I unfortunately have no love story to
share no points but I may have a couple
of stories nevertheless you know I first
came to to India in year 2000 with the
World Bank and was working on water and
sanitation and when I arrived in India I
discovered an incredible an incredible
challenge faced in the nation
600 million people use the outside for
toilets open defecation is the norm when
I first discovered this I said well you
know this is just merely an expression
of underdevelopment of poverty nothing
more and surely it’s just inconvenience
and like a good economist I said to
myself as incomes will grow over time
people will build their own toilets but
what I discovered that what I call
inconvenience are just a symptom of
already was very deeply an issue of
dignity when people have no other place
but to go outside is a non front to who
you are and the world around you
but then I discovered even more what he
discovered is most of the health
problems that people face and in
particular poor people come from the
fact that sanitation hygiene behaviors
are extremely weak out there when people
are defecating in the open that very act
pollutes water and that very water
enters the mouths of children girls boys
men and women and sickness and the loss
of life and the loss of time so there’s
something far deeper in this problem of
open defecation but he didn’t stop there
what I discovered is that the full
burden of open defecation was fully on
women women wake up girls wake up
early in the morning to go to the
bathroom and they wait all day long in
the evening to go to the bathroom
outside because that’s the only time
they have some security quote unquote
you know that health problems that
emerge when you can only go to the
bathroom early in the morning and late
in the evening
such was the burden of open defecation
after that that women and girls and the
security they face going out in the open
and you’ve heard stories of horrendous
rape if not snakes
so clearly the simple issue of 600
million people going out into the open
which I conveniently called merely an
expression of poverty was deep deep
expression of dignity of problems of
health and worse a clear clear burden on
women and girls and then a couple of
years in this country I and my
colleagues discovered something quite
interesting
we discovered a village in Bangladesh
which proudly showed a sign which says
no one defecates in the opened this was
fascinating what is it that people would
put up a sign with such pride well very
interestingly to solve the problem of
open defecation what governance
governments around the world including
mine in Bangladesh including India we’re
doing what mechanist would do you don’t
have a toilet I’ll build a toilet for
you I’ll hand it to you for an economist
that was even better if you give
something free certainly the demand for
it would go up but what we discovered is
that you handed the toilets to people
and what did people do that converted
them into storage places they converted
them into animal sheds and some even
converted them into puja Hut but no one
used it for toilets and then we
discovered this village in which a sign
went up and says we do not defecate we
be open and then a couple of years later
we found another sign in Maharashtra
which says we do not marry our girls to
villages that practice open defecation
what was going on what we discovered in
this village was a group of civil
society organizations that had come into
the village and that brought the village
together and walked them through what
they called the walk of shame and what
the walk of shame showed to the villages
whether they were rich villages or poor
villages whether they came from upper
caste or lower caste what they showed to
them is that your behavior of open
defecation was hurting you your children
suddenly that village turned around in
the recognition that they have to take
that they have to make a difference and
what we discovered was village after
village began to build their own toilets
and began to practice good sanitation a
completely different mode of delivery
the one that we were very comfortable
with middle toilet kind of do people on
the other hand and group of NGOs said
it’s not about building it’s about
changing behavior it’s about bringing
collectives together communities
together and actually trying to show
that you can make a difference
there was a complete disruption in
service delivery and he woke me up to
the reality that if we’re going to deal
with problems of poverty we could not
just come up with the whole solution of
government coming in and building from
the top you have to disrupt that simple
linear way of delivering up to a
completely different way of thinking to
a completely different way of delivery
and what the village in Bangladesh
showed and what the village in
Maharashtra showed was that you actually
have to talk to communities and you have
to get communities involved and let them
figure out the solution of development
and in this case there were two very
very important elements in the in the
story of disruption one aim to deal with
behavior not the physical building of
toilets and to don’t talk to the
individual talk to the collective why
the collective two very important reason
one person in a village may have good
sanitation behavior another one may have
poor sanitation behavior both of them
will suffer and then both of them
jointly actually have good sanitation
behavior the health impact could not be
felt by the others
they were the economists called
externality was the first reason to
bring the collective collective together
extremely important the other one is
when you bring a collective together the
collective creates a peer pressure
