Episode 10: Working in and with Communities
Andrea Burniske has more than 20 years of experience in international development, 15 of which were spent developing and leading programs and projects in countries such as Tajikistan, Peru, Colombia and Russia for various international development agencies. Her work has centered on environmentally sustainable economics and business development, women’s empowerment, and emergency responses among other areas. She is currently working at Purdue University where she is the Chief of Party for a USAID-funded program named Long-Term Assistance and Solutions for Research (LASER) as part of the Partners for University-Led Solutions Engine (PULSE), which seeks to promote close collaboration around development challenges between academic researchers and NGOs and other development practitioners. She joins us from Lafayette, USA.
She talks to us about:
the role of media in social development
social structures and power relationships
human flaws
working with governments and donors
building trust by being in the field and developing sincere relationships
corruption
the bridge between academia and development - and much more.
Transcript
Intro: Just based on my experience, I think that nothing substitutes for being there all the time, in creating a level of trust with people so that they know who they are interacting with always and they know that they can count on you and they know that you do have their best interest at heart because they can see that. You are not just doing a job, you’re actually working on transformational change with them.
Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa and I will be your host as we speak with and learn from practitioners of all backgrounds and affiliations around the world. Each week we aim to rethink ethical behaviour and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different practitioners. Our guest today is Andrea Burniske. Andrea has more than 20 years of experience in the international development sector, 15 years of which were spent developing and leading programs and projects in countries such as Tajikistan, Peru, Colombia, and Russia for various different agencies. Her work has centered on issues such as environmentally sustainable economics and business development, women’s empowerment and emergency responses, among other topics. She is currently working at Purdue University, where she is the Chief of Party for a USAID funded program named Long Term Assistance and Solutions for Research as part of the Partners for University Led Solutions Engine, which seeks to promote close collaboration around different development challenges between academic researchers and other development practitioners and partners, particularly in USAID operating countries. Andrea, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Andrea: I’m very glad to be here. Thank you Safa for inviting me.
Safa: You studied international development in grad school. Can you tell us a bit about that time? And you know what you were drawn to, what you were interested in and what you were thinking about at that time of your life?
Andrea: Sure. Well, first of all, I had just gotten my degree in Russian language and literature, and I was in grad school studying journalism, thinking I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. But I was still stuck, you know, trying to keep my focus on Russia. That was really my main impetus at that time. I honestly had no idea there was such a field as international development. And it was much smaller in those days. So there were organizations like Care, there was Peace Corps, but nowhere near as broad and deep as it is today. And so you just didn’t really hear about international development as a career much. So really what I studied, what you know, besides different geographic focus — like obviously Russia and the former Soviet Union, but you know, there were things like intercultural relationships, and there was some focus on international development. I believe it was a cross cutting or a multi disciplinary topic where I was at university, which was University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. And so I took classes for that and studied, you know, politics but my main focus was international journalism. And one of the ways, aside from just really intense interest in Russia in those days as it was changing. You know, we all have our special geographic focuses, and who knows why we’re drawn to what we’re drawn. But that was mine. One thing I started doing a lot of research on was communications in international journalism and especially the MacBride report, which was headed by Sean MacBride and this was called ‘Many Voices, One World.’ And it was through UNESCO and the concern was the concentration and commercialization of the media and what the implications that that had for developed, for special development. You know, not just in so called developed countries, but especially in the so called developing world and, you know, control by — okay, maybe we’re not controlled by the government but we’re controlled by commercial interests. And very large commercial interests. And that was a real- aside from then, my, you know, my ongoing interest in all things Russia at that time, almost the end of the Soviet Union, I was really interested in this and how media can promote development or really kind of be more controlling of the paths that countries take of development. And I studied that one in my master species topic actually, I went to Russia and spent a lot of time there interviewing my friends who were journalists and finding out about — okay, well here the state isn’t controlling media anymore, or barely so, but, you know, seeing the first steps of corporate interests taking over control of the media. So really, I entered in that way, which was really kind of odd I think, and I was at the same time also on the board of a sister city committee in Eugene, Oregon who had a sister city of Irkutsk, and I got there and help set up very scientific exchanges between government and business people in that region, civil society people and then, you know, and then bringing people to also Oregon and really that with my entree into development and it kind of went from there.
Safa: Very interesting, there are so many interesting issues, ethical issues you mentioned, like corporate interest in media, or generally, the control and impact that media can have on development issues. So after that, once you began to work in the international development sector to some of perhaps your earlier jobs, what were some of the experiences or challenges you had? How was it different to be applying what you had studied or what you had spent time researching and thinking about? What was the difference between being a practitioner in the field and what you had expected perhaps before?
