Episode 7: Urgency, Security and Humanitarian Assistance

Paul Barker began his career as a peace corps volunteer in Iran before beginning to work with a variety of organizations primarily in humanitarian contexts in Sudan, Ethiopia, West Bank and Gaza, Afghanistan and more. Over the years he has worked on addressing the underlying causes of social issues in vulnerable areas through policy analysis, advocacy and improved program design. He has held numerous Country Director positions with CARE and Save the Children where he led programs that addressed important social issues such as emergency feeding, maternal and child health, rural credit and micro finance programs, water and sanitation, peace building, child rights governance and child protection, climate change adaptation and mitigation and more. He joins us from Portland, USA.

He speaks to us about:

• the joy of working in rural communities

• working with governments

• internal tracking and accounting systems

• the role of the media

• a sense of urgency

• the role of the military - and much more.

Transcript

Intro: Yeah, all these European and American and UN donors suddenly had lots of resources for Afghanistan. So infrastructure was being done on a large scale not only by NGOs but by private contractors working for these different development agencies. Large nationwide projects were created both for rural development and for education and for healthcare. So a lot of indicators of development dramatically improved.

Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development Podcast, a podcast dedicated to speaking with and learning from international development 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 Paul Barker. Paul began his career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran before beginning to work with a variety of international development organizations, primarily in humanitarian contexts in different countries around the world, including Sudan, Ethiopia, West Bank in Gaza, Afghanistan and others. Over the years, Paul has worked on addressing the underlying causes of different social issues and vulnerable areas through policy analysis, advocacy and improved program design. He has held numerous Country Director positions with Care and Save the Children where he has led programs that address important social issues such as emergency feeding, maternal and child health, rural credit and micro finance programs, water and sanitation, peace building, child rights governance, climate change, adaptation and more. Paul, thank you so much for speaking with us today.

Paul: Thank you Safa.

Safa: Maybe we can begin by you first telling us a bit about your time as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Paul: Sure, I was a Peace Corps volunteer for five years in Iran -1971 to 76. I had been interested in the developing world for a long time, going back through high school and who knows when it all started. But actually, I left for the Peace Corps in Iran the day after graduating from college, and I ended up spending my first 2 years in a village in eastern Iran, which is the center of nematollahi sufism as well as just a small, very peaceful sort of environment, mainly farmers and a few religious leaders, a few teachers, but a very interesting place to spend a couple of years. I then extended for a couple of years in Shiraz, working as a teacher for the tribal high school, a boarding school for nomadic students who came to Shiraz because it wasn’t practical to have high schools migrating with students up and down the mountains. That was a very interesting way to learn about how education programs could be designed to uniquely and very effectively address that needs of tribal people. In my fifth year I was there a Field Officer overseeing and supporting the English teaching program for Peace Corps. It was interesting from a number of points of view. I mean, I suppose I went in with some naive thoughts about how oh, somebody coming from America would obviously have a lot of things to share with these people in rural parts of Iran, but also didn’t take me very long to realize I had a lot to learn from people in rural parts of Iran. I was fascinated by the depth of the culture, the hospitality and the genuine friendships that we developed. And I was also very impressed at how a civilization had developed in these desert oases that live very much in harmony with the environment. And coming from America and the Vietnam war, that was a very pleasant contrast and a lot of useful lessons.

Safa: So after your time there, you began to work in the international development sector and you worked in rural areas also in Egypt and Ethiopia, correct? So could you tell us about how you transitioned or you began to work in that sector? And what the work environment was like at that time?

