The effort by industrialised countries to assist in the development of newly independent and less advanced countries has now been underway for half a century. Much has been learned that will be of use to future technical experts and consultants with an ambition to work in this field, and universities in the USA, UK and elsewhere have set up training courses to prepare these people for the task ahead. Most of the materials used on these courses are dry technical reports that impart the facts but do not always convey the human interest. Here is where fiction written against an accurate technical and historical background has much to offer in sweetening the pill of studying and conveying the total human milieu in which socio-economic progress must be achieved. Fiction can also serve a purpose in providing the layperson and general reader, whose taxes and charitable donations fund the work, but who does not read the technical reports, with a palatable insight into the vast field of international development.
Perhaps the most important contribution that fiction can make to training for development is to help keep the effort people-centred. Projects are undertaken by people, for people, and each individual person has their own personal hopes and fears and also reflects to a greater or lesser extent the wider traditional and cultural attitudes of their extended family and ethnic community. In using fictional characters a novel can paint a colourful ‘warts and all’ picture that cannot be clearly presented in the monochrome language of an official document.
Projects succeed or fail to the extent that they win the committed support of the intended beneficiaries; this is the only way of guaranteeing the continuation of the innovation after the international impulse has been expended. Success comes as much from anticipating the effect of negative characteristics as from engaging the positive attributes of both project workers and the target community. In communities that have experienced decades of failed projects, there has evolved an underground culture that seeks to subvert, for the immediate benefit of a chosen few, the next foreign-funded project to come their way. It is important to design projects that harmonise with people’s real needs, and so recruit the goodwill of the many to defeat the manipulations of the few. The necessary lessons can be learned only from a complete analysis of past experience and the results can be more fully presented in fiction than in a purely factual review.
The value of imagination in fiction writing should not be overlooked. Formal reporting records only what has happened and seldom speculates about what might have happened. The fiction writer can range freely over the field of possibilities, weaving unlikely scenarios and warning of unforeseen hazards as well as opportunities. This can help the development worker to be alive to the unexpected and to gain that degree of lateral thinking and flexibility of mind that yields great dividends in this field of work.
International development agencies sometimes commission reviews or meta-analyses of numerous projects in selected areas such as health, agriculture or small and medium enterprises (SME). Such studies must usually be limited in technical range, time scale or geographical extent. They may be comprehensive, detailed and statistically significant but difficult to read in full and often only perused in abstract and conclusions. Fictional accounts, on the other hand, need observe no constraints on technical topic, space or time, and can use variety and anecdote to enrich the text. Also, by introducing a human interest story they draw the reader on and by this means impart much more of the ambience of the real human and physical environment.
Some teachers may argue that all the instructional material that is needed is contained in strictly factual technical reports and it is true that under the threat of failure of examinations students can be forced to read almost anything. On the other hand the history of the industrial revolution in England, for example, has shown that fiction can be very effective in exposing exploitation and changing human attitudes. Today, the frontiers of the war on poverty have moved to the developing countries where fiction in a true developmental setting can offer painless instruction to the student and an adventure in an unfamiliar world to the inquiring lay reader.
Laypeople in all advanced countries become anxious from time to time to know what their tax dollars, euros and pounds, as well as their charitable donations, have realised in terms of helping poor people in poor countries. It is often suspected that there is much waste due to inefficiency and corruption and people are frustrated that after many years of effort there are still countries where little seems to have been achieved. At the same time the layperson often has little or no knowledge of either the challenges or successes of past efforts. Fictional accounts of real development project experience can help to keep laypersons better informed, increasing interest and gaining more support for the work of the experts.