Andrea: Well, when you study things or even when you just go over for a short time, you’re really focused on a specific kind of sectoral area or some activity that you’re doing. When you study, you study a lot of cultural differences, but you don’t know really the power over everything you do that policy and that government has on what you’re able to accomplish. And when I say government I also mean, you know, people, people and communities are microcosms of that. Governments don’t come from outer space and just suddenly drop over people and control them like the mother ship. You know the people who are in government come from the culture that enables them and has shaped them. And so it’s just this really reflective thing. And it was surprising to me to learn through work that, you know, it became very apparent that a country that had certain challenges that were, you know, thought of as non democratic or non supporting of civil society, for example, it wasn’t that the people were just oppressed and they really wouldn’t support that, if only they were free to do so, there was really social structures that were recreating that all the time, from bottom to the top and then the top to the bottom- in that if you didn’t understand those kind of social power relationships, but also just the things that you know, were holding people in check through systemic structures holding change in check, and that was, you know, reinforced all the time by what people would allow and what they wouldn’t allow. I guess I didn’t understand just how strongly you have to understand all those things to even try to make any change in development.
Safa: I see, a more of understanding or deeper experience of the social structures that are implicit in everything we do. You came from a interest and a background in journalism and of course you’ve probably experienced and you also think that you know, words and language and messaging can be very powerful in a variety of layered ways. When you think of the work that you’ve done your experience with language and communication, maybe in programs that you’ve designed or your professional experiences, what are some of the ethical issues that you’ve had to navigate when it comes to working with language, using language as a tool in your work?
Andrea: Okay, so there are two levels on which language was really interesting for me and while I was — I did study many, many different languages for a long time, and I almost went into the field of linguistics because I love learning and thinking about how we communicate and causes us to be able to communicate and how words shape our worlds, really. And so with that in mind, it was one of my interests in journalism actually, and so I was really very aware of the power of words and how people construct meanings based on their own expectations and their own experiences, and had many, many situations of, you know, saying things the wrong way or not really totally understanding how much of my culture was reflected through my own words, and having to be very careful and thoughtful and intentional about how I communicated myself and also the communications that went out on behalf of my organization. And I’m not just talking here, the kind of control that everybody who’s in a professional context exercises in order to avoid risk or in order to avoid, you know, conflict — that’s important and you have to observe that, too, but I mean, just to be able to even communicate with people what you mean and why you mean it that way and what you’re trying to do. It can be very fraught.
Safa: Absolutely. There’s a lot of thought that can go into the way we communicate and express ourselves and then therefore it has an impact on the relationships we are able to have and perhaps the impact we are able to have. In your work, in the programs that you were designing and then later on the programs you were leading, what were your your own personal concerns or ethical commitments? What were you particularly committed to, you know, doing well, doing ethically?
Andrea: So for me, I think it was really, in a nutshell, a joy of working together for positive change in a community kind of way. That means making a good, what ____ would call a ‘good community’ and the power of people to do that, whether that be here in the United States and then my doing it first in Russia and then in other countries- it was really this joy and synergy and how we could get together and really transform things. We could transform everything if not for the fact that we are human beings and human beings always muck up everything I’ve found. I muck up things for myself. We all, you know, we get together with the best intentions and we just, you know, our human things get in the way of, you know, our interests, our worries, our inadequacies, all of, you know, not to mention the systems and the ability or not of us to even change those system. So there have been situations where, you know, I found it very difficult. Situations, for example, where I’ve been talking with government officials that I knew could care less about the people we were discussing. That would really tell me, you know, you should give the money to ask me, we know what should be done with it, and I thought, yes, indeed, I know you understand what should be done with it and that’s not what I think should be done with it. But then other times when you’re able to work with people in this synergistic away and it just keeps creating good things, you know, not without problems of course, but good things that you know people are committed to building on and even you can manage to get those people who you would think would be the last people on Earth that might work with you. You can even, you know, try and figure out what is their self interest in making things better and try and work on that and build on that so that good community results.
Safa: I see. You know, that tension between striving for positive social change and the barriers or road blocks, whether it be government interest, private interests, other reasons that come up — that tension can be hard to navigate. But in your work, have there been any methods or tools or approaches that you found particularly useful or effective, in your experience?