Paul: Yeah. I met my wife in the Peace Corps. And one thing we wanted to do was live and work overseas to the extent we could do that. And so we had applied to this organization called Option Amdoc, which recruited medical volunteers to work as volunteers in obviously medical programs around the world. And we didn’t hear anything back. And so we kind of forgot about this. Until one day in 1981 I got a postcard for little NGO called Lalamba in Colorado who wanted to know if I’d be interested in being their project manager in Sudan for a refugee health project. Well, this was all very exciting. The only problem was our son was six weeks old then, and so I thought I would really love to do this but with a six week old baby, one couldn’t think about it. But as it turned out, when you were seven weeks old, I could think about it. And so we ended up applying for and accepting these positions with this little NGO working with Eritrean refugees in eastern Sudan. We worked for room and board and even no money. So we got less money with that then we did with the Peace Corps. We enjoyed the work a lot but then I started to realize that I probably needed to get a paying job. And so I learned about professional development organizations, having worked around them and a number of them got good references to some people I knew who had been working in the field for some time and Care was particularly pointed out to me as one that a friend in UNHCR thought did excellent work and had a rewarding time doing that. So I persisted and managed to get a job with Care in the Sinai in Egypt, and it was a good introduction to rural development. As a project manager for an agricultural project, working with co operatives to develop greenhouses to raise vegetable seed links. This is a technology that they’d been introduced to in the Sinai from the Israeli occupation but didn’t have the resources and support systems to continue now that the Israelis had gone back to Israel. So it was interesting working with and developing co operatives to run that. And I know I made a lot of mistakes. But I also learned a lot about how one can interact with communities, the importance of getting a local organization too feel ownership of a project if it was going to continue. And, uh so that was a very positive experience. From there we went to Upper Egypt to Aswan to develop a micro finance project and it continued on.

Safa: More of an organic way, one project lead to another.

Paul: Yeah, the whole career seemed to evolve that way. So from agricultural development to micro finance than to Ethiopia, where I got involved with relief feeding and food for work programs and urban as well as rural programs. Ah, a bit of HIV/aids programming and then to the West Bank, Gaza, where we were trying to start programs from scratch and dealing with two complicated governments to work with. So yes, it just sort of evolved one assignment to the next.

Safa: And it’s incredible that your son was only six weeks old when the first opportunity was suggested to you! So your family always accompanied you in your work?

Paul: Pretty much. There were a couple of times when we had evacuations, and so they spent a little bit of time in the States. For one of our children, it was like six months. Another one spent, uh, I think it was two years during the high school in the States, but almost all the time they were with us overseas so they had interesting experience growing up in a multicultural, multi linguistic environment.

Safa: You mentioned that eventually you transitioned to working in relief feeding and in a context where it was conflict situation. Could you tell us about some of the ethical challenges that you grappled with during this stage of your work and just a bit about that time?

Paul: Yeah, there were ethical challenges from different dimensions. One was working with governments who really tried to impose a lot of structure and guidance and limitations on what you’re able to do. It’s important to work with governments because they are the legal authority in the countries we work in but they also do have their own priorities. And they sometimes would prefer to direct aid to areas that they want their support to increase and to deny aid in areas that they don’t want to favor. They also can be very bureaucratic. And we tend to spend a lot of time dealing with reporting requirements and getting permission and getting things authorized. And it’s just the amount of time went in ended up doing that was kind of frustrating, and we of course have internal issues. There were complicated food accounting issues. You manage a large food assistance program. We were doing up to 70,000 tons of relief commodities a year, so we had to redesign and improve the systems for tracking and accounting for all that food and preventing its waste and dealing with responsible disposition of food that did get damaged unfortunately. It became a very complicated process and it’s a kind of a different set of skills to manage relief programs than development. And then there’s this intermediate sort of kind of programming that has both relief and development components. We did a lot of ‘food for work ‘ work in Ethiopia in those years, providing employment to help communities build irrigation systems and roads and erosion barriers since and so on, paying them with food commodities. It was logistically challenging and complicated. We sometimes had a bit of corruption to deal with, and so finding that corruption dependent on the integrity of your accounting systems and you’re auditing work. Forever challenging.

Safa: Forever challenging. You also worked in a leadership capacity in many of these assignments in many of these countries, could you tell us what was your motivation throughout throughout the years?

Paul: I mean, obviously, one wanted to improve the quality of life for the people that we were working with, which had to do with level of education and nutrition, shelter. But also it had a lot to do with improving the capacity of the national staff we worked within our organization so that increasingly they would play leadership roles and it was interesting over the 38 years I worked international relief and development to see the evolution of roles and responsibilities because it started out with primarily Americans — the organizations I worked with- being not only country directors but also project managers in rural areas. And as the years evolved these roles became increasingly international, so we had Canadians and Europeans doing a lot of senior roles, and then it became a lot of people from the countries we were working in, and not only at project manager level, but also moving up to be deputy country directors, country directors, heads of finance and so a tremendous evolution of human resource capacity and also the trust I think the organizations felt able to give to staff that they worked to develop over the years.