they monitor each other we hold each
other accountable extraordinary that
people from high caste would actually
give land to people from poor cows lower
cost to build toilets that’s how big a
change that’s how big a shit that had
happened you can imagine I was a
complete convert I was a zealot if you
will and I would go around all over
India talking about this and what I
discovered where villages going and
talking to other villages other villages
crossing state boundaries and talking
with others and the idea that open
defecation had to stop was coming from
the conversation among communities
another big destructive factor in how
development happens not because
governments talk to government but
communities talk to communities my
passion on this was so much and I used
to talk about it all the time that when
my daughter who was then five years old
was asking her school to art school can
you draw something which which basically
reflects what your father does it work
what he does at work this is what my
daughter came up with I was the plumber
I was the sanitation worker it’s
probably the most proudest gift my
daughter gave me because I had learned
to move away from my narrow top-down
economists perspective web development
men I was disrupted in understanding the
development was far more than top-down
it was about communities of us
collectivities about behavior change let
me take you to another country
Madagascar Madagascar was facing serious
issues where children were not going to
school or were dropping out of school
one one set of problems the second set
of problem was that nutrition for
children at an early age was not been
given and you know this is a this is a
very challenging story that when
children babies born and from that early
stage the first thousand days for the
first three years if they’re not given
good nutrition if they’re not taken care
of if they don’t have good sanitation
what you actually have is stunting
something comes up as height four eight
so physically your height for age is
smaller because you’ve faced all these
problems when you were growing up but
more than that during these first
thousand days and indeed the first three
years your cognitive power does not grow
so a poor child who grows up in a world
of poor sanitation poor nutrition enters
the world already defeated because their
ability to learn is already stunted how
do you then turn this around well in
Madagascar they found a innovative idea
they created what a known as
unconditional cash transfers very simply
targets were set out very poor families
were identified and they were given cash
an income support at that stage the idea
of just getting income support to poor
families waste of money
well you know what the men will capture
it they’ll go drinking oh these people
will use it in a different way
top-down right condescending in the way
service delivery rather give them health
schools give them nutrition programs
again top-down you turn this around and
you give households and in particular
women cash transfers unconditional in
your name here it is you come and you
can see
lining up to get their cash transfer
every two months and all you do is you
talk about what it means to have good
nutrition what it means to breastfeed
your child what it means to send your
children to school extraordinary results
within a year you’ve found stunting
results beginning to change we didn’t
hear you began to see children going to
school we didn’t hear you began to see
nutritionist being being fed to children
in a different way and the power of
disruption here was cash transfers
directly in the hands of women and a
conversation between women about what
that cash transfer to do to you this
became a nationwide story let me take
you from there to Bangladesh my country
and about two decades ago we found
ourselves in a deep problem and the deep
problem is you have any classroom
secondary primary the secondary school
in particular maybe 20 25 percent of
that classroom were girls
the rest were boys and if you looked at
the dropout rates from secondary school
it was the girl that would drop out more
than the boy it was a serious serious
gender issue and one with the natural
natural solution build more schools try
to get girls to come to the schools
right get the state to bring more school
student to the table wasn’t working what
happened well we took a program which
was at a pilot stage in the World Bank
and scaled it up in the name of every
girl create a bank account give them a
scholarship but what were the conditions
of that scholarship you have to go to
school in the ten seventy five percent
of the time
– you have to pass the final exam three
your family cannot marry you off
certainly during the school cycle in two
decades we found that the percentage of
girls went from about 25 percent in a
classroom fifty-five percent of a
possible combination became one of the
first countries that were able to turn
around and create gender equity as
measured by by by the SDGs phenomenon
and again what was it you trusted you
trusted families to make the right
decision by giving power directly to the
client so it was an extraordinary lesson
for all of us in the World Bank and the
World Bank to come in and provide that
kind of resource let me bring you back
to – India and an extraordinary
revolution is happening right now in
India that is not well known across
states in India women for women have
been organized in self-help groups these
self-help groups are places where women
growth agency they talk to each other
they learn about each other and they
invest in economic activities over a
period of 15 years 3.5 million rural
poor women were organized into self-help