Andrea: The most effective tool isn’t really a tool at all. It’s actually very — in my experience, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to put it out there that I have this wisdom I’m imparting, but just based on my experience, I think nothing substitutes for being there all the time in creating a level of trust with people so that they know who they’re interacting with always and they know they can count on you and then know that you do have their best interests at heart because they can see that. You’re not just doing a job. You’re actually working on transformational change with them and that, you know, we don’t always get an opportunity to act at that level in development. Right now, I certainly don’t because I’m very far removed and I’m working more on policy change. And I’m not in the place where I’m hoping that people will transform their world in the way that they would like to see it. And I’ve had certain — when I when I was working in Tajikistan, for example, I had an opportunity to work on that very close level with people every day, going into this post conflict community, working with women and figuring out how we could change the world in ways that that looked good to them and that offered them more hope and at the same time, you know, help the community to be receptive at least — at least not hostile and gradually over time, more supportive. But in order to do that and do it well, and do it in a way that is lasting for people who you’re working with, they have to transform themselves, and they won’t feel supported to do that unless there’s a critical mass of other people who they can count on because nobody wants to be the pariah, the only one who’s changing in their communities, and you just have to be there and they have to trust you, and you have to show that support. So many donors or many times donors have programs where they want to reach a million people or just a great number of people and create this incredible depth of change. And that just doesn’t happen. You can’t do it without actually being there in person and influencing people in person and showing your goodwill, and that you put yourself at risk too.
Safa: Creating trust is a issue that comes up with all the other guests that I’ve spoken with as well — how have you experienced working with donors, you know, in terms of the conditions that come with funding or the competition for funding or the just overall, what are some of the ethical issues or just other experiences generally that you’ve had in terms of that relationship and how it impacts the work that perhaps you or your colleagues envision?
Andrea: Well, first of all, I want to make it very clear to everybody who’s listening that despite the bad rap that donors can get, sometimes I found the individuals who work for donor organizations always really care about development. At least the ones I’ve worked with and I’ve worked with many. They quite often have very strong development backgrounds themselves, and they know what’s going on. And they really care about making positive change. And they are constrained by their own organizations and the political priorities of their organizations and the relationship of their organizations with the host government. Many, many different things constrain them and keep them from being able to maybe support — what they would support if they didn’t have that kind of constraints. So that being said, for the most part, donor representatives that I’ve worked with have tried their best to help support the things that we were doing the field. For one thing, they become, if the donor is supporting the program that I’m leading, it’s the vested interest of that donor representative to help me make that program a success. And I’m the one usually or, you know, my teams are out there with people, you know, understanding what’s going on and communicating that. And they want that to lead to success. It makes them look good and they they wouldn’t be in that role if they didn’t care about it. So they usually want things to work well, and they’re just quite often constrained by those political considerations I’ve spoke of.
Safa: Yes, in terms of the political environment in which this kind of work happens, have you found that you, over the years, you’ve picked up perhaps some political skills or approaches that have, you know, helped you in terms of implementing the work that you want to do given the the different political contexts that you might be in at that time?
Andrea: Yes, I say that hesitantly because I still don’t think I’m as good at it as I could be. But I think you understand where the donor is coming from me and you understand their operating environment and that people are pressuring them for certain things and certain perceptions of the work in that particular country. So you help them navigate that too and avoid what might be considered very challenging for them and put them in an untenable situation. It’s quite a balance. I remember when I was working in Colombia, for example, and the US government didn’t want to fund people who were fleeing from zones that had been sprayed for coca. And even though in those zones most people were forced to either grow coca by the armed conflict actors including, you know, all the sides of the armed conflict actors and other drug traffickers who you know, had a real part of the conflict. But that was there. And also there were situations where people were just so isolated and they had no other source of income really, you know, the Colombian government was not in many rural parts of Colombia because of that conflict. So with the absence of government to support them, protect them, provide services — they’re on their own, there’s no access to markets. So what choice did they have? Coca is a perfect crop. It grows no matter what you do with it pretty much so there are a lot of issues or a lot of context that that people felt they had no other option. And yet we couldn’t provide any assistance to those internally displaced persons and families who were fleeing those zones because it was known that they were, as I was told, they’re criminals. And the Europeans didn’t see it that way as I recall. I wasn’t — we never were told not to fund IDPs who were fleeing from coca zones but we were told that by some representatives of the US government and, you know, I got the feeling that they would rather not have told us that but that was a policy and they had to enforce that. And it made things pretty difficult sometimes for the work we were doing. And it was pretty sad sometimes to see those populations not being able to be helped, even though they suffered the same things as you know, the other populations who were being internally displaced — in terms of conflict, all the effects of conflict.
Safa: Absolutely. There’s often, you know, very vulnerable communities that might not receive the support that they need or they deserve. But at that time, working in that environment, did you ever find that, you know, your identity, perhaps as a woman or as an American or as perhaps Russian speaking, you know, different aspects of your identity — did that ever help your work or hinder your work? Or how how did navigate or reconcile your personal background and how it was viewed while you were in a working environment?
