The Trouble with Short-Term

I've long harbored a mild distrust of the expanding interest in social enterprise in the young business school community as exemplified by blogs like NextBillion. This distrust is probably magnified by a sense of my own hypocrisy since I'm more a part of that community than I would like to admit - young, (ostensibly) well-educated, living in the United States, and with limited experience in or relationship with the very communities that I would like to help.

A recent post in NextBillion confronts this dilemma - how can young, Western idealists make a difference for poor communities when the problems are so complex and the local context matters so much?

This is simple to ask, but difficult to answer. For example, it’s incredibly important that people in the wealthy world understand the living situations of their brothers and sisters at the base of the pyramid. The only way to help someone with technical skills to be an effective innovator for the poor – who has grown up in a place where electricity is reliable, bankruptcy laws protect people from multi-generation debt bondage, and it is uncommon for babies to die – is to provide them with experiential education in places where this is not the case.

But how possible is it to design learning environments in which college students are the guinea pigs and learn from the people they hope to help, rather than vice versa? How can testing a new device, the design process for which is intended to teach students how to be socially-responsive engineers, truly be a test for the students rather than a test on the community in which they are embedded? There are no base of the pyramid Hollywood sets to practice on.

It's the underlying limitation of my own short-term commitment that makes me cringe. I don't speak the language, I don't know the culture, my skills were built up in a different world, and by the time I learn enough to be useful, I'll probably be shipping back to the U.S. In the long-term, when my wife has finished medical training, we plan to make a commitment to being overseas, but until then, here I am - rooted in Boston. I talk to so many people who are in the same position, with a deep desire to engage on global issues, but planted on the wrong continent.

During my senior year in college, a friend told me that it was dangerous to try to help people who you aren't in relationship with, who are more part of a problem to be solved rather than people to be loved. I've struggled with that and have felt the strain of working on global health and development issues from a computer in Massachusetts. It's the driving reason I left a tremendous job and wonderful colleagues and am now working at Boston Public Schools. I wanted to be doing something that is more local.

Nathan at NextBillion believes "that there are enough problems in the world that there must be room enough for everyone to take part in solving them." Surely that's true - but I sometimes wonder if we oversell our role in the solution given our priorities. If I want to help small holder farmers in Western Kenya, but I'm unable or unwilling to go live in Western Kenya and get to know some farmers and see a) if they're interested in my help, and b) if I can actually BE of any help, then I'm probably better off just giving money to One Acre Fund.

I like where the blog post ends up - a call for Americans who want to help to connect with African entrepreneurs and innovators who are much more capable of making a difference and being committed for the long-haul. But I remain skeptical about what kind of a difference a spring break trip can make. With limited exceptions, short-term trips tend to be of more benefit for the traveler than the host. The ultimate prize is converting travelers into residents who can be like grafted branches onto the local flora - rooted in the communities they seek to serve.

*Picture: Kigali International Airport, with an Air Ethiopian plane