The current system of international aid is outdated and ineffective. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the poorest countries were significantly off track to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, a set of global targets that countries established in 2015 for tackling poverty, reducing inequality, and protecting the environment by 2030. Trends have only worsened in the past year.

Finding the right solutions requires a systems perspective. Countless different factors come together to produce outcomes; these factors themselves constantly change and evolve, and they are all interconnected. Action taken in one part of a system will have knock-on effects elsewhere.

Human systems are made up of people, relationships, organizations, and institutions. Long-term change to such systems requires shifts in behavior and incentives. There are no easy solutions, and money alone is unlikely to be sufficient. Instead, processes of discovery are needed to figure out exactly what will work in a particular setting, country, or region.

Current international aid models struggle to operate in this way, for at least three reasons. First, international aid has become increasingly “projectized”—that is, it has focused on developing high-level strategies and plans, and enforcing compliance with those plans, rather than adopting a wider perspective on how to manage uncertainty in addressing complex problems. Efforts concentrate on meeting predetermined targets rather than assessing realistically whether aid is achieving the desired impact.

Second, aid has become too narrow in scope—its underlying assumptions too often center on providing more money, more technical inputs, and more technocratic solutions, when the major problems do not admit such easy fixes. The difficulties are typically knotty, involve politics and power, and require behavioral changes. For instance, while international aid has sought to tackle inequalities in terms of access to education or adequate health coverage, it has concentrated on narrow inputs, such as funding for new buildings, equipment, and supplies, rather than recognizing the need to strengthen the motivation and incentives of frontline staff, engage users themselves in reform processes, and understand how political influence can shape performance and outcomes. As a result, schools get built, but children do not show up and learn; health centers exist, but they do not reach the most vulnerable.

Third, international aid programs continue to adopt blueprints or templates taken from elsewhere that are not appropriate to the local context they are meant to address. Organizations import solutions—often from donor countries—rather than work with local groups to understand their problems and find contextually appropriate responses.

Instead, these organizations need to learn to do things differently. Aid delivery must become much more problem focused and politically smart. It must concentrate on getting to the underlying issues or problems preventing better outcomes—essentially by asking lots of why questions. In many countries, this needs to be accompanied by brokering or facilitating reform coalitions, in environments that are politically challenging, complex, and uncertain, and where partners may be less than perfect.

Read the full article about approaching development differently by Leni Wild at Stanford Social Innovation Review.