In my last post, I talked about becoming—slowly and not always successfully—a more patient person as a result of living in Rwanda. To most, this probably seems like a good thing. Patience is a virtue after all. However, looking at this change from an economic perspective, the shift can be explained by a depressing phenomenon: my time is less valuable in Rwanda than it was in New York City. This is not only bad for me since it means I make less money. It’s also bad for Rwanda and other developing countries as well as for anyone interested in reducing global inequality. It’s also why Global Health Corps’ mission is so important.
To start, let’s look at why I’m more patient here and why that’s not so virtuous after all. In my last post, I mentioned that, in Rwanda as opposed to New York, I am much more comfortable waiting out the rain rather than rushing to my next activity. In economic terms, the primary force between my different choices in the two places is that I face lower opportunity costs[1] in Rwanda than in New York. Essentially, the value of the next best alternative of what I could be doing with my time instead of waiting is higher in New York than in Rwanda. When I think about the major categories of how I spend my time—sleeping, working, preparing and eating food, exercising, and socializing/relaxing—the opportunity cost of not doing most of them is equal or higher here than in New York. The one category that stands out as driving my lower overall opportunity cost of waiting for the rain to pass is work.
How can this be? My placement organization, Gardens for Health International (GHI), is engaged in developing innovative, long-term solutions for childhood malnutrition through agricultural and health education. As the first staff member devoted to monitoring and evaluation (M&E), I have been able to put in a places a number of new data collection and reporting processes and tools designed to help improve the work we do, especially as we look to expand our work to a greater geographic area. Back in New York, I was working at the New York City Department of Education and primarily focusing on teacher effectiveness and evaluation metrics. I cared, and still do, deeply about that work, but I wouldn’t say that I gained more or less satisfaction from a day there than at GHI. In neither case have I been paid by the hour so my lower wage doesn’t have a direct impact on my decision to be at work an hour more or an hour less. If the change in my job and my wage don’t explain it, what could? My working hypothesis is that I know I’ll accomplish less in an hour at work here than I would in New York; my productivity is lower.
When I say my productivity is lower here, I’m not saying that I spend all day here on Facebook. I really mean that for every hour of hard, focused work, I produce less quality output than I would back in New York. Given that I am about the same person, who, if anything, has more experience now than when I was working in New York, my environment must drive my lower productivity. Part of this is infrastructure. Factors like slower internet, working on a laptop while sitting on a wooden chair and not on a desktop with a large monitor and an office chair, and reduced access to expensive data management and statistical software packages—useful for M&E—contribute to my lower productivity for sure.
One of the biggest challenges is the lack of colleagues who could fully support my work. This is in no way meant to disparage my colleagues at GHI. Unfortunately, we simply don’t have the type of complementary skill sets that maximize collaboration. There’s only so much I can do to help plan an agricultural training and only so much that Moses, our agriculture program manager and former GHC fellow, can do to help me design evaluation metrics. It’s certainly not the same as the DOE where I worked on teams of 10-15 people whose common experiences let us understand the intimate details of each others’ work when given the opportunity.
Part of this difference is that I went from a large government organization to a small non-governmental organization, but part of it is also that there is just a much more limited supply of people with the skills and experience that match those of my former colleagues. This is not a situation confined to monitoring and evaluation and similar work. The human capital[2] in Rwanda is not as developed as it is in the United States due to a number of historical and environmental factors. As we see in my case, this means that even individuals with similar skills and knowledge will be less productive—produce less output in the same time—in Rwanda and other developing countries than in those with more developed stocks of human capital because it is harder to find coworkers with the skills that help make each other more productive. In other words, human capital is complementary; more human capital makes human capital more valuable.
The complementary nature of human capital exists throughout the labor market. For instance, a road construction worker is more productive not just because when he or she has better equipment, but also when the engineer who designed the road is more skilled. Taking an example from sports, John Stockton and Karl Malone were longtime teammates on the Utah Jazz. Famous for the way they ran the pick-and-roll together, both players are Hall of Famers. Undoubtedly talented in their own rights, when running the pick-and-roll, they made each other better in a way that was unique to their specific combination of talents. This combination was so effective that Stockton is the NBA’s all-time leader in assists[3] and Malone is second all-time in points scored; both are marks they probably wouldn’t have reached without each other.
The complementary nature of human capital highlights both the importance of creating opportunities for interaction and partnership between individuals from high human-capital and low human-capital countries and the challenge doing so. These interactions are crucial to reducing global inequality because they have the power to make workers in low human-capital settings more productive immediately. When these interactions also result in knowledge transfer, they help to form human capital as well. This increased human capital is a long-term, sustainable investment that continues to the benefit those with higher human capital and those working with them for years to come. Sustained increases in productivity in developing countries are a key lever for raising people out of poverty and reducing inequality.
The challenge is this: individual wages are largely driven by productivity. Thus, if a person, no matter where they are from, is less productive in Rwanda than they would be in the United States, the person will generally earn a lower wage and, in many cases, might find their job less fulfilling since they are not maximizing their productivity potential. This combination of lower wages and fulfillment will cause more people, with the choice, to work in the United States or another high human capital country than in Rwanda. Now, not only are these people not directly producing value for Rwanda, there is also a spillover effect to this decision. By taking his or her human capital out of Rwanda, he or she is also reducing the productivity of potential coworkers in Rwanda, especially if the person leaving has skills that are scarce here.
The opportunity and challenge I just described is why GHC has such potential to be a force for change. Most directly, by pairing fellows with high human capital together at placement organizations, GHC increases the productivity of its fellows at least for the fellowship year. Additionally, GHC’s focus on fostering a professional network helps foster collaboration among fellows and link fellows to job opportunities where they can contribute to and benefit from the complementary nature of human capital. For instance, my situation has improved in recent months because Gardens for Health recently hired a former GHC fellow to work with me as our M&E Associate.
The GHC’s impact on global inequality is likely maximized if fellows stay at organizations focused on social justice. When fellows move on to other career paths, it’s still a good thing, especially when it means higher productivity in developing countries. GHC’s potential to create and concentrate human capital in developing countries by initiating global collaboration is a critical component to its long-term impact. As we say in Rwanda, turi kumwe (we are together), and that’s a good thing because, in blunt economic terms, we’re not very productive alone.