Phaenarette was a midwife. She was the mother of an observant boy who grew up to practice midwifery on his own terms. He observed that his mother’s practice was to bring children into the world. And emulated that in his own practice of bringing ideas into the world. Socrates discovered the maieutic method, rooted in the Greek word maieutikos (“of midwifery”). Socrates’ maieutic method is about probing to give birth to new ideas latent in his minds of others.
My partner, Jasper Yang, and I applied the art of midwifery to our university thesis. The process took nine months (three terms) of probing to give birth to new concepts of social change. The thesis received the ‘Best Thesis Award’ in the Development Studies course, 2018–2019. Although our advisor recommended publishing, the idea never materialized. Even so, I would like to take a deep dive into the writing process.
What was the thesis about?
We studied how the Philippine Rural Development Program went about human development.
In 1943, a nine-year-old boy experienced a famine that killed millions. Ten years later, he seldom heard about the famine while attending an elite college. But the aversion of the famine only reminded him more of its misery. The famine that had once torn a hole in his worldview was unfelt by most of his teachers, friends, and classmates.
More years later, he asked a question that would forever change the way we go about development. He realized that the food supply was normal during the famine; there was actually no shortage. Food prices were rising as people began to hoard, expecting inflation to rise as a result of the ongoing war. At the same time, the income for rural farmers remained the same. He realized that this system favored the rich and often left the poor to pick themselves up. His probing gave birth to the idea of human development theory. His name was Amartya Sen. During a 2004 interview, Sen summarized what piqued our interest in development theory:
“Human development, as an approach, is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it.”
Sen questioned conventional ways of helping others. He questioned enriching the poor with tangible resources — money, food, water — alone. He realized doing so only disconnected those who wanted to help and those who needed help. And he asked if there was another way to help. A way where people were not only at the end of change; people were at the heart of change. This new way of helping others is the people-centered approach: a way of helping others by tapping into empathy. In doing so, those who wanted to help were able to connect with those who needed help. In the same vein that Amartya Sen had questioned the status quo, Rao and Mansuri questioned the people-centered approach. In doing so, they found that:
“On balance, greater community involvement seems to modestly improve resource sustainability and infrastructure quality. But the evidence suggests that people who benefit tend to be the most literate, the least geographically isolated, and the most connected to wealthy and powerful people.”
We observed that most people who wanted to help others had the same idea. They want to give everyone a voice, especially those who have yet to speak up. This thought train led us to our thesis. Reflecting on this, we needed to ask:
“who the hell is making all that noise?” and
“who have we not yet heard from?”
The following sections will reveal our process, our answers, and our conclusion.
How we answered the questions
Dr. Ignatious “Iggy” Frome sat with Juliette, an 11-year old psychopath. Moments earlier, Juliette ‘lost her cool’ and choked her older brother purple. Dr. Iggy, a psychologist, judged her to be a psychopath. Children with psychopathic indicators are usually sent to “inpatient correction facilities.” Juliette’s flabbergasted father rephrases this in layman’s terms, “Jail?” he questions with much dismay. Looking for a compromisable alternative, Dr. Iggy proposed a solution. In an attempt to nip it in its bud, a confident Dr. Iggy laid out an eloquent proposition for Juliette. “I will set a task,” he said, “if you complete it, you win.” He then offered his personal phone for Juliette to play with for one hour as a reward. In exchange, the task was for Juliette to apologize whenever she did something wrong. Juliette accepted the challenge. Looking around, Juliette noticed an odd figurine at Dr. Iggy’s desk. “What’s that she asked?”
“Oh um, that’s something that one of my kids made me,” Dr. Iggy shared.
“it’s ugly,” she remarks with distaste, “Is your kid stupid?”
Realizing that she had done wrong yet again, Juliette retracted her words before the bewildered doctor could respond.
“I’m sorry,” she stammers, “I didn’t mean it.”
How powerful are incentives? For the first time in her life, a callous and unemotional Juliette made an apology. A little girl who was not programmed to feel sympathy had expressed, at least in words, sympathy. This was a fictional scene coming from the hit television series New Amsterdam. But the power of incentives is well acclaimed. We respond to incentives every day. It’s why we choose to love; Why we go to work; And why we don’t trod around neighborhoods and smacking people in the face.
We answered the questions with that logic in mind. We wanted to know the incentives of those planning the rural development program. Were they financial, social, moral, legal, or others? We also wanted to figure out where the incentives came from. Did it come from the people according to their claim of a people-centered approach? Did it come from someone or elsewhere?
