Episode 7: In the Name of Development

Andrea Cornwall is currently Pro Director of Research and Enterprise and Professor of Global Development and Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She is a political anthropologist and her research focuses on power, inclusion and rights. Some of her work has focused on reproductive and sexual health in Zimbabwe and Nigeria, citizen participation and accountability in health policy and governance in the UK and Brazil, and contestations over gender, empowerment, and rights in international development. We speak about:

• applying an anthropological lens to the development sector

• fashions, fads and buzzwords in development work

• interrogating participatory methods

• analyzing power dynamics

• decolonizing international development studies

• social movements being the biggest catalysts for change

• the state as one site of change

• care, leisure and compassion as part of a wholistic approach to development - and much more!

She joins us from London, UK.

Transcript

Intro: And so just keeping on funding projects and funding programs and funding deliverables without taking the human dimension into consideration and thinking about how we are nurturing and supporting the people that are doing this work, what things can we fund that will allow those people to recuperate, that will allow them to laugh and to connect and to feel looked after? And what would it mean to think about development in that kind of much more rounded way?

Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development podcast. My name is Safa, and I'm your host. Thank you for joining me as we speak with and learn from practitioners, academics and activists of all career stages and organizational affiliations around the world. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behavior and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different guests. Today I am in conversation with Professor Andrea Cornwall. Professor Cornwall is currently Pro Director of Research and Enterprise and Professor of Global Development and Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She's a political anthropologist, and her research focuses on power, inclusion and rights and includes work on reproductive and sexual health in Zimbabwe and Nigeria, citizen participation and accountability in health policy and governance in the UK and Brazil, and on contestations over gender, empowerment, and rights in international development. Professor Cornwall, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Andrea: Thank you, it's really great to be asked and very nice to meet you.

Safa: Thank you so much. So just to start the conversation, could you tell us a bit about what drew you to anthropology and working in academia, and then later the eventual focus on the development sector and development issues?

