Community based Initiatives and CCTs

This week’s readings focus on how policy makers can drive innovative solutions to society’s problems without investing precious time and money into it themselves. They can offer individuals incentives for a futuristic approach via prizes, implement structures to promote non-profits to come up with replicable and sustainable solutions, allocate government funding and support to social innovation research etc. The readings cite successful examples that have not only achieved optimal results but have also been replicated by numerous countries, such as Brazil’s Bosla Familia, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, and America’s Teach for America. However, while all of that is necessary and commendable, the literature concentrates on individualistic approaches and ignores the effect of collective communal thinking for a common problem.

The Small Grants Programme (run by the United Nations Development Programme) and funded by the Global Environments Facility (GEF) is a platform that invites solutions from a community, with regard to community specific problems. Sabah, Malaysia faced an issue of sea turtle by-catch in commercial fisheries. On one hand, the incidental capture at sea by mechanized fisheries was the biggest threat to sea turtles (that are on IUCN’s Red List). On the other hand, livelihoods of fishermen needed to be taken into account. Through dialog and consensus, local fishermen determined an ‘average daily catch’ and started to use Turtle excluder devices (TEDs) that excluded turtles from fishing nets, but not at the exclusion of catches. Many parts of the world have seen turtle by-catch decrease by 97% in trawl fishing fleets since adopting

TED technology.

This is just one example of many. Community based initiatives can be great problem solvers as they alleviate the problem of information asymmetry, and by engagement, the people of the area are better disposed to adopt the new innovation, thus making the technology more impactful. Thus, it might be worth the policy maker’s time to also encourage communal thinking and engage them when developing solutions.

This is not to say that the incentivizing approaches mentioned in the articles are not worth pursuing. However, I am wary of the conditional cash transfers programs that have become famous in much of Latin America and are now spreading to Asia. Firstly, the amount of grants is not sufficient to meet the long-term needs of the poor- to measure ‘poverty’ quantitatively against a line that does not take into account the quality of their lives, and the fact that these grants are the only thing that sustains them from day to day, is not a fair measure of their condition. This brings us to my second critique: these grants are not sustainable. What happens when the money runs out? In case of funding shortfall or donor pull out due to political reasons, this program is doomed to fail. How long can the donors be expected to keep paying? If the goal is to take a certain percentage of people out of poverty through these CCTs, they will plunge back into poverty the minute these grants stop. Thirdly, these CCTs do not invest in human capital, in the form of skills and education, and do not spur entrepreneurship. Just doling out money is incentive enough for able people to stay home and feed off this welfare program. In doing so, the overall productivity of the economy decreases.

Thus, a time limit is important for all CCTs and the above questions make it imperative that a country envisions a broad Development Strategy that incorporates a CCT program, and not vice versa.