Safa: Earlier you mentioned that some of the challenges that you faced included working with governments. There are different layers of power dynamics in every community, in every country, and sometimes that can be a challenge to navigate, even between international development agencies and governments and communities. What have been your experiences with challenging, you know, the power differences and different power relationships that are involved in executing a project or advocating for a policy or any of these things?

Paul: There are different levels of authorities one deals with — so you start out with government, which gives you national legitimacy to be working in the country. And they have their layers of authority at the provincial, regional, local levels so they become counterparts but the most critical people to deal with are leadership in communities. I think we started by working disproportionately with whoever was recognized as traditional leadership. So you get the elders who are almost always men, older men and more prosperous men. So then you realize after some time that they’re more interested in their interests then the poor people, then in the interests of women and other minorities. So one has to be then evolve systems to give equal voice to the other members of the community. Creating organizations specific for a project would often required 50% or more female participation. A micro finance project we ran in Tanzania ended up with over 70% of participants being women. And one of the lessons learned was that women were much more responsible at managing finance that men were. They were more honest with the accounting systems and they took loans and they developed projects mainly to support family needs — be it education or health or housing. Men tended to want to take loans for consumption, for their pleasures too often — I don’t want it bad mouth all men but as a generalization, women were a safer part of the community to work within micro finance. And I think, probably generally true for a lot of development activities.

Safa: So in these efforts, in these initiatives, how were you able to use your language skills? As you’ve learned quite a few languages over the years. Was this something that was your own personal interest and commitment or something that you felt you really need to do in order to facilitate the work that you were committed to doing?

Paul: Yeah. I don’t speak that many languages. It is Arabic and Persian I speak pretty well, uh, some Kiswahili. But I guess as a result of that, I ended up spending most of my years working in countries that speak either Arabic or Persian and, uh, I found it extremely useful. A lot of foreigners working in those countries don’t speak very much, uh, of the local languages, but I think you get a lot more credibility with staff and with communities if you can talk directly to people in their own language. And it just to me, it was just a lot more fun. When we went to Tanzania from Sudan we did end up taking Kiswahili classes for about six weeks, so I didn’t get a in depth knowledge of Swahili, but enough to get around pretty well with shopping and with basic conversation. And, uh, people’s eyes light up a bit when you can speak to them in their own language. And the more you can speak and the more they can feel comfortable telling you what their concerns are directly, I think encourages them and also give you confidence that things are not being filtered out of conversations by translators, which is can be a challenge or a danger if one doesn’t have local knowledge.

Safa: Absolutely. It’s a different level and depth of communication when you share the same language. Working in humanitarian settings can have an emotional toll, physical toll. These are sometimes very difficult circumstances. Could you speak to us a bit about how you were able to work in that environment or process any of the emotional challenges that come up with working in such a complex emergency type environment?

Paul: It is a new reality to work in an area where people are very obviously starving. And we had some terrible famines in Ethiopia our first couple of years there and part of the work is to do assessments and so you go out as a small team with not much more than paper and pens and vehicles to meet people and assess local situations and plan future distributions. But you would see people who were terribly emaciated and there was nothing you could do in that moment for them. So it was just an emotionally difficult thing to deal with. And it could give you an additional sense of urgency that we have to make sure that systems are set up, that people know when to come or where to come as soon as possible. But you can’t address all the problems nearly as quickly as you want to. So that was challenging and emotionally difficult. I spent a year working in Sudan, 2006 to 2007, and most of our work then was in Darfur, and it was in a pretty dire situation, with some huge camps, refugee camps, IDP — internally displaced people camps where hundreds of thousands of local Darfurians from different tribes would be forced to live because their villages had been burned and their livelihoods destroyed. And there was no obvious end to this crisis and so it continues to this day. I was perhaps a little too out spoken on this with staff or whatever. So I did end up being made persona non grata in Sudan after that one year and had to leave sooner than I would have otherwise. And I don’t know really what one should have done. It was a very difficult thing to witness. I wasn’t speaking publicly on the media about things we had seen and experienced in Darfur, but I would talk to staff about it and it was in emails and some of this confidential information was somehow accessed and leaked by some of our staff to newspapers and government. It was a very frustrating situation and so I was forced to leave that year and a couple of years later, the government of Sudan kicked out twelve organizations, including Care and I think Save the Children. It is this frustrating thing — you have to work with governments but sometimes the governments really do not have the interests of their people, or all their people at heart. And that’s probably the biggest challenge.