Andrea: So it's an interesting question how I got into anthropology - because when I went to school, there was no such subject as anthropology. And most of what me and my classmates did at school was study chemistry, biology, English, history. And we were kind of set up by our school to want to have professions, to have jobs, which were really kind of you study for the job, and then you do the job. So people would want to be engineers, they wanted to be lawyers, they wanted to be doctors. So my thing was to be a doctor. My parents wanted me to be a doctor. There had never been a doctor in the family. And I really liked people. And I liked the idea of helping people. But I realized just as I was about to apply for medical school, that it wasn't really me. And I didn't like the idea of being responsible for people dying, I found that really difficult to handle. But I still wanted to be around people and work with people. So I went to do psychology. And that didn't really work out. It was experimental psychology. It was very scientific. And it felt as if it took me even further away from people. And so I changed to literature. And I loved that, I loved reading, I did German literature and German language. And it was beautiful, but I couldn't really work out what I was going to do with it. So I just stopped studying. And it was a time of a lot of social upheaval in Britain, Margaret Thatcher had been elected as the Prime Minister in 1979. And I was at university in the early 1980s. And there was a lot of protest, a lot of agitation. And I got involved in a lot of these movements, I got involved in the anti-nuclear movement, protesting against nuclear missiles. I got involved later on in the mid 1980s, in going to picket lines for the miners strike, which is a big struggle against the loss of the mines and of working class ways of life and life ways. And about that time, I just felt as if I'd got to a point with Britain that I couldn't bear living here anymore. I'd had a series of very badly paid jobs, I'd seen a lot of deprivation and a lot of poverty. And I just wanted to get out. And it sounds really naive, looking back, and I guess I was really naive. I got a job in a restaurant in London, I saved up money to buy myself a ticket to Zimbabwe, because I had a friend who had been to Zimbabwe, and it was somewhere which I had become aware of, because of Bob Marley's song about liberation of Zimbabwe and ideas about liberation, and what it meant to be in a country that had liberated itself, where there was the socialist revolution, and where there seemed to be an enormous amount of energy and excitement. And one of the movements I'd been involved in was the anti-apartheid movement. And I've gone to protests and been involved in boycotts and other things. So I had a sense of Zimbabwe, and about the oppression that people have experienced in Zimbabwe. And as a white person, I guess I wanted to go also just to see what that was about, what colonialism had done to somewhere. So I went to Zimbabwe, originally just to travel, just for a couple of months. And I fell completely in love with the place. And I met somebody who said, come and work in a school, there are schools being built everywhere, because people had been denied the right to education. And I thought, what a good thing to do, I'll go and work in a school and I'll go in and help and be part of this thing. So I went to a school and I started teaching in this school, and I really loved it. I loved the teaching. I loved the whole experience of being able to just be involved in that change that was happening in that country at the time. And also, I felt it was something which allowed me to do that stuff with people, to be around people, to speak to people, and to try and understand what had gone on with them, and then to make a contribution. So at that time, I thought being a teacher was something that I would want to do - I still hadn't heard of anthropology by that stage. I stayed and I stayed and stayed - my ticket ran out, and I carried on staying and then I carried on - I was paid a very small sum of money, and I carried on living on that money. And I then got a job in a different part of Zimbabwe, in the south of Zimbabwe, where it's very, very dry, where people had been forced off better land and put in these very dry, arid areas where it was difficult to eke a living, very poor area on a big, long, mud road that took you all the way down into an area by these hills - it took, you know, hours and hours to get to town from, right in the middle of what what people would refer to as the bush. And I went to go to work in a school there. And it was in the school that I guess I discovered what anthropology was. So I discovered it in a couple of ways. One was, I went there because I knew somebody who was doing a PhD in anthropology, who was living in the local village and working in the area. And he had persuaded me to come and teach in the school, the school had literally just been built, it was just breezeblocks. With a corrugated iron roof, there were no books, there were barely any tables, it was really just starting off. And so I taught from my memory, I taught from what I had learned myself at school. And then I got books from town when I went to the capitol and brought the books back. And then one day I applied to something called the Ranfurly Trust (Book Aid), which sends books out to countries. And so these books, this big package of books came. And in the package of books, there was work by anthropologists - an anthropologists call Gilbert Herdt, and who wrote a book called Guardians of the Flutes. And so I had this anthropologist friend who was doing this research, I had read this book by this anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, and I began to think: oh, anthropology, this is about studying people. It's about understanding people, and the ways in which people think. And I found in my school where I was teaching, that there were lots of girls who felt themselves to be very vulnerable to sexual harassment. And then every now and again, one of those girls would drop out, and she would be pregnant, and it would be very difficult for her to carry on with her schooling. So I tried to do some work with workshops and with classes to help the girls to understand a bit more about preventing pregnancy, and then opened up a whole story about how difficult it was to gain any access to any contraception, or any sex education and how difficult it was in that context, to be able to have an opportunity to say yes, or to say no, in relation to sex. And that took me to their mothers to find out what kind of sex education they were given at home, which took me to their aunts, who were the ones who gave sex education, and had stopped giving them sex education to young girls or to teenage girls, because of the experiences that they had had, very disruptive experiences during the war, and so on, and so on. So it led eventually, to a project that came about because the women told me that they'd been encouraged to take these pills, the contraceptive pill, but it was causing all of these side effects. And they didn't really know where the side effects were coming from. It turned out that nothing had been explained to them, they had just been given these pills, and told to take them, and it would help them to space their children. And so this great long story took me to interviewing the women and talking with them about the pill and about their own reproduction, about their own fertility, also about how to prevent pregnancy. And also to kind of get a sense of those side effects and how when women were experiencing their side effects, it was really important for them to both protect themselves from pregnancy, but also to be able to seek medical assistance, for example, if they had very high blood pressure. So this took me back in some ways to my original thing of wanting to be a doctor and wanting to work with people. But it also took me forwards in terms of anthropology, because I began to become aware that the ways in which the women understood their own bodies was very different to the way that I understood my body, or also the things I had been teaching in my science classes. And so an anthropological project was born, which was about trying to understand through women's own experiences of their bodies, what was going on with their bodies around pregnancy and fertility in order to enable them to protect themselves better. And that took me then back to university in the UK to study anthropology.

Safa: Wow, wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that journey and that trajectory. Could you also share a bit about how that project then kind of transitioned you into other work that was related to development issues or kind of the transition you made in terms of using that anthropological lens in the broader development sector?

