Development rests on four critical pillars: physical assets, economic capacity, institutions and, perhaps most importantly, human capability.
These four do not exist in isolation. They reinforce one another. You cannot sustainably develop one while permanently neglecting the others. There may be some mismatch between them at different stages, but when the imbalance becomes too pronounced, something is fundamentally wrong.
Are we developing, or are we simply doing things in the hope that they will somehow become development? There is no denying that we have built a lot. Roads, railways, hospitals, universities, stadiums, markets and office blocks now dot the country. Some are necessary and have undoubtedly improved lives.
But perhaps we have become too fascinated with the physical manifestation of development. We build the thing and somehow assume that utility will follow.
Yet a railway is not industrialisation. A hospital building is not healthcare. A university is not human capital. An industrial park is not industrialisation. These are inputs into a larger system.
The real question should therefore be: what must exist around an investment for it to produce the outcome for which it was intended?
Take the upcoming abattoir in Isiolo. On the face of it, it is a brilliant idea. Isiolo is a livestock-producing region. Value addition makes sense. An abattoir could create jobs, improve returns for livestock keepers, and open wider markets, but it is only one link in a much longer chain.
Where are the livestock production systems that will supply it consistently? Where are the veterinary services, aggregation, transport, cold chain, certification, financing, processing and markets? Where is the value chain that makes the investment sustainable? If those things do not move together, what exactly are we building?
The same question arises with Isiolo's medical college. A massive investment has gone into physical infrastructure, yet the relatively small number of students enrolled raises a difficult question: was the investment need-informed or want-driven?
Perhaps enrolment will grow. Perhaps the institution will eventually become a regional centre of excellence. But do we ask these questions before investing, or only after the building is standing?
What was the projected demand? What labour-market need was identified? What will it cost to operate? What alternatives were considered? What else could those resources have achieved?
These are not questions meant to kill ambition. They are questions meant to make ambition intelligent.
Then there is Nairobi, where office-space oversupply has been well documented, with some buildings reportedly remaining unoccupied years after completion. Yet the construction continues. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with building offices. But what does it say about our economy when capital continues flowing into buildings while productive activity struggles to generate sufficient demand for them?
Perhaps we have become more interested in building the infrastructure of an economy than in building the economy that will use it.
This is the contradiction we need to confront. A country can have impressive hospitals without enough doctors or medicines. It can have police facilities without sufficient institutional capacity. It can have research institutions whose innovation output remains disappointingly low. It can have universities producing graduates while the economy struggles to create productive opportunities for them.
The physical investment exists. But the system does not quite work. Perhaps, therefore, our development conversation needs to change.
We are very good at asking: How much are we spending? We should be equally interested in asking: What are we expecting this investment to produce?
Not every public investment has to make a financial profit. A hospital may not generate a commercial return, but it should generate better health outcomes. A road may not directly make money, but it should reduce transport costs, connect producers to markets and stimulate economic activity. A college may take years to produce economic value, but it should develop capabilities the economy needs.
The issue is not whether every project makes money. It is whether every major investment has a clear purpose, measurable outcomes and a place within a larger development system, and this brings us to opportunity cost.
Every shilling committed to one project is a shilling unavailable for another. What if some of the resources tied up in underutilised facilities were instead invested in irrigation, agricultural extension, health workers, vocational skills, water, research and technology or enterprise development? Would the alternative have produced a better outcome?
Perhaps Kenya's problem is not a shortage of plans. We have never lacked visions, strategies, programmes and development plans.
The problem may be that our ideas do not always talk to each other. The road is planned separately from the industry, the industry separately from the skills. The skills separately from the labour market. The hospital separately from the health workforce. The abattoir separately from the livestock value chain. And the budget is then distributed among all of them as though putting the pieces on the same table automatically makes them a puzzle. It doesn't.
Development is not the accumulation of projects. It is the interaction of capabilities.
Sometimes infrastructure must come first. Sometimes human capability. Sometimes institutions. The important thing is knowing what the binding constraint is, understanding the relationship between the investments and sequencing them accordingly.
This is why we need to move from project thinking to systems thinking. We should stop asking only, what are we building, towhat are we trying to make happen? What must be in place for that to happen? And are we investing in all those things together?
Because there is a danger in mistaking the physical evidence of development for development itself.
We can build an impressive Kenya without necessarily building the productive, institutional and human capabilities that make that Kenya work.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable question we should be asking now is: are we developing Kenya, or are we just building it? Because the two are not necessarily the same thing.
Development communication professional |[email protected]
