Sep 23 2011 @ 15:34

Combining our heart and head, together

I'd like to share two stories with you.

First, I want to tell you about this amazing kid, Mohammed. He lives in Northern Ghana, in a village called Nyologo. For six months of the year it’s hot, dusty and dry, and for the other six months it’s rainy with green fields filling the space between sparse trees.

When you and I talk about people who live on under $2 a day, Mohammed’s one of them. I stayed with him and his family for a few days 6 years ago, gathering water, working on his father’s small farm, just living life together. We’ve stayed in touch ever since.

I’m really proud of him: He’s at the top of his class in high school and has ambitious plans to attend University, and he dreams of changing Ghana.

This past August, Sari, my partner, and I had the privilege to visit Mohammed, just to hang out and catch up. While we were chatting one day Mohammed let me know some tough news: That his father’s harvest wasn’t good, one of his younger kids got sick, and someone stole some money from him – and so Mohammed’s father wouldn’t be able to pay his school fees. For lack of a hundred and fifty bucks, Mohammed wasn’t going to be able to go to school this year. Sari and decided we would pay Mohammed’s school fees.

As you can imagine, when we shared this news with Mohammed, he was ecstatic. His eyes lit up, he father was beaming, his mum was giggling. Sari and I were smiling that smile that hurts your cheeks! Man, it felt great!!

But here’s the thing – I know that Mohammed is only one kid out of thousands. I know that his father might run out of money next year, because the rains fail or because of any number of events that may happen that are beyond his control. I know that when Mohammed goes to school his class is packed and his teacher might not show up and that there’s no responsive local government to address those problems. I know that Sari and I have helped a person, but we haven’t addressed the root of the problem.

And that’s where my second story comes in. It’s about Malawi.

Malawi has 15 million people, and ideally, every one of them would have convenient access to a safe and plentiful source of water. According to official counts, about 2 million people don’t – nearly the population of Toronto.

But the reality on the ground is different than official statistics. When I visited two years ago I would walk through some villages where there would be 3, 4 or even 5 water pumps for a few hundred people, but there were other villages with only a single pumps – this inequitable distribution leaves many wanting.

And then there were the broken water pumps. In fact, 25% of people in rural areas don’t have access to clean water because their water systems are broken.

I visited one particularly offensive project, a Canadian funded water system, built by a Canadian engineering firm. In the shadow of one of the last functional taps of over a hundred, were the remnants of an American funded, American built water system identical to the Canadian one.

This is outrageous. Broken water systems on top of broken water systems.

This caused us at Engineers Without Borders Canada to ask: Does Malawi really need another new water pump?

Instead of building more infrastructure, we focused on understanding and solving the systemic problems. One bottom-up innovation we’ve developed along with our Malawi government partners is a way to collect and simply display information about every existing village and waterpoint in a given district.

Now, for the first time ever, people like our partner and Malawi colleague Mr. Chaponda has all the information at his fingertips to prioritize repairs and locations for new wells, based on legitimate needs.

But that one innovation took three years and tens of thousands of volunteer hours to develop and refine, and we’ve still only brought it to a quarter of Malawi. And of course, this tool is not a silver bullet – it’s only one piece of a much bigger and more complex puzzle.

We’re focused on solving the larger systemic problem, but in the meantime a lot of people still won’t have water.

So how do these two stories come together? For me, they represent the choice each of us is often forced to make when supporting international development, and especially when supporting Africa.

Should I follow my heart?

Or should I follow my head?

I know that following our hearts can be profound – $10 bucks for a bednet, volunteering at an orphanage in Tanzania for a couple of weeks, $150 for Mohammed’s school fees – these are tangible, personal and immediate. But they are rarely enough.

On the other hand, following our heads leads us to lobby our government for better aid policies, make investments in patient capital or undertake work like EWB’s in Malawi. But these approaches alone risk creating tools that don’t reflect ground-realities, they risk representing people with numbers that can just be moved around in a spreadsheet. Employing the head along can leave you de-motivated by the enormity of the challenge, and cynical about the $50billion development industry.

My journey over the past 12 years of dedicating my life to international development has taught me that the true power – the true big idea – is eschewing this false choice between heart and head. I’ve learned that the true power of change comes from combining the heart and the head.

For me and thousands of EWBers who have contribution millions of hours over the past few years, this has meant balancing tensions: Feeling urgency, while having the patience for change. Employing rigorous management, while caring about people. Listening and being humble, while pushing forward big ideas.

For me bringing the heart and head, together, has been powerful.

Bringing the heart and head, together, has brought partnership.

Bringing the heart and head, together, has brought empathy.

Bringing the heart and head, together, has brought true meaning.

The real magic of this approach is in personalizing it – we can each make it our own. And so I give you that challenge, to discover how you’ll combine the heart and head as global citizens, as investors in Africa’s development and perhaps as practitioners.

What’s truly beautiful, is that it’s also bringing the heart and head together that will propel Mohammed to learn what he needs to learn, whether a teacher is there or not, to get himself to University and ultimately to drive Ghana’s development, from Ghana.

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