Kartik: I misused “quick win” – I meant in general short-term solutions vs long-term solution. When there are quick wins we should take them, but we should also make sure that A. those quick-wins are sustainable and B. that they aggregate up into long-term solutions.” We tend to associate “quick-wins” with proven, effective interventions, like de-worming. The issue is often with how we implement quick-wins: we should be improving government capacity to carry them out, when often what we do is immediately jump in and start doing them ourselves.

You’re absolutely right, often the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Education and general health are both linked to long-term development, but a sense of urgency (I perhaps should have said over-urgency, instead of urgency) often changes how we approach these problems. Most developing countries need functioning, effective education and health systems. These systems require long-term investment and *gulp* capacity building, but this often clashes with our slapdash methods of addressing problems. There’s evidence that the surge of money flowing into HIV/AIDS research, an urgent area, has weakened health provision in other areas. The urgent move to endorse universal primary education has led to, in many countries, a collapse in the quality of that provision. When we rush into things we’re more likely to get it wrong, and the more we express how urgent things are, the more likely we’re going to rush into them.

“Urgency” is also often used as an excuse to crowd out other opinions on interventions. Resistance to the methods suggested by Jeffrey Sachs, for example, are often met with the assertion that “we don’t have time for discussion, people are dying now!”

Justin –
No, I don’t think we should take our time addressing these issues, but we should embrace long-term, carefully thought-out methods of tackling them. Take starvation – the most “urgent” response often takes precedent – the WPF has grown in size relative to the FAO tremendously, but food relief does very little to address the long-term, structural problems with protecting large populations of people from hunger.

I do believe all these things are “urgent” relative to the other problems of the world – if I didn’t I would have picked another line of work. In the end, when I say “be less urgent”, what I really mean is “stop discounting the future so much.” I would rather we have had put a permanent dent in poverty by 2050 than constantly putting small, temporary dents in it with short-term targets and goals.

And yes, you’re very right – a lot of failed aid has to do with our own aid institutions being pretty awful from the start

Matt, as an aside, did I ever mention that when working for a particular Government department, I had a meeting with officials from Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Finance. It was pretty depressing; they asked at one point ‘what can we do to get more aid in Zimbabwe, we lack resources to do anything’. It took all I had to stop from embarrassing my colleagues by saying ‘you mean, apart from the obvious?’…

Really? So we can just take our time ending starvation, stopping irreversible environmental degradation, putting an end to evil and corrupt governments and wars, etc. ? Thats a relief. I think I’ll just go have another beer then.

Seriously, I don’t think our sense of urgency is the issue. The problems we are dealing with are unquestionably urgent.
Rather the issue seems to be that aid agencies can’t think of (or perhaps aren’t allowed?) to do anything better with their left over money than dump it into unnecessary workshops or new shiny white land rovers.

Its the system that is screwed up, not our sense of urgency about the problems.

Also, longer-term policies and quick wins are not mutually exclusive, and in fact may at times be complementary.