Andrea: Yeah, it was something that was very striking to me as I did that work. I was I think the first white woman who'd lived in that area. And people had all kinds of ideas about white women. So white women are weak, they can't walk. That's why they have to be in cars. That's why people have to carry things for them. White women don't have period pains, white women don't experience difficulties when giving birth. And so the whole - all the narratives about white women which had come about because of people having either no contact with white women, or seeing white women being ferried around in cars, and having servants to carry things for them, affected me very deeply, as I came to understand more about Zimbabwe's history, and came to think more about my own whiteness, and my own privilege in that situation, and think about what I was teaching in the classroom, the kind of literature that I was teaching in the classes, the kind of biology that I was teaching in the classes, all of which were inflected with colonialism, and with epistemological violence that had been done to other ways of knowing. And so in that way, I think I came to the kind of - it wasn't called, you know, decolonizing in the way in which it's called now in terms of decolonizing knowledge, but it was more about participatory understandings where you would start not with what you know yourself, but to start with where other people's knowledge was, and to seek ways of understanding and ways of engaging with people that were not treating their knowledge as somehow inferior, or as somehow exotic, as something that needed to be gathered. Taking their knowledge on the same terms as you would take the knowledge that you've been brought up to think of as right. It was a very profound experience in terms of shaping my identity as somebody who then went on to work in development as well. Because as a white person, in a context were so much violence had been done to people in the name of development, where the state - the white state, had prevented people from planting trees in fields, or farming close to river edges, or let alone all the violence perpetrated on people's bodies, you know, in the name of development. Women being given depo provera injections to stop them being fertile without even knowing what the injection was for, and stuff like this. I think it was quite an important political moment for me - sort of education about the violence of development, and also about my own whiteness and my own complicity with it, insofar as I was trying to do something, and I'd gone into that context wanting to help. And I think there's something - there was a powerful lesson around white saviorism, and all of the kind of impulse to want to help to make things better, without seeing those things as deeply inflected with that politics. How I ended up in development is a curious question, as well, because having had that political perspective on it all, from that point, the idea that I could work for development agencies or have anything to do with development would have been very remote. But I came into development, having come back to the UK and having gone to study at SOAS, where I've come back now as a Pro Director many, many years later - I found that the anthropology that I thought I was going to study, which was finding out about people, helping to understand, helping to bridge different understandings. I found myself in a place with a very rarefied kind of anthropology, a very theoretical, very lofty anthropology, that wasn't really interested in everyday ordinary stuff, like the kind of things I was interested in about people's bodies, and about, you know, people's education and about everyday life. It was interested in very sort of esoteric things. And so I found that during that time of studying anthropology, I was constantly looking for things which were more about that kind of practice based, applied, how do you take a concept, how do you take some of these ideas and actually do something with them that brings about some kind of social change or some kind of recognition or some kind of way of addressing inequality? And that took me to participatory research. So the work I had been doing in Zimbabwe with women about reproductive knowledge, which had used a lot of pictures and drawings and women representing their reproductive biology, I guess, through these drawings, had evolved into a participatory method, which was like another series of other participatory methods, which began to be taught in the early 90s, late 80s, early 90s, to a growing international network of people who are trying to change the ways in which development agencies went about doing their work. So what they were trying to change and what I began to get involved in trying to change was an assumption that expert knowledge and Western knowledge was the only way to know or to understand things. And these participatory methods allowed people to find out about other knowledges and enabled people to enter into the worlds, the life worlds and the understandings of people that they were working with, to build a stronger relationship, but also to work on the relations of power between the people who think they know, who think they're the expert and the actual experts who are the experts of their own lives. So that took me - I met Robert Chambers, who is this extraordinary person who very much influenced me and drew me into a network of people who were doing really exciting work with participatory methods. And so on the one hand, I had academic anthropology, which was quite an isolating and quiet kind of rarefied area, and on the other hand, this very warm, excitable community of people who work together. And I found myself being drawn into that community and being drawn into that kind of work. And via that work, working for development agencies. So I then went on and did work with ActionAid, I worked with a number of other NGOs. And I also worked, supported by grants and by other forms of financial support, for agencies that were trying to do interesting interventions around inequalities, women's empowerment, social protection, and so on.

