Episode 10: Swedish Development Cooperation
Magnus Saemundsson is currently the Senior Education Specialist at SIDA, the Swedish governmental agency for development cooperation, based in Cambodia. He initially worked as a secondary school teacher and lecturer in Sweden before transitioning to the Swedish Ministry of Education. He joined SIDA in 2003 and over the years has been serving as a Senior Education Expert in the Nordic region, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia and other countries. His work with SIDA Cambodia has focused on supporting the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport in improving quality assurance systems in learning and teaching, creating the first multi-donor trust fund to support capacity development at all levels of the education sector, supporting skills training programmes through private-public partnerships and much more. He joins us from Phnom Phen, Cambodia.
He speaks to us about:
the historical and problematic ideas around development work
the Swedish approach to development cooperation
systematic and behaviour change requiring a long time
long term donor investment
the challenge of corruption
building trust
institutional memory residing with local staff and partners
the importance of communication in leadership
the power of knowledge
the role of art and culture - and much more.
Editors Note: This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity and coherence.
Transcript
Intro : This is one of the challenges for government organizations like SIDA or USAID or DIFID, that the government and the Ministry of Finance and the general public, the media they want to see results. And they want to see results from the Swedish or US or British money, or whatever. And then you want to have your flag on things and be able to say, okay, we supported this and then this was the result. This is actually, in most cases, very difficult to do. And as you say, social changes, changing behaviour, behaviour changes take a long time.
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. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behaviour and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different practitioners. Our guest today is Magnus Saemundsson. Magnus is currently the Senior Education Specialist at SIDA, the Swedish governmental agency for development cooperation, and is based in Cambodia. He initially worked as a secondary school teacher and lecturer in Sweden before transitioning to work with the Swedish Ministry of Education. Magnus joined SIDA in 2003 and over the years has been serving as a Senior Education Expert in the Nordic region, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Laos, and other countries. His work with SIDA Cambodia has focused on supporting the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports in providing quality assurance systems in learning and teaching, creating the first multi-donor trust fund to support capacity development at all levels of the education sector, supporting skills training programs through private-public partnerships, and much more. Magnus is also very much involved in arts and culture in Cambodia and strongly believes in the necessity of supporting creativity and the arts as part of social and economic development. Magnus, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Magnus : Thank you very much for having me, Safa.
Safa : Thank you, it’s our pleasure. To begin with, maybe we could speak a bit about what sparked your interest in education in general and what motivated you to first work as a teacher for a few years and then also what made you transition to the policy side, and join the Ministry of Education and later SIDA?
Magnus : That’s a long time ago, but actually, I didn’t aim to become a teacher. I aimed to become a artist and went to art school but being an artist, you don’t earn so much money. So I went to the part of the art school that was training art teachers. So that’s how I started in that field. And then I became a teacher and I really liked being a teacher, I really liked being among young people, and discussing things and finding out things together with young people. So moving from teaching art, I started to work a lot around the use of computers and IT and ICT. I was one of the first teachers in Sweden to actually work with computers in the classroom. So when that became a subject in Swedish schools, I was asked to move into the National Education Agency in Sweden, to work on the first curricula in the use of ICT in education. And from that I transitioned into other things. As you rightly said, I’ve been working in education for a very long time. And one of the things I realized in this period is that education can look very differently from the outside but when it actually comes to the core of it, it’s very simple in the sense that if you have good teachers then you have good schools, you have good education. If the teacher is not good, the schools will not be good, education will not be good. And from transitioning from ICT into the National Education Agency, I was also asked then to move to Brussels to work with the European cooperation in the education field. So gradually, in an organic kind of way, I was moving between different parts of the education system. And then I was asked to apply for this position at SIDA by people I knew that were working at SIDA and knew me. So I got it. And it was a very, very interesting step forward to start to work with policy in development. And as I said, there are many differences and many similarities. One difference is actually the money side. That in the West, in Europe, in general and not least in Sweden, the schools are really well equipped compared to here. And the teacher training is very different in the sense it’s much longer, it’s much deeper, and so on and so forth. But when it comes to schooling, when it comes to the schools, there are so many similarities in that you need teachers with dedication and teachers that are interested in the subject, but mostly, are actually interested in the students and that is independent of where you are in the world, of what kind of school building you’re working in, what kind of tools you have accessible. So that’s the short story.