Andrea: Yeah, I’m trying to think of any case in which it really helped my working environment, especially being a woman in the places that I was. You know, it may have helped sometimes in different contexts its helpful if people don’t take you as seriously because they don’t see you as much of a threat. And sometimes in Russia, for example, that was helpful. In other contexts such as in Tajikistan it was not helpful -you know, being an American was almost never helpful. There are some countries that really like America and at the very beginning in Russia, you know, that was fascinating for everybody and they loved America and that was helpful at first. Then towards the end, when Putin came to power, that became a liability. And in fact, it happened that way. Soon after Putin came to power I lost my ability to renew my visa because at that time, everyone was being accused of being a spy. And definitely being a woman, for example in Tajikistan had some issues, you know, and you often felt that you weren’t taken as seriously, or that you know — it suddenly become apparent here I am talking development issues with this man and other Tajik nationals who were working on these issues and I’m the only woman and his wife is serving us. And, you know, in his world, I would be serving and wouldn’t be talking about these things at all. And sometimes that awareness made things a little uncomfortable, thinking that, you know, having somebody serve me in that role. Yeah. And definitely in Colombia, quite often, there were tensions working with Europeans because they didn’t agree with Plan Colombia, for example, and felt thought that we, as Americans were all representing that even if we personally didn’t support some of the US government policies. You know, we were always representatives of our countries, you know, of the political environment of our countries.
Safa: In terms of the differentiation that is made between international staff and local staff and perhaps the differential treatment that maybe international staff experience versus local staff. What have been your experiences or when you just think about the sector and the the systemic realities what are your thoughts or reflections on the difference between the two or any issues that come to mind?
Andrea: So one of my first lived experiences of the differential treatment was even before I really started working in development. And it was when I was gathering information for my Masters thesis and going to Russia. And when Rush first opened up, and Americans first started, you know, going there, although we were very few and on planes over to Moscow at the time, I would be one of the like one or two women on board, it was all men doing business development work and things. But so what used to happen is we’d go to the regions and get off the plane and we would be treated very differently. We would be allowed to board first. We would be given extremely preferential treatment, and the rest of the Russians would be treated quite shabbily by everybody had control over boarding the airplane or anything. We would always be given really preferential treatment, and it was quite embarrassing. We didn’t like it at all and there was nothing we could do about it. In terms of working in development, usually the places I worked, I was one of maybe two or three expats. Sometimes I was the only one there for most of the time but no matter who else was working with me, I was always, you know, my close team were always people who were, you know, were the national staff. And I couldn’t have done my work at all without insights from them. So these people who became my close friends and they’re still my friends and I would work very hard with communities on change, they would tell me what was really going on that I didn’t understand. And quite often even these people were people from higher class or they were more educated than the communities we worked in. And sometimes they didn’t really know. You would think that people who live in the same country know all about the different lived experiences of different people in different classes. But just as the case here in the US or for you in Canada, you know, you might not necessarily know or I might not necessarily know what it’s like to live in a ghetto, for example, in the inner city if I’ve never done that. And these people I worked with didn’t necessarily know or even speak Tajik very well — in Tajikistan they spoke Russian and they didn’t really understand the lived experiences of people in that community. But they still knew what was going on from their cultural insights and in ways that they could tell me. Okay, this is happening, and this is something we have to address. And if I didn’t have the strong trust of those people, if those people hadn’t been by my side constantly as my friends and colleagues then I would have never been able to have anything be accomplished with our projects.
Safa: Very interesting. You mentioned earlier, you know, the cultural nuances, the cultural practices that sometimes you have to navigate in your work. When it came to, you know, issues that really came up in your programs or perhaps the changes you want to accomplish, whether it’s through services or policies — were there times where you had to kind of navigate cultural practices that perhaps you or your organization didn’t agree with but was widely accepted in the country you were working in? And you know it’s often difficult to work around that — what have been your experiences or what are some of your reflection on that challenge?
Andrea: Uh, that happened. I wouldn’t say there were things that I necessarily had to do that my organization didn’t agree with. I would say that there were contexts that either my organization didn’t believe, like all of my situations in Russia, especially, you know, there came a time where I was interviewed by the KGB and was followed around by them and people sat next to me on the plane and told me about how much better the KGB were, they call them the FSB now, but it’s the same, how much better they are than the CIA, and when I would tell those things and my — Gary who is my husband now who worked with me in Russia, in most of the countries that I worked in, had the same kind of experiences and we would tell our organizations and they just wouldn’t believe us. So there was quite a lot that went on that was just like, you know, they just, they found it, you know, just too far out. And so then you would just have to try and work and get things done knowing that people just thought you are a curiosity almost, right. In Tajikistan I had an interesting situation where, in order to work in the community I worked in, there came a certain time when I had to meet with a warlord who was a very conservative Islamic warlord leader and had a whole host of young men who would die for him and he was training them. And, you know, he had been one of the main leaders in the civil conflict that had happened right before we arrived, and this guy was quite honestly nuts. He’s in the media often with respect to, especially when new kind of scuffles or bordering on conflict arises. And he was training in Russia, in the military somehow there, but he would come back and forth. But he was a kind of leader of the community I was working in, an unofficial leader that the government officials all warned us, you know, don’t meet with him. But there came a point where I had to meet with him because he thought we were trying to enslave people by, you know, giving them micro credit and we had to kind of negotiating the terms for that with him so it would reflect more Islamic loan systems and, you know, telling him that nobody was making a profit off this, this was a community, you know, self help group kind of loan situation where it all, you know, anything that was left over from the loans, went right back in to support that loan fund, you know, just discussing it with him and and getting his buy in. And he ended up, you know, creating some buildings for us and being supportive, but also was pretty nuts in terms of some of the ways he would react and some of the things he would say. But, you know, those are the kinds of things that you need to do if you want to be able to operate in that place.
