Some thoughts on career choices in development

This post will summarise my understanding of choices available for youngsters interested in development and policy making. 

There are perhaps ten categories of options that are available for anyone who wants to pursue a career in development and public policy:

1. Government - eg. state, national, and local government entities, and public sector organisations.

2. Multilateral and bilateral organisations (aid money) - eg. World Bank, ADB, IMF, WHO, UNICEF, DFID and CDC (UK), USAID and DFC (US), SIDA (Sweden), NORAD (Norway) etc

3. Philanthropic donors - eg Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), Omidyar Networks, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF), Tata Trusts, Skoll Foundation etc

4. Impact investors - eg. Avishkaar, AgDevCo, Global Innovation Fund, Lok Capital, Elevar Equity, Unitus Impact, Acumen, Accion International etc

5. Consultants - eg. Dalberg, Bridgespan, IDInsight, and public policy consulting wings (an increasingly big share) of the mainstream consulting firms.

6. Solutions/service providers - eg. Central Square Foundation, EkStep or eGov Foundations, Dimagi, Technoserve, Precision Agriculture Development (PAD) etc. 

7. Field NGOs - eg. Pratham, SEWA, Pradhan, Grameen Foundation, BRAC, RDRS etc

8. Entrepreneurs - eg. Edtech/Medtech/Fintech/Agtech companies, micro-finance firms, technology platform startups etc

9. Research - eg. think tanks (NIPFP, NCAER, CPR, J-PAL, etc), or academic positions in Universities and College.

10. Free-lance - eg. consulting (STCs), media etc

What are the considerations that one needs to keep in mind while making choices? Let me point to a few factors:

1. Scale - Government, at any level, operates at a scale that is unmatched, especially when we take the context of a country like India. In comparison, the vast majority of international development and policy making, except perhaps for the likes of aid agencies in smaller countries, is at a minuscule scale. 

While scale is important from the perspective of creating aggregate impact, it also runs the risk of being entangled in large bureaucracies. It is easy to get lost in the distance, comfort and inertia of the bureaucracies of governments or large multilateral organisations and loose sight of the primary objective. 

In contrast, smaller organisations, with their narrow and well-defined remits, have the freedom and ability to prioritise and focus on specific activities and thereby stand a greater likelihood of creating impact. Besides, being dependent on creating impact for their survival means that there is a greater degree of incentive alignment in these organisations. 

2. Work diversity - This is the choice between specialising in one area or being a generalist who engages with several sectors, or the choice between depth and breadth. Entrepreneurs, NGOs, and individual government departments belong to the former category, whereas an aid or donor entity or consultant typically belongs to the latter category. 

3. Ownership - There is the broad choice of being a public servant, working for the government, and a private employee. The latter, in turn, can be with a for-profit or a non-profit organisation. An important differentiating factor is the level of compensation that private sector offers (especially those like consulting and impact investing), which is far higher than that received by people working in governments. 

Further, apart from working for the government, it is also possible to work with the government by being a service provider or researcher or funder of activities in partnership with the government. Consultants, philanthropies, NGOs etc often work closely with governments.

4. Nature of activities - This refers to whether the activities are in the nature of directly implementing or executing something, or advising or funding someone else's execution. The former belongs the category of "doing" type entities and the latter to that of "saying" type ones. 

There is great value, especially early in a career, to roll up the sleeves and get hands dirty with direct execution. This is essential to make one aware of the messy and complex realities of doing development, something which can remain elusive for those not exposed even after a full career in development. In fact, I would go ahead and argue that it's almost impossible to contribute meaningfully or engage with satisfaction in development without having worked in the field and accumulated insights about how poor people live, informal markets operate, and governments work. 

It therefore may be useful to choose an area where one gets to work in the trenches in the early stages of career. This can provide a very good foundation to become more effective while working latter in any of the other areas. 

There are several other personal considerations. For example, what are the weights one attaches to aspects like work security, compensation, work-life balance and so on in your career objective function? The choices are a function of the weights we attach to these specific aspects.