groups they saved two billion dollars
and they use that money to leverage more
than 20 billion from financial
institutions today when you go to some
of these self-help groups of women’s
women programs one of the extraordinary
things you will learn is that many of
them don’t send their children to free
public schools they actually borrow
money to century
to private schools where they believe
the education is better poor women
organized organizing themselves
borrowing money to invest in their
children when they have three schools
next door that is the power of change
that you are seeing across India even
more over the years in these self-help
groups as Agency has been strengthened
we now find in many states Bihar Kerala
Jharkand a portion of these women are
actually running as an child leaders and
learning getting into into into politics
and changing the nature of programs
again that linear top-down delivery to
poor households turn on its head and say
you are empowered to deliver a
disruption in the way we do service
delivery leads to incredibly different
accounts now you may think that is it
all about communities don’t we actually
change institutions whether they are
electricity companies or governments
I’ll give you one example negative in
Bangladesh in West Bengal in Kerala a
fundamental shift has happened that
money that’s run by either the central
government or run by the state
government that money is transferred to
local governments and chives and
panchayat have to have systems of
service delivery that are linked to
communities this is what I call bringing
the state closer to the citizen this
movement of service delivery by
empowering local governments is
transforming many parts of the world my
own country is an incredible example I
remember what is going to our village in
Bangladesh and our house is actually
built which crosses the boundary of to
panchayat to local government boundaries
so whenever whenever we go
we were very very
privilege that the head of the local
governments come to visit us and this
time they head to the local governments
the two heads of the local governments
came to visit too because our houses
exactly on the boundary of these two
panchayats
so I asked one of the one of the heads
so what’s what’s different in your life
these days and he said you know I’m
getting this money from central
government I’m using it with the
citizens to build roads you see that
road you came in today remember last
time you came it was flooded today is
done money that has been transferred to
them in conjunction with the citizen
they’ve decided to fix the road so I
asked the other local government leaders
so what is change for you he said I
didn’t get that money
I said why he said I didn’t pass an
audit my mind my books were bad I have
to fix it in order to get the money
fascinating first money is going to the
local government to make choices at the
local level – there’s competition right
you just don’t get the money simply to
use you have to prove that you’re able
to manage it that creates competition
between local governments to change who
they are and how they how they function
so my friends what do these examples
tell us about where does disruption come
from what we have learned in development
disruption comes if you focus on
behavior change not on hardware or let
me say differently that you deliver
Hardware through behavior change one to
that you make women center of your
delivery system that has been an
extraordinary lesson across the world
but as women have been brought into the
delivery system it has changed the
nature of the fight against poverty
third you make it demand driven you let
the bottom tell you what is needed to be
done rather than the top coming down
fourth you link communities and
collectives to the market the market is
really powerful but if connected to
communities it’s a partnership that will
change service delivery completely but
one of the most important lesson in the
disruption is you have to bring the
citizen close to the state and the state
close to the citizen empowerment of
local government why I say that is
simply because no matter what we do in a
pilot
it cannot be scaled up without the state
actually being an enabler and the only
way a state is an enabler is when the
state invests in itself to figure out
mechanisms of linking up with the
citizens and that changes completely the
nature of how service delivery is done
you know for me the biggest disruption
in the last 25 years and that’s how long
I’ve been in the World Bank has been the
quiet revolution inside the World Bank
traditionally we look at the World Bank
as here they go again
privatize your macroeconomic stability
fund big infrastructure we do all of
that but we only do that in a context
where we have learned the art of
disruption or at least learned the
tradition of change comes from being
disruptors the world being a disrupter
that itself is a very disruptive use and
I have to hand it to you to invite me in
front of all of you to speak as a world
banker on disruption but this is what we
have learned that it will as a World
Bank which is owned by 180 countries
working across the world if we can be a
disruptor with the way we support
countries that certainly service
delivery will change certainly today we
will help India move from 600 million
people in the open defecation to those
who have the dignity of being able to
have their old toilets and use their own
toilet ultimately disruption is only for
one one purpose it is the purpose that
the future belongs to them that the
future is they carry what they’re not
the burdens of poverty but the burdens
of hope that they can do whatever they
want and that is the power of disruption
