“I was completely hit by the poverty that I was seeing”
Suma Chakrabarti has more than 40 years of experience in international development cooperation. Here, he talks about what drew him to this fields, how foreign advisory and development cooperation are changing – and why he thinks that his cultural background is a competitive advantage.
Your career as a foreign advisor bridges more than four decades. What drew you to this field first – and what has kept you engaged over the years?
I have been a foreign advisor at various points in my career. I was born in India and went to England with my parents in 1964, when I was five. On a trip back to India in 1969, I was completely hit by the poverty that I was seeing. Masses of people lying on platforms in the Calcutta main station, begging. It was like one of those Hieronymous Bosch paintings from the Middle Ages. That image inspired me to work in the field of development and kept me engaged.
I also realized that I had a good way of connecting with people. Working with foreign government leaders, you need to understand where they're coming from. What is motivating them? What are they frightened of? You have to actually understand their characters for your advice to have impact.
You were born India and raised in the UK. How do different cultural backgrounds help you establish a connection to people?
One advantage of being a migrant is that you carry more than one culture inside you. When we moved to Britain, I was not going to live there forever. I was going to go back. And India, or my part of India, which is West Bengal, is fundamental to my character. I have a good understanding of what makes people tick, what is on their minds. And so I've come to realize that one of the reasons why I'm able to connect with people of different cultures is because my own cultures are mixed. That also may be part of my empathetic approach to providing advice. And the importance of empathy in my industry is one of the aspects I’d like to do research on when I'm in Berlin as a fellow.
The geopolitical environment is becoming kind of fragmented, polarized. How do you see the role of foreign advisors under these circumstances?
Well, I think the aid industry is dying. In Britain, for example, our jewel in the development crown, the Department for International Development, after which BMZ in Germany is modeled, actually got destroyed by Boris Johnson. A lot of people thought that when Keir Starmer and Labor come to power, there'll be good times again, but that’s not the case. We've had a generational shift, whereby even the parties on the left are no longer interested in this agenda. They've also become very inward-looking as well. This means the emerging markets and developing countries have to become much more self-reliant, which is no bad thing.
“The emerging markets and developing countries have to become more self-reliant.”
You state that there has been a shift towards more specialized advisors. What are the reasons for this development?
Many countries from the Global South no longer need anyone to tell them whether a particular investment should go ahead or not. They can do that themselves. Instead, their economic development now requires more specialized advice. Let’s take Kenya as an example: I think they're not going to ask for how you build a public civil service because they've got a pretty good one already. But they may want to build a regulator for the banking industry, which requires more specialist advice.
Another reason is that aid budgets from the West are declining. Lots of money that we used to put into health and education programs won't be there much longer. What the West is going to be able to offer is specialized advisory. And that's what you're going to focus on.
Looking forward to your time as a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow in Berlin, what are other things you want to explore?
I like that mixture of politics and art that Berlin has. So it's always a good place to visit, I find it very refreshing intellectually. It's also a good place for me because some of the people I want to interview are there. There'll be people in the German parliament and government that I'd like to talk to. My work will very much be a reflection of my professional experience. I'm not an academic trying to do primary research. I'm trying to compare the various times I've been an advisor and trying to understand in which occasions my advice was being taken forward and in which occasions it didn't work and why. So my goal as a fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy is to write about international development and the work that I've done in that area. I think what'll come out of Berlin is a long article. And then potentially that becoming part of a book.