Safa: As you say, it’s very frustrating. Is there any tools that you would say, you know, helped you through that difficult time?

Paul: I think a sense of community helps a lot. So you know all the international NGOs working in Sudan or in Ethiopia or Afghanistan at these times were having similar problems. So the knowledge that we could, uh, share experiences and come up with common strategies and to the extent possible craft advocacy messages that would be acceptable was useful. Also I had strong support from head offices. Another example might be in Afghanistan. I worked there for periods of time. But the first time was 1995 to 99 and the Taliban were in the southern part of the country and they were threatening Kabul and we didn’t know what was going to happen. So in March of ’96 four of us from Care went down to Kandahar to talk with the provisional leadership of the Taliban in Kandahar, and we negotiated a simple agreement to explain to them what we did and who we were as an organization and to get them to commit to allowing us to operate in areas that they controlled and to crossing front lines. Now it was — I think we were the first organization to do this, and it is probably something could not be done now. But at that point, it was before Al Qaeda and the terrorist restrictions and problems we’ve had in later years. But Taliban were recognized as not a very nice organization even then. We had a lot of support in designing this agreement from Care headquarters in London and in the US, and we had excellent staff to work with in getting this done. And we had a philosophy that to the extent that the government acts responsibly, we will treat it as a responsible authority in an area. And I think that’s a strategy to help encourage responsible behaviour of governments. And we had to recognize that the Taliban were in a position to provide security in areas they controlled and to deny it if the so choose. The agreement we negotiated worked well and enabled us to work safely in the areas they controlled for quite a while.

Safa: That philosophy of we will work with a responsible government as long as they act responsibility — that really strikes a chord. In the country example of Afghanistan, which is a country you worked in at different time periods. Over the years, when you take a historical kind of look on the country context and the way that the conflict has developed, or the different chapters of it over the years. And when you think about the work that, you know, humanitarian aid or international development organizations and agencies that they’ve done over the years and the impact of it or where it stands now, when you take a step back and just think about the work that has been done there over the years, what do you think, what do you think about the current situation and what are your thoughts?

Paul: Wow, so that’s a pretty big question. A few observations though. One is these first years working there under the Taliban government were perhaps the easiest times because there was not much of a government and we could work with local Taliban authorities in communities. We were able to establish home schools for girls and we had something like I can’t remember — 70,000 students and two thirds of them girls in these homes schools by the end of the Taliban time. These are things we could negotiate and work locally with community ashuras or councils which would include the local religious leader who, of course, would be a Taleb at that point and sometimes he would also be the teacher in the school. So it was interesting what one could accomplish in an environment where one would have thought these things were not possible at that time. So we have lots of stories of being able to accomplish difficult things under the Taliban. The past years working in Afghanistan were just right after the Taliban left government. So 2000 to 2003 the amount of resources for international development greatly increased in a dramatic way. It was very difficult to get funding earlier years to do reconstruction and development work. And then there is almost this curse of too many resources and how to manage it responsibly for a few years afterwards. But Afghans were still in pretty good behaviour. So security was still very good around the country. The government was very appreciative of NGO efforts and so those were, in a lot of ways, the most rewarding years to work in Afghanistan. Then security starting in 2003 but especially later, 2005, 2006 and beyond — every year kept getting worse. So the last time I worked in Afghanistan was 2017. I was only there for four months, but the security had gotten complicated enough that one could not walk down the streets of Kabul like one used to. I used to ride my bicycle all over Kabul, but I couldn’t do that now. I mean both for security and in terms of kidnapping and terrorists but also just congestion and traffic make it impossible now. The government in Afghanistan I think I always found reasonably supportive of our work. The challenge some times became how do you work with the government but also appear to be sufficiently independent that you didn’t become a target of the opposition forces? Not only Taliban but the Haqqani network and ISIS and other groups that oppose the government. And so those became tricky issues to juggle and to keep going.