share no points but I may have a couple
of stories nevertheless you know I first
came to to India in year 2000 with the
World Bank and was working on water and
sanitation and when I arrived in India I
discovered an incredible an incredible
challenge faced in the nation
600 million people use the outside for
toilets open defecation is the norm when
I first discovered this I said well you
know this is just merely an expression
of underdevelopment of poverty nothing
more and surely it’s just inconvenience
and like a good economist I said to
myself as incomes will grow over time
people will build their own toilets but
what I discovered that what I call
inconvenience are just a symptom of
already was very deeply an issue of
dignity when people have no other place
but to go outside is a non front to who
you are and the world around you
but then I discovered even more what he
discovered is most of the health
problems that people face and in
particular poor people come from the
fact that sanitation hygiene behaviors
are extremely weak out there when people
are defecating in the open that very act
pollutes water and that very water
enters the mouths of children girls boys
men and women and sickness and the loss
of life and the loss of time so there’s
something far deeper in this problem of
open defecation but he didn’t stop there
what I discovered is that the full
burden of open defecation was fully on
women women wake up girls wake up
early in the morning to go to the
bathroom and they wait all day long in
the evening to go to the bathroom
outside because that’s the only time
they have some security quote unquote
you know that health problems that
emerge when you can only go to the
bathroom early in the morning and late
in the evening
such was the burden of open defecation
after that that women and girls and the
security they face going out in the open
and you’ve heard stories of horrendous
rape if not snakes
so clearly the simple issue of 600
million people going out into the open
which I conveniently called merely an
expression of poverty was deep deep
expression of dignity of problems of
health and worse a clear clear burden on
women and girls and then a couple of
years in this country I and my
colleagues discovered something quite
interesting
we discovered a village in Bangladesh
which proudly showed a sign which says
no one defecates in the opened this was
fascinating what is it that people would
put up a sign with such pride well very
interestingly to solve the problem of
open defecation what governance
governments around the world including
mine in Bangladesh including India we’re
doing what mechanist would do you don’t
have a toilet I’ll build a toilet for
you I’ll hand it to you for an economist
that was even better if you give
something free certainly the demand for
it would go up but what we discovered is
that you handed the toilets to people
and what did people do that converted
them into storage places they converted
them into animal sheds and some even
converted them into puja Hut but no one
used it for toilets and then we
discovered this village in which a sign
went up and says we do not defecate we
be open and then a couple of years later
we found another sign in Maharashtra
which says we do not marry our girls to
villages that practice open defecation
what was going on what we discovered in
this village was a group of civil
society organizations that had come into
the village and that brought the village
together and walked them through what
they called the walk of shame and what
the walk of shame showed to the villages
whether they were rich villages or poor
villages whether they came from upper
caste or lower caste what they showed to
them is that your behavior of open
defecation was hurting you your children
suddenly that village turned around in
the recognition that they have to take
that they have to make a difference and
what we discovered was village after
village began to build their own toilets
and began to practice good sanitation a
completely different mode of delivery
the one that we were very comfortable
with middle toilet kind of do people on
the other hand and group of NGOs said
it’s not about building it’s about
changing behavior it’s about bringing
collectives together communities
together and actually trying to show
that you can make a difference
there was a complete disruption in
service delivery and he woke me up to
the reality that if we’re going to deal
with problems of poverty we could not
just come up with the whole solution of
government coming in and building from
the top you have to disrupt that simple
linear way of delivering up to a
completely different way of thinking to
a completely different way of delivery
and what the village in Bangladesh
showed and what the village in
Maharashtra showed was that you actually
have to talk to communities and you have
to get communities involved and let them
figure out the solution of development
and in this case there were two very
very important elements in the in the
story of disruption one aim to deal with
behavior not the physical building of
toilets and to don’t talk to the
individual talk to the collective why
the collective two very important reason
one person in a village may have good
sanitation behavior another one may have
poor sanitation behavior both of them
will suffer and then both of them
jointly actually have good sanitation
behavior the health impact could not be
felt by the others
they were the economists called
externality was the first reason to
bring the collective collective together
extremely important the other one is
when you bring a collective together the
collective creates a peer pressure