Safa: Very interesting. So you mentioned your reflections on participatory approaches, and citizen participation and the power dynamics that are at play in terms of implementing those approaches or using those approaches. And you've also written about how sometimes development agencies, development actors, they kind of use these buzzwords of the moment, but they do so in a way that's not very sincere, or it's used to kind of check a box that says, yes, we've used participatory approaches. And so today, in 2021, what are some of the ways in which you think participatory approaches are still used in ways that are still maybe limited, or have their own problems embedded in it?

Andrea: Yeah, there's several aspects of that aren't there. So on one hand, there lots of fashions in development. So something becomes a fad for a while. And everybody's into it. And there are all these acronyms, and there are consultants who do it, and there are packages, and there are toolkits, and whatever else. And then another fad comes along, and things, you know, a whole load of other things come with the fad. So I think part of what I was looking at, in that buzzwords work, together with others, Karen Brock and Deborah Eade and others. And lots of people who got involved in that buzzwords book, which was really fun to do, was that all of these fads have a history, but also all these fads and this kind of - the use of these quite empty signifying terms, is also something that we need to look at a little bit more closely to be able to understand what's actually going on. So why are nice warm, fuzzy words like community being banded around by development agencies? And if you look at the words, you know, empowerment, equality, it all sounds very good. But in practice, the kinds of practices that are associated with development projects are very short lived usually - they had three year project cycles. They were acts of intervention sometimes which were using really kind of identikit policies and frameworks for really different countries, where something that was being picked up in one place was being then imprinted in another. And then you start to ask questions about well how meaningful are these projects? Are they simply generating more work for certain kinds of people? Are they generating more opportunities for accountancy companies to come along and audit them? You know, a huge amount of aid money gets spent for accountancy companies and international consultancy firms where people may not have local expertise, but they just go from country to country, because the buzzwords and these kind of universal frames of reference, allow them to be able to get this work. So I guess that buzzwords work was part of a kind of understanding of both of the kind of the political economy of development. And also the lack of historicity, the lack of a sort of perspective in development where these flashes of fashion come - that they come repeatedly. So they'll come in waves, you'll have fashion for participation, and 20 years later, it comes around again, and then it comes around again. And that's also in itself quite interesting.

Safa : Mm hmm. Yes. You mentioned this kind of need for more historical approach. And on the podcast, we also often talk about kind of positioning the development sector within all these broader global sectors and thinking about neoliberal systems and coloniality, and how they all intersect and shape what also happens in the development sector. Could you maybe share with us a bit about how that type of maybe political economy analysis has helped you in your work or has helped you in your understanding when you've been doing these projects, in terms of the patterns or the issues that you see in the development sector?

Andrea: Yeah, that's a complex question to answer simply, and I think part of my training as an anthropologist is to stand back and to look at things and to observe things and to try and make sense of what's going on and to look at what's going on in terms of power and power relations - I have that kind of built into me almost as part of my - it's become a disposition as part of my training as an anthropologist. So that's what I was bringing, I think, to looking at development. So when I worked in participation, for all the enthusiasm I expressed earlier in this podcast about participatory approaches, enthusiasm which I carry on having to this day. So this afternoon, I sat with a group of interns, I'm setting up a collaboratory at SOAS where we can work on learning to collaborate and bring different kinds of people together in that collaboration. So I've got three interns at the moment. And we were talking about methods and I said, Oh, you know, there are all these participatory methods. Let's have a workshop and we can talk about how, you know - I can show you how some of them are used. And we can bring people together. So I think the participatory methods in themselves are wonderful. They're potentially really liberating. The question is, how they're used, who uses them and for what purpose. And I guess, in that anthropological sense, and looking at the political economy of aid and the way in which development organizations work, those two things came together to being really quite cynical as to what was going on, when people were claiming to be participatory, but actually participation was being used as a way of stipulating the outcomes that a development agency or you know, organization in question was seeking to bring about. So people would participate people in a conversation in order to get what they wanted, in the end, or claim that people had participated or claim that people had been consulted. And I saw some really, I think, quite shocking examples of that, where participatory exercises were held. And then the things that the agency wanted to hear ended up being the things that were reported - you know the so called Voices of the Poor was a good example of that.