Safa : It’s very interesting that you went from art to teaching to the policy side to the development side. Somewhere you have said that your motto in development cooperation work is, and I quote, “we are not here to tell you what to do. We are here to support you in implementing the reforms you consider necessary.” So in working in the development side in the education sector, as your experience grew, could you speak to us about what you learned in terms of the approaches you felt were best to take or the attitude or the perspective or the lens to have when working with other countries, with partner organizations in situations where there’s a variety of different ideas or cultural practices or beliefs and just about this motto that you have?
Magnus : Yeah, this is actually really one core of the issues around development cooperation. One of my colleagues, who has was passed away now, he joked about what slogan we should have for Swedish development cooperation and he said, “like Sweden in due time.” And that’s very much of the thinking that was in development from the beginning, (historically) development was very much about looking at these countries that are ‘underdeveloped’, that was the phrase that was used, meaning that they would ,with our support, become like us. And of course, you cannot do that. And in that, you had this idea that some of these countries were inferior, and some of them were superior, and not only in terms of economic development, social development, culture, and all of these things, but what we have come to realize more and more, globally, is actually that all cultures are different. But it is very difficult, in many cases, to speak about who is ‘developed’ and who is ‘not developed’. And one of the big things that is lacking, and that was obvious from the very beginning, is lacking knowledge. And knowledge transfer was something that was seen as something very simple. We either sent teachers or people that could teach the local people to drill for wells or all of these other things, or we took people back from Cambodia, from Tanzania, other countries, back to our Western countries, send them to training institutions or school or universities. So they would then come back with the ‘real’ knowledge, helping them to become better, become ‘developed’. And as I said, this view has changed a lot and you can see it in the whole discussion that was around the Paris Agenda in the early 2000s, and Accra and Busan, where actually equality between different countries is now seen as very different than it was before. And you can see very concretely how this former view was kind of devastating in some cases, and a very practical example, here from Cambodia, is in teaching how to read and write. The Cambodian script system is the Indian script system from the beginning. And there are many differences from Latin script for example. One of it is that when you write, you do not make spaces between words, you write a whole sentence in one line. And that’s the way you do it in the Indian script and that is the way you do it in Cambodian, in Khmer. But in the 80s and 90s, there was a kind of global agreement among experts, when you’re teaching students to learn to read, you go by the whole word. So instead of learning C A T, you learn the word cat as a single item. And this was introduced here by foreign experts. And actually, because the ‘experts’ thought they were developed, that they had the knowledge, in the end the ministry here said Okay, that’s probably the way we should do it. And this was simply devastating for 10 years, students had much bigger difficulties learning to read than they had before in the old system, where you went from one letter before you actually started to read sentences. And then, about 7,8 years ago, Cambodia said, no, this doesn’t work. We have to go back to our old system. And that’s what they are doing now. They are doing that with lots of support from organizations, with early grade reading. So they actually moved back to a system they had before. And that means that all of a sudden, the young students are learning much more than they did before. This is a very good example of how the global experts and the West can have a view of things that could work very well in their country but that doesn’t work at all in another very different country. And that is then a good example of what I mean, that we have to look at what these organizations, countries, governments want to do. And some of the things might be something that we don’t think they should be doing, and then we will not fund it. But basically, we are not to come here to tell them what to do. We are going to support the things we think are positive and they want to do. And this goes for organizations as well. And I think that’s also actually a core of what SIDA has been doing a lot. With giving support to organizations in the sense of giving them core support, you give money to a certain broad field of activities or actually supporting the organization, whereas many other organizations, they have much more of a project approach, they want certain things to happen and then you pay for the organization to deliver that particular part. Whereas, SIDA, in general, has seen this as no, we have to make it possible for the organization to deliver in a much broader sense. Of course, we also support projects, but this is a basic difference in approach to organizations and to development cooperation and that is also very much in line with the Agenda from Paris and Busan and Accra. So, that is, from my point of view, one of the really positive parts of Swedish development cooperation.
Safa : Very interesting. I mean, as you say that core funding requires maybe more long term investment, and part of that is just allowing for more time, allowing and funding a longer term presence. In terms of measuring impact or thinking about impact, there’s sometimes a tension between more short term successes and longer term goals and plans for systemic change, but that is not always achieved in the timeframe that is possible. In your work, when you think about impact or when you think about achievements or reaching certain landmarks, but it having taken maybe many years longer than had previously imagined or been planned for, how do you kind of navigate that or think about that or what is your personal perspective on how social change or systemic change on a particular issue, institutional change, how it requires a lot more time than we might normally think?
