The Dialogue on Development: Heart, Mind, Hand

If you manage to read all the way through my long (loong) review of Michela Wrong’s book, “It’s Our Turn To Eat”, somewhere near the end, you’ll find this statement tucked in:


“it’s not the heart that is in the wrong place, it is the hand that is responding in the wrong way. In this respect, aid idealists and aid sceptics ought really to dialogue as on the same side, wanting the same thing, giving benefit of doubt, assuming goodwill unless proven absent. But that is another article, for another day.”

I inserted it in there to compel myself come back to the subject because sometimes I mean to come back to a thing and then I get distracted and I don’t. So now I’m coming back to it. Sort of.

At the weekend, while thinking about how best to approach the subject, I thought back to that opinion piece by Paul Kagame published in the Financial Times week before last in which he argues that Africa has to find its own way to prosperity. If you still haven’t read it, you should read it. It’s encouraging to see an African president engage proactively in the aid debate.

What I want to zero in on for my purposes here is this statement he made early on:

“We who live in, and lead, the world’s poorest nations are convinced that the leaders of the rich world and multilateral institutions have a heart for the poor. But they also need to have a mind for the poor.”

While I read this, I had in mind what I had written earlier about the hand responding in the wrong way.

It occurred to me that we’re both agreed on the fact that the hearts of donors, aid and development agencies/workers are in the right place, for the most part. Or, if they’re lost, they’re not terribly so—it would not take a long haul flight, a train and a bus to get their heart to the right place. (Yes, I know everywhere there are bound to be exceptions, but I speak in the main.)

However, there was also an interesting difference in our diagnosis of where the problem might lie. I suggested that there was a lack of forward integration—that whereas the heart is in the right place, it is not moving the hand to do the right thing. Kagame for his part called donors and aid/development agencies on their lack of “a mind for the poor”.

This difference interested me and gave me pause. I was intrigued specifically by the phrasing:

A mind for the poor.

Naturally then, I googled it, interested to track its most recent usage.

Google led me to some interesting places: the NextBillion.net blog, on a review of the book “In the River They Swim” which features essays about poverty reduction, sustainable development and entrepreneurship by influential people around the world, including President Kagame of Rwanda; a commentary by Michael Miller, Director of Programs at the Acton Institute which made reference to the dichotomy between “good intentions” and “good solutions” published early last year that quotes an official of a Rwandan agency promoting investment in that country calling for more business investors and less philanthropist and; a FastCompany article on Rwanda.

Interesting: what all these sources have in common with the FT.com article, apart from the phrase “a mind for the poor” is Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda.

(Note to self, must buy, must read: In the River They Swim: Essays from around the world on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty. Does anybody else know of another genesis of this specific phrasing, another context where the term “a mind for the poor” is used widely? Do share.)

In the opinion piece published in the Financial Times, President Kagame makes a valid point about the place of mind that fills the lack in mine when I argue that it is the hand that gets it wrong.

In fact, the essence of the Make Poverty History Campaign is to compel the heart to move the hand in what Kagame describes as believing that we can solve the problem of poverty with sentimentality.

To be fair, to be deeply moved to do something, to do anything, to do what we can, when we encounter human suffering is natural, and in this respect Bono and Bob and Blair are not acting out of sync with their humanity.

What is harder is to develop the discipline to route the things that the heart feels compelled to do through the mind, to subject them to scrutiny for all the assumptions that they make about what it is fitting and right to do and how best to go about doing what needs to be done. 


It takes discipline to put a long enough pause on impulse in order to engage broadly and meaningfully with those to whom the hand will eventually be extended but in doing so you give yourself the opportunity to grapple with difficult questions such as: how do the poor see themselves and how is this different from or similar to the way we see them; why does poverty exist such as it does in that particular place and; how will the action that we are taking today serve to empower or emasculate in the short, medium and long term.

But. (Yes, there is a but): I’m betting my bottom dollar that all the thinking that leading development agencies have done on poverty and development and aid since their inception can fill multiple terrabytes of electronic space. Further, this thinking is done by some of the world’s best minds, whether motivated by the opportunity to do good and make a difference in the world, or lured by, among other perks, business class travel.

Yet we have not got it convincingly or steadily right.

Which is why that phrase that Kagame et al employ intrigues me:

A mind for the poor.

Definitely worth investigating further.