Safa: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So in your work, you kind of have two hats, one as your own research, writing and scholarship, and the other as educator, as Professor. And when it comes to the process of designing courses and programs, you've written a bit about your approach to really intentionally designing programs in a way that promote critical thinking and critical interrogation of the mainstream or the dominant practices. Could you speak to us a bit about maybe the responsibility you might feel or your approach to teaching and shaping the ideas of this kind of new generation of students who are, you know, in some cases, some of them come with a kind of romanticized version of what they can do in terms of working in the sector? So could you speak about how you've tried to maybe challenge those ideas that some of them have?

Andrea : Yes, sure. And, and I was also one of those kinds of students myself, I think it's something which I think was quite important for me to realize, that I was reacting to myself in some ways in the way in which I was teaching. So I came to work at the University of Sussex in about 2011, then I was given the task of teaching, or I asked for the task, actually - it was part of my purpose in moving to Sussex was to say I want to get out of development, I don't want to work for a development research institute anymore, I want to be able to work more critically. And to be more outspoken about things that were quite difficult to be outspoken about, because I was being paid by development agencies to do the work I was doing. So freeing myself, putting myself into the university space, the first thing I wanted to do was to teach a first year, the big first year class in development: Introduction to Development, almost 200 students. And I saw this, I think, at that time as being an opportunity to dissuade as many of the white students as possible, who were just like me, with that naive going to Zimbabwe, because it was exciting, and because I could, I could just take myself off to Africa, and it would be a journey of adventure and then I could try and help people. And I guess part of my motivation was to say, let's look critically at what it means to do stuff like this. And let's think really critically about what it means as people who are from the global north. Why are we interested in working in countries in the global south? What is it? What is that impulse all about? And why aren't we turning that impulse to work in our own communities in the global north, where there's a lot of poverty and deprivation and racism and xenophobia. Bit of my story, which I didn't mention, but it's relevant to this was, when I finished my degree in anthropology, I went and my PhD in anthropology was based on fieldwork in southern Nigeria. And it was very typical anthropology. It wasn't very critical of anthropology - it did anthropology in a very kind of classic way. And I walked away from that, and went and worked on a housing estate in South London, as a facilitator, as a kind of community facilitator working on a health promotion project. And it was about as far as you could get from that rarefied world of anthropology. And so having gone into this very intense practice based stuff in my own country, I found myself back in development, as I said, because of Robert Chambers and participation, but I kept a bit of that consciousness with me. And I guess, in what I was trying to teach them to these first years, was to think about development as global. So the development is as much working in those communities in South London, as it was working in southern Nigeria or southern Zimbabwe. I tried to also work with thinking about who are we, and what is that desire to help? And where does that come from? And can that go bad? Can it be something that's a problem? I also wanted the students to think about the political economy of development in a much broader way than just being about development agencies or about the states. So looking at, for example, multinational companies and the work that they did, and their claims around development and not only corporate social responsibility, but some of the companies that were selling very small products through women vendors in remote areas, for example, in India, and very much boosting their profits while talking about empowerment of those women. So to bring that kind of critical perspective, and to read development with that critical lens to say, well, what's going on here? What's going on in terms of relations of power? What's going on in terms of the different kinds of actors? What kind of dilemmas are there in development? One of the sessions, for example, was saying, well, does ais do more harm than good? Should we just stop having aid, and some very powerful arguments made by people from the African continent that aid was actually more harmful than help. And it was better to stop it and to think instead about accountability of states, and about ways in which the market could do some of the work that development agencies or otherwise funding as part of colonial relationships of those countries. I mean, there are all kinds of problems of those arguments. But it was interesting, the students were very challenged by it. We had a session about representation, looking at the adverts that are on telly, the comic relief kind of adverts, which I'm glad that they've now pulled - so the images of the suffering African child, and the way in which that's used to generate money, the poverty porn as it as it come to be called. And we really interrogated a load of questions about, you know, what is it? Why are you interested in studying development? What is this about? And I did this, I taught in a way like a trainer. So I developed a way of teaching that was bringing workshops into this 200 student space. And so I absolutely loved it, it was really great. And the students did blogs, they didn't write essays, they took photographs, they did diagrams, we did a big giant timeline of development from zero A.D through to the present. So that development isn't only a post war industry, it's also something that we can think of as being about change and planned intervention over a very long period. And so it also gave us a chance as people from different generations to think about social change and how do you bring it about? And that was the bigger motif for it all. And I was just gonna say, you know, I started in this very cynical mode, which was, let me try and dissuade people as much as I can, from getting involved in this because of all this white saviorism. But after a couple of years, I realized that the people being attracted to those classes, were people who really wanted to change the world, they saw bad stuff around them, and they wanted to get involved in changing it. And the idea that I was trying to put them off doing that was something that was also unconscionable. It was more to help think about, how do we change things? And on what terms and how can we become most effective? I learned a lot as a human being going through that process myself.