Magnus : You’re absolutely right. This is one of the challenges for government organizations like SIDA or USAID or DIFID, that the government and the Ministry of Finance and the general public and media, they want to see results. And they want to see results from the Swedish or US or British money, or whatever. And then you want to have your flag on things and be able to say, okay, we supported this and then this was the result. This is actually, in most cases, very difficult to do. And as you say, social changes, changing behaviour, behaviour changes take a long time, and it’s very often a long process that moves slowly with a lot of assistance and all of a sudden, things are looking different. You can see it in the West, in how people talk about gays and lesbians. In Canada, in the US and in Sweden, with consistent work on this, with a lot of resistance, all of a sudden, in most of the Western countries, the general public opinion and the legislation has changed completely. So most of the Western countries now have the same legislation for marriages between people from the same sex as heterosexuals. So this is a very good example of how this change takes time. But it is possible to do. But on the other hand, when you’re looking at very complicated changes, like increased democratic processes and support to that, that’s a very, very long process. And then you really have to work inside a culture, inside the society, inside the history of that society. That’s one of the really difficult parts of coming from outside, importing into a country, and we have seen devastating examples where they try to do that with military means. Also, with the more kind of soft power means. And changing big systems like food systems also takes a long time. One of the things that we, and I think this is really a right thing, globally have seen is child centred teaching as an important part. By actually looking at the different ways of learning from group learning to activity based learning to inquiry based learning, all of these things — there are many labels, but basically, learning based on the idea that the learner is interested in learning the things that we want them to learn, and giving them the opportunity to learn with assistance. And group learning is the other opposite, where you actually have decided what they should learn and they should memorize it basically, not to understand it, but memorize it. But actually changing this way of looking at learning takes a long time. And in countries like here, in Cambodia or in Tanzania, this has been a very difficult process. In legal terms, the curricular terms, what you’re teaching in a teacher training college is based on the idea of learner centred teaching. But in reality, very little has changed in many cases. Now here, it’s been moving very fast during the last 5 years. But this has taken almost 30 years to change. But the new teachers coming out, they have a different way of looking at it. If you’re working as an organization like SIDA, you have to have the confidence in actually working for a long time. And that means in almost all cases, if you enter into support, that if you expect a change of way of thinking, behaviour changes in a broader sense, and with a broader group, then you really have to look at it, time wise, in 10, 15, 20 years. Whereas a lot of the thinking that is behind the getting the flag and being able to tell that our money made this difference, that’s very different than to actually get these things together. So that is a struggle for all development agencies actually, to do what we know is needed — long term invest. And what we know is to report back, okay, this is what happened for our money. This is really a big challenge for all of us.
Safa : Mm hmm. As you say, it is a big challenge for different actors, different organizations, but when it comes to working in partnerships with governments, whether it’s the government of the country you are in or also other regional governments, partner governments, what have been your experiences with trying to establish dialogue or agreement and just working together on an issue despite the political context, despite the political agenda of the different partnership members, the different countries? Sometimes it’s hard to maybe find unity or bring together people who have different competing priorities. So when it comes to that more diplomatic side of the work and working with other countries and overcoming any of the political challenges, what have been your experiences or what are your thoughts in terms of how to approach that?