Safa: That’s such an interesting example, as well as the fact that, you know, at the end he did support you in some ways. And there was some kind of, something good that came out of it.
Andrea: Yeah, he supported us in many ways, but he didn’t stop being kind of, to my mind, a little bit of a scary and threatening figure. (Laughs) So yeah, but some good came out of it. We got too and the women that we worked with got to, you know, do their self help loan group and open some social enterprises and that was seen as okay and not, you know, threatening Islam and their community. We engaged people who were from the Islamic training, it was a scholarly institute for Islamic studies and people there were, you know, we would engage them to come and speak about what the Quran really says, instead of how it was interpreted by pretty illiterate mullahs in that community, for example, and he appreciated that we took Islam seriously and in showed respect.
Safa: Absolutely. In your work, especially as you started taking on more leadership positions, How have you experienced the process of ensuring accountability or ensuring transparency? There are sometimes challenges that organizations face. Have you ever come across any cases of, I don’t know, perhaps corruption or mismanagement or what have been your experiences with ensuring accountability and transparency?
Andrea: Oh, that’s a really difficult thing and a really good question. So, it’s almost impossible to ensure — accountability to stakeholders is one thing, transparency with reflect to donor funds and those sort of things when you’re working in countries that I worked in, people were pretty corrupt. I mean, this is the way things were done. Everybody got their cut, right. So, for example, in Russia, there was no way that I could actually hold accountable people that were in higher positions than I was who were maybe my partner organization who were, you know, getting the funds through the bank account. And then, you know, everything would look good on paper, but people have ways of siphoning things off. In Tajikistan people — even in my own office, I would have to constantly, I mean, I had my trusted group of people who would tell me what was going on, and they were the ones who would point out these things were happening and say, you know, this is going on and it was pretty bad in Tajikistan I have to say — it got to the point where I would be constantly looking for things when I would be signing accounts, papers and, you know, documentation for spending. But it got to the point where if it wasn’t in my face and if were so impossible to find that there was just, I figured there was nothing I could do about it. Many times there were things I could find. You know, I remember ordering a milk tank for a women’s bakery that we — and I specified that it would cost this much and these would be the specifications for the product. And it was delivered, and it was supposed to be stainless steel, and it had cost a lot of money and it wasn’t stainless steel. It was obviously painted silver, and I just felt, you know, if it’s at a point where it just affronts my intelligence — do these people think I’m a fool not to know the difference between these things and then I would, even though I would sometimes create a little bit of conflict by saying no I’m sorry take it back, this is not stainless steel, its painted silver and our bookkeeper would say, no, it’s not. I would have to argue about that fact and show him a fork and say this is stainless steel and that is painted silver and see how it’s flaking of into the water, take it back and get our money back. And knowing that these were people who knew him as friends and, you know, you have had a discussion with Gary earlier, I’m not sure if he told you the situation with the suddenly missing huge generator that could only have gotten out from his compound on a truck and sanctioned by the people who opened and closed that door. But you know we face those things all the time and we would have to put our foot down and sometime be pretty, pretty stern about it. In Gary’s case with the missing generator, he had to tell people, okay, you guys were responsible for security and procurement. You’re not getting paid okay until that is returned or you come up with the money amongst your selves because it couldn’t have walked out of here. (Laughs) So little situations like that. With respect to accountability, there are a lot of challenges with that were sometimes people don’t understand the way development works. So one thing comes to mind when we were giving out emergency responsible food items and non food items to displaced people in Tajikistan and even — no matter how much you make signage that says, you know, people with so many children get this, people with this many children get this. They still don’t understand why you do that sometimes or they don’t read closely or what not so you’re constantly having to answer to things that you’ve done your best to make clear or that you know, then later you explain and people still don’t like it and t hey don’t want to understand. But in some cases it is a matter of true accountability. In some cases, it’s on the side of the project implementers, and sometimes it’s on the side of other stakeholders who you’re working with, like when we work closely with government stakeholders, we had a case once where there was an organization we were working with very closely and one person was, it turned out, had been molesting one of the children that was part of a group that we were overseeing and we really, we had to call that person out and report that person. And you know, the government officials with whom that person worked weren’t really very happy about even knowing that — not necessarily they weren’t happy with him for doing it, they weren’t happy that we reported it and called it out, made it an issue, and they felt that made them look bad. But we felt we had to do that for accountability.
