Doing away with the cookie cutter: why development requires listening to people and why one size doesn't fit all

Sailing into the port of Mumbai you could be fooled into thinking it was Hudson Bay, New York. The skyline is littered with skyscrapers – beautiful modern constructions: glass, curved, multistory and helipad-roofed. Of course, closer inspection of the city from the ground reveals quite a different sight. Looking down rather than up, sprawling slums nest around the bases of high-rises – the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty for which Mumbai is infamous. But this this chronic Indian wealth disparity is not the subject of this particular piece. Rather, I want to highlight the misfit of many of India’s recent “development solutions” for the country itself, starting with these buildings.  It is a misfit for which I believe India has the Western world to thank. 

Mumbai by night

Environmentalists argue that recent increased air temperatures in Mumbai are directly linked to the numbers of new glass skyscrapers in the city. The glass used in these buildings streamlines sunrays, magnifying their intensity, creating a literal greenhouse effect within the buildings. This then requires vast amounts of A/C energy consumption to cool the buildings back down, and this dramatic increased energy use is heating up the whole city. Most of these glass buildings are either corporate offices or hotels, supporting the ever-increasing number of foreign workers in the city. The modernity of the buildings has brought Mumbai up to par with its global economic counterparts: New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai as a legitimate centre of business and commerce. It almost seems that without such modernity, Mumbai is somehow left behind as a world player in big business. In rainy London and chilly New York, the greenhouse skyscraper design works well. The glass buildings save on heating costs as they warm up quickly with just a little sun. But in India they make absolutely no sense when a less expensive alternative could, by design, keeps its interior cool. This is a classic example of cookie cutter model failure: a design that works in the West, but fails elsewhere.

I must confess I cannot take credit for noting this fact about the buildings. Social and environmental investment advisor, Neeraj Doshi, brought it to my attention when he presented at the recent training conference for fellows of the IDEX Fellowship in Social Enterprise. The IDEX programme, for which I am a field coordinator, puts recent graduates from India and worldwide in 10-month placements with local social enterprises or schools in India. The aim of the programme is to give fellows the opportunity to learn about socially driven enterprise in India from an on the ground perspective, developing their own solutions to problems by getting a field understanding of the need.

I believe Doshi’s point about the misfit of the Mumbai buildings rings true above and beyond climate conditions. I spent last year as an IDEX fellow myself in Hyderabad, working in an affordable private school serving the low-income community in the old and orthodox Muslim part of the city. My job was to identify challenges the school faced and develop and implement sustainable solution programmes to help them. One of my central projects was to help develop a learning difficulty scheme to improve the situation for the children in the school identified as “basic learners”. I started my research, as many do, with trusty Google, thinking about the kinds of support children with learning difficulties receive in my home country, England.  In the UK, the government offers testing of children with learning difficulties and provides lots of great resources for free. After some research, I discovered exactly the same opportunities for government testing exist in India, and it was a simple case of getting kids to a testing centre in Hyderabad. I triumphantly announced this discovery in my school and was surprised and disheartened to be met with very little enthusiasm and a lot of anxious head bobbles. I couldn’t see the problem. One teacher eventually explained. “None of the parents will go for it,” she told me, “over here that’s basically a doctor certifying that your child as stupid.”

Working with mothers in school

Another case of cookie cutter failure, this time on my part. It had never occurred to me that something like parent attitudes would be powerful enough to prevent the success of something so logically valuable. It took me a while to get this information out of the teachers – people in India don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, particularly when talking to foreigners – and it was only because I had developed a particularly close relationship with this one teacher, that I found out at all.  I had to rethink my whole approach, this time starting from an understanding of parent, teacher and student motivations. If I had pushed forward with my original plan of getting kids tested, I could have done some real damage. I learnt my lesson that day – rather than trying to fix people, how about actually listening to them.

The Human Centered Design toolkit www.hcdconnect.org is an incredible resource developed by IDEO and the Gates Foundation for people working in development. HDC is about putting people first. Rather than working from problem straight to strategy hypothesis, you must first take a step back to understanding the motivations of all the key stakeholders in any one situation. IDEX fellows train in this kind of design thinking and try to bring in this approach to the work we do in India.