Magnus : This is a difficult question and needs a delicate answer. Your absolutely right, many countries we work in are not democratic in the sense we would like them to be. They are autocratic or in different ways, different senses, the gray scale is huge in this sense. And sometimes this is very difficult. And another problem that is related to this is that in many of these countries, not least here in south east Asia and in Cambodia, is actually the issue of corruption. Corruption is a huge thing and devastating for all movement forwards and all movement of accountability, transparency, and the whole idea of democratic processes. And that makes it sometimes completely impossible to work on certain issues. Specifically, where there is a lot of money involved. Where the elite is getting a lot of money, and they are afraid that the money will disappear from their pockets. So in certain cases, you’re not simply as an agent of democratic ideals. You’re not able to work on these areas. But on the other hand, in countries like Cambodia, you have a lot of good people and you actually have organizations that are very positive and are really struggling to work towards the same ideas that we are supporting. And here, you actually have the education system that has been a kind of island of opportunities and positivism in that sense. Not only in terms of the current leadership, which is extremely positive, and has been for a very long time. And that is also because we have, and ‘we’ meaning the whole development group here, has been working on this issue for a very long time. And because we have been here for a very long time and working consistently, not being too much of coming in and telling them what to do, but actually seeing them as partners and they see us as partners too. So, we have been able to work closely with them and then, as I say, some things are easier. One example is comprehensive sexual education, sexuality education. That was not a struggle to do it here. And it is actually implemented in schools. But when it comes to then changing the behaviour and how teachers work with gender lenses in schools, it is much more difficult. So actually there is a gap, in many, many cases, between writing the document, writing the policies, and even writing a very concrete curricula and syllabus, that’s one thing and that we have been able to do very successfully, I would say, in many of these fields I’ve been working in here, and also in countries like in Laos, and really in Bangladesh as well. But when it comes to the concrete changes, it takes a much longer time actually to get the whole system to take this on board and the individuals to take this on board. This is really a challenge, working with governments, specifically with governments, but then you also do have organizations that might be doing good work in one way, but not doing good work in other ways. But getting this balance right is very, very difficult. And specifically, as the basis of Swedish development cooperation, we are supporting democratic processes, supporting increased respect to human rights. All these issues are difficult in practice in many, many, many of these countries. And sometimes you see, this has been moving forward, but sometimes then it all goes back, like you are seeing, for example in Tanzania in the last few years. Tanzania has been moving very much forward slowly, slowly but moving in the right direction, but all of a sudden, it really reverted. You see it also in the West, you see it with countries like Hungary and the US and other places. This is work that is never ending and you have to be able to move between different aspects of it and there is no right or wrong, there is no solution that works in all cases, you have to go case by case. And one of the most important aspects of this is to work in a way that these organizations, the people in these organizations trust you. You are here to support them and you will be here for a long time to support them. And you are not coming in with the money and working for three years and telling them what to do and then you are leaving and you’re very unhappy because they didn’t really do what you wanted them to do and so on. So actually building this trust is really a key for success.
Safa : Mm hmm. You mentioned building trust and that taking time. In some cases, in organizations where there is a turnover of international staff, when new staff come and go every few years, sometimes there is a kind of loss of institutional memory. So perhaps there was a project or partnership and new staff come in and it gets lost or people don’t know about it, or even if there are reports written about the lessons learned from it, the new staff perhaps don’t read that, so there’s sometimes a loss of information, loss of institutional memory and that can harm the work that is done or doesn’t make it as efficient or it doesn’t build on it. Have you experienced that yourself? Not only perhaps in SIDA, but seen it in other organizations and how have you been able to navigate that change in staffing while still trying to maintain the trust and the relationships that you have built already?
Magnus : Well this is, this is really one of the key issues. I have very good relations with people in the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport here in Cambodia. And once I was traveling with one of the Secretaries of State, who is mainly responsible for the cooperation with foreign development partners coming in, and he told me that one of the big challenges, maybe the biggest challenges in working with these foreigners is that you have people coming in from Stockholm or Washington or Brussels, they come from headquarters of these organizations. They represent a lot of money. They have been studying Cambodia at a distance, they may have been working in headquarters, they may have been working in other countries. And then he said, so they come to me, and they say, so this is the problem of education in Cambodia and this is a solution and we have the money. And then three years later, they come back to me and they say, you know what, I didn’t understand what the problem really was. So I didn’t have really the solution to the problem. And then, a new one comes in. So this is really a big challenge. This is a big challenge for our partners in these countries. This is a big, big challenge for all these positive ministries. It is less of a problem working with other foreign organizations that are a partner here too. You really see that. People come on a 3,4,5 year contract and then they leave. It takes you at least one year to understand the context. It takes you another year to actually get into (understand) what can we work in. And then in the third year you actually can start to really work on it but then you leave and go somewhere else. So this is really a big, big challenge. And as you rightly said, the institutional memory is not in the reports. We had a huge clean up day here at the embassy yesterday and we were selecting out and throwing out a lot of reports that we have had for 5 years, 10 years, and nobody has been reading them. And I was in a discussion with another one of our partners that we have been supporting for a very long time, we financed a midterm review with them 5 years back. And now we were talking about Okay, let’s revisit this midterm review and see what actually has happened because nobody has been reading it since it came out and we have meetings and seminars around it and so on and so forth. So a lot of that work, the reporting work, is not really benefiting the institutional memory. But on the other hand, all these organizations like SIDA, like DIFID, like the EU delegation, they are based on that model that you have experts that are coming and they are not supposed to and couldn’t stay on forever in a country. And then you need to have the local staff to carry on the institutional memory. And in the organizations I work with here, like UNICEF, you really have very, very good local staff that really are the institutional memory. And for the development partners working with the Ministry, the institutional memory really lies with the Ministry and specifically less with the foreigners coming in. We have more of the kind of theoretical view that we try to put into the local context but we are really depending on our local staff and our local partners.
