A Development Problem With a Moral Dimension
Development organisations rarely talk directly about evil. We talk about poverty, exclusion, inadequate infrastructure, under-funded health systems — the measurable correlates of human suffering that our programmes address. But beneath many of those conditions lies something that data alone cannot capture: behaviour that harms others, sometimes wilfully, sometimes through negligence, and often through the quiet normalisation of systems that produce unjust outcomes.
This essay takes that problem seriously. It draws on philosopher Lars Svendsen's taxonomy to distinguish four categories of harmful behaviour: demonic evil (cruelty pursued for its own sake), instrumental evil (harm as a means to other ends), idealistic evil (violence justified by an abstract cause), and stupid evil (preventable harm through negligence or indifference). Each of these operates in every society, and each creates conditions in which development is harder, slower, and more fragile than it needs to be.
How Evil Undermines Development
The connection is direct. Corruption diverts resources from schools, clinics, and community infrastructure to private accumulation. Greed at institutional and systemic levels means that merit becomes secondary to personal connections — that the capable student from a poor community loses the scholarship to the well-connected one, that the effective health worker is passed over for promotion in favour of someone with the right affiliations. "Evil ruptures our relationship with one another," as the essay puts it, and that rupture is expensive. It erodes public trust, reduces cooperation, and makes collective action — the basis of effective development — much harder to sustain.
Disproportionate harm falls on the already disadvantaged. This is not coincidence. Systems that enable harmful behaviour tend to concentrate its costs on those with the least power to resist or exit.
Education as the Long-Term Response
The essay argues that the response to this problem is not primarily legislative, though good law matters. It is educational. Education — properly conceived — builds the moral consciousness and the capacity for critical reflection that makes citizens less susceptible to systems that harm them and less likely to perpetuate harm themselves.
But this requires education that has moved beyond the exam-focused curricula that dominate much of the West African schooling landscape. When education is primarily instrumental — a credential to be gained, a route to personal enrichment — it cannot do the work of values formation. Schools need to be what they can be at their best: places where knowledge is connected to its consequences, where students learn to think about their place in a community and their responsibilities toward it.
What This Means for MIWA
MIWA's Education Access programme exists in precisely this space. We are not simply trying to get more children into school — though that matters. We are investing in education that equips people to participate meaningfully in the decisions that shape their communities and their lives.
Sustainable development, as the essay argues, is contingent on justice and on attitudinal transformation. The work is slow. It cannot be measured in a single reporting cycle. But it is foundational — and it is the kind of work that MIWA, alongside our partner communities and volunteers, is committed to for the long term.