Finding What’s Appropriate

Parag Gupta
Founder, Waste Ventures

This question first of all comes up when it comes to technology. We’ve discussed it both here and on our Waste Ventures blog, there are many different examples of how technology that is seen as "better" or "more advanced" is simply not appropriate. What’s been useful and cost-effective in New York can easily be misplaced and expensive in Mumbai.  

Where the appropriateness of any given technology is relatively easy to evaluate – as long as you have your "bigger"-"newer"-"more modern"-blinders off – looking at business processes can be more difficult. Does it make sense for us to move our waste picker companies to digital systems for accounting & monitoring? There are clear benefits, but is it appropriate? An attempt at increasing efficiency and transparency, can easily back-fire through the fact that only staff members explicitly trained to use the systems would have access to it – thus in effect leading to a decrease in transparency.

Most thorny however are questions relating to social appropriateness. Providing waste pickers with ID cards and uniforms helps reduce persecution, but can lead to displacement of waste pickers unable or unwilling to get ID cards – for example illegal migrants or people escaping previous persecution by authorities. In recycling, waste pickers are often exploited by the long value-chain of recycler they feed in to through predatory lending, faked weights and lack of market information. Yet, many waste pickers will resist to challenge and/or change whom they sell their materials to due to the basic form of social protection that this relationship provides them. Intervening in this relationship might be economically beneficially for the waste picker, but socially ruinous. 

These questions and challenges are crucial to ask all along the way of building out any intervention. However, while asking all these questions, we also need to watch out so that the question of appropriateness doesn’t become a blockage to deliver radical, systematic improvements.

We’d like to hear from you:

• What’s your method of evaluating the appropriateness of an intervention?
• What are the tell-tale signs of an interventions that’s appropriate and one that’s not?
• How do you ensure that you keep on asking yourself tough questions about your intervention while at the same time doesn’t let that block from you for implementing the changes you seek?