Safa : Speaking of national staff or local partners and the great work that they do, in some organizations, there is really a notable difference between the way international colleagues are treated versus national colleagues, both maybe at an organizational level or individual level, depending on the organizational context, but what have been your experiences with maybe trying to overcome this or addressing this, not necessarily as SIDA, but just as a sector or generally, have you seen any improvements in terms of this difference in the way that national staff versus international staff are treated?
Magnus : Basically, no, I have not seen an improvement. Personally, I think this is a very problematic thing for me personally, because as I say, we are really depending on our local staff and local partners, and only looking at the salary scales, they are completely different. You have all other things like the possibility of moving up in the organization. For example if you’re working in an embassy like we are here, if you are a local staff, there are very, very few steps up to the ceiling. Whereas if you are working as a foreigner in these kind of organizations, well you move somewhere else and you move on in the system. We have a few examples of local staff that have been able to move from being employed as local staff. And in that sense, you are always looked upon as something of an assistant to the foreign experts. But some have been able to move up and now are actually employed as international staff. That’s really great that they are here. They have institutional memory, they have a memory of working on these different projects with different partners, different ministries for a very long time. So they have actually, to a large extent, been my sources of knowledge and my teachers in how to work in Cambodia and what works in Cambodia and the challenges of working in Cambodia. But I can not see any solution in general. I don’t know if there is a solution because the international development cooperation is really built on this. It is built on a thin layer of foreigners that are moving between countries, moving between their home countries and different partner countries or in the case of multi-laterals who are moving just between countries like Tanzania and Cambodia. And then you have the big part of the organization which is local staff. And this is the way this is created, so there is really a very big gap. And to be honest, I don’t know how we could solve this issue but we should.
Safa : Yes, but speaking of one of the aspects of the work environment or work culture, one of the aspects is good leadership. And you yourself have been in positions of leadership for many years now. And also earlier, we were touching on the importance of having committed leadership in terms of the government partners. But when you think about the sector and development work, what do you think are some of the characteristics that make a good leader and that really help to drive projects forward or to lead change in terms of development work?
Magnus : One of the things I’ve learned a lot from was two reports that McKinsey made about 10 years ago. One was about, they were looking at 10 education systems that always come out on top in international comparisons, and the other was 20 different systems that had been moving (progressing) very fast. And there were some things they found that were very fundamental that worked throughout all of these systems. One is actually that it’s difficult to become a teacher, and many people wanted to be come a teacher. That was independent of actually the salary scale. And the other was leadership and the leadership in schools and in the system, and there were two main points in it. One was actually staying there for a long time. If you coming in with a reform agenda and you stay there for one term, like three or four years, and then you leave, not much happens in reality. So for all of these systems, you had lead ministers, reform ministers that were staying there for at least 10 years. That’s one of the things — staying there for a long time and then being consistent in that these things have to change and we have to change them, not getting new things in all the time and all that. So the time perspective is important and being consistent. And the other thing is communication. Leadership is really dependent on communication because if you don’t get the people with you, if you are a school leader, and you don’t get the teachers on board with you, well, nothing really will happen. And the same thing goes for systems like the education system, if the Minister is coming in with the reform agenda but is not able to communicate the vision and the reform agenda and get the people with him, then not much will happen. You will always have resistance to reforms but without actually really addressing the issue of communication, you are not really addressing the resistance and you’re not really changing it, you’re not getting those people on board, because in the end you have to have the people on board that are going to implement it. So it is really extremely important. Leadership is not only having good ideas, it’s very, very much an issue of communication. How do you get people to actually understand what you want? How do you get them to understand that they will benefit from these changes, and it’s not a threat to them? So communication really is a core (of leadership).
Safa : Moving back to more the education sector work part of the conversation, one part of the activities that you’ve been involved with in Cambodia in terms of the education sector, is private-public partnerships in the education space. Could you speak to us a bit about that work and also maybe some of the ethical considerations when it comes to working with the private sector?
