What transformation looks like

The story of one of the coolest things I've ever seen

Feeling depressed about the grim news rolling in week after week of savage cuts to global aid spending - not just in the US, but also Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands? Me too. So I wanted to share something joyful about international development.

This is a piece I wrote for the Guardian back in 2015, when I was living in Ethiopia — and it’s about one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life. As I’ve added at the end, I think there are some pretty fascinating lessons here for how we go about change-making in the global North too.

---

Over the years I’ve frequently been a source of amusement to my wife Emma, but rarely more so than when I came home from work at the Department for International Development (DFID) one day a decade ago and recounted to her a particularly mortifying interaction I’d had with the IT department.

My computer had gone on the fritz during a password update, and in order to resolve it I’d had to tell the tech support guys my old password over the phone — while a senior official was in the room. Imagine my joy as I had to spell out “f-u-c-k-i-n-c-r-e-m-e-n-t-a-l-i-s-m” while my visitor attempted and failed to stifle their mirth.

Although I use slightly more discreet passwords these days, I’ve still never really drunk the Kool-aid on change that happens one step at a time, at a grindingly slow pace, measurable in decades.

This can be a rather frustrating worldview when you work on global climate policy — but, now and again, a deeply satisfying one when you get out and see real development happening in real places at unreal speed.

And it turns out that it looks like this:

Each row belongs to a woman who’s a member of a self-help group in a village near Nazret in Ethiopia. Each column is one of their weekly meetings. And each of those number fives is five birr that each member saves, week in, week out — about 15 pence.

Not a lot, but you’d be surprised what happens next. Right away, the women can buy their food in bulk at a big discount. More importantly, they can each start borrowing money from the self-help group and diversifying their income. At first in tiny ways — by buying sand and concrete to make fuel-efficient cook stoves and then selling them on, or by financing setting themselves up as a baker rather than a day labourer.

By the time a group’s been around for a few years — like the group I saw the following day in Adama town — it’s all kicked off. Members of the self-help group are saving 10 times as much. They’re putting money aside into a social insurance fund in case one of them gets sick or has an accident.

And they’re taking out loans at a much bigger scale — to buy cows and sell the milk, or build a house extension and letting out the rooms, or buy a taxi, or (in one case) open a tiny pool hall. They talk in terms of capital adequacy, and rate of return, and business plans. They say their next step is to go into business together to set up a livestock operation. I believe them.

In every single case, these are people who were targeted in the initial outreach because they were the very poorest of the poor — the hardest to reach, the most vulnerable, the ones living on a single meal a day if that. Now they have smartphones, sofas, little houses. Some of their kids are in higher education.

But here’s the thing: they all say that the money’s not the point.

They’re evangelical about the saving, don’t get me wrong. But they all say that the thing that’s really changed their lives is the relationships with each other: “We’re family now.” The trust they have in their group. The shift in their relationships with their husbands as they’ve stopped being dependent and started being income earners.

Above all, the power — to make change happen, rather than have it as something that happens to them: “We used to be so timid.”

This is designed in. Each group draws up its own bylaws; although a facilitator is on hand to help, no one tells them how to run themselves. Everyone takes turns drawing up the agenda, chairing the meetings, summing up the discussion. Groups self-assess their members on confidence and articulacy. They hold themselves to account. They charge themselves penalties if they’re late.

As self-help groups mature, they self-organise into clusters, and then those clusters into federations. They set up and nurture more self-help groups. They set up kids’ clubs during the holidays. Then they set up kindergartens. Then they set up schools. They arrange skills training for their members. They start sorting out water and sanitation. They plant trees in their neighbourhood to spruce the place up.

So guess how much aid it costs to run each self-help group?

A pittance. And according to one cost-benefit analysis the rates of return are £173 for every £1 spent — an almost unbelievably high multiple, among the very highest available for any development project.

To a large extent, these groups are self-financing. True, it costs money to run networks of facilitators in areas where mature clusters aren’t in place yet — but these are met primarily by local church or community groups. When I first heard about self-help groups in Ethiopia I thought they were a form of social protection. Having visited them, I realise it’s the opposite. This has nothing to do with welfare.

I’m not a programme expert, nor a monitoring and evaluation nerd — but I’ve visited a fair few development projects over the years, especially when I was at DFID, and I’ve never seen anything like this. This isn’t a project, it’s a movement — there are now 25,000 self-help groups in Ethiopia, and they’re multiplying like yeast. And it is absolutely, categorically, totally transformative.

All this has happened in large part because of work that Tearfund, a Christian development NGO, has been doing with local churches over the past two decades. And when you talk to Tearfund’s country head, Keith Etherington, you get a strong sense that you’re still only seeing the opening act of this story.

This is some of the most impressive development work I’ve ever seen, and it’s being done on a shoestring — with more funding, much more can be done to roll this out across the country. If you’re planning on giving money to anything any time soon, I simply cannot imagine a better rate of return than this.

Ten years later

Reading back over this article a full decade later (seven of them at Larger Us), a few things stand out for me.