We did still make headway with the learning difficulty programme at my Hyderabad school. It involved a film screening for the parents of the as fantastic Taare Zameen Par, a Bollywood blockbuster by Aamir Khan about a boy growing up in India with dyslexia, as well as a session led by a local respected a Muslim lady explain to the parents, in Urdu, that learning difficulties just mean a different style of learning. Often dyslexic children are more creative and have high IQ’s than others. Since then, a number of children in the school have received government testing, through the choice of the parents, and are now benefitting from extra exam time, scribes and free resources.

One size does not, and should not, fit all

Anyone wishing to work in development should be prepared to get their hands dirty. It’s not possible to help people by appealing to their needs without meeting them, seeing their life or listening to the things that matter to them. The process of really understanding the needs of a community cannot be carried out in a few days as a period of time is required to build up the relationships which facilitate honest and genuine conversations.  Afterall, people are proud. You wouldn’t tell a total stranger the things that keep you up all night such as the worries you have about your children’s future or your inability to pay bills, so why should those that are poor or uneducated?

Sometimes, I believe people who work in development get so wrapped up in the business plan, the models and the jargon, that they can lose sense the most important part of the project process: the people that they are trying to help in the first place.  People are not cookies, and one shape does not fit all. Social enterprise and human centred design, with hands on research as well as implementation is, in my view, the only way forward.

Update: Spoken English Program

A little while back I posted about the Spoken English Program I devised with a couple of other IDEX fellows for schools here.  Yesterday, I saw this video that Faisal has made of the program running at his school showing the student progress over a couple of months. It's a heart-warming watch. 

 

The program is now officially running in 12 schools and reaching out to more than 1000 children in Hyderabad. We've seen both successes and failures along the way, and found that some schools have been able to integrate it very well into their curriculum, whereas others have struggled. The next steps for us are to share the program with more school leaders at the owners' meeting next week to encourage more schools to pilot the program. Then we shall study impact assessment, noting which elements within each school have led to its success or failure, in order to make revisions to the syllabus before handing it over to next year's cohort of fellows.

Careering forward

Something Arif, my school owner, requested specific help with was providing careers guidance to students in their final years at school.  Alliance, like most other Indian APS’s runs up to 10^th standard, age 16. From there, anyone who wants to study further, either at university or doing some practical qualification such as teacher training, must first complete the +2 (sixth form) at a college. Without this, their options are to find an unskilled job somewhere, or else just get married.

I remember being 16 and feeling the pressure of having to make a decision about the direction of my life. The multitude of questions rolling around ones head at that age are pretty intimidating (still are aged 23 in fact!): What’s my ambition? Do I continue to study? If so, where? And what? What do my parents want from me? What do my teachers think? What are my friends going to do? And most of all, if a make a wrong choice, can I reverse it?

Back home in Oxford, I was given advice left, right and centre from teachers, parents and friends and from there I was able to make some informed choices. I was also given practical guidance about which steps were needed to take to achieve my goals. Some students at Alliance, those with educated and aware parents, will also get this kind of guidance and support, but many will be on their own.  Sadly, a great number of parents here believe that their investment in their child’s education need not go further than paying their school fees and expect the school to take full ownership of all areas of educational development. And this means that the responsibility for careers guidance falls solely upon that of the teachers.

Arif, is fully aware of this fact and was keen to run sessions with higher classes teaching them about choices available and showing them what steps they need to take now to achieve their future goals. Although certainly a noble cause, this eagerness to push careers is not entirely selfless – for Arif, students who know their goals are likely to focus harder on their studies, meaning his school results are likely to improve.  Furthermore, parents who see children getting themselves into good jobs and earning money are more likely to send their other kids to the school too, or recommend it to their friends and neighbours. But none of this is a bad thing, in my opinion.

Junior Achievements

Zach and Shruti guiding groups of students through the
JA program at Alliance

So to kick off our careers events, back in November we ran a Junior Achievements training session with 9^th and 10^th standard.  JA is an external service provider and international non-profit organisation which trains volunteers in a set of careers counselling sessions to share with groups of young people. The IDEX fellows were lucky to be given training as JA session leaders early on in the fellowship.  More than one trainer is needed per session so we’ve been sharing each other’s human resource and helping out at different schools. Four other fellows helped me run the day at Alliance.