Safa: Mhm. These are all very complicated situations, but when it also comes to accountability from the communities you’re trying to serve in terms of, you know, whatever the project or service may be — what do you think can be done better or what more can be done to kind of — I mean, every situation is different, it’s very hard to generalize, but in your experience, what more do you think needs to happen to make programs and organizations more accountable or held to account by the communities that they’re trying to support?
Andrea: They need to be more part of the community for one thing. If you’re just somebody from outside who comes in and you have this thing, that’s kind of, you know, not really part of the community, then that’s more difficult to navigate. But if you are working very closely with the community yourself, then you have people who can explain also and help hold us accountable. Yeah, I think that comes from close work with the community, from managing their expectations, not promising anything in advance beyond the next day, basically. So in that Tajik community where we worked we never told them, we’re gonna build you a women’s community center if you attend these trainings. We never told them any of the things that we possibly could do if everything went the way we thought, you know, we would like to see in terms of of them promoting transformational change themselves because we didn’t want that to be the motivator and we didn’t want, you know, I wasn’t sure at a certain point how much we could do. So it’s not promising anything beyond what you absolutely know that you can deliver and managing those expec… — making assumptions very apparent, and you know, sorting out our own assumptions about how things will happen and what we will be able to do and really clearly discussing those with people. But it’s difficult in every environment, in every context it’s difficult because some people don’t trust that kind of, you know, legalistic accountability. They don’t even want that. That’s not a real relationship. As far as they’re concerned, the trust in the cooperative work comes from knowing them and being with them on the anniversary of their son’s death and in what you say, your word and things like that. So our Western concept of accountability is not even really accepted in many places, in a lot of places, so that’s very difficult to navigate. And then accountability actually, in many cases, accountability becomes you’re my friend, I trust you, you know, you should do what I need. In some cases, that’s not for us, an ethical thing, so that’s an even further level of difficulty.
Safa: Right, there’s so many different layers to it. When you think about your motivations in getting into the sector, in the work that you do, has it changed over time? With having an experience in one country and going to another, have you altered or changed your motivation or the focus of it, or has that changed in any way?
Andrea: Over time I would say I’ve got a little more tired — not from development work but from working with humans I would say, because it’s not just in developing countries. And all of these things that talk about context specific and are, you know, based on one culture, one political system. But you find the same kinds of things reflected everywhere in different ways, manifesting in different ways. When I first got into development, as I said, it was the joy of community transformation, in doing things together and I’ve had experiences where that joy — there was not that joy of working together and for things that didn’t quite manifest in that way, and it all came down to human bickering and people wanting a piece of the action. You know, there are not only political agendas, but even personal psychological issues. And I won’t say I don’t have my own of those, we all do right, but sometimes things don’t, you know, don’t come together in that magic way. And sometimes they do. AndI’ve gotten more aware of the fact that those things can throw everything off in ways that you don’t expect and that you can make tremendous change and then have it all go backwards too. That’s another thing, a disappointing thing. So I think originally I got into development for, one of the reasons is for the joy of understanding other cultures, understanding the very different ways and the very similar ways that people are, for really trying to understand the human condition because of my own personal curiosity about the human condition and what people — the good that people are capable of doing together. And I think I also learned about the horrors that people are capable of doing together, and are capable of permitting when they take no action. And it can make you tired after a while, and it could make you retreat into just a, you know, the safest world that you can retreat into, which is the comfort of family and friends and not really having to stretch yourself, and that becomes boring very quickly and it becomes, you know, the call of going out and trying to do positive things returns. But there definitely is a need to rest, I would say, for all of us who would put ourselves out in situations where things are very different and we don’t understand and there could be a lot of personal burnout and disappointment too.
Safa: That sense of the need for rest or renewal or self care can be so so important in being able to continue something you believe in over the long run.
Andrea: Yes, it can and and also work on yourself. I mean, I’ve read a lot of Harvard Business Review kind of leadership things, and some of it rings very false. But other things ring very true, and the whole focus on emotional intelligence and leadership is one of those things. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but the idea that leading is not getting people to do what you want them to do, that leading is knowing yourself and your weaknesses and your strengths and always trying to understand yourself better so that your interactions with other people are more positive. Yeah, and don’t become a trap for you and don’t become a misery for other people.
Safa: Absolutely. The process of self development and self knowledge, self knowing it can be such a important task that never ends.
Andrea: Yeah, it never does end, and that’s, that’s hard too. But it’s also, you know, very renewing if you go back to that — in all of the difficult things if you go back to yes, but I’m knowing myself better, and I’m knowing the world better and it’s always, you know, enlightening and exciting. And this is what the world is, basically, this is what the world is.
