D is for Development

Development. Sustainable development. Community development. Community health development. Grassroots development. Locally initiated development. International development. Peace Corps approach to development. Economic development. Gender development. Youth development. Democracy and development. Long-term development. Short-term development. Urban development. Rural development. Agricultural development. Development studies. Peace and development. Great Lakes development. Human Resource development. Decentralized development. Millennium Development Goals. Assisted development. Development assistance. United States Agency for International Development. United Nations Development Program. Human Development Indicators. Human Development Index. Non-sustainable development. Ecological development. Green development. Rwanda Development Board. Business development. Private sector development. Public sector development. Non-profit development. Educational development. Infrastructure development. Progress towards development. Development policy. Developing countries. Developed countries. “I work in development.” “Are you looking towards a career in development?” “Yes, but is it real development?”

Signs of development:
Next to my health center, a new micro-finance and lending bank has opened . 

I hear the word development so often that I’m not so sure I know what it means anymore. Hundreds (thousands? millions?) of books, academic articles, university courses, organizations, and agencies are dedicated to development. I too, think I am dedicated to development. I believe strongly in the universal, inherent need for all humans to constantly improve, to develop.

Since I arrived in Rwanda, the government has expanded
free access to education from 9 years to 12

When I joined Peace Corps, I thought I wanted a “career in development”. I imagined facilitating development across Africa, while also developing personally. Well, I’ve certainly developed personally, and in Rwanda, I’ve witnessed a lot of projects and programs labeled ‘development work’.

Rwanda is a country that claims to be dedicated to development. The government’s Vision2020 outlines the country’s lofty goals, the most prominent being transforming Rwanda into a middle income country (defined as per capita income of 900 USD) by 2020 (current per capita income is around 220 USD).

New classrooms built at the local secondary school

But as Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen has explained, and Owen Barder nicely paraphrases in a Center for Global Development blogpost: “development must be judged by its impact on people, not only by changes in their income but more generally in terms of their choices, capabilities and freedoms; and we should be concerned about the distribution of these improvements, not just the simple average for a society.”

Clearly, there’s no magic formula or monitoring and evaluation report that can measure development. Still, after two years of watching countless development projects worth millions of dollars assist with ‘immeasurable and unquantifiable results’, I can’t help but become extremely frustrated as I witness "development workers" develop new projects and programs, while the people who are in most need of development assistance go on without it.  

So, I’m afraid I will just have to continue to develop my thoughts on development…