In marketing, the first question you ask is, who is my competitor and what is my position, but as Neela explains, “in development we don’t think we have competitors, we think of our end-users as beneficiaries,” assuming that they are benefitting from what we offer them. “But there are always competitors…and if we tend to think of them as customers for our services, rather than beneficiaries, we’d start to think about, what is competing for their time, and attention and limited resources and how can we beat that competition”? We cannot expect people to simply find a service attractive because it is free, and instead need to ask, who are we competing against?

Neela considers herself a ‘double agent’ having worked in both India and the US. For her, double agents are key in activating BI across the global South. “It’s our responsibility to sort of advance the field, not by parachuting in and doing the work and leaving, but really thinking through how we can build local capacity quickly enough”.