Safa: Wonderful. Yeah, absolutely. So you know, related to that. In the podcast, we talked about sometimes how in the ecosystem of the sector, you have different stakeholders, you have the government, donors, civil society, grassroots organizations, private sector, academia. And you know, depending on the context, one or more can maybe be more dominant. But in thinking about the role of the different actors and the kind of the impact that each may have - and in thinking about how social change maybe, can happen best or can happen more effectively, or also in thinking about social movements and their relationship with development sector type work, could you maybe share a bit with us about your thoughts on the different stakeholders that exists and the the dynamics between them, especially when it comes to thinking about more long term systemic changes, rather than more short term band aid interventions?

Andrea: Thank you. It's quite a hard one to generalize about. So I'll give a couple of examples, if I may. I think the most significant force for change, and this is something I will generalize about is social movements. I think social movements have been responsible for some of the biggest changes that we've seen in struggles for equality. And actually, the very idea of a struggle for equality also implies a social movement. So you think of the feminist movement, you think of the movement for black lives. And you know, the non violence movement, there's all kinds of movements that have been tremendously influential in shaping how we think about change, but also bringing about some very real changes. So if we look at some of the most significant changes in the 20th century, they've been brought about by movements. So the first thing is to think about that - so the significance of movements, the kind of support that people would like to give for development is much better placed with funds that give support to movements. So, for example, women's funds that direct support to feminist and women's movements, rather than the kind of corporate development organizations that do projects. There are, of course, very good projects. And you know, I'm not saying that those organizations don't do good work. But the kind of real seismic change, the change where things really do start to be different are where movements are able to articulate a set of claims and demands, and then states are able to respond to them. So I guess for me, again, a site of change, a very important site for change is the state. The example I wanted to give, because I think it very much depends on the kind of state, depends on the kind of political parties that are able to have any kind of role in legislation and in shaping policy. So it's not just you know, all states or all governments, but particular conjunctures can bring about a great deal of change, when the state is able to act in the interests of equality and justice. And I always think of an example of a woman who I know Cristina Buarque, she's Brazilian, and she was, you know, a lifetime feminist, sitting outside the state, critical of the state, involved in the women's movement. And then she had an invitation to become part of the state to take up a role as the Secretary for Women's Policies for a state in the Northeast of Brazil. And she went into that role as the Secretary for Women's Policies, with resources to be able to really make a difference. And she set about implementing and designing policies and interventions and programs that would transform the lives of, you know, hundreds of thousands of women, I think, probably in that context. And that's not an exaggeration, large amount people. And so that was a feminist inside the state, using the state as a vehicle for change. And changing the state, as the state became engaged in that change process. So an example of one of the programs that she was supportive of, that she helped to make happen, was a kind of food for work program that gave food and support to people during a hungry period. And she revived that program, and gave not only money for food, so a stipend, an amount of money, but also training to women. And the women needed to go through a citizenship training before they chose a skill that they'd be trained in. Those women who applied for it were women in the sugarcane industry, who were very, very exploited, working really hard in the fields, and it gave them an avenue, an exit out of their lives in that kind of work into a different kind of work. The citizenship component was a very powerful transformative device that allowed those women an opportunity to think about themselves and think about their own lives and think about their own power. And think about gender and think about constraint and think about all of the things that had held them back from having equal rights, and the freedoms that they would like to - that they began to realize that they should also be entitled to. And one example of that, one woman, and her story really struck me as being a very powerful example for development - is this one woman, she went on this course, she went on the citizenship course, she lived in a very, very, very poor area. She had a job working in a hotel cleaning, she was very much exploited and abused by her employer. One day her brother went missing. And it turned out, he'd been killed. And so she didn't come back to work for a couple of days. And she came back to work and the guy at her work sacked her and said you didn't turn up, she said, well my brother's been killed, he went missing, and then we discovered his body. And he said, well, you didn't turn up to work, you've lost your job. And she then turned to him, and just started to tell him that she was going to take him to the tribunal, she knew her rights, she was able to cite all of her rights from the training she's had on citizenship. And he became quite frightened and said, no, I want to give you your job back. And she said, why would I want to work for you, you know, you treated me so appallingly. And now you've done this, and blah, blah. And what was so amazing about it, she came out of that, she said, look, you know, I do need the money, but I'm not going to be treated like this, I'm a human being, I'm a citizen. And she said, the thing that this course has taught me is that I can stand up for myself, I've got the right to have rights. And she said, and I also have the right to leisure, I've got the right to have a day off, I've got the right to go to the beach and to enjoy with my child. I don't have to be treated like this in the workplace. And that story stayed with me because, you know, this is an employment training program, that could have just been a very kind of routine thing. You know, you give people a course for two weeks, they go and train into job, none of that consciousness raising. But what this feminist bureaucrat had done is inject consciousness raising into something that was a state program that reached you know, 1,000s of people, and produced those kinds of effects. And the most powerful effect was this woman's recognition that she had a right not to be abused in her workplace, and that she had a right to leisure. Development doesn't speak about leisure or about pleasure as being development outcomes that are desirable. But if we think of development as being about the whole human being, and about developing human potential, and addressing inequalities that allow some people to have the privilege of leisure and pleasure and other people to be denied it, then, you know, that for me is is part of what social movements have brought, but also a different way of working can bring to development.