Safa: So eventually you transitioned to working at Purdue University. Could you tell us about, you know, that decision and also what you’re working on in this role?
Andrea: This decision was not really my decision, although I accepted it. First of all, I had work for a university before. One of my first leadership positions in development came quite unexpectedly to me through my Washington State University in Russia experience where the person that was the Chief of Party ended up having to leave and I replaced them because I spoke Russian and I knew a lot about Russia. But I never really led a major development project, and that was a huge learning curve. And so — but I enjoyed very much working with a, at a university in Russia and, you know, having my employer be a university and having it be a place where there were many different disciplines that could contribute to, you know, I guess they call them now evidence based solutions, you know, really curious minds that were at work, trying to find solutions to things and had also technical expertise to do it. You know, sometimes that came up that they might not have known how to apply it quiet very well but that’s another issue. So that was, you know, I like academia and that I like being around students, people who are learning, their just possibilities are just, you know, just the idea of how rich with possibilities the university environment is and how much learning is promoted. There are a lot of challenges as well, but those things are definitely present and exciting. And so at the time, you know, we had left Colombia, my husband and I, we decided to come back to the United States because our younger daughter has down syndrome, we felt that she was not, she was reaching a point where people were starting to be biased towards her. She wasn’t a cute little blonde girl running around anymore. She was obviously a girl with special needs and becoming older. And we, you know, she was facing some challenges that we knew would only get worse with time and she really wasn’t progressing and learning because there weren’t necessarily people that had the same level of expertise teaching special needs children. And so we decided we would come back to the United States. Anyway, we had both reached a point where we were tired of being foreigners all the time and representing our government whether we disagreed at the time or not with that government. So we came back and I was the first one to take on a new position. It was with an organization where I had a job focusing on girls empowerment, which was really exciting to me. And so I took that on in Washington D. C and my husband was supposed to follow me. He ended up getting offered a job at Purdue for the Center for Global Food Security , he works here with that center, and it was a dream job for him and has been a dream job for him. And I knew that and mine was a two year project, it was time bound and I could have sought more positions with my organization, but decided no, okay, I will come to Indiana and enjoy my husband and daughter there at the end of the project and for a while it was very challenging to live apart from them and just come back from time to time when we could and that’s what we had to do and I did do. You know there came a point where I didn’t know what I would find here, and I just thought, ok that’s fine, I’m going to be here with my family and I am going to find something that’s meaningful for me. And, you know, luck would have it that a position arose that was very good, I would say a starter position and it was in international agriculture and it was kind of low key, it was much more low powered and low pay and, you know, the position was much more junior than I had been used to for more than two decades. But still it was a good position to start out, I got my foot in the door and that was how I ended up here and just moved on to different positions over the years.
Safa: So now you’re working on a project that promotes this closer collaboration between, you know, academic researchers and development practitioners, correct?
Andrea: Correct. Yeah the idea is that to promote research, evidence based solutions to international development challenges. And that resonated with me because I have been in many situations were I thought, wow, I could really use an engineer to help me do this or, you know, many times I thought I could use a researcher to help me design this — not evaluation but sometimes very much deeper even challenges, that it would have been very helpful to have somebody in academia who I would even be able to profile in my thoughts helping me. But if you don’t have that cost built into your budget, if you don’t know really how to reach out to researchers, and there is so much cultural difference researchers have. You have to think about their research, their teaching load — so they have a different time frame, they have a different you know, they might have a conceptual framework that they have to operate on, which is their research focus. And maybe they have skills and experience that could be used that they might not have incentives or interest in applying that to a development challenge. And sometimes they really don’t understand that development world, and so from both sides, it really requires people understanding those very different contexts and realities and worlds. And that’s a lot of what me and my team do is we try and work with researchers and with practitioners to help them, you know, understand the different worlds and the different incentives and the different constraints that both have so that they can jointly design development solutions. At Purdue our most successful ones have come — I can’t think Purdue at large, but the teams that I worked with here — the most successful ones have come when an organization says to us we have this need for research and can you help us do it? I work closely with a faculty member who, for example, worked with an organization to design a complete new system for emergency response and the organization thought they just needed new software. But really they needed to look at their entire system and then map an improved version of that system and all of the forms that that required onto the software. So that needed to be done. And this faculty member was engaged in that for some years and various kinds of things like that. In another situation the same faculty remember worked on, you know, trying to promote kangaroo mother care in hospitals in Malawi. And so the idea was that — not just behaviour change aspects that people usually work with, but actually looking at the constraints that clinics have, that health care practitioners have in allowing that to be practiced. How does the workflow happen? What is the timing and how can you arrange the space so that it can enable that and then we even had an industrial designer design movable furniture for nurse stations and things that would further allow for kangaroo mother care to happen and the importance of that is that it reduces — for premature babies, it reduces mortality by about 40% so hugely important and really requiring what we had — an industrial designer and an industrial engineer to look at those things. And those are things that as a practitioner, I never would have thought of. I didn’t know what any of those professions would do, and I certainly would not have dreamed of, you know, recruiting people from those particular professions to do development work. So it could be very, you know, you can find expertise in academia in places you would never expect, and it can provide some very elegant solutions as long as that, as long as the issue and the challenge comes from the development practitioner and it’s not a researcher saying, hey, I think it would be really interesting to develop this gadget or do that thing, and it may be just very related to what they want to do and have no use in reality.
