fun and other necessities

a puzzle

during training as agriculture volunteers, we’re presented with a paradox. the areas surrounding Antsirabe, one of Madagascar’s most productive vegetable and dairy regions, suffers from worse child-stunting due to malnutrition than most anywhere else in the country, worse than many areas that struggle to produce much food at all. visit the homes of many of these families, and you’ll also find an array of televisions, radio sets, smartphones, and motorbikes. stay long enough and you’ll likely find yourself invited to parties, soccer games, or a night out at the bar, where a substantial amount of money is spent on liquor and beer.

in fewer words, there appears to be both know-how, access, and money for growing and/or buying nutritious food, and yet the children (and often their parents) go undernourished.

similar situations play out across the world. In Poor Economics, the authors lay out case study after case study of poor farmers across the globe. their story is often told as one of insufficient food leading to fatigue, fatigue reducing their ability to work for money, insufficient money leading to less food, and so on. they are trapped, in common (and dated, as the book argues) development parlance.

the kicker of these stories is that the farmers are also found to have spent much time and effort saving money for a television set and radio, for example, or an expensive family wedding. again, the same puzzle appears where there seems to be both a strong savings ethic and adequate money for large discretionary expenditures, but somehow not enough for food. the authors ask one farmer they met personally about this, naturally, and his response is telling. “of course, but TV is more important than food!”

its usually at this point where the condescension comes out. these backward rural peoples are too simple to recognize the necessity of nutrition for a better life, they are soft or, worse yet, uncaring in their refusal to sacrifice simple pleasures for the long-term health of their families and children1, yada yada. biblical allusions begin to be heard, and it’s concluded that only through stronger efforts to reeducate the general populace can they be saved.

I am making some sweeping generalizations - our Peace Corps training staff in particular didn’t say most of those things, but they are common enough responses in my conversations with local Ministry of Agriculture workers, other extension volunteers, and even the farmers themselves here on the east coast, that I find them representative of a non-trivial percent of the people working to address poverty and malnutrition here.

even during our own training, we would survey our host families about their needs and priorities, ask them what they felt were the worst problems facing their communities, and often hear that the town needed more concerts, soccer games, and drinking halls, that there weren’t enough hobbies to go around and if, hypothetically, they came in to a large sum of money, they’d first make sure to buy a new iPhone. and we were explicitly told to disregard responses of this kind; they’re clearly immature, unserious, and it should be telling to the volunteer than the respondents are often the young and “inexperienced”. it seems to be the opinion of many here that the poor don’t know whats best for them.

but what if we were to take them at their word? paired with observations of people’s actual purchasing behavior, rather than the responses of interviewees well-versed in development work curriculum (read: “experienced” people), the unserious and immature answers are very informative. the paradox resolves cleanly if “fun” really is equally important to people, even in the face of struggles with nutrition - the issue rests in our assumption that fun is always a luxury relative to other “basic” needs. If a folk-understanding of Maslow’s pyramid2 has misled us, where then do we turn?

enter the capabilities approach. It’s defined as follows by Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The capability approach is a theoretical framework that entails two normative claims: first, the claim that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance and, second, that well-being should be understood in terms of people’s capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are the doings and beings that people can achieve if they so choose – their opportunity to do or be such things as being well-nourished, getting married, being educated, and traveling; functionings are capabilities that have been realized.

which capabilities and functionings are most (or at all) important are widely debated - one of the approaches leading philosopher’s, Nussbaum, came up with a list of ten and included both play and affiliation among life, bodily health, etc.; others have critiqued this and all other attempts to decide from afar what should matter to people, preferring instead to let communities define their own priorities in their own words.

to dance around that philosophical quagmire a bit, I’ll hedge a little: here in Madagascar, looking specifically at malnutrition in farming communities and based on my observations of the people I live and work with here, Nussbaum’s inclusions of play and affiliation as meaningful determinants of well-being seems correct, in the sense that it helps explain what we see happening in people’s lives.

a key part of the theory is that capabilities and functionings are not necessarily exchangeable - if you are lacking play in your life, increasing your bodily health cannot make up for this entirely. there is no exchange rate between Vitamin A levels and participation in family rituals that allows you to sacrifice one for the other entirely and come out as fulfilled as if you had both. practically for us, this suggests increased access to food, improved nutritional training, and so on will not meaningfully increase a farmer’s bodily health if they are lacking in other capacities or functionings; they will instead, if possible, divert those resources to improve their overall well-being by addressing other perceived shortfalls in their life.

which is once again well-aligned with repeated observations here and across the world of farmers selling their most nutritious food products, eating bare minimum diets to keep working, and sinking money into entertainment, social staus, and community events. it also matches with the “unserious” priority rankings we often see in survey responses. and importantly, these previously inexplicable actions are all perfectly rational from the proposed holistic well-being perspective - we can’t just sweep away the historical ineffectiveness of nutrition development programs, for example, by begging insanity on the part of the attendees.

so what

this capacities approach clarifies our understanding of how people make decisions in their pursuit of a good life, and it helps to square our theory of change with real world observations. it also complicates the shit out of what to do about problems like stubborn malnutrition. directly addressing them seems to require a view of all the other capacities and functionings that are held by a given community and their relative standings, and then the ability to identify which is the bottleneck for a given individual or group3. which was hard to do beforehand anyways, and even with a more accurate model of potential tradeoffs, this poses a real challenge to progress.

here in the Peace Corps, the agency’s model of integrating volunteers into communities for two years at a time is nicely suited for exactly that kind of work - our first three months at site are explicitly set aside for building relationships and searching out both the stated and revealed needs and preferences of our counterparts, and it’s from that understanding that we work to develop trainings, grants, clubs etc. in partnership with our town - but unfortunately that doesn’t make actually performing it any less complex.

with that said, I think a more accurate understanding of peoples motivations is important. it doesn’t change the realities of development work or policy writing or workshop design, but neither did our previous, simpler models. the capabilities approach allows us to understand why our previous (and possibly current) efforts have not been as effective as we would have liked, and this provides an opportunity to act and change that fact, whereas a flawed model that concludes we are right and people are dumb accomplishes nothing good for anyone.

in that line of thought, I think there are some actionable takeaways from all of this for our program here in Madagascar4: we should move away from theories-of-change that demonstrably conflict with reality here and elsewhere, such as our current simplification of Maslow’s work, and explicitly introduce the capabilities approach in our training and staff’s; greater emphasis should be placed on creating trainings and spaces or scenes that improve multiple capabilities at once-for example, integrating fun structures for clubs, competitions, and celebrations- rather than the usual bare-bones training curriculum; and finally, volunteers should recognize that there will be cases in which continued nutrition-based programming, for example, at a particular site at that particular time, is not effective at addressing malnutrition. and in those cases, we need to know to look for other bottlenecks to development rather than settle for a paradox.