Safa : Wow, thank you for sharing that powerful story. Absolutely. And it relates to thinking about impact and measuring impact and our criteria for impact and all of those kinds of questions. Thinking about maybe what you think should be thought of in terms of the end goal of development programs or projects or processes. And also in thinking about the importance of really thinking about the process, not just the product, about how we do things, not just what we achieve at the end. At this stage, maybe now in 2021, what are some of your thoughts about the ways in which we understand our goals and how to get there and the process and the product and just impact in general.

Andrea : I mean, impact is having, making a difference, it's seeing change. For me the process of the stuff I've just been reflecting on - raising consciousness, enabling people to see themselves as actors and as subjects who've got a right to have rights, who can stand up and protest when they're not being able to be accorded those rights. The power of collective action, people coming together and as a body of people rising up and saying, we are not going to put up with being treated like this anymore. And these are the things that we want to now change. That, to me is impact. It has an impact. But is in itself an impact. In order to be able to do that. It's the impact of organizing. It's the impact of mobilizing, it's the impact of changes in consciousness that enable people to wake up and realize that they have got power, they are able to make a difference, that they shouldn't just put up with things. In terms of development, where that takes us in terms of development, I think, is to think well, if that's what impact is - if impact is being able to act as agents in claiming rights and bring about social change that deals differently with people being exploited or people being treated badly by systems and by structures and by people, so that we get a fairer world, we get a world in which people have more opportunity to flourish. Then very narrow, very sort of overburdening reporting and monitoring systems are not going to deliver us any of a sense of what makes change happen. And so something which I became interested in as part of the work that I did most recently in development, is thinking about the disjuncture between what gets measured and what counts in terms of measures and what actually matters. And how much gets missed if you don't try and understand the process by which change happens, rather than just measure the outcomes or outputs of change. So I did some work, for example, on process evaluation, participatory process evaluation, as a way of complementing, but also enriching and getting a better understanding of those processes of change, so you can really understand well, what happened at this stage and what happened as a result of that process. Rather than, you know, you put a bunch of money in, you then set things that you think are going to be the outputs, and you count the outputs. And then you regard that as if it's equivalent to the change that you've sought to try and bring about - when there might be all kinds of other reasons why that happened. And you don't really understand what worked and what didn't work.

Safa: Yeah, I mean, there's so much to reflect on in terms of everything you mentioned. Thinking about the past year, it's been such a challenging, heavy year in so many ways, in thinking about the COVID-19 context, the pandemic, and the impacts it has had globally. What do you see, or maybe some of the shifts that are happening and how it's impacted the sector over the last year?