Safa: Yeah, you mentioned that around 2002, 2003 the funding increased for projects in Afghanistan, and there is a politics to funding. Could you tell us about your experiences with that? And how you think that affects the work that, you know, agencies are trying to do? And how to navigate the politics of funding?

Paul: Yeah, all these European and American and UN donors suddenly had lots of resources for Afghanistan. So infrastructure was being done on a large scale not only by NGOs but by private contractors working for these different development agencies. Large international — well, not your international but nationwide projects were created both for rural development and for education and for healthcare. So a lot of indicators of development dramatically improved in Afghanistan. These projects were funded in different ways — sometimes directly by donors, increasingly, though, donors would give money to the government and the government would subcontract NGOs to do the work, so it became logistically a little more complicated. Coordination was important, but also challenging, and then as security got worse and interests of donors waned, the needs are still huge, but it’s more and more difficult now to get resource to manage projects. It’s also more difficult just because security is more challenging to implement that. But this issue of getting money through the government but also wanting to be seen as adequately independent of government makes it more of a security challenge to work, especially in areas where the Taliban have a strong presence, then would have been the case with other funding streams in previous years.

Safa: Speaking of security challenges you mentioned to me before when we spoke that one issue that is becoming more common places is the interface between military interventions and the military and aid agencies or development organizations — not just in Afghanistan but in in different countries. I don’t know maybe you experienced this in the West Bank and Gaza or in other countries that you worked in — what have been your ,you know, some of the ethical considerations or the issues that have come up in your experience when the military and the aid sector kind of interface?

Paul: Yeah, it can be quite challenging. I first experienced interacting with the military In 1991 after the first Gulf War. I worked in northern Iraq and southern Turkey. There had been a great expulsion of Kurds to southern Turkey and then the military, the foreign militaries had arranged enough security in northern Iraq for them to come back. So there was an interesting role that the military could play and did play there. Obviously, non government organizations are not in a position to provide security, so that created a stable environment. Also, the military add tremendous logistical capacity with their helicopters and trucks and so on to move people and commodities one place to another. And in an area like northern Iraq, the Kurdish area, they were not seen as an occupying power by the local people. So it seemed like it was an environment where it was appropriate to coordinate with military rather openly to most efficiently delivery resources where needed. Another example of where I think the military has done a good job with their logistical capacity was in Pakistan after a huge earthquake in the north, the American military was able to divert helicopters from Afghanistan to provide emergency relief to areas were they were cut of. So there is a rule in non contested areas for the military to use its unique logistical support systems to provide aid so let me be hopefully clear on that to start with. But it also can become problematic, especially as areas are more in contention, as they became in Afghanistan after 2002, 2003 and the U. S military started a program to provide humanitarian relief and development aid directly from the military to communities around Afghanistan. And they saw this is a way of doing a couple of things. One is providing assistance. The ulterior motive was to get intelligence and to hopefully get acceptance from the communities for their presence. But they were not seen neutrally, especially in the southern parts of Afghanistan. And the problem then became that the lines became very much blurred and confused between what the military was doing and what professional development agencies were doing. And we felt vulnerable as a result. The military didn’t go anyplace without their heavy equipment in their guns and their protection. And we never went anyplace with heavy equipment, guns or protection. So we were quite vulnerable by comparison and it can become confusing — who are these people? You know, what is the difference? I think it became easier for some communities to think that we were a part of this military occupation of Afghanistan. Even Colin Powell, who I have a lot of respect for in a lot of ways, once referred to non governmental organizations as force multipliers. From his point of view, from a military point of view, what we were doing was bringing development aid and and some stability by this assistance that was going in and the acceptance that should be providing communities. Well, it makes sense, I guess, from the military point of view — it it still does not make sense from the non governmental organization point of view. A related challenge was trying to convince the military of our perceptions and we would have meetings and we had presentations we developed to explain to the military why this was a problem and why we had to maintain our separation and distance from what they were doing and we’d appreciate it if they were not involved in relief and rehabilitation work and development work. It was a difficult message to get across that was made all the more difficult because they kept changing the military every six months on their different rotations of soldiers in and out. So we’d sort of get some people oriented to understanding our concerns, and then they would be gone and a new crowd would be in. This was a problem in Afghanistan. But I want to also talk about Africa because the United States had developed what they call Africa Corps to provide military assistance to countries across Africa from east to west, mainly across the Sahel. So there’s a fairly substantial American military presence providing security training to local militaries in these countries. And there again, they are trying to use development activities as a way to gain greater acceptance for their presence. And even though a lot of these countries are not as dangerous, by any matter or means as Afghanistan, still this confusion can can grow and it becomes official US Government policy to support this military presence and their involvement in development work so much that when we were in Tanzania, some funding became available for HIV/aids work, and we were told that if we wanted to apply for that funding, we would have to agree to work with the US Navy and their presence in Tanzania at that time, so we chose not to apply for it. This sort of — these should not be conditions of development, you know?

