Geek Heresy (33 page)

Teaching and Parenting

Despite what I’ve said above, there are cases where the mentee’s aspirations are either unclear or unformed. This is usually the case with
children, who require a special kind of mentorship – parenting and direct instruction.

But I have also met adults who have had so little say in their own lives that they seem terrified of making the smallest decisions for themselves. In Pradan’s communities there are, of course, women who never become like Diggi. They’re more comfortable following their husbands or their peers. Still, they have some urge to grow. Imparting relevant skills nurtures not just knowledge but confidence in the ability to learn. For such people, teaching can be an effective form of mentorship, as long as the focus remains on intrinsic growth. More generally, there are a whole line of educational categories that deserve greater attention in social causes: primary, secondary, and tertiary education, of course, but also vocational education, job awareness, soft-skills education, confidence-building exercises, artistic or athletic skill development, leadership and management training, community building, organizational development, so-called capacity building, and so on. Depending on the context, some of these may fit best with individual or group aspirations.

And That’s Not All

Intrinsic growth, and therefore mentorship, takes time. Pradan commits to villages for years, sometimes decades. Often it stays until self-help groups are fully autonomous and there is nothing left to teach or support. Mentors provide encouragement and inspiration, even occasional pressure, but they don’t harass or dictate milestones.

Pradan’s sole objective is benefit for the village. Mentorship is fundamentally different from the transactional processes of business, trade, quid-pro-quo politics, and other forms of exchange. In some transactional relationships, a lower-status person performs some work for a higher-status person, or pays them directly in exchange for their advice and help.
¹²
This may look like mentorship, but the vested interest in the relationship can lead to exploitation. Direct, tangible benefits for the higher-status party conflict with the true goals of mentorship. Any material exchanges should be undertaken with care, transparency, and even suspicion.

Of course, if there were absolutely nothing in it for mentors, mentorship would be a hard sell. But mentoring is both gratifying and empowering for the mentor. I have volunteered for several programs where there was an oversupply of mentors, and we competed with each other for the attention of prospective mentees. When done well, mentoring is a deeply caring, empathetic activity. If Aristotle was right that “we become just by doing what is just, temperate by doing what is temperate, and brave by doing brave deeds,”
¹³
then it seems likely that through mentoring, we become more giving, self-transcendent individuals.

Mentorship differs significantly from attempts to “roll out” or “scale up” packaged interventions. If helping people reach their personal aspirations is the focus, then agendas have to adapt accordingly. Pradan, for example, is prepared with a range of packaged interventions, but it calls on them only when village communities request them. The focus is not on pushing packaged interventions onto every community, but on matching packaged interventions with a community’s aspirations. “We do not see ourselves as a service delivery organization, but rather [as being] in the business of rekindling hope and fostering processes,” Ghose says. “We help develop knowledge, skills, and [social] linkages that help poor communities participate on an equal footing in society.”

Lastly, it’s important that the emphasis be placed on
good
mentorship, not just the trappings of mentorship, or mentorship as a trendy buzzword. There are any number of ways in which mentorship could go sour. Just because some mentorship efforts, possibly under other names, such as “capacity building,” have failed or fallen out of favor doesn’t mean that mentorship couldn’t be done better.

Mentorship is not earthshaking conceptually. Yet, in part because it is rarely held up as a model in social causes, it has often been neglected by theorists, policymakers, and donor organizations.
¹⁴
Mentorship, though, works well as an overarching framework that avoids the problems of top-down authority, benevolent paternalism, or pretended equality.

What’s Not Mentorship

Mentorship differs from other approaches to social causes, such as coercion, manipulation, charity, and trade. Coercion involves physical or legal force to constrain or command action. Examples include military force for regime change and China’s one-child law to limit overpopulation. Manipulation is in fashion among technocrats as a way to induce “voluntary” choices through extrinsic incentives. Paying families to send their children to school through conditional cash transfers and imposing sin taxes on unhealthy goods are types of manipulation.
¹⁵
Charity, in the form of handouts without attempts to nurture people’s capacity, can be helpful in emergency situations, but, when provided without reflection, it can become a crutch that stunts growth. And trade is often considered an unqualified good, but it easily devolves to exploitation when exchanges happen between parties of unequal power or wealth. Think blood diamonds and Nigerian oil.

Mentorship is most studied in the business world, where it is sometimes contrasted with coaching and managing, both of which share mentorship’s acceptance of status disparity but differ from mentorship in important ways.
¹⁶
In certain definitions of coaching, coaches are content-free sounding walls and program managers: They introduce no technical knowledge to the relationship.
¹⁷
Unlike a coach, a mentor often brings relevant expertise and resources. Managing, meanwhile, is the art of causing others to perform constructive work, usually toward the manager’s goals. The emphasis is on achieving the goals of the higher-status entity, reversing the objective of a mentoring relationship.

Any of the options above might be strategically used in a broader context of mentorship. I’m not recommending mentoring in opposition to other models, but mentorship as the overarching framework, as well as a conscious shift toward more mentorship. Mentorship allows for a judicious switching between modes. The broader goal of intrinsic growth might require a discerning application of other models, but always in service of the mentee’s aspirations and intrinsic growth. Mentorship’s long-term hope is the maturation of an independent peer or partner.

From External Packaging to Intrinsic Growth

Despite everything I’ve said about mentorship, it would be a shame to overlook technological amplification when it’s appropriate. Lonjo took advantage of new seed varieties, savings schemes, and other interventions as it worked with Pradan. Packaged interventions are important – a wise person or a wise society will apply the right ones in discerning ways. But even in their application, there’s always an opportunity to nurture intrinsic growth.