The answers to those questions
So, who the hell was making all that noise? As we later realized, it was not a question of who; but rather, a question of what. Take two: “what was making all that noise” the answer would lead to the value chain analysis.
The value chain analysis is a way of figuring out how to help the rural poor. It worked by identifying the most productive commodity — vegetable, livestock, or fish — in the community. The commodity would then serve as the focus of a program. In Aurora (Baler, Philippines), coconuts were the most productive commodity. Thus, the program needed to help coconut production so they built a farm-to-market road. Farmers could now skip through rough roads and long detours and reach the market with ease.
To answer the second question, “who have we not yet heard from,” we went to the project site looking for an answer. We met with the local community leader, the Barangay head. He told us about issues with water supply, livelihood, and illegal deforestation. We also met with any local we could find situated on the project site. Likewise, the local residents shared these problems; often, reiterating them. We went into greater depth on these accounts on page 19 of the thesis. While it was true that the intervention consulted the community — making it people-centered by default — the community only participated in the details of the program. The actual intervention, the big decisions, was already made. The key takeaway here was that the people were not making all the noise and they were not yet heard from.
How asking these questions led to our conclusion
We met a wide array of people: A woman deemed ‘housewife’ who wanted to learn how to contribute more to her family; Two farmers struggling to buy seeds and fertilizers; A mother of two who struggles to find something as basic as clean drinking water; And a man living on the outskirts , in constant fear of his crops being at the end of an impending flash flood. According to him, the area was prone to flooding due to unmediated illegal logging.
We learned how the project was able to help the community bring about personal triumphs. One local explains, “the tricycle drivers complain and don’t want to take us [to our homes] because the road is muddy, so it’s important to us that the road is good.” Other triumphs were altruistic. Some locals mentioned how kids could travel easier due to concrete roads. Others mentioned how farther-flung households will have access to markets and incoming traffic. We concluded that the farm-to-market road was a huge step forward. Despite the triumphs, more midwifery is still needed. Did it enrich the life or the enrich economy in the rural community? What are the next steps? How do we assure that people will reap all the rewards? Are they helping the people in the most need?
What did we learn from all of this?
The effectiveness of the project was never in doubt. After all, building a farm-to-market road is already a common-place intervention. But “art is never finished, only abandoned,” says the great artist Leonardo Da Vinci. Thus, it would only do good if we continue finding ways to improve. To do so, we needed to learn about the incentives in play and if the project was as people-centered as it had claimed to be.
The organizations had moral obligations and social incentives to keep their promises. Choosing a farm-to-market road could be a financial incentive due to its cost-effectiveness.
With that in mind, let’s recall our sample earlier about the power of incentives. The scene between Dr. Iggy and Juliette was not actually a scene about the ‘good’ that incentives can bring. In fact, it was the opposite.
After apologizing for her rude comment, Juliette claimed her reward. Four more apologies and she could play with Dr. Iggy’s phone for an hour. The doctor’s excitement turned to horror in a matter of seconds as Juliette went on with her devious plan. She imitated Dr. Iggy, she called him “fat-face,” and called him out on his sweat stains. A fed-up Dr. Iggy demanded Juliette stop her game. “Okay, I’m not playing,” he says before receiving a faceful of spit (Juliette’s pièce de résistance).
Dr. Iggy made what was happening clear when he claimed that he was not playing. Indeed, most of us would love to separate some aspects of life from play. As reality stands, that is not always the case. What Juliette did was treat Dr. Iggy’s apology scheme as a Game. Some people will always try to game the system, looking for unimaginable ways to win.
Many different actors were trying to game the project. The contractors gamed the bidding processes by scheming for larger margins. The locals gamed the building phase by refusing to sell parts of their land. Those were some of the games that we were aware of at that time. We were short on probing the top-level decision-making. Thus, we can only speculate the games people higher up the food chain were playing.
We mentioned earlier that the program was people-centered by default. You could argue that it was not enough. We wondered if they chose to build farm-to-market roads relative to other interventions; if the people in the most need were being helped; if our far-flung friend with illegal loggers as neighbors would even use the road if his crops would get washed out by flood; or if the locals were privy to options — the source material for the road, the designated contractor or the source of labor — that could have made the project more efficient?
And so, I close
In the end, we had more questions than asked. This is why I enjoy research. There were several avenues we wished we could have explored. And even a hint of regret for not doing so. The most lesson is the importance of midwifery in the development or social sector. We can revitalize the world by following the path of changemakers before us. So, who the hell is making all that noise, and who have we not yet heard from?