Safa: That’s so wonderful. So do you think that these collaborations are increasing? Would you say that, you know, it’s becoming more common place?
Andrea: Yes, I know that donors are more and more asking for it. Not across the board and not in all, within donors there is different degrees of receptivity and ability to promote this in different operating units, I would say, but I have seen it more and more, and I’ve seen it in various donors asking for this kind of collaboration. The degree to which people understand what works best in that it varies. So some people will promote research, not understanding that actually it’s not the research per se that needs to be done, it’s that close collaboration where there is an issue that is clear and that if you undertake that research, it will have a built in use for it, and there will be people who are ready, who are waiting right now to use that so you don’t have to shop it around after you design this thing, there’s already a place for it, and and people are co designing it with you, those solutions with you. I would say that not everybody really understands that real deep concept of what we call research translation, but that’s what we’re trying to promote is that from the very beginning the solutions are sourced from development practitioners, whether that be donors or whether that be the donor’s implementers, at any level from community organizations to international organizations, whatever the problem or the challenge should come from there and then the research should be co designed so that the researcher is already designing something that’s going to definitely be applied.
Safa: It sounds very creative and innovative, but also practical and usable. So that’s so great. Does this type of work, you know, give you faith when it comes to the future of development work or what’s happening now?
Andrea: It gives me faith because — I don’t know about the future of development work, because there’s so many other things and political issues that go into what people are able to do. But what I like about it, it feeds into my own attraction to really collaborative ways of solving problems and putting, you know, evidence, you know, things that are just the guesswork of people ‘I’d like to do this and therefore that’s what we’re gonna do’ , it’s at least you know, things that have been, that are being carried out with more of a scientific method about whether it actually works or not, and what does it respond to. So you know, then that comes with behaviour change kind of issues, too. So it’s not just that you could develop a gadget and then everybody’s gonna be oh, thank you so much for that gadget that solved everything. So that, you know, whatever it is you’re designing has to be something that really people have asked for in the first place. And you have the context to — whether it be a gadget are a policy or a practice — people have already asked for it and have already acknowledged the need for it. Yeah, so it gives me, it gives me faith in how we’re doing things, even if sometimes the political systems can be challenging to operate in.
Safa: Absolutely. Are there any final thoughts or reflections that you’d like to share with us?Anything that maybe we didn’t touch on that you would like to bring up?
Andrea: I’m not sure, I think we’ve touched on a great many things and pretty comprehensively about my experience and certainly about my beliefs and my focus. But one thing that I’ve noticed, and it seems to be more and more understood, maybe it’s just my perception that it is, but it seems the lines between what is called the developing world and what is called the developed world are blurring a lot now. It seems that people are understanding that the big challenges that are out there are really things that are challenges for us all. And that really, you know, many of them threaten our existence, and they don’t threaten the existence of people in the developing world only, and so that line is becoming more blurred and we’re seeing the solutions that we are proposing for the developing world are things, increasingly, we want them to be things that we can actually use too in the context where they’re needed in the United States or in other of the traditionally thought of as developed countries. Yeah, I really think those lines are being blurred and we’re looking for global solutions for everybody.
Safa: There’s so many layers of interconnection and a broader international environment that we all live in that -
Andrea: Yeah and climate change — the huge elephant in the room, right? With climate change we’re all going to be impacted by all of the things that are happening as a result of that.
Safa: Absolutely. We are all in the same boat in some way.
Andrea: Yeah, quite so.
Safa: Andrea, thank you so much for sharing all your experiences and reflections. It’s really being a great privilege to speak with you today. So thank you so much for your time.
Andrea: No, you’re quite welcome. It was a pleasure for me, really, to recall all of these things and to explore them with you.
Safa: Thank you so much. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. To keep up with our weekly podcast please subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Google podcast platforms where you can also rate and review the episodes and share them with your friends. You can also follow us on instagram where are handle is @rethinkingdevelopment and should you have any listener questions that you would like me to ask any of our future guests, please feel free to email them to us. I look forward to continuing similar conversations with you all in the weeks to come. Until then, take care.