First, something I wrote about here on the Substack a few weeks ago: the sheer power of connection. The women were so emphatic that it’s their relationship with each other, more than the money, that’s the real point here. “We’re family now.” Amazing things happen when people come together in small groups.

Second, these women were doing mutual aid years before Covid mutual aid groups became a global phenomenon. In the process, they built a tonne of local resilience — look for instance at how the women in Adama built a social insurance fund. And this is a big deal at a point when communities all over the world are facing so many different kinds of risk — environmental, economic, social and political.

Third, it’s striking how this approach of mutuality turns power dynamics upside down. Self-help groups aren’t about one set of people helping another set of people, through donations, volunteering, or whatever. They’re about people helping each other — in the process, becoming less dependent on anyone else.

Fourth, it’s also interesting to note how different mutual aid groups are from professionalised charities. There was a piece in the Big Issue last month about how Covid mutual aid groups have fared since the pandemic, and it included this great observation from Esther Foreman who runs the Social Change Agency:

We see a lot of organisations that become charities and get full of hierarchy [and] then it sort of dissipates. What they started with was a lot of energy and mutualism, which is great, and then they get forced into becoming incorporated and they get obsessed with who’s going to be the chair and doing tax returns.

This reminds me of a story I’ve always loved about Alcoholics Anonymous. Early in AA’s life, in 1937, its co-founders Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith knew their approach was a game-changer — but they were only reaching a handful of people. They set out to raise enough money to scale up dramatically, and managed to arrange a lunch to pitch it to the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Foundation loved it — but they also declined to fund it beyond a few thousand dollars. What Rockefeller recognised was the risk that too much money would kill what made AA work, by turning it into a professional organisation rather than a network of mutuality. At the time, Bill and Dr Bob were bitterly disappointed. But in years to come, they credited the Foundation with having helped them to avoid ‘the trap of professionalism’. (Full story here.)

Organisers Assemble

Fifth, finally, and maybe most importantly, I’m obsessed with how the tiny self-help groups I saw in Ethiopia were able to aggregate together into a major political force — first clusters, then federations — that was far more than the sum of its parts.

This is a very particular kind of political organising.

It’s different from centrally directed ‘mobilising’ — the kind that comes with a headquarters and people in it who make the decisions on policies, campaign priorities, tactics and so on.

It’s also different from bottom-up protest movements — like Occupy Wall Street or Extinction Rebellion. What I saw in Ethiopia was about solutions, not protest.

Instead, it’s a lot more like community organising, of the kind you find here in the UK in the work of incredible organisations like Grapevine, Act Build Change, Citizens UK or the Civic Power Fund (some of which we’ve had the joy of working with at Larger Us).

But it’s also much more than community organising, because by coming together — in an ‘Avengers Assemble’ kind of way — these self-help groups are able to wield power at a much bigger level than just that of individual communities.

By coming together, they’re able to affect not just what happens in their neighbourhoods, but also in their towns, cities, regions, even whole countries.

This is real people power, not the fake version offered by hard right populists. Self-help, powered by connection and relationship, that’s then multiplied by aggregation (just like cells aggregate themselves into tissues, organs or organisms), in a way that makes politicians sit right up and pay attention.

Reading about it again a decade on, it feels like there are vital lessons for us in the UK, Europe and the US about how we organise for the moment we’re in right now. I’m left wanting to understand much more clearly how this process of organising + assembling works. I’ll see what I can find out and come back to it in a future post.

Links I liked

While we’re on the subject of Avengers Assembling, this piece on Programmable Mutter — on the coordination challenges faced by both tyrants and the people who oppose them — is really good.

Crucial polling finding from Persuasion UK: ‘Reform-curious’ Labour voters are not opposed to net zero. What this means: Labour are free to ramp up climate ambition without worrying about losing voters to Farage and co.

This piece by former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon, which warns about Israel’s “messianic” and “extremist” government, does not pull its punches — and underlines that 70% of Israel’s people want a comprehensive end to the war in return for bringing the hostages home, and an election as soon as possible.

My brother Jules Evans had a terrific op-ed in the New York Times this week on “How the American Right Learned to Love Psychedelics”, observing “how tightly entwined a once left-wing psychedelic movement has become with the Trump administration and the tech right”. He argues:

I worry that the psychedelic enthusiasts of Silicon Valley will apply their “move fast and break things” philosophy to mind-altering drugs, approving them too quickly and without adequate protections for Americans. Psychedelics are very promising as a mental health treatment, but they are also incredibly powerful drugs that carry serious risks.

Finally, I loved this analysis of Trump’s tariffs as an example of bad strategy by Lawrence Freedman, who literally wrote the book on strategy — in no small part because of this jewel of a paragraph:

We rarely have had such a clear-cut example of bad strategy. This is not about objectives, for someone with terrible intent can be strategically adept, but about deciding on a course of action that will not only fail to achieve its stated intent but will have negative consequences that far exceed the positive. In this respect Trump’s tariffs policy is on the extreme end of the scale of badness, exemplary in its awfulness. It has features that are common to most bad strategies but in key respects it was unique. This was a bad strategic decision that only Donald Trump could have made, not just because he had to be president to make it but also because it was necessary to believe things about international trade that only he and a few close advisers believed.