How a new approach could transform global development

Devel­op­ing soft­ware in Sil­i­con Val­ley is a world away from deliv­er­ing glob­al health solu­tions in Addis Aba­ba, but the uncer­tain­ty and risk inher­ent in both sec­tors mean that both can ben­e­fit from agile prac­tices.

Agile’s high­ly cus­tomer-cen­tric approach­es, involv­ing nim­ble teams, iter­a­tive solu­tions and net­works, may not ini­tial­ly appear to be a good fit for glob­al devel­op­ment. The sec­tor typ­i­cal­ly has rigid rules on how to deliv­er aid: fund­ing has to be pre-approved, and projects are designed over­seas and in advance, far from where they’re imple­ment­ed.

Devel­op­ment agen­cies, how­ev­er, are dis­cov­er­ing how effec­tive agile meth­ods can be in this con­text. An agile approach offers the abil­i­ty to react to evolv­ing cir­cum­stances in a com­pli­cat­ed envi­ron­ment with mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers – and to build on realised suc­cess­es. So could agile be a game-chang­er for the aid sec­tor?

Rigid design

Aid deliv­ery has been tra­di­tion­al­ly dic­tat­ed by what tech bros might call the ‘water­fall mod­el’ – a project man­age­ment tech­nique based around the fixed imple­men­ta­tion of a pre-designed plan with objec­tives often set in an HQ far from the con­text of their intend­ed des­ti­na­tion. 

The argu­ment for local­i­sa­tion in glob­al devel­op­ment is that direc­tion comes from a place of pri­or­i­ty, not the vision of a dis­tant donor with their own strat­e­gy. That’s espe­cial­ly true when the inter­na­tion­al fun­der isn’t the source of mon­ey but instead reports into anoth­er lay­er, which may not nec­es­sar­i­ly be devel­op­men­tal­ly mind­ed. This set of real­i­ties can lead to bad out­comes, says Tes­sa Dooms, who runs Jasoro Con­sult­ing and has more than a decade of devel­op­ment expe­ri­ence.

She cites an exam­ple from South Africa when, in the midst of the coro­n­avirus cri­sis, a devel­op­ment work­er realised that all their projects required face-to-face con­tact and there­fore couldn’t go ahead. They asked their organ­i­sa­tion if they could help their imple­ment­ing part­ners to assist their own mar­gin­alised com­mu­ni­ties, only to be told that they weren’t a “human­i­tar­i­an” organ­i­sa­tion so couldn’t help feed them – but could buy them lap­tops instead.

“That kind of stuff, it evades log­ic,” Dooms says. “If you’re going to actu­al­ly have part­ners on the ground, you must see their needs and be able to respond. If not, why are you there?” Any inno­va­tion needs to have close ties between the peo­ple and the con­texts, she adds. 

Agile in devel­op­ment allows respon­sive­ness in the chang­ing envi­ron­ment and adap­ta­tion when pre-pro­grammed activ­i­ties are no longer appro­pri­ate. Many projects have a com­plex set of stake­hold­ers on the ground – includ­ing com­mu­ni­ties, imple­ment­ing part­ners, employ­ees, gov­ern­ments and sup­pli­ers – where unequal pow­er dynam­ics can emerge. Pro­po­nents of agile say the methodology’s focus on end-users help redress those imbal­ances, with com­mu­ni­ties rather than gov­ern­ments or donors hav­ing more con­trol over inputs and out­comes.

Short-term, flexible planning

Aid agen­cies from the World Bank to USAID are embed­ding agile meth­ods – using small, nim­ble teams on the ground, engag­ing part­ners to co-cre­ate solu­tions or using an agile approach in cer­tain areas such as pro­pos­al writ­ing – rather than adopt­ing the method whole­sale.

Agile doesn’t replace their man­age­ment prin­ci­ples but allows for more short-term and flex­i­ble plan­ning, says Tor­b­jörn Pet­ters­son, direc­tor of HR and com­mu­ni­ca­tions at SIDA, the Swedish Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion Agency.

He also stress­es how the pan­dem­ic illus­trat­ed the rapid­ly and unpre­dictably chang­ing con­text for devel­op­ment work; con­flict zones and cli­mate change are oth­er exam­ples of how an envi­ron­ment can change dur­ing a project. 

Covid-19 restric­tions, Pet­ters­son rec­ol­lects, led SIDA to repro­gramme around a third of their bil­lion-dol­lar bud­get in 90 days.

“I’m quite cer­tain that the fact we had exper­i­ment­ed for a cou­ple of years with agile method­ol­o­gy made it eas­i­er for our teams to respond very quick­ly. And the result was quite impres­sive,” Pet­ters­son says.

Adoption trends

The rise of mobile and oth­er tech influ­enc­ing deliv­ery in the field means there’s more scope for soft­ware solu­tions to prob­lems. Per­for­mance met­rics are also more eas­i­ly iden­ti­fied and applied to improve a project. 

Water map­ping tech­nol­o­gy is an exam­ple of how clean water and san­i­ta­tion projects can use data to have the most impact. The World Bank and AusAid used the open tool Formhub to cre­ate smart­phone data col­lec­tion forms for a rur­al pro­gramme in Viet­nam. This col­lab­o­ra­tive appli­ca­tion shows in real-time how much of the pop­u­la­tion has access to clean water and if changes in deliv­ery need to be made.

The rig­or­ous approach to mon­i­tor­ing, eval­u­a­tion and col­lec­tion of met­rics is some­thing pri­vate busi­ness­es could take as inspi­ra­tion from the aid sec­tor, says Brig­it Helms, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Miller Cen­ter for Social Entre­pre­neur­ship. 

“What is built into these projects is some kind of reg­u­lar data gath­er­ing from the ulti­mate users,” she says. There must then be the incen­tive to learn from that data and incor­po­rate it back into the project, pro­gramme or prod­uct.

Wider change

There are lim­its to the change in course, how­ev­er, with the agili­ty being in how you deliv­er, not what you deliv­er. Wider changes to how devel­op­ment works at scale are also unlike­ly in the near future. One major chal­lenge is that donors tend to issue requests for pro­pos­als for mul­ti-year and com­plex projects that are still out­lined in a frame­work requir­ing step-by-step detail.

“It’s real­ly hard to plan devel­op­ment at that lev­el of cer­tain­ty and often­times, these designs lock you into a cer­tain course of action that becomes very dif­fi­cult to adjust,”  Helms says.

It pos­es the ques­tion: who is the real cus­tomer when the end-user isn’t the stake­hold­er hold­ing the purs­es­trings? But that’s anoth­er par­al­lel with the tech sec­tor, where the design of web­sites and apps may be more informed by the demands of adver­tis­ers or oth­er fund­ing enti­ties than end-users. Yet more food for thought on the role of agile in the future of glob­al aid.