Marfo – outcomes  

So if I say that siloed research is, especially applied work done in siloes is one of our biggest problems, the other big problem is really the whole issue of how we actually address the issue of outcomes and how we measure what we do.  And I think I’ve always used the example of even the natural sciences where most of us would have thought that the natural sciences are so objective that you don’t need to worry about what is different from place to place.  Like a metal is a metal is a metal.  It doesn’t matter.  You want to heat a metal to 600 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s going to increase by about three inches, you do it Ghana, you do it in Canada, you do it in Singapore, chances are the answer will be the same thing.  Human development is not like that.  Human development is really primed by social and cultural processes.  And so the context in which people live their lives is very, very important.  So, but as human societies and as researchers we are confronted with one interrelated- one problem with two sides.   

One side is our biological existence.  And of course, that is what we share.  Human beings across all cultures, we share one biological heritage.  So the trajectories of development are driven by biological processes which do not vary a whole lot going from one setting to the other.  But there is also the contextual path of our development.  The culture in which we live.  The geographic locations and, in fact, even in that social and cultural realm there are some elements that are universal.  I mean, most cultures have families.  So family is another universal concept.  So it doesn’t have to be biological to be universal.  You can get ecological, environmental things that are actually universal as well.  So here is the challenge.  The challenge is as we try to understand the outcomes of human development. You know, how do we do it? Or we’re trying to deliver an intervention-how do we do it?  Do we think we have a program that works for everybody?  And therefore, all we have to do is just to implement it.  And I hear that a lot in the circles where some of my colleagues like to tease me as someone whose office hasn’t changed or what happened to you Kofi; you’re always talking of context and I say context is very important. 

 So if my goal is to create a scientific database that allows us to understand what is common across our universe it’s a very laudable goal.  But it will also mean that we will have to be ignoring a lot of things that are very important but are localized.  So localized that you cannot measure it in the same way across context.  That’s one of the biggest challenges for international comparisons right now, the way I see it.  So every time somebody says, “well, but we cannot be just studying individual settings.  We need to look at what cuts across.”  And I say, “by all means, let’s do that. But just remember that by the time you isolate the things that you think you can compare across cultures, you’ve already dropped a lot of things that are very important but cannot be compared across context because they differ from one context to another. ” So how do you balance it?  I think there’s a practical, commonsensical way to balance it and even the international organizations like UNICEF, in some of the databases they are creating like the MICS are beginning to have what they call the more general kinds of questions and then questions that are designed in addition so that countries can determine whether they want to gather data on those questions that are very, very localized. When you do that you get the best of both worlds.