While there are successes, obviously in public perception things are not going right, or development is not working 100%. Do you feel there is fundamental change needed in the development sector? Yes, there is a change needed. Development cooperation is no different from investing in research or investing in economic development in Europe. There are always things going wrong and I think what the financial crisis has forced us to do is to reconsider our own assumptions and what we have been doing. Was it really the smartest way to attack the problem? Is there a more efficient way? Can we do it cheaper? Can we do it faster? This is what the crisis has taught me - that we should be more critical of our own processes and the way we work. The nature of development funding itself is changing, especially given the increasingly important role played by foundations – such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. What are your thoughts on this shift? What I like about the new money coming in is that they pose new questions and they force us to rethink our own practices. They approach the same problems from a different angle. You can be in favour of that or against it, but at least it is refreshing. It forces us to rethink our own assumptions, to focus. That expands the palette of approaches that we can implement and in that sense it is very good. Do you also see also a growing role for the private sector? It is interesting that for such a long period the development sector excluded the private sector from its thinking. The people whom we work for have always been forced to work with the private sector - albeit often on very unequal and unjust terms for them. I think what we need to do is to strengthen poor people’s position in the market and to help them to be recognised as resilient actors in that market. I was recently in Kenya and there you see milk farmers who have organised themselves, who have improved the quality of their product and increased their output. And you can see that immediately they have a better bargaining position with the private sector organisations they have been dealing with. Whereas in the past these private sector firms dictated the terms of engagement, now you see the farmers coming in and saying ‘this is not the way we want to operate - and if you won’t buy at our terms we will go to your competitor because he will buy our milk’. That’s interesting because it presents a new perspective: poor people who are now more powerful in that market. So, the power lies in the ability to change the terms of engagement with those private actors and I think that is what it is about – working with the private sector, but on equitable terms. Does SNV and the development sector in general have something to learn from the private sector in terms of being more business-minded? I think what you can learn from the private sector is that if the private sector does not produce sufficient quality they are out of business! I mean – if your product is substandard you are not going to survive in the market and that is what we should learn from them. If we produce substandard results we should be out of the market as well. You started as CEO at SNV last year, so what has your experience been so far? Can you give us some insight into how the organisation is transforming and also why those changes have been made? We went through a difficult period and there were clearly a number of problems facing the organisation that needed to be addressed – not least the political and economic climate in the Netherlands and the related decline in funding for development cooperation. > JULY 2012 CONNECT #1 11 Pagina 10
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