Perry Maddox predicts 9 international development trends set to shape the next 5 years and explores what it means for leaders.
Predicting the future is a fool’s errand.
Seriously, who would have predicted what happened in 2020? Apart from the scientists who did, of course.
So, when my board recently asked for a paper on the future of international development, I had to laugh a little. I’m no futurist. Channelling more fool than scientist, here is what I told them, summarized below in 9 trends.
I’d love to know what you think about these predictions!
International Development Trends 1 & 2: The Big Picture
1. We will fall further behind. Five years from now, Global Goal progress will be well off track, as will climate commitments.
We will have missed the 1.5 degree warming limit, and 600 million of 1 billion youth entering the job market by 2025 will largely not have found jobs. In 2025, expect many actors to double down on the Global Goals – accelerating to catch up in the last 5 years – but disillusionment with these goals will also grow.
The question is whether we enter the final 5 years with momentum toward catching up or whether the Global Goals will finish with a whimper.
2. Covid casts a long shadow. The pandemic will shape our world for years to come.
The US won’t reach herd immunity. Kenya may only vaccinate 30% of its population by 2023, and with much of the developing world largely dependent on a single vaccine manufacturer at present, we are unlikely to see a critical mass of the global population vaccinated soon.
As such, the risk from variants will grow, as will the knock-on impacts to education, economies and societies for years.
International Development Trends 3 & 4: Thematic Trends
3. Climate, Equity & Justice, Misinformation, Inequality & Migration. These mega-challenges will dominate, not the least because tech-driven change is worsening them. These issues could create extinction-level global risk, more frequent natural disasters, and serious fractures in social contracts and societies globally.
Whereas poverty was once the north star of our field, its primacy will be diluted.
Instead, we will grapple with an increasingly complicated field: mega-problems that transcend developed-developing binaries; medium income countries raising different challenges around inequality; budget drain from increasingly frequent humanitarian crises; a proliferation of thematic focus areas from global public goods to niche, local issues; and, decolonizing our own field.
4. It’s Still the Economy, silly. The global jobs crisis will continue, at least for those who need the jobs most.
For all the experts and studies in youth employment I’ve encountered, nobody really knows how to solve this scale of problem without a massive wave of job creation. Unless global economies take off, a range of adaptive strategies will be needed for a mass of stuck, unemployed youth.
Meanwhile, governments will face huge pandemic borrowing bills to be repaid for years to come, and many economies will take years to recover from the pandemic’s damage. Whether we are set to experience a post-pandemic ‘roaring 20s’ or a 70s style stagflation is up for debate, but inequality grew heavily in both decades.
The road to recovery will be rocky, varying by country and by household, with a K-shaped recovery increasing inequality overall.
International Development Trends 5-7 : Waves of Change
5. The Old and the Young. The rest of this century projects as a longevity revolution. By 2050, the 700 million old people today will swell to nearly 1.5 billion. In just thirty years, 20 percent of the world will be over 60 years of age. Sub-Saharan Africa is the outlier, where youth populations will increase 50% by 2050.
How a relatively younger Africa’s needs are considered alongside global ageing priorities will be of critical importance.
6. Youth-Powered Innovation Accelerates. A new wave of youth-powered innovation, organizing and activism will grow. From the School Strikes for Climate (beginning only 2.5 years ago) to a resurgence of protests often led by youth reaching record highs in 2020, we see today how a new range of youth-powered activism will shape engagement on big issues. The resilience and creativity of this action bears unique attention, as does the innovation it will birth, because
The demographic momentum of the largest youth generation ever remains a shaping force.
7. The Political Wave Machine. Sadly, rising nationalism and shrinking civic space shows few signs of slowing. Recent UK & US elections showed that aid budgets are easy fodder for partisan politics. A diminished role for ‘global Britain’ is obvious between Brexit and deep FCDO cuts. The Biden administration promises a US return to multilateral, development and climate engagement, but his predecessor’s unilateralism will take years to repair. As China assertively lays claim to leadership on the African continent, rising influence from actors in China and the Middle East will increasingly challenge Western hegemony over aid budgets.
No matter the ‘donor’ country, domestic political moods will shape generosity toward the developing world.
International Development Trends 8-9: Changing Actors
8. Diversification of Actors and Funding. These days everyone predicts an increasingly diverse multi-actor global system for development.
I predict greater organizational inequality.
Large INGOs, multilaterals, and donors will lumber on as power-holding incumbents dominating resources in our field, buoyed by private-style contracting mechanisms and cartel-like membership bodies. Grassroots action will continue to proliferate in innovative ways, but small actors face a harsh starvation cycle. In the middle, business as usual might could mean extinction for the mid-sized INGO. All the while, for-profit actors will quietly eat up more and more of global development budgets.
On the funder side, actors like Giving Pledge signatories and participatory, trust-based grant-makers offer new visions for philanthropy. New funding mechanisms stand to proliferate, but none seem ready to truly reshape the field, just yet.
9. #MeToo or #MaybeNot? Will the scandals like #AidToo that rocked our sector and the social forces of Black Lives Matter add up to a major change? Perhaps not as much as we would hope. It’s not like these issues are new.
Divergence is more likely.
A cadre of progressive organizations and funders will forge a different path that returns power and seeks to restore justice. On the other end, many actors will be slow to change, hobbled by dated leadership or tempted by toothless mainstreaming and performative box-ticking.
Localization looks like a trend set to continue, driven more by funders than by INGOs. If anything, we may see a telling flashpoint if big INGOs, donors, corporates and multilaterals ignore calls for local leadership.
Still, a new minimum standard is here. Organizations that are not led, staffed and governed by people who are representative of the communities they serve will struggle to claim legitimacy and to access funds from progressive donors.
What’s it Mean for Leaders?
In a word, VUCA.
Our world will become more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
This can be positive with new technology and new ways of organizing increasing our capacity to make change happen. But the macro-trends do not point to smooth sailing ahead. In 2018, sector leaders already saw a fragmented development ecosystem and worried about how to stay relevant in a world that is heading in many different directions at once.
That was before the pandemic. As we look ahead:
- Agility and resilience will become the backbone of successful organizations, while a cultural predisposition toward equity, change and innovation will underpin successful strategy.
- Dated financial thinking and business models stand to be disrupted and exposed, brutally. Factors like liquidity, reserves and treasury management will rapidly overshadow income when it comes to financial health.
- Inclusion, trust and culture will increasingly prove to be the reagents for true organizational development, and for attracting the talent you need for a changing world.
Buckle up leaders. Volatility is ahead.
The question is whether we will be broken by it, or whether we leverage a changing world to cut ties with dated approaches, business models, and today’s strategic thinking.
When we do that, we’ll be well placed to ride the waves of change in our field.