As we saw, Digital Green uses how-to videos of farming techniques as a teaching aid to persuade farmers to take up effective agricultural practices. To this end, it has an extensive online video library, maintains a data analytics system to track performance, and uses handheld video cameras and pico-projectors – portable projectors about the size of an ice-cream sandwich that can project digital video onto a wall in any dark room. So technology is a key part of its work.

But while Digital Green’s ultimate goal is to help raise farmer yield, income, and welfare, its focus is resolutely on building human capacity. It does this in several ways. To begin with, Digital Green’s videos and pedagogy are about nurturing knowledge and capacity among farmers. The videos are carefully curated for local relevance (to crop, season, climate, and geography), and they are ordered in such a way that content with the quickest return and most visible benefits are shown first. That helps build farmers’ self-confidence and appetite for more knowledge. Next, Digital Green works mainly by teaching its partners its methodology. With Pradan, Digital Green began by directly overseeing the video processes in villages, but over time, the practice was taught to Pradan’s staff, who in turn provide training to interested self-help groups.

So there is a packaged intervention here, whether you think of it as the how-to videos or the Digital Green methodology as a whole. But facilitating intrinsic growth – either of farmers or of partner staff members – is the ultimate goal. Again, it’s not about the packaged intervention.

Anytime there’s an intention to provide a packaged intervention, there’s an opportunity to mentor. Most people agree that if you give a
man a fish, he eats for a day, while if you teach him how to fish, he eats for a lifetime. But as we set aside turbo-charged, heat-seeking, robotic fishing poles to solve other people’s problems, we could do more than teach people to fish. We could also support instructors to teach fishing, encourage entrepreneurs to manufacture fishing equipment, promote policymakers who can run well-regulated fish markets, nurture universities to do ichthyological research, cheer nations toward sustainable fishing, and on and on. That way other societies can foster their strengths, so that ours are less and less needed.

Evidence in agricultural development suggests that programs do well when they contribute to the growth of farmers and agricultural extension organizations. Studies attest to Farmer Field Schools, in which extension agents show farmers practical techniques in the field.
¹⁸
The higher crop yield associated with the Green Revolution in South Asia was due at least as much to ramped-up extension efforts as to the introduction of new seed varieties (putting aside questions of its negative effects on soil and agricultural systems).
¹⁹
Today China is among the few countries that continue to place faith in extension, deploying a force of nearly 800,000 agents unmatched elsewhere in quality or quantity. As a result, Chinese farmers are agile and productive.
²⁰

A packaged intervention can be thought of as a concrete focus for the sake of fostering intrinsic growth. It’s great that Diggi’s family earns more income today as a result of better agriculture. But what’s truly remarkable – and self-sustaining – is her transformation into a confident community leader. For her, agriculture was a convenient focus that enabled more abstract learning.

Any packaged intervention and any activity can become a platform for fostering intrinsic growth. My friend Deogratias Niyizonkiza, founder of Village Health Works, uses health-care interventions as a starting point for mentoring a Burundian village to improve its own schools, food security, and livelihood.
²¹
I-TECH head Ann Downer once told me about K. Sethu, a taxi driver with a grade-school education whom she mentored into becoming the facilities manager of I-TECH’s growing India office.
²²
And, as El Sistema founder Abreu said, “An orchestra is first and foremost a way to encourage better
human development.” To him, music “is a primary instrument for the development of individuals and societies.”
²³

Nurturing wisdom takes time, and intrinsic growth happens gradually. Unconfident single-crop subsistence planters are unlikely to transform overnight into cash-crop superfarmers who sell wicker furniture in the offseason. Struggling farmers might need relief before extension, and extension before diversification. This doesn’t mean that people must be constrained to learning one thing at a time; it just means that great care must be taken to tailor programs for the context, for people’s aspirations, and for their level of intrinsic growth.

It’s Mentorship All the Way Down

Mentorship can be applied at various levels.

Pradan’s leaders initially fell into a routine where frontline staff followed orders handed down from the leadership. But cofounder Deep Joshi quickly realized that it made no sense to expect self-confident decision-making from villagers when his own staff had to blindly obey orders from above. It was a philosophical contradiction with practical implications: Rural communities needed to see Pradan staff as role models.

So Joshi thought as hard about how he should run his organization as he did about what it should accomplish. He wanted the nonprofit to get used to “inducting, nurturing, and developing professional development workers who are . . . self-regulating, and continuously seek excellence in their tasks.”
²⁴
Over time, Pradan’s senior leadership has developed a way of working that tries to do this. All staff members, for example, undergo a one-year apprenticeship that includes two weeks of immersion in the home of a poor rural family. During that time, they are effectively cut off from middle-class comforts. Most emerge with greater self-knowledge, a better sense for the hardships faced by poor families, and strengthened resolve to tackle them. In their work, they are given a lot of responsibility and latitude. Employees receive continuing training. Senior staff members join Pradan’s governing council and act as mentors more than bosses. Some eventually move on to start
their own nonprofit organizations. The staff becomes increasingly independent and autonomous, just as the communities they work with are expected to do.

Thus Pradan has multiple layers of impact: the staff cultivates intrinsic growth in the rural communities it works with; management cultivates intrinsic growth among staff; and leadership cultivates intrinsic growth within.

The Long, Hard Road

In
Memorabilia
, Xenophon, a student of Socrates, relates the story of a young Hercules, who meets two women at a crossroads. One offers him a life of ease and pleasure without notable achievement, the other a long, hard road that leads to “the most blessed happiness.” Hercules, of course, chooses the latter.