Safa: Absolutely. All the lines are being blurred. Neutrality is not — is hard to establish. It’s very challenging

Paul: Yeah, very much. How we get out of this now that we’ve gotten into it…

Safa: Yeah, I mean, it was interesting you started with the example of Turkey were as you said, maybe it was a bit more effective just because of what the logistical capacity, the sense that it was not an occupying presence. But every country, every context has its own challenges. When you think about the role of the media in these kind of humanitarian contexts, when it comes to these kind of development projects and issues, have you found that they have generally been a player that has contributed to to raising awareness to, helping with advocacy, with helping with messaging getting across or have you have you come across situations where they really perhaps did not contribute positively? Maybe it was harmful — their their involvement or their interventions or their stories. How have you, you know, experienced the interface between the media and the sector, the development sector?

Paul: The media does play an important role, and a lot of what they do is they raise international awareness and consciousness of problems. And if different droughts and famines and guerrilla warfare is not in the news then donor countries don’t know about it and resources are less likely to be made available. So one thing that most NGOs do is have strategies and protocols for trying to work with the media, to share our analysis of what’s happening and what we are doing about it. And so I think there’s a lot of positive things that can and do happen as a result of the media’s role. They sometimes get stories wrong. They sometimes want to sensationalize something that can exaggerate a problem, and that makes the work more difficult. I guess one of my main, you know — since retiring, I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on Iran advocacy issues and trying to support this direct comprehensive plan of action and efforts to normalize relations between Iran and the rest of the world because I spent these years in Iran. So I was all excited when the Obama administration negotiated this agreement, and I’ve been very distraught when the Trump administration has destroyed or done its best to destroy it. And I think the media is too often gullible to reporting information that comes out of the government and treating it uncritically and so I’m concerned that that’s going to contribute to a very dangerous situation, right? I know it already is contributing very dangerous situation with Iran so the media can also play a very negative role if it is not adequately critical with its own reporting,

Safa: Right exactly. It can be used for both good and bad, depending on the context and the interests. You mentioned your retirement and I wanted to ask you about that decision. How — at that time in your career when you decided to retire as compared to when you first began, how did you feel about the industry and the changes that had happened in the sector? What was it like at that stage? What had changed? What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed or you’ve experienced over the years in terms of how development work is done or how aid is delivered or any of these issues?

Paul: I think in many ways development work has become much more professional over the years. It has learned a lot from mistakes made and it has gone through rigorous processes of evaluation and monitoring and lessons learned studies to know better what works and what doesn’t. So I think there’s been a lot of positive change in that sense. I alluded to the fact that development work is increasingly owned by professionals from developing countries, and I think that’s a very good sign. It’s rare now when a westerner would end up as a project manager in a rural part of the country in Asia or Africa or Latin America. So that is good news in the sense of development success. It is also sort of sad in a way because part of what I have enjoyed is working in rural areas. We still get to go to rural areas and meet rural people as parts of monitoring and evaluation and so on or just periodic field visits. But it’s not the sort of level of in depth experience I had in the earlier years working in relief and development programming.

Safa: These changes can have different side effects as well. When you think of the people you’ve met, you know, the people that have really stood out to you, whether it’s your colleagues or your friends. Just people you’ve met in the countries you’ve been in. Is there anyone who, you know, stands out to you, or perhaps a few people that you think that really embodied the spirit or the skills or the kind of qualities that you think are really important for this type of career path or who really inspired you over the years or kind of became your heroes in some way, in this sector?