Magnus : Okay, so basically, I’m very critical of private schools. I think general education is a public good. And general education is the responsibility of governments of any given country. And part of that responsibility is to provide good education to everybody. And private schools are in most cases, contrary to that, because you are providing education, in some cases very good education to the people that are able to pay themselves. So, in general education, in the countries I’ve been working in, I don’t see really a place for private activity or public — private activity. Whereas, what I’ve been working on, when it comes to skills training, in the post general / post basic education, when you actually are starting to train young people for work, for the life of work, for the world of work, then you need to cooperate with the employers. If you are setting up a system of skills development that is only done with government money and government structure and then you are aiming that these young people, in three years time, they will start to work in something — that is not in line with what they’re studying. This was one of the things that SIDA and others did a lot of work on in the 70s. We put a lot of money to build schools, for example in Tanzania, for technical training, vocational training. But when the students came out from them, they were well educated, but there were no jobs. But what we have been supporting here is actually looking at the emerging sectors like the IT business, which really has been growing here and it’s a business that grows very fast. If you’re producing computers or anything around applications, you need to move very fast, and you need to have new equipment and all these things. And you only can provide that in the sector that is operating. The government will never be able to actually follow in the fast pace that you need in order to do that. And what we have been supporting specifically is within the tourism sector where you have on one hand, here you have NGOs doing really good work with very poor people, with the most vulnerable people, giving them a kind of basic training in the hospitality sector, but if you are looking at moving up in the value chain, you need to really cooperate with the businesses. You need to work with the restaurants and so on. Because they are the ones that are able to, first of all, to tell you what kind of knowledge these young employees need to have when they come out to training. And on the other hand, they can provide the on the spot training, on the work training. So that’s why our support has been within the private skills training sector where you need this very, very close cooperation. But in general education, no, that’s not what we have been working on, because you do have a lot of ethical issues around that. Who can pay for that? And you can see it in many, many countries, even here, that happens. You are really leaving out the most vulnerable part of the population. And that’s the core of what SIDA is working on, supporting the vulnerable and poor people to be able to make their own lives better. So there are lots of issues around private schools and private sector involvement in general education. But we have taken the stand that no, we are not supporting that.
Safa : I see. Speaking of the most vulnerable people and the idea of leaving no one behind and always making sure that programs also address the needs of the most vulnerable, not only in the education system, but more broadly speaking, what have you found over the years has really worked in terms of maybe supporting that sector of society or to improve the lives of the most vulnerable, the most disadvantaged, what have you found to be ways in which that has been achieved successfully?
Magnus : Knowledge in one of these key things. Not schooling. Knowledge and schooling are not the same thing. In many countries — and Southeast Asia is a good case in that sense, in Cambodia and Laos — for example, malnutrition is a very, very big thing and it affects young people and children and newborns, because it is something that you carry with you from the first thousand days and the first five years, and so on and so forth. It has a very huge impact on your possibilities to have a good life, your mental abilities, all these things, and the malnutrition here is not because you lack money. It’s very much based on lack of knowledge of nutrition. And that is something that has been improving, UNICEF and others have been working very hard to try to provide this information about what you should give your kids to eat and that is also back to the challenges of changing behaviour because it’s very easy to tell people what they should do. But actually changing their mindset is much more difficult. And that’s back to — so you can tell them kind of on the surface what they should be doing, but if they don’t understand what nutrition is, and that’s very much back to the issue of biology and all these things, you need kind of a basic understanding that includes a bit of chemistry and physics and all these things you have to provide that through school. That’s the easiest way to that, to provide that knowledge. So knowledge is really a basic, basic thing. You have also seen schooling and knowledge playing a big role in the aspect of gender because women in particular, young girls and girls in particular, have been in many societies, really the biggest part of the vulnerable group. In most societies, majority of the population, they have been seen as second class citizens and all these things. But getting more and more girls into school, you see that girls are getting confidence that they didn’t have before as individuals and groups. You see that here in Cambodia very clearly, how young girls are taking up much more space, they are entrepreneurs, they are moving up in the government system, with huge resistance, but they’re still moving up. They are moving into the universities, they are getting better grades and so on. So actually, that self esteem that comes from knowledge and having knowledge and having gone through the formal education system, which is also important in that sense, that has been a big way forward, it has been very positive. And then the thing is actually, not giving people fish but teaching them how to fish. That’s easy to say, but in many cases difficult to do. So the other part of it is actually assisting people to become entrepreneurs, and assisting, for example, poor farmers to become better farmers. And there is a delicate balance in that because we can see it in micro loans, micro finance loans that are in many cases, a great thing and have been helping a lot of people but it can also be a big trap, that you’re actually getting into great debt. That means that you are not getting a better life but quite the opposite. So it is easy to say but not that easy to actually do. For example, supporting cooperatives for farmers has been a way forward in many cases. But actually these are the two things — the self esteem, knowledge and assisting people to slowly slowly become better in economic terms. Because they are better at creating, better at producing things, better at selling things, and all these aspects.
