Doing the undoing: Development worker experiences implementing UKAid cuts in Malawi

• In Event: The role of policy in education

Proposal

INTRODUCTION
When the United Kingdom reduced its aid budgetary allocations by 4.2 billion pounds in November 2020, hundreds of aid projects around the world abruptly stopped. Justified as promoting alignment around key priorities like girls’ education, the cuts were a conservative-led austerity measure in response to COVID-19 and Brexit (NAO 2022). In public critiques of the cuts, humanitarian and civil society actors argued that the impacts would be devastating to the world’s most vulnerable populations (Lock 2020; UNICEF 2021).
Popular narratives of the cuts emphasize the poles: Decisions were made by leaders in the UK to cut funding, with deleterious impacts felt by those enrolled in terminated projects. This telling misses the layers of impact, particularly among the mid-level actors who represented the projects to communities: the projects’ “local faces,” whose livelihoods and credibility were at once compromised when promised funding stopped. The work of these mid-level actors, while vital and historically situated, is routinely overlooked (Peters 2019). So, too, is the relational nature of development project programming in practice. Critical development scholars have long pointed to mid-level actors to understand how development happens and the inequalities it reproduces (Lewis 2005; Morley 2019; Mosse 2011; Peters 2020; Silver 2019).

METHODOLOGY
Drawing upon analysis of interviews and discourse data, this research documents the experiences of a cadre of development workers—the “local faces” of projects—whose livelihoods were impacted by UKAid cuts at the same time they were tasked with telling project beneficiaries they had lost valued support. Their experiences lend insight into the relational and delicate work of doing--and undoing--development (Peters 2019).
This research derives from a larger study of gendered discourses and interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We set out with a particular focus on COVID-19-related school closures in Malawi, attending to how schoolgirls’ situated experiences of the pandemic related to discursive constructions of gendered risk shaping resource flows (Silver & Morley under review). As the UK implemented funding cuts, we noticed dissonance between discursive commitments to girls’ education and material disinvestment in projects which were supporting girls holistically (Worley 2021). We turned to mid-level actors to understand how the cuts were being implemented and the consequences of the cuts that may be missed in popular narratives.
We focus in particular on development workers’ experiences implementing the closure of two projects in Malawi. One project provided support for survivors of domestic violence; the other aimed to increase resilience of food insecure households. Though these projects are beyond the education sector, their implications for education are two-fold: they directly relate to individual and community wellbeing which shapes educational access, and their closures impact the broader international development infrastructure for implementing projects across sectors. Analysis of 11 development worker interviews and 21 news stories inform our findings.

FINDINGS & DISCUSSION
While analysis is ongoing, preliminary findings highlight both the emotional toll mid-level actors experienced and damage to relationships. Rumors circulated for months before official communication about project closures was released. One development workers described that the phase of not knowing “was really torture and not good for us…[it was like] waiting for a panga knife.” Some development workers were told of project closures in staff meetings, while others heard through individual calls from their supervisors. As they processed their job loss, these mid-level actors also reflected on others who would be affected. One participant described the range of personal and professional impacts:

"I borrowed some loans to support my education, and I was supporting my relatives and other dependents. So, I depended on the assurance that this program will continue and with that premature closure of the program, it affected not only me including my dependents and the impact is being felt even up to now, in my professional career, and in the relationship I built with other stakeholders at district level. Imagine that relationship we developed with our implementing partners, the staff, and the women organizations that we were supporting and some of the survivors of violence. So, it really affected me on a personal level."

Others articulated community relationships as “broken”:

"When we were working with the communities, we built good working relationships. However, when we went to the same communities to explain about the phasing out of the project, the news was not taken lightly. The relationship was broken."

Critical development scholars have argued that the relationality of development is overlooked and marginalized, and this study surfaces the ways that relationships matter to both the doing and the undoing of international development projects. Exploring the emotional, material, and relational dynamics of “undoing” aid opens analytic spaces to understand the labor of development and the myriad invisible resources mobilized--and jeopardized--through aid and its withdrawal. Attention to these two particular projects in Malawi allows us to reflect on the implications on the education sector of austerity measures made outside of it. This research supports the social justice and inclusion conference theme through considering political and economic structures that contribute to the marginalization of certain groups--and their relationality--in international development spaces.

Authors

• Alyssa L Morley, Michigan State University

• Rachel Silver, Faculty of Education, York University