Thank you. That is, in some ways, exactly the right dilemma that we face.
There are a number of things that one would want to unpack about this. What I guess I would say is that this goes to my last point about not Christmas-treeing the DFI with objectives that are all valid and make us feel good, but are not verifiable. More importantly, in this case, if you cannot connect an outcome to the activity of the DFI, then it is a bit of a mug's game to say that it was our $50-million investment that resulted in this change. That is why also, by the way, about the time that I wrote that op-ed, some of us, although we consider ourselves development-friendly, were skeptical about the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act, which I know several of my colleagues in the development business supported simply because of the measurability and the connection issue.
I would say give the DFI a mandate to achieve development, recognize that development is more than reducing income poverty, and that, as you pointed out, the human development index—at the very least, which the UNDP measures and propagates every year—has other dimensions to it, of which health, education, and the gender elements of these are important. There may be cases—in fact, my colleague gave the example—for not investing in infrastructure if this is already publicly provided for the very poor. That may well be, but suppose the DFI invested in—the way they have in Stockholm—a green train line between the airport and the city or connecting suburbs to a city, which, in fact, poor people would use. I would argue that anecdotally this is a good investment to make and it's good for development. However, if then someone asked me to show that this investment resulted in a reduction in poverty, either narrowly or widely defined, I'd be hard pressed to do so. In fact, three quarters of my organization would just be writing reports trying to convince folks about that.
I think we're going to need some judgment and common sense, and this is why I'm arguing for small, crown corporation-like professional organizations staffed by experts to whom we should give the mandate because we trust what they're doing.