they monitor each other we hold each
other accountable extraordinary that
people from high caste would actually
give land to people from poor cows lower
cost to build toilets that’s how big a
change that’s how big a shit that had
happened you can imagine I was a
complete convert I was a zealot if you
will and I would go around all over
India talking about this and what I
discovered where villages going and
talking to other villages other villages
crossing state boundaries and talking
with others and the idea that open
defecation had to stop was coming from
the conversation among communities
another big destructive factor in how
development happens not because
governments talk to government but
communities talk to communities my
passion on this was so much and I used
to talk about it all the time that when
my daughter who was then five years old
was asking her school to art school can
you draw something which which basically
reflects what your father does it work
what he does at work this is what my
daughter came up with I was the plumber
I was the sanitation worker it’s
probably the most proudest gift my
daughter gave me because I had learned
to move away from my narrow top-down
economists perspective web development
men I was disrupted in understanding the
development was far more than top-down
it was about communities of us
collectivities about behavior change let
me take you to another country
Madagascar Madagascar was facing serious
issues where children were not going to
school or were dropping out of school
one one set of problems the second set
of problem was that nutrition for
children at an early age was not been
given and you know this is a this is a
very challenging story that when
children babies born and from that early
stage the first thousand days for the
first three years if they’re not given
good nutrition if they’re not taken care
of if they don’t have good sanitation
what you actually have is stunting
something comes up as height four eight
so physically your height for age is
smaller because you’ve faced all these
problems when you were growing up but
more than that during these first
thousand days and indeed the first three
years your cognitive power does not grow
so a poor child who grows up in a world
of poor sanitation poor nutrition enters
the world already defeated because their
ability to learn is already stunted how
do you then turn this around well in
Madagascar they found a innovative idea
they created what a known as
unconditional cash transfers very simply
targets were set out very poor families
were identified and they were given cash
an income support at that stage the idea
of just getting income support to poor
families waste of money
well you know what the men will capture
it they’ll go drinking oh these people
will use it in a different way
top-down right condescending in the way
service delivery rather give them health
schools give them nutrition programs
again top-down you turn this around and
you give households and in particular
women cash transfers unconditional in
your name here it is you come and you
can see
lining up to get their cash transfer
every two months and all you do is you
talk about what it means to have good
nutrition what it means to breastfeed
your child what it means to send your
children to school extraordinary results
within a year you’ve found stunting
results beginning to change we didn’t
hear you began to see children going to
school we didn’t hear you began to see
nutritionist being being fed to children
in a different way and the power of
disruption here was cash transfers
directly in the hands of women and a
conversation between women about what
that cash transfer to do to you this
became a nationwide story let me take
you from there to Bangladesh my country
and about two decades ago we found
ourselves in a deep problem and the deep
problem is you have any classroom
secondary primary the secondary school
in particular maybe 20 25 percent of
that classroom were girls
the rest were boys and if you looked at
the dropout rates from secondary school
it was the girl that would drop out more
than the boy it was a serious serious
gender issue and one with the natural
natural solution build more schools try
to get girls to come to the schools
right get the state to bring more school
student to the table wasn’t working what
happened well we took a program which
was at a pilot stage in the World Bank
and scaled it up in the name of every
girl create a bank account give them a
scholarship but what were the conditions
of that scholarship you have to go to
school in the ten seventy five percent
of the time
– you have to pass the final exam three
your family cannot marry you off
certainly during the school cycle in two
decades we found that the percentage of
girls went from about 25 percent in a
classroom fifty-five percent of a
possible combination became one of the
first countries that were able to turn
around and create gender equity as
measured by by by the SDGs phenomenon
and again what was it you trusted you
trusted families to make the right
decision by giving power directly to the
client so it was an extraordinary lesson
for all of us in the World Bank and the
World Bank to come in and provide that
kind of resource let me bring you back
to – India and an extraordinary
revolution is happening right now in
India that is not well known across
states in India women for women have
been organized in self-help groups these
self-help groups are places where women
growth agency they talk to each other
they learn about each other and they
invest in economic activities over a
period of 15 years 3.5 million rural
poor women were organized into self-help
groups they saved two billion dollars