Safa : Speaking about the economic system and micro loans, from the perspective of a donor agency, when you think about the financial system that exists within the international development sector, and the way in which funding is given, the structure, when you think about it from your perspective, as a donor, what do you think can be improved? Or what do you think should be done to maybe make it either more effective or more accessible? I know that organizations and individuals, they have their own struggles with it, but I’m sure from the donor agency side, there’s maybe a different unique perspective.
Magnus : So you have a big need for loans, for example like a government needs a loan, and then you have the big banks and that’s one discussion. You might need to have loans for upcoming industries, for example. ICT businesses as one example of it. And you need to have an accessible structure for poor people. And this last one is the trickiest one actually, to create a system where you actually are giving people money, or you are loaning people money, because giving them money is not always the best thing to do. Because you need to actually have the responsibility that you will get the money and you invest it wisely. And one of the big challenges for the micro-finance system has been, in many cases, like in Bangladesh, and like here, Cambodia is actually an extreme example of it, it’s been extremely easy to get these loans. And that has been partly or to a large extent, because it’s been rather easy to set up micro-finance institutions, and because it’s been easy to set them up and easy to get these loans, then it’s easy to get a new loan to repay the old loan. So in many cases, what we’ve seen in studies here, the poor people can have three, four different levels of loans from different micro-finance institutions. And that makes it really a trap for them because they cannot get out of it because they are getting a new loan to pay the old loan. This is really a tricky, tricky, tricky thing to do, because you need to do it very much within the legal framework of how this looks in a particular country, what legal framework there is, what kind of inspection system there is. In a country like Cambodia, part of that is actually back to the issue of corruption. Because of course, if you have a lot of money and you want to keep the money, you are able and willing to pay the officers that should be inspecting you and seeing that the rules are followed. So that is an area that is really, really very difficult to be active in (as SIDA).
Safa : Mm hmm. I see, there are not really easy solutions of course to any of these questions. But I also want to switch gears a bit and ask you about your commitment and your interest in the arts and culture sector and how that relates to development and social and economic development and activities. Could you tell us about your thoughts on the role of the arts in society and in development and growth in different ways, maybe some best practices in terms of using the arts, maybe to promote human rights or to promote democratic discussions or for raising awareness for all these different types of possible activities?
Magnus : Well, art and culture, that’s a big part of life, a big part of any society really. There are so many aspects of it. But one of the things that is related to your question actually is what is called the public space. And in many countries, public space is very narrow. The possibility to actually discuss things, discuss specifically difficult things and challenging things, is in many cases very, very narrow. And if you have a strong NGO sector and human rights activities, which is absolutely really needed, then that can be very often seen by the government as threatening them because it’s seen as politically threatening. And then one way of getting around that is actually working through expressions that are not seen, in that sense, as politically threatening. We have seen it in Europe and Canada and the US, where you can use literature, you can use song, like the protest songs in the 60s in the Vietnam War as an example. How you can bring forward ideas and discussions that sometimes have to be more or less hidden or subtle but are still there or sometimes they can be very frank. But that is a very important part of this, how to use cultural expressions within the public space towards public discussion. And I can see it here that that is a growing aspect of culture. But culture is not only that. Culture is much more than that. Culture is very much about self esteem. Culture is something to feel good. Music makes you feel good but music can also have a social aspect to it. One part doesn’t say that the other part is not important. But if you are only supporting arts and culture because you think it is politically important, then it becomes propaganda. So you really need to have this balance in it. Art and culture has to have a life of its own because it’s important for people, for society, but at the same time, they can be used and are used in the public dialogue, public discussion. So my engagement in culture here is actually based foremost on actually — I see the importance of art as art and I see the importance of music as music. But I also see the importance of these expressions to discuss, for example the role of women. That is something that’s popping up very often in Cambodia. How can women dress? How can women behave on stage? How can you describe women in movies? That is an important part of the discussion. Movies are not around gender, basically, but being a cultural expression, they bring these things forward. And then it is important to be proud of yourself, to be proud of your society and culture plays a huge role to be able to say ‘I’m proud’ because the music in Cambodia is great, ‘I’m proud’ because the art in Cambodia is great. That is another part of this and it is related to what we started to talk about, the idea from the very beginning within development cooperation, the idea that some countries are ‘developed’ and other countries are ‘not developed’. So very often in the past and sometimes still now, there is the idea that cultures in a country like Cambodia are not ‘developed’, they have to become closer to the Western culture, which is completely not acceptable. So you need to have all these aspects in your mind when you’re talking about culture and art and development cooperation.
