551. Making Aid Count: Terry Roopnaraine on Development Consulting 

Show Notes:

Terry Roopnaraine, a technical consultant for international development projects, has been working in the field for about 25 years. He provides technical services to support projects funded by bilateral donors, UN agencies, and multilateral agencies like the World Bank. Over the last decade, an increasingly important area of the practice has been working with foundations.

Terry's work involves providing services that are required to make these projects work and deliver the best impacts on the ground for the beneficiary populations they serve. There is a huge accountability chain because these projects are often funded through the public purse of one country or another, so there must be some kind of proper accountability and evaluation.

The Role of a Technical Consultant

Terry talks about the roles a technical consultant might play. He divides his work into two broad areas: project implementation and management, and learning evidence and evaluation. The implementation side of technical consulting focuses on getting a project up and running, recruiting staff, putting in inputs, designing activities, and ensuring that things are run according to time and budget. The learning evidence and building the knowledge base aspect of technical consulting is also crucial, as it ensures that a program is delivering on time, not leaking funds, and has robust monitoring systems in place to capture change systematically. Evaluation of effectiveness is another dimension of technical consulting, as it is about delivering the best impact for the beneficiary population. 

Research and Evaluation in Technical Consulting

Over his career, Terry has worked more in the research evidence and evaluation side of technical consulting, which is partly an artifact of being a refugee from academia.

His intellectual and academic orientation was research-directed, and when he moved to development work, he focused more on research evaluation and evidence building. One of his early projects was Conditional Cash Transfer Evaluations in Latin America, which were an aid instrument that aimed to incentivize uptake of health and education services. These programs were popular throughout Latin America and were easy to evaluate quantitatively. However, there was a growing awareness that the program's effects were not as expected. To understand why the program didn't have the expected effects, Terry began conducting ethnographic and qualitative research. He worked with other qualitative researchers to push the idea that understanding the voices of people who were benefiting from these programs was important. Terry talks about the projects he worked on during the early 2000s in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Peru and how his background in anthropology influenced his approach, and how they conducted research differently from previous projects.

Challenges of Conducting Ethnographic Research 

Terry explains the challenges of conducting semi-structured interviews for management consultants and how they approach this process. The interviews were conducted in a way that was more accessible to anthropologists than for management consultants. Terry talks about the process of conducting ethnographic research in a short training workshop format. He highlights the complementarity between quantitative research findings and qualitative research findings. Survey work is broad and generalizable, while qualitative research is done over a smaller sample and is more in-depth. For example, in Nicaragua, an iron supplement for children was given out for three years, but blood tests showed no effect. In the next round of community field research, the researchers asked questions about the iron sprinkles and found that it was commonly believed that the sprinkles had a terrible reputation due to alleged health risks, and no-one wanted to pass them out. 

The Importance of Household and Nutrition Research

Terry also discusses the importance of household research in nutrition research. Household research is crucial because it helps observe people preparing food, feeding children, hygiene, sanitation practices, dietary diversity, and meal frequency. One example is in Cambodia, where an organization gave eligible families chickens to supplement their meat-poor diets with eggs and animal protein. However, people were not increasing their consumption of chicken and eggs, instead selling the chickens to buy bulk staples like rice. Recently, a project in Rwanda for UNICEF found that people living in resource-constrained circumstances are looking for bulk heavy foods, such as maize meal, sorghum, cassava, or rice, as the first thing they look for because they are concerned about financial or food security, and these foods provide bulk and store well. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of the issues faced by people in these communities. He discusses the importance of a sufficient and diverse diet for children, particularly under two years old, in remote areas. 

Terry shares his experience with personal safety in various countries, including rural areas where he has worked. And while he has taken a Hostile Environment training course, he believes that shared humanity is the most effective safety mechanism, as most people have no desire to do harm. By being receptive, respectful, and engaging with people in a positive way, most places are generally safe.

Effectiveness in Development Aid and Philanthropy Programs

Regarding the effectiveness of development aid and philanthropy programs, he states that the appropriateness and relevance of a program to an area are crucial, as it should address specific needs in a direct way. He identifies how certain approaches are ineffective, and stresses that a direct relationship between needs on the ground and the program is more likely to succeed. The design of the program should be simple and efficient, as most successful programs are simple and straightforward.

The context of the program is also important. The more functioning the governance context, the more likely the programs are to succeed. For example, in Rwanda, a country that has experienced genocide, the efficiency of food distribution was impressive.

Terry talks about how initiatives worked in Rwanda and the importance of collaboration with government ministries to deliver health, nutrition, or education projects, as they are more likely to produce impact. However, in countries with weak governance, the government may not be a viable partner in delivering development programming. To scale up projects, the government must be involved. 

Timestamps:

00:04 Technical consulting in international development

05:32 Technical consulting in development projects

12:35 Anthropological research methods in cash transfer programs

20:35 Ethnographic research methods and findings in global health

27:18 Food security, safety, and anthropology in various countries

33:18 Development program effectiveness with a development economist

Links: 

UNICEF Ethiopia study: https://www.unicef.org/ethiopia/reports/unicef-generation-el-nino

Paper on El Salvador’s Conditional Cash Transfer program: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220388.2015.1134780

Paper on nutrition in Rwanda: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mcn.13420

Study on Peru’s CCT in indigenous communities: https://publications.iadb.org/es/pueblos-indigenas-y-programas-de-transferencias-condicionadas-ptc-estudio-etnografico-sobre-la-0

Suggested readings:

Rossi, Lipsey, Freeman: Evaluation, a systematic approach (not terribly exciting, but a real wealth of evaluation info)

Olivier de Sardan & Piccoli: Cash transfers in context: an anthropological perspective (this collection contains an essay I wrote together with my collaborators on the Peru project)

Lewis, Rodgers and Woolcock: Popular representations of development: insights from novels, films, TV and social media (fun read, one of the authors is a good friend of mine)

Amartya Sen: Development as freedom (still a classic)

Paul Richards: Ebola: a people’s science helped end an epidemic (fascinating study, quite anthropological, of the community response to Ebola in Sierra Leone)

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