A little bit of optimism never killed anyone

The more I think about development, the more pessimistic and sceptical I seem to get. While I reckon it's generally a good thing in an industry often characterised by good intentions without much to back it up, sometimes it's downright moany and inappropriate; the other day I was introduced to someone who had spent their summer on a project with an NGO in Malawi, and before she could even finish explaining what she did there, I had to stop myself from blurting out some pointed question about how rigorous their monitoring and evaluation set up was.

Similarly, I saw this advert today (see photo or video if you are a Spanish speaker) for Vicente Ferrer's foundation - the recently deceased and publicly-decorated Spanish philanthropist (whose work I am not familiar with so the following is no criticism of what he did as much as his foundation's ad campaign) - in which he appears saviour-like, holding the 'key' to development, urging us to give a little and solve the problem of poverty . Usually, and in fact today was no exception, I would double back and question why there was a white Spaniard in the foreground covering half the advert which was supposedly putting the poor of India (represented by nameless dark-skinned children behind him) first, whilst the text had the arrogance to claim we outsiders with our spare change have the 'key' to relieving poverty in India ("we are the key that can change everything" it says in the video).

This then sent me into a spiral of thoughts about a variety of frustrating phenomena: the depressing lengths to which charities have to put us the potential donors in the foreground to get any sort of reaction (see Lilie Chouliaraki for a fascinating treatment of this subject - still reading odd chapters of the book when I get the chance); my friend telling me that she went to a conference about happiness and is now set on going to Haiti for a month next summer to help the world's poor ('what will you be doing?' 'Not sure, whatever they need me to do'), the pervasive idea of international development as charity, ah the list goes on. And this suits my slight tendency to scepticism - it's much easier to criticise and avoid putting your neck out and making the solid claim that in many cases international development efforts are good and we should celebrate them when faced with criticisms of volountourism, of useless and even harmful development projects, and of the whole development 'project' itself.

But not today (or this evening at least). I'm reading Angus Deaton's The Great Escape, which opens up with a relentlessly optimistic salvo ('Life is better now than at almost any time in history. More people are richer and fewer people live in dire poverty') and which goes on to claim that the "total number of dollar-a-day poor people in the world fell by three-quarters of a billion between 1981 and 2008," and even more damningly positive things like the fact that there is not a single country in the world where child mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950. Added to this I came across a review of Charles Kenny's Getting Better as well as this article from the Independent and I'm thinking that it's time for a bit of optimism in my development thinking. Clearly there are many many negatives and criticisms that can be made, but perhaps, at the start of the new year, and in contrast to my previous post we should reflect on the successes for a moment. If only to steel us for the inevitable setbacks and frustrations as we observe what happens development-wise in the 12 months to come.