elite that has lost contact with the ordinary people. It can succeed only if it is carried forward as a broad, popular ‘movement of reconstruction’ with primary emphasis on the full utilisation of the drive, enthusiasm, intelligence, and labour power of everyone. Success cannot be obtained by some form of magic produced by scientists, technicians, or economic planners. It can come only through a process of growth involving the education, organisation, and discipline of the whole population. Anything less than this must end in failure.