Thread by @doctorow

The term "#solutionism" gets thrown around a lot. Any time an attempt to address a problem fails, it's easy to point at the technological elements of the failure and deride the whole enterprise as a solutionist muddle.

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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/the…

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Which is a pity, because solutionism is real, and it's a scourge. I mean, it can literally kill.

Take Poshan Abhiyaan, a Modi/World Bank joint project to address malnutrition-based "stunting" in children under six, something 38% of Indian children suffered in 2016.

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As @AarefaJohari describes in a long investigation for @scroll_in, the absolute failure of Poshan Abhiyaan is pure solutionism: the program spent money on an app to track which kids were malnourished, but it didn't offer sufficient funds to feed them.

scroll.in/article/100752…

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There are a lot of details, but that's it in a nutshell. The program's funders - including the Gates Foundation - spent lavishly on an app to keep records of child hunger, and didn't care or didn't know that there wasn't adequate funding for food for the kids they tracked.

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The closer you look at the scheme, the worse it gets, and Johari's reporting is a case-study in solutionism at its worst.

The front-line workers in India's anti-child-hunger campaign are the women who work at anganwadis - who meet with parents and kids and give them food.

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The anganwadi system is a disaster. The centers themselves are grossly underfunded. 40% of them don't have running water. Many have toilets, but often they are purely ornamental, not connected to water or sewers.

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One anganwadi, in Shivni, Barwani, had been shuttered for ten years awaiting roof repairs, while Mehmooda, the woman who staffed it, had spent a decade in a "temporary" center in a classroom.

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The anganwadis are understaffed. Th full staff complement is just two workers, but many only have a single worker. They are grossly underpaid - though they work for the government, they are classed as "honorary" workers, earning "honoraria" and not entitled to benefits.

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It's not uncommon for anganwadi workers to retire into dire poverty, with no pension or savings to support them.

These underpaid workers have inadequate tools: they lack soap, and the scales and height measurement tools used to evaluate malnutrition are often nonfunctional.

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The anganwadi workers treat malnutrition the obvious way: by providing food. But they don't get enough food to help the families whose kids are starving - the rations are so thin that a month's food is gone in a week.

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If you wanted to improve the anganwadi system, there are some obvious places to start: equip it with good buildings staffed by adequately compensated workers with functional equipment, and then give them enough food to address the hunger they find.

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Instead, they got an app.

Really, you couldn't ask for a better example of solutionism, but it gets worse. The app's interface was in English, a language large numbers of anganwadi workers can't read or speak.

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The phones the workers were given to run the app were old, underpowered 2G phones that hung and crashed repeatedly. Workers - themselves at the edge of poverty - were pressured to buy better phones to run the app. Many went into debt to do so, fearing for their jobs.

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When better phones were eventually distributed, they were locked down so workers couldn't install the messaging tools they used to talk to each other and the families they served.

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Even when run on adequate hardware by someone who was familiar with technology and could read English, the app was still terrible. It lacked basic functions, like moving a kid who aged out of the under-four category into the over-four category.

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So kids got double-counted, distorting statistics. The statistics, by the way, were available to anyone nationwide through a "realtime dashboard" that omitted vital data that the workers had collected, like height and weight (these being the key to evaluating malnutrition).

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To top it all off, the app didn't let workers revise the data they entered if they found an error.

The funding breakdown for the Poshan Abhiyaan program is solutionism in budgetary form: 36% for phones, 36% for "behavior-change campaigns," 8% for scales and height charts.

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The discretionary budget for the women who staffed the anganwadis? Just 2% of the total.

None of this is to say that a program aimed at helping starving children shouldn't have good record-keeping.

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The paper system that the anganwadis used may have been accurate, but scattered paper records are hard to collate and learn from - for example, to identify places where more funding is needed.

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The thing that makes this solutionism isn't that it used digital technology - it's that it ignored all the parts of the problem not related to digital technology, sidelined the workers who understood the problem and treated them and the families they served with contempt.

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Child hunger isn't the result of behavioral problems or poor record-keeping. It's the result of not enough food. Job one: make sure that the workers on the frontline have the food they say they need for the families they serve.

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Job two: pay the workers a living wage. Repair the buildings they work out of. Staff those centers adequately. Make sure their toilets and scales and height-measurement tools work.

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Then, if you must, add some digital technology - by incorporating the workers themselves - let them design and test the apps, evaluate the hardware, and field trial them. They are the experts and should drive the process.

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The problem with solutionism isn't that technology is irrelevant to problem solving - it's that technology developed in a vacuum by people who will never have to use it will only ever make problems worse.

eof/