Listening to People on the Receiving End of Aid
Posted on 1 September 2010 | 3 responses
This is the first in a series of blog posts on the work and findings of the Listening Project, which organized over 20 Listening Exercises in various contexts and regions since late 2005. The Listening Project is a systematic exploration of the insights of people who live in societies receiving international assistance (humanitarian assistance, development cooperation, peace-building activities, human rights work and environmental conservation). More than 130 international and local organizations contributed over 400 staff members to Listening Teams that held conversations with nearly 6,000 people over the last 5 years.
By Dayna Brown
The Listening Project has listened to the experiences and reflections of a wide range of local people (and not just “key stakeholders”), including aid recipients, community members and leaders, government officials, civil society and religious representatives, teachers, health workers, business people, academics, NGO and CBO staff, women, and youth.
Each Listening Exercise produced a report that captures in rich detail the stories, opinions and perspectives of local people on the cumulative effects of international assistance on their lives and their societies. The Listening Project is now analyzing the evidence from these conversations and is writing Issue Papers which highlight some of the common concerns that were raised by people across these locations.
What has been most striking to us is that how people experience international assistance and the system that they describe is remarkably similar across geographical areas and contexts.
While donors and aid agencies have committed to involving aid recipients more and to improving accountability (through the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the Accra Agenda for Action, the Good Humanitarian Donorship Initiative, the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership, etc.), we found that most donors and aid agencies do not spend much time listening to local people’s perspectives or reflecting on the impacts of their work, much less the cumulative effects of their and others’ interventions. Several people in different places said, “no one has ever asked us our opinion of aid before this.”
INGOs Should Align with Development Frameworks of Developing Countries
Posted on 10 August 2010 | No responses
By Steven Lawry
This is the second of two posts by Steven Lawry exploring why and how developing country governments should set a strong, clear frame for development efforts, and why and how donors and INGOs should work within that frame.
In my last post, I argued that INGOs tend not to work as closely as they should with governments in developing countries. This has many causes. An important one is that donors have found INGOs to be reasonably efficient vehicles for channeling funding to developing countries on terms that ensure the donors retain maximum control over program priorities and program management.
This is short-sighted and undercuts many benefits to development strategy and poverty reduction that would result where both donors and INGOs worked more closely with host governments. In this post, I offer some reflections on what can be gained by closer donor-INGO-host government management of development strategy and programming.
Donors Should Not Drive Development: Learning from Botswana
Posted on 9 August 2010 | No responses
By Steven Lawry
This is the first of two posts by Steven Lawry exploring why and how developing country governments should set a strong, clear frame for development efforts, and why and how donors and INGOs should work within that frame.
As a young man starting out in international development work in the 1970s, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana. But my only connection to the Peace Corps was a monthly paycheck (a very small one). I was for all intents and purposes a Botswana government civil servant. I held an established government post, Assistant Planner in the Department of Town and Regional Planning.
The Department was a unit of the Ministry of Local Government and Lands. I reported to a Senior Planner, a Swede funded by SIDA. She reported to the Director, who was seconded by UNDP. He reported to an Undersecretary in the Ministry, who was a Motswana, and so forth.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but what seemed to be a sensible and effective way of integrating overseas staff into a developing country’s public service was quite unusual. I came to learn that, in other countries, apart from a few high-level advisors, donor-funded staff usually worked in separate management units, located in aid missions or in the offices of donor-funded contractors and INGOs.
Should INGOs Work in Many Different Countries?
Posted on 5 August 2010 | 3 responses
By Jennifer Rubenstein
INGOs do not have enough aid resources (money and/or trained personnel) to do everything that they want to do. They must therefore make difficult decisions about how to allocate their limited resources. These decisions are shaped to some extent by more or less practical considerations, such as concerns about aid workers’ safety and the need to raise funds. But INGOs also take moral and ethical considerations into account. What sorts of moral and ethical considerations should INGOs deem relevant when making distributive decisions?
One consideration that INGOs seem to treat as morally relevant—at least in their public self-presentations— is the number of countries in which they work. For example:
• “We work in nearly 100 countries to overcome poverty and injustice.”
Some INGOs argue that working in many different countries is a means to other valuable ends. For example, Oxfam states (on page 5 of this report) that “with a programme spread across the world, Oxfam has a greater understanding of the many causes of poverty, and we can achieve greater impact.” The foregoing statements imply that working in many countries has intrinsic moral value. I am inclined to think that it does not.
Evaluating Advocacy? Start from the Beginning
Posted on 22 July 2010 | No responses
By Sherine Jayawickrama
Following this blog’s last several posts on impact measurement (and the discussion that it helped engender), I came across an interesting advocacy toolkit on the iScale website that describes a system that combines planning, monitoring and evaluation – all focused on helping advocates learn and make corrections in realtime.
The toolkit is quite detailed and prescribes a multi-step planning process that is likely to take a lot of time upfront, and it demonstrates just how complex multi-actor advocacy campaigns are and how challenging evaluating progress (let alone results) can be.
I like that, even as it seeks to build the mindset and infrastructure for evaluation from the outset of an advocacy campaign, the toolkit is realistic about how complex evaluating impact will be. It notes that “in most cases, no single actor, factor or strategy can independently create the change needed to achieve success,” and recognizes that “impact is attained through the combined and coordinated efforts of multiple actors… in conjunction with multiple external factors and conditions.”
