This is the last of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs.

By Keith Johnston

Identifying and making decisions of global scope and significance is challenging for two related reasons. Compared with a national board, the issues become more abstract and more complex at a global level. Both these challenges take us beyond our comfort zone and we have to work at making these shifts.

I will start by trying to write about abstraction in a non abstract way!

Getting clear about what the International Non-Governmental Organization (INGO) wants to become, getting a view of the whole global system, simplifying it well, and connecting it to reality on the ground, is a harder job than doing this for a national board (and it is not easy there!). The international board needs to ensure that over-arching systems are in place to achieve the alliance’s strategy and these systems will be more complicated, and the discussion of them will end up being more about systems of systems, at a global level. Secondly, the global board needs to be clear how it wants different parts of the alliance to work together or to instead have the freedom to function independently but also manage quality and risk.

Systems-of-systems issues include how different international systems interconnect (such as advocacy and delivery and the development of people within the agency) and the intersections between national systems and those operating across the alliance– for example, how international campaigning or programming priorities affect those within a particular country or region. For a national board the focus is more on single systems or the interaction between simpler systems.

Describing a system is describing an abstract model of what actually happens; describing and making decisions on systems of systems involves abstractions of abstractions. It often makes our heads spin to try to think this way and to relate this to the realities on the ground for our organization.

Greater complexity adds a further challenge. Most of the issues that INGO boards need to focus on are ones where the relationships between causes and effects are not clear. It may be possible to use data, experts, or research to make some links between causes and effects clearer or these may only become visible after the event. Either way, international boards are negotiating zones of high uncertainty and the very human tendency is to pretend we can know or control more of the situation than is actually the case.

The irony is that as we strive for greater reach and effectiveness, and try to wrap our arms around more of the challenge, we get to hold onto less – more aspects of our work elude our grasp or need to be let go of for the governance role to be done well – and what we do manage to hold onto seems more slippery – we can be less confident about maintaining our grip!

International board members find themselves trying to hold onto enough to be effective and informed while also reaching further afield to be able to see the larger systems at play. All of this happens with high levels of uncertainty. This reinforces the need for international boards to build in ways to reflect, re-assess, and learn as they navigate across these uncertain terrains.

A working paper I have prepared on this and related themes – “Acting Globally – Thinking Globally” – is available here.

Keith Johnston has served as Chair of Oxfam International since 2007 and is a partner at Cultivating Leadership.

This is the fourth of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs.

By Keith Johnston

The central governance questions for any board are: What are we trying to become? Where are we going? These are the core questions for the board of an International Non-Governmental Organization (INGO) too but the international context may make them even harder to answer.

Burkhard Gnärig, Executive Director of the Berlin Civil Society Center, challenges global board members to answer the question: “what are the GLOBAL decisions my organisation has to take?” and then to make sure that these can be taken from a truly global perspective. The international board needs to be clear about what its INGO is there to do and what the board of the INGO needs to govern. What value is the international board seeking to add to the work of the whole INGO? What is its role and its reach?

Once you have a sense of these questions, you have to be sure you are doing the right work. Observers of board performance often point to boards spending too much time on reworking the past and responding to the present and challenge them to instead lift their focus to work on shaping the future. Different advisers suggest rules of thumb of between 60-80 per cent future-focused and 40-20 per cent on the past and present.

How would your board ratios compare? How would the ratio be for INGO boards if the ratios were recast to follow Burkhard’s prescription? What if we aimed for 70 per cent of the time of the INGO board being focused on the future global issues the board needed to address? And what if we added a performance measure that we were addressing these issues from truly global perspective?

There may be some stellar INGO boards already achieving this level of performance. Well done if you are. Care to share your secret? Email me on keiath@cultivatingleadership.co.nz. For most of us this is more a noble aspiration. But what might you need to do to achieve a performance like this in your board over the next three years?

At the international level it is one thing to put future-focused global issues on the table. It is another to have the board achieve a global perspective on those issues. Getting to global brings more factors into play: the scale of the issues gets much larger, there are more intersecting factors and thus greater complexity, and decisions are more removed from the actual implementation and necessarily involve more abstraction. Boards find it hard to think strategically about global issues and how the specific work of the INGO will shape and be shaped by these global factors. In part boards find this work hard because staff find it hard. If it is hard for staff to get their arms, and their heads, around these global issues and their implications, then it is hard for them to shape up the issues and options in ways that boards can discuss them and work the issues through to an effective resolution.

One of the constraints here is that we are light on ‘theories of change’ or the logics for why we intervene in the ways we do and why that might be the most effective way to respond. We often do things because that is the way we have done them in the past or we have observed others doing them with apparent success or our partners or supporters might have been keen on these initiatives.

It may be a struggle for the board and staff to identify actions that will have the greatest impact on the INGO’s mission and then making sure those actions are done well. Almost inevitably, these theories of change will start out being uncertain, incomplete, and experimental. The international view also may be that the theories cannot be worked up at the global level and the role for the international board may be to ensure this work is being done at whatever is the appropriate level – regional, country, thematic. The biggest wins