Labor Intensive Development

There is a crew of men painting a center line down the main road that runs from Lilongwe down through Zomba and on to Blantyre. They have one pick-up truck with a large barrel of paint, some orange cones, paint brushes in varying states of wear, a length of string to make straight lines and small paint buckets made from an assortment of plastic containers. I have seen these same guys working for over a month now painting this one line—sometimes solid and sometimes dotted for passing zones—that stretches on for over 300km. When you see something like this it stands out in your mind and you think about how it is done back home. I think of a high-tech truck that can drive down the road cleaning the area with pressured air and then paint it with a spray-paint gun mounted on the back of the truck. This truck would have some flashing lights and drive at about 10 miles per hour, meaning that two or three guys could accomplish the work of 40 or so in two or three days instead of several months.

There are a lot of us that think sending a truck like this to Malawi would be a good development project. I can see the proposal now—roads painted faster and more accurately, more efficient use of paint, better paint retention time, less traffic obstruction, less risk for road workers, etc… All it would take is the one truck and we would send back reports each month on how many miles of roads have fresh lines to keep the drivers of Malawi safe. Until of course the truck needs maintenance or the spray-paint gun breaks and there are no parts for it in country. The cost of the truck, the shipping costs, the maintenance costs are negligible costs in terms of foreign aid, though combined they could probably pay the current crews wages for the next year. Employing Malawians to paint provides a steady income for the men who would otherwise be unemployed. All of their supplies are available locally and they can adjust their work schedule to the amount of funding annually available for road painting, unlike the high-tech truck which has high upfront costs.

So Malawians should say no to the high-tech paint truck right? Thank the donors for their good intentions but politely decline the assistance. Well, it doesn’t often work this way. Aid is political and often the beneficiaries in the proposal are not the only beneficiaries of the project. Government officials are inclined to keep saying ‘yes’ to aid projects, as those who decline are seen as difficult to work with and may miss the next round of handouts. And though the high-tech truck might not be a good development for the workers, modern equipment is seen as a sign of progress, a sign that the current political party is working for the people. To further complicate the issue, we might discover that the road workers, who were hired out of the capital city and have been living away from their families for months at a time, have a higher likelihood of contracting HIV and spreading it along the length of the main road—Lilongwe to Blantyre.

So do we like a high-tech solution or a labor intensive solution to paint lines? These are the often seemingly simple yet convolutedly complex decisions of development work. As for me, I say stick with the labor intensive method, but hire the men locally and spend a little more on training and safety. All of that to decide how to paint a line on a road, now let’s stop an HIV/AIDS epidemic…