The Limits of Nonprofit Impact: Examining A Recent Scholarly Analysis
Posted on 15 July 2010 | 2 responses
By Sherine Jayawickrama
A recent Harvard Business School working paper titled The Limits of Nonprofit Impact: A Contingency Framework for Measuring Social Performance (by Alnoor Ebrahim and V. Kasturi Rangan) comes to an interesting conclusion: that measuring impact only makes sense under a limited set of circumstances.
In their May 2010 paper, Ebrahim and Rangan consider the debates on performance and impact of nonprofit organizations playing out in private foundations, U.S. nonprofits and international development actors (both donor agencies and NGOs). They observe that there has been increasing pressure on NGOs to measure performance at all levels of the logic chain: from inputs, activities and outputs (that are under their control) to broader outcomes and impacts (that they have little control over).
Their review of evaluation literature finds that the term “impact evaluation” often refers to evaluations involving a counterfactual (what would have happened without the intervention being evaluated) and that experimental designs using randomized control trials (RCTs) are now considered the “gold standard” for assessing impact.
When Too Much Rigor Leads to Rigor Mortis: Valuing Experience, Judgment and Intuition in Nonprofit Management
Posted on 12 July 2010 | 5 responses
By Steven Lawry
Several powerful donors have concluded that nonprofits make inadequate use of impact assessment tools. They are backing up their arguments with an implicit threat: measure in particular ways or you don’t get the money. Wise nonprofit leaders know that the problems they work on are not susceptible to simple measurement. They know that the kind of formal impact measures some donors expect and management consulting firms prescribe are hard to come by honestly. They collect various data all the time to inform their judgment and decision-making and to spur learning. Now, data collection (to donor-specified standards) is increasingly used for accountability purposes.
This may have the effect of reducing the degrees of freedom nonprofit leaders have to innovate and to pursue promising but risky ideas (without the fear that failure to prove one idea will poison their chances to learn from that failure and try something else another day). As former Ford Foundation President Susan Berresford argues, insisting that grantees demonstrate measureable, short-term impact can have the effect of “miniaturizing ambition” for doing risky but potentially break-through work.
People who impose these restrictions confuse use of prescribed tools or achievement of certain outcomes as evidence of good management. Sometimes they are. But, in and of themselves, they hardly constitute an impressive tool kit of good management practice.
When Aid Bureaucracy and Development Clash: A Former USAID Administrator Speaks Out
Posted on 9 July 2010 | No responses
By Sherine Jayawickrama
A newly-published essay by Andrew Natsios – who served as USAID Administrator from 2001 to 2006 – lays bare the tension between the compliance side of aid bureaucracies and the programmatic side of those same agencies. He argues that the balance has now tipped so strongly toward compliance that the integrity of programs is under threat. He also asserts that the compliance side of aid has taken over management and decision-making at USAID.
It is interesting to see Natsios, who presided over this “counter-bureaucracy” for five years, rip into the compliance culture that he oversaw. He does so with a clarity and insight that should not be ignored as development and foreign assistance policies are being redefined by the Obama Administration and on Capitol Hill. Ironically, Natsios’ account of these tensions and imbalances may also reveal why these policy processes seem to be so bogged down and delayed.
Natsios provides a historical perspective of how the compliance culture came to be dominant within the U.S. foreign assistance bureaucracy – he calls it “a painful story of good intentions gone bad.” He is unsparing in his critique of what this has resulted in, and declares that it is well past the point where compliance has become counter-productive.
Will Information Bring Change? An Innovative Model from East Africa
Posted on 28 June 2010 | 1 response
By Ilana Kessler
Twaweza, the NGO where I am interning, is an East Africa-wide experiment in using information access and citizen agency to improve public service delivery. Twaweza has an innovative (and largely untested) theory of change. This blog entry explains the theory of change and raises some concerns around the key question: can access to information really bring about change?
The Theory of Change
Twaweza’s theory of change relies on providing ordinary citizens with information in accessible formats about topics that matter to them, particularly education, health, and access to water. Still in its early stages, Twaweza is focusing its first efforts on getting information to ordinary citizens by signing agreements with five networks that can publicize Twaweza’s content. These five networks – mobile phones, media, religious institutions, the teachers’ union, and fast moving consumer goods – reach virtually every person in East Africa.
Twaweza aims not only to reach everyone, but also to provide information in a manner that is accessible and meaningful. An example of this is Uwezo, the Twaweza partner program where I am working. Uwezo will conduct an annual assessment of basic literacy and numeracy skills in students’ homes, reaching about 250,000 children in districts across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania this year.
A Peek at the New U.S. Development Strategy
Posted on 25 June 2010 | No responses
By Sherine Jayawickrama
Today, as President Obama headed to Canada for the G-8 meeting, the White House released a statement outlining a new U.S. strategy to advance global development. Given the continuing delays – and considerable confusion – that have marked the Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review (QDDR) and the whole-of-government development policy review process, it is a relief to hear that President Obama will be issuing a new policy directive on development “in the near future”.
After months of guessing – and a leaked memo that pretty much spilled the beans – excerpted below is what the White House statement outlines.
President Obama’s new development policy will:
• Foster the Next Generation of Emerging Markets: The U.S. will intensify efforts to promote sustainable economic development and support good governance by making targeted investments in countries and/or regions where the conditions are right for progress.
• Invest in Game-Changing Innovations: By leveraging the power of research and development, the U.S. will work to create and scale-up technologies for health, green energy, agriculture, and other development applications.
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