and they use that money to leverage more
than 20 billion from financial
institutions today when you go to some
of these self-help groups of women’s
women programs one of the extraordinary
things you will learn is that many of
them don’t send their children to free
public schools they actually borrow
money to century
to private schools where they believe
the education is better poor women
organized organizing themselves
borrowing money to invest in their
children when they have three schools
next door that is the power of change
that you are seeing across India even
more over the years in these self-help
groups as Agency has been strengthened
we now find in many states Bihar Kerala
Jharkand a portion of these women are
actually running as an child leaders and
learning getting into into into politics
and changing the nature of programs
again that linear top-down delivery to
poor households turn on its head and say
you are empowered to deliver a
disruption in the way we do service
delivery leads to incredibly different
accounts now you may think that is it
all about communities don’t we actually
change institutions whether they are
electricity companies or governments
I’ll give you one example negative in
Bangladesh in West Bengal in Kerala a
fundamental shift has happened that
money that’s run by either the central
government or run by the state
government that money is transferred to
local governments and chives and
panchayat have to have systems of
service delivery that are linked to
communities this is what I call bringing
the state closer to the citizen this
movement of service delivery by
empowering local governments is
transforming many parts of the world my
own country is an incredible example I
remember what is going to our village in
Bangladesh and our house is actually
built which crosses the boundary of to
panchayat to local government boundaries
so whenever whenever we go
we were very very
privilege that the head of the local
governments come to visit us and this
time they head to the local governments
the two heads of the local governments
came to visit too because our houses
exactly on the boundary of these two
panchayats
so I asked one of the one of the heads
so what’s what’s different in your life
these days and he said you know I’m
getting this money from central
government I’m using it with the
citizens to build roads you see that
road you came in today remember last
time you came it was flooded today is
done money that has been transferred to
them in conjunction with the citizen
they’ve decided to fix the road so I
asked the other local government leaders
so what is change for you he said I
didn’t get that money
I said why he said I didn’t pass an
audit my mind my books were bad I have
to fix it in order to get the money
fascinating first money is going to the
local government to make choices at the
local level – there’s competition right
you just don’t get the money simply to
use you have to prove that you’re able
to manage it that creates competition
between local governments to change who
they are and how they how they function
so my friends what do these examples
tell us about where does disruption come
from what we have learned in development
disruption comes if you focus on
behavior change not on hardware or let
me say differently that you deliver
Hardware through behavior change one to
that you make women center of your
delivery system that has been an
extraordinary lesson across the world
but as women have been brought into the
delivery system it has changed the
nature of the fight against poverty
third you make it demand driven you let
the bottom tell you what is needed to be
done rather than the top coming down
fourth you link communities and
collectives to the market the market is
really powerful but if connected to
communities it’s a partnership that will
change service delivery completely but
one of the most important lesson in the
disruption is you have to bring the
citizen close to the state and the state
close to the citizen empowerment of
local government why I say that is
simply because no matter what we do in a
pilot
it cannot be scaled up without the state
actually being an enabler and the only
way a state is an enabler is when the
state invests in itself to figure out
mechanisms of linking up with the
citizens and that changes completely the
nature of how service delivery is done
you know for me the biggest disruption
in the last 25 years and that’s how long
I’ve been in the World Bank has been the
quiet revolution inside the World Bank
traditionally we look at the World Bank
as here they go again
privatize your macroeconomic stability
fund big infrastructure we do all of
that but we only do that in a context
where we have learned the art of
disruption or at least learned the
tradition of change comes from being
disruptors the world being a disrupter
that itself is a very disruptive use and
I have to hand it to you to invite me in
front of all of you to speak as a world
banker on disruption but this is what we
have learned that it will as a World
Bank which is owned by 180 countries
working across the world if we can be a
disruptor with the way we support
countries that certainly service
delivery will change certainly today we
will help India move from 600 million
people in the open defecation to those
who have the dignity of being able to
have their old toilets and use their own
toilet ultimately disruption is only for
one one purpose it is the purpose that
the future belongs to them that the
future is they carry what they’re not
the burdens of poverty but the burdens
of hope that they can do whatever they
want and that is the power of disruption
Please follow and like us: