Dear development leaders in Davos: Learn to be plumbers

DAVOS, Switzerland — Standing in the main hallway of the Congress Center on the last day of World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last month, I stopped development leaders as they passed and asked a simple question: “What’s your main takeaway for the global development community?” The big agency chiefs, senior NGO executives, and social entrepreneurs paused in their tracks, pursed their lips, and looked to the ceiling. They were suffering from a common affliction here: Information overload. The savvier ones turned the question back on me, and I stammered something about needing more time to process the many futuristic innovations and geopolitical trends highlighted during the week. Now, some days after that intense period of hypernetworking and big thinking, I’ve come to a conclusion about what this year’s Davos gathering meant for our community: Development leaders need to be plumbers. With a dozen years to go before the finish line of the Sustainable Development Goals, we need to get the underlying plumbing right in order to have a chance to reach those goals. That plumbing includes everything from having the country-level data to track progress against the goals to having the project-level data to know what’s working and what’s not. It’s also about having the financing tools in place to mobilize trillions of dollars in investments at the macro level and the financial inclusion systems in order to reach specific individuals most in need at the micro level. Most importantly, it’s about the development leaders of today building out the best systems so the development leaders of tomorrow can focus on delivery. Here are four key questions to ask yourself to see if you’re ready to be a development plumber this year. 1. Do you know your data? At a session on gender data on the sidelines of the annual meeting, I learned about a fascinating report from the group Equal Measures 2030. In it, 109 policymakers from five key countries — Colombia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Senegal — were quizzed about basic facts related to women and girls in their countries. The results were astounding. Only 6 percent of the policymakers interviewed could come within 20 percent of the actual number when asked to estimate the rate of maternal death in their own country. And on the topic of early marriage for girls, they were not much better: Just a quarter came within 20 percent of the accurate figure. Those results made me wonder: Would development leaders do any better? If we hope to achieve the SDGs, leaders of implementing organizations, funders, and beyond must be operating from a base set of facts and knowledge. Every leadership team at every major development organization ought to have at their fingertips the key data points that underlie their theory of change across every key issue they work on. And that exercise can help highlight what we don’t know, and force us to prioritize getting that critical data. 2. Do you manage from a dashboard? Global development is moving from wholesale to retail. The business model is undergoing a major transformation from implementing organizations that serve a few major funders, to everyone focusing on results at the level of the individual: Literacy rates, health outcomes, and the like. That shift in thinking will still take years but development leaders can’t embrace it if they aren’t able to see inside their operations like retail business executives can. At a World Economic Forum breakfast session organized by Pact, leaders discussed the difference between implementing organizations that see technology as a line item in their budget and those that are changing their DNA to become “digital first.” It’s a critical qualitative distinction, and it can’t happen without the right systems in place. That means global development leaders ought to be able to see real time results — not just financial metrics — across all of their projects and initiatives everywhere in the world. Building those systems — both the data collection and the measurement tools — is not a small effort and development leaders who don’t prioritize and invest in that plumbing may find their organizations woefully out-of-date as this business model transformation gains steam. 3. Are you making development deals? In this new era of innovative financing, either you’re a dealmaker or your watching from the sidelines. I spoke with the United States Agency for International Development Administrator Mark Green at a breakfast session on the Utkrisht bond, a development impact bond targeting maternal and newborn mortality in Rajasthan, India, launched by Merck for Mothers, UBS Optimus Foundation, Palladium, Population Services International, and HLFPPT, along with USAID. He emphasized that while contracts and grants will remain important vehicles for USAID going forward, more emphasis will need to be placed on other instruments such as the pay-for-results bond being presented. Innovative financing instruments like that are just vehicles: Implementers are still a critical piece of the puzzle. But unlike contracts and grants, to be a party to a deal like this one requires operating in a precompetitive space, bringing opportunities to the table to engage partners and key stakeholders. Development leaders who think like plumbers will want to ensure their organizations are equipped to play in this new environment where deals are co-designed and created outside of competitive procurement and grant processes. 4. Are you ready for the financial inclusion revolution? Some 1 1/2 billion people are not connected to the financial system today. They store their money in sari folds or under the mattress. But that’s changing quickly and we may very shortly enter an era where nearly every person on earth has a government issued identification, a smart device connected to the internet, and some kind of mobile money account. Are your projects and initiatives designed for this coming revolution where everyone is “on the grid?" Development leaders will soon be able to design programs with the knowledge that funds can be transferred directly to beneficiaries and front line workers such as community health workers. This ability to precisely target funding will upend traditional development approaches and unlock new ones. And the digital IDs, connectivity, and smart devices that go along with it will enable new business models. One example announced in Davos is a partnership between Last Mile Health and Living Goods to deploy 50,000 community health workers to provide digitally-enabled care to 34 million people. As one of the plumbers behind this deal, Living Goods’ Chuck Slaughter, put it to my colleague Catherine Cheney: “Where mobile is coming in, it’s shifting power from institutions to individuals.” After some precious time to reflect on it, here’s what I learned in Davos for development leaders: Now’s the time to take a hard look at the plumbing and roll up your sleeves.