Paul: My sense is to say I know a lot of those people. Engineers and managers, Afghan engineers and managers we have working Afghanistan, managing our field offices, negotiating with Taliban with solving difficult problems, keeping the logistics of things moving ahead, just amazing people accomplishing incredible things under very challenging circumstances. In Egypt, I had a very talented bunch of staff in the ’80s when I was working on this micro finance project development and none of us had particular experience in micro finance before, but we worked hard, and we came up with a program which not only promoted community owned and managed revolving loan funds, but also initiated and supported a wide range of community development activities. Very impressive staff — and these projects I’m pleased to learn continue even now long after the funding ended. So that’s always encouraging, and not all projects do that. But when they do it’s a rewarding feeling. There are other staff who work in main offices and do project activities that maybe aren’t so romantic but they are really critical — so accountants who put in incredibly long hours and will fight for integrity, even when it has got a financial cost with finding mistakes — will come up with new systems, whatever. Very inspiring people in their own ways. One thing I’ve learned over the years is the importance and the value of auditors. Auditors sometimes make your life miserable because they are always looking for problems but at the same time, if there are problems, we need to know about them. And if we don’t find them soon enough they become bigger problems. So, learning to work with and support auditors has been an important thing to learn. And I have come to grudgingly appreciate them. I didn’t initially realized what important role they could play.

Safa: As you say, they can be something to embrace, not to run away from.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, they can be. It’s interesting because they could be very difficult.

Safa: Yeah. I mean, there are so many challenges that can be revealed.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, they go after audit commodities and they come back and say, well, you know, you got a quantity of oil missing from this warehouse. No, I didn’t know that, actually. And so you know, there are systems to deal with that — you file reports, you hold staff accountable, you recover losses. But if we don’t discover that, somebody else might, and it becomes much more embarrassing and much more expensive as a problem.

Safa: Sometimes it is better to deal with them sooner rather than later.

Paul: Yeah.

Safa: When you think about the challenges that you’ve faced in a position of leadership, is there one that particularly stands out? You mentioned, you know, working with auditors. Because in a position of leadership there is a different sense of responsibility — so is there a particular situation where it was quite challenging? Or that comes to mind?

Paul: I think a key skill to have is working with people and supporting staff. And maybe it’s a style of working, but I’ve found that taking the time to get to know staff and to work with them to listen to them pays tremendous dividends, both in program design and management. They usually are working much more closely with communities and with activities or projects than I am, especially as you get higher and higher and management. So you have to a) listen to them, work closely with them and make sure they feel confident to speak their mind into you. Make sure their contributions are heard. The challenging part comes when you have underperforming staff who, for whatever reason, don’t get the memo, they don’t get things done on time, they don’t understand what’s required in a report -so using different techniques to work with them over time is perhaps a bigger challenge.

Safa: Right, understandably. Are there any last thoughts you would like to to share with us or leave with us to think about?

Paul: Well, we live in a challenging world where the disparities of wealth and poverty are great, where problems — environmental problems are greater than ever before. I think that’s another change we have seen over the last few decades is how belatedly the world has recognized we have a huge climate problem. I think another challenge we have in development is that sometimes our successes can lead to other problems. So we had tremendous success as development agencies improving standards of health care around the world and so people are living much longer. But that also is exacerbating our problems of population growth. So we have to — and the environmental challenges that come with that. So there are these tensions I think in what we do that we have to be sensitive to and then we have to help the communities and the countries we are working with deal with the next generation of problems. And I think we have to listen very well to them because often they know answers that we don’t know. So listening is is really key.

Safa: Yes, that’s a theme that comes up a week after week as I speak with different people. The importance of listening.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Safa: Thank you so much for sharing your reflections and your thoughts and your time. It has been very interesting and there’s a lot to, you know, ponder and continue to think about. But thank you, thank you so much.

Paul: Ok thank you Safa, it has been a pleasure talking with you.

Safa: Thank you to our listeners. To keep up with our weekly podcast, please subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Google podcast platforms where you can also rate and review our episodes. You can also follow us on instagram where our handle is @rethinking development. And should you have any listener questions that you would like me to ask 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.