Andrea: So COVID-19, I think, has really pushed us all to think much more carefully, and much more clearly about the centrality of care and compassion in all the things we do. And so that extends to the development sector as much as anything else. I was very struck just before Christmas, I did a series of interviews with activists in the south of the United States, and in Brazil, activists involved in black movements, and in work around feminist movements for change, building feminist political power. And for all of them, one of the things that came out was just how little external agencies who fund those kinds of activisms and the kind of activists are actually thinking about care and how they can fund care. And one of the most radical propositions that one of the groups made, which I absolutely love, is that it's better to be funded to do nothing, because nobody funds you to do nothing. And she didn't mean to be funded to do nothing all the time, it was to be funded to take a day a week, that was just a day for you, to be funded to not have to do projects that you had to write reports on, to be funded to just do the things that you were doing to bring about change, because you were bringing about change - to fund your leadership rather than to fund activities that you had to list and you had to make sure that you scheduled and showed the donor that you'd carried out afterwards. And I was very taken with that. So I was thinking actually COVID-19 has been such a frightening time, such a difficult time, such an uncertain time. And the toll that that takes on us all is huge - the toll it takes on people who are already very, very, you know, exhausted, often spent from all of the work that they're doing for others, brings us to the question of care in new ways. And so I guess something for me again, it takes me back to the comments that I made earlier about pleasure and about leisure. And I think, you know, development needs to take seriously pleasure, leisure connection and care. And so just keeping on funding projects and funding programs and funding deliverables without taking the human dimension into consideration and thinking about how are we nurturing and supporting the people that are doing this work? What things can we fund that will allow those people to recuperate, that will allow them to laugh and to connect, and to feel looked after? And what would it mean to think about development in that kind of much more rounded way? And that idea of that activist of actually being funded to have a day a week just for herself to do whatever she likes, and to have a wellness day or to have a day of just, you know, not idleness because she wouldn't have been idle. But something which didn't have to be explained or accounted for. And how revolutionary that would be, if agencies were able to move in that kind of direction.

Safa: Yeah, I think that's so beautifully said, and I'm pretty sure it will resonate with so many listeners. Just as a final question to wrap up, could you share a bit about how your motivations might have changed over the years, or what your priorities are right now in terms of where you want to invest your time and the types of projects that interest you or excite you right now, at this stage of your career?

Andrea: Yeah, I think I've gone from being very focused on the world out there, and working with people across the world, and working with ideas, to being focused on inside an institution and working to try and create a space in that institution that people can be cared for, and nurtured, but also be empowered and able to go out from the institution to make change happen. So I've moved from being a teacher, from being involved in kind of facilitating learning, to being a manager or being a bureaucrat, as I call it, a sort of accidental bureaucrat. I'm now in charge of research and enterprise in SOAS. And I see SOAS as a place that is very much aligned with my own desire to see change in the world, to see a fairer world. We have 1,000s of students who come and study with us, we have had incredible people studying with us who've gone on and done incredible things. And I guess so now I'm putting my energy into making my institution the best possible place for them to study and to be in - focusing particularly on research, because that's the area that I have responsibility for. But also in my own institution, I'm bringing some of the lessons I've learned about empowerment, about consciousness raising, about an intersectional approach to equalities into the very fabric of the ways in which we work with our staff and students. And so my project, I guess, has come home, into the university. And I'm learning a huge amount of how difficult it is to bring about change. I'm learning a lot about resistance, I'm learning a lot about the way in which those struggles can in themselves be very, very energizing and inspiring when you apply them to the very places that you work in. So I think I'm bringing a lot of that learning from all the different stuff I did out there in the world, now very much closer to home, without much of a change in the things I'm interested in. So I'm still interested in power, I'm still interested in inequality and discrimination in right. But it's from a different perspective.

Safa: Wonderful, and we wish you all the best with that. Thank you so much for speaking with us today. It's been really wonderful to listen to you and learn from you.

Andrea: Thank you, you have asked me really good questions. I've given you very long answers. But thank you.

Safa : Thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you also to our listeners for tuning in and supporting the podcast. I invite you to join in on the conversation by going to our website, hitting the send us a voice message button and sharing some of your thoughts with us. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on your preferred podcast player, rate and review past episodes, and share our conversations with your friends. You can also keep up to date with our latest episodes and offerings by signing up for our newsletter on our website and following us on social media. On our website, you can also find a donation link where you can choose either a one time donation or reoccurring monthly donation option to help us cover our production costs. Thank you again for tuning in. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all next time. Until then, take care.