Safa : As you say, so many different aspects. When it comes to global north, global south partnerships in the arts and culture sector, are their activities and exchanges happening perhaps in Cambodia between Swedish artists and Cambodian artists?
Magnus : It is coming, and globally it has been that the artists coming from what was before called the ‘developing world’ are becoming bigger and bigger names on the international scene. You see it in the international biennials. Here, you are getting more and more new Cambodian artists getting invitations to these kind of big international dance festivals. Not because they are exotic Cambodians, but because they are great performers, they’re great artists. They are Cambodian, they are Cambodian dancers, but there is a combination of being a great artist and being great Cambodian artists. And you’re seeing that in many, many more aspects, you have artists, visual artists like Sokhorn Meas, that are also invited to take part in international biennials and are having exhibitions in London and New York. So this has been growing, this has been growing in Cambodia very fast during the last 10 years, specifically the last 5 years, I can see really a big change in this and that is back to the fact that new artists, upcoming artists, they feel confident, their self esteem is really growing because they see their compatriots, other artists gaining this kind of international recognition. It is really growing and it’s a very, very positive part of the development process in Cambodia.
Safa : We mentioned earlier that now in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of things are changing in different ways. Of course in the school system, we see either a shutdown of schools or homeschooling or online learning. Do you have some general thoughts when it comes to developing cooperation in this time of coronavirus now?
Magnus : Well, as you said, this is a global crisis but this is a local crisis as well. And that’s specific for all countries because of how their economies are. So here you have two industries that have been exploding, much of the GDP has been coming from the textile industry, garment sector and from the tourism sector. Tourism is simply dead. And you have thousands and thousands and thousands of people here that have been engaged in working in tourism at all levels. Working as tour guides, working in the restaurants — that is completely dead. And that will not come back within the next year, two years, three years. So you really have to rethink that. So what are these people going to do? What will their livelihood be? You have the garment sector here, it is really a big sector. There are only 16 million inhabitants in Cambodia and around 1 million have been directly working in the garment sector. So you can see that there are at least 3 million people are depending on that sector. Due to the, first of all, the difficulty of getting the raw material from China and India here, they are not producing. Then you have the next step, their buyers are not buying in the West. So a lot of these people, maybe 150–200,000 of them are out of work already, maybe 1 million will be out of work by the end of this year. So that’s another part of it. It is another sector that really needs to be rethought. Do we think that the tourism industry will come back as it was? Do we foresee that the garment sector will be coming back the same way that it was before? Okay, if we think this, then we can prepare for that. If we think it’s not, then we really have to think differently. So what are the industries that will be replacing them? What are the workplaces that will be replacing them and it’s not only in Cambodia, it’s globally. Globally, this is a catastrophe for huge sectors. And that means also that the development agencies have to rethink. We are doing a lot of work and a lot of thinking together with all the partners here in Cambodia and globally about social security, because that is the first step to be able to assist these people that are losing their income. Simply that they can buy food. The next step has to be okay, so instead of only seeing that they get cash in hand, how can we help them to create new industries, create new jobs, and we have not got there yet. But that is really the challenge for development cooperation. Business is not as useful and business will not be as usual for the coming years.
Safa : Right. As you say, business is not as usual and it won’t be for the coming years. I think that’s very well put. Magnus, thank you so much for everything you have shared. It’s been really, really wonderful to hear your thoughts and your reflections.
Magnus : Thank you very much for having me. As I said, working in development cooperation, working as a foreign expert is so rewarding. And the most rewarding thing is that you meet and get to know and get to be friends with people coming from very different cultures, very different backgrounds, that enrich you and enjoy being with you and that’s really one of the most beautiful parts of being engaged in this business. Then it’s also such a rewarding thing to see, as I’m seeing in Cambodia, that what we are supporting and that what I have been engaging in is actually making the world a bit better, a bit better. Thank you.
Safa : Thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure and we really appreciate your time and all your thoughts. There’s so much to think about and to reflect on. So thank you so much. Thank you also to our listeners. To keep up with our latest episodes, you can listen to us on your preferred podcast provider and follow us on social media where you can join in on the conversation. If you have any listener questions that you would like me to ask any future guests, please feel free to email them to us. I look forward to continuing similar conversations with you all next time. Until then, take care.
