Summary:
- Drawing on The Prosperity Paradox, the article argues that most development aid has historically relied on push strategies that deliver inputs without creating incentives, understanding real Jobs to Be Done, or building systems that sustain themselves.
- Although push strategies may provide short-term relief, they often fail to scale because they are not self-reinforcing and require repeated donations rather than investment.
- By contrast, pull strategies that are rooted in market-creating innovation, profit, and demand can align incentives, sustain institutions, and turn aid into a pathway to enduring prosperity.
Every year, billions of dollars flow into development aid. Even amid shrinking budgets in 2025, the OECD projection for official development assistance is about 170 to 186 billion dollars. Yet despite this flow of capital, development crises persist and in many cases, worsen. Why is it that development aid so often fails to scale into lasting prosperity?
For my first blog of the year, I want to revisit one of my favorite chapters of The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty: the tale of two strategies—push versus pull. At a moment when funding is tightening and development actors are being asked to do more with less, understanding which strategy actually scales matters more than ever.
The puzzle worth revisiting
Push strategies are often driven by the priorities of their originators, typically experts in a particular field of development, and result in solutions that are recommended, and then delivered, to low-income countries.
For decades, development and development organizations have relied heavily on these push strategies, directing resources into poor countries in an effort to help them begin a march toward prosperity. Sometimes (often) these resources are welcomed. Think new school uniforms or water wells or vaccines. Other times, they go unused. Think toilets or large sporting infrastructure or clean water equipment.
Either way, despite good intentions and massive spending, push strategies are temporarily successful at best and structurally incapable of scaling. They tend to focus on inputs delivered rather than outcomes sustained. They treat poverty as something to be managed, rather than solved, and more critically what’s missing is innovation.
The mechanism of failure
As The Prosperity Paradox explains:
“Development and prosperity take root when we develop innovations that pull in necessary resources a society requires. Once a new innovation that is profitable to the stakeholders in the economy (including investors, entrepreneurs, customers, and the government) is introduced, the stakeholders are often incentivized to help maintain the resources the innovation has pulled in – such as infrastructures, education, and even policies”.
Push strategies generally fail because they lack this kind of innovation. More specifically, they fail for three related reasons: they ignore the Job to Be Done, they fail to create incentives to maintain systems, and they are not self-reinforcing.
First, push strategies overlook the Job to Be Done. Jobs to Be Done is a theory lens that reveals the circumstances and forces that drive people toward or away from decisions. When a Job arises in someone’s life, they actively “hire” and pull in a product or service to help them get that Job done.
Push strategies skip this step. In The Prosperity Paradox, one example is the mass construction of toilets in India under the well-intentioned “Clean India” mission. Millions of toilets were built, yet many went unused. Scarce water was prioritized for drinking and bathing, not for cleaning toilets, and hastily installed facilities became unsanitary and unpleasant. Another recent real world example comes from Ethiopia, where donor-delivered clean-water equipment (worth around $4 million) was lost and unused despite ongoing water access challenges. In both of these cases the issue wasn’t a lack of infrastructure, it was a lack of understanding of the Job people were actually trying to get done, and the constraints shaping their circumstances.
Second, push strategies fail to create incentives to maintain systems. When the 2010 World Cup ended in South Africa, a stadium built near Cape Town remained underutilized and expensive to maintain. At smaller scales, the same pattern repeats itself: once a project is “completed” and funding ends, upkeep often ends with it. Infrastructure breaks down, services fade, and communities are left feeling back at square one. In push strategies, no actor is economically incentivized to sustain quality, access, or continuity.
Third, and sequentially, push strategies are not self-reinforcing. They do not generate revenue, profit, or feedback loops. Scaling requires repeated investment. Push strategies, by contrast, require repeated donations.
None of this is to say that push strategies are useless. They can deliver relief, and relief is essential in moments of acute crisis. But relief is not the same as resilience, and definitely not the same as prosperity.
The better alternative
Pull strategies offer a fundamentally different path. They share three defining characteristics.
First, they often originate from innovators on the ground who are responding to the struggles of everyday consumers or specific market demands. Second, pull strategies have more of an investigative or inquisitorial approach to problem-solving as opposed to a more advocacy or assertive approach. And third, they focus on creating, or responding to the needs of, a market first.
When people recognize a Job, they actively pull solutions into their lives. Pull strategies don’t start with infrastructure, they start with an innovation that creates demand, that then justifies infrastructure. The innovation designed around the demand from the market is what makes pull strategies sustainable and scalable.
Think of it like a reinforcing loop. A profitable innovation creates incentives for investors, entrepreneurs, and governments which in turn leads to stronger and more durable institutions. Profit is not extractive here, it’s simply what aligns incentives across the system.
Push strategies are indispensable in moments of acute crisis. But by design, they cannot scale into sustainable development. Aid may be able to push systems into existence, but markets can pull systems into permanence. So if development efforts were structured to support pull strategies by backing market creators, addressing real Jobs to Be Done, and building systems around demand-driven solutions, development aid could finally scale and create the prosperity it has been so persistently trying to achieve.