The main aim of JA is to get students thinking outside the box with regards to their future. Ask a group of Indian APS students what they want to be when they grow up and you’ll be pushed to hear more than 3 answers: doctor, advocate or engineer. (Funnily enough, very few say teacher!) Many of them are simply not aware of the huge array of options out there, and it is this that JA specifically looks to change. First we ask students to think not about jobs, but about industry. Name one industry and think about how many jobs are involved in it. Computer industry?  Well we have designers, software engineers and factory workers who assemble the computers. Good. But thinking outsider the box there are many others involved in the process: The salesman in the shop, factory manager, the computer repair person, even the lorry driver who ships the computers from factory to shop.  Within any one industry there are many more jobs that initially meet the eye. And every one is vital to the functioning of that industry.  Once the students see this and then start making lists of all the industries they can think of suddenly the number of jobs out there is dramatically multiplied. It becomes easier for them to imagine themselves in specific roles rather than some kind of vague idea of being, for example, a doctor. After all, chocolate factories need tasters, right? Suddenly being an advocate isn’t quite so appealing…

Everyone engrossed in the chocolate factory video -
a rather mouth watering example of induaty

JA is also about getting students to look internally, to themselves, to think about what skill sets, talents, values they have which would fit with a certain job. Want to be a doctor but faint at the sight of blood? Perhaps that wouldn’t be the best-suited job after all.  One girl told me she was good at singing but was too shy to become a famous singer. Okay, well what about looking after young children – they love to be sung to. Or becoming a music teacher? Or even making jingles for the radio! JA isn’t about giving people answers but about getting them to ask the right questions and look beyond the obvious. This is something that very nicely started off any careers guidance program. And we had a great response from the students at Alliance.

Parent sessions

Post JA, we ran a more job-specific session with students where Arif went through exactly what trainings were needed for actual career roles. Then we did a similar session just with the parents to get them thinking about their children’s futures as is this group that can often present the biggest obstacle to a child’s educational development.

A tough crowd: mothers at our careers talk.
Still a very traditional community in Golconda

A huge number of academic educational studies have shown that children whose parents take an active role in their education do better in school and beyond it and this is something both myself, and Arif, really wanted to relay back to parents of the children in our school. The most important thing was to make them realise that their child’s capacity to educationally develop does not stop as soon as they have left the school building.  A child who is given a healthy and balanced diet, enough sleep, regular exercise and a space in which to study will find it far easier to concentrate at school than those who don’t, who may get ill and have to miss days or who are too tired to focus in class.  The responsibility for ensuring these kinds of things must lie with the parents.  A child who can concentrate and study hard will achieve good results and good results is what the parents want to see.

Arif explained this to a group of burkha-clad mothers and I then talked (with a translator) about the value of education opening up the doors to new opportunities rather than closing them. These parents will have the power to make decisions about whether their children continue to study or whether they must enter into paid work, or even marriage, as soon as they leave school so they too needed to be convinced that it is worth continuing to invest financially in their children’s education. The fact that they have already chosen to pay for the education of their son’s and daughters up to now means they do see this, we just wanted to show the real links there exist between, nurture and support at home, taking an interest and the time to help children to think about their educational development and genuine life success in the future. Arif told me that me, coming from the UK as an independent female, was a good role model for them.  I have a BA and MA qualification and have had the opportunity to work abroad from this.  We wanted to show the parents that with the right support and forward planning this kind of opportunity might some day be open to their children too.

Soft skills knowledge

Our plans for the next couple of months involve running sessions on tips for careers success. I wanted to introduce the idea of “soft skills” – those character traits and knowledge, such as knowing how to present themselves well in an interview, that give people a real advantage over others but which are unlikely to be taught to the kids by their own parents.

Sharing resources: A JA session we ran with
students at another fellow's school

Some other fellows are currently working on creating a job specific presentation and handout explaining to students what exact decisions need to be made now if they want to reach certain careers, such as those who want to become heart surgeons must choose the science option at +2 in college. I am hoping to add to this with a number of practical career advancement presentations based around teaching soft skills on subjects like ‘writing a resume’ and ‘how to tackle an interview’.  The idea with this whole project again, is to create a combined set of resources the take the form of presentations, handouts and lesson plans that can be shared and taken to individual schools by the IDEX fellows and adapted to specific needs of students and staff there: Replicating and scaling.

Although it’s still a while before many students will actually have to be putting these things into practice it is never to early to make people aware of how, no matter where you are in the world, cracking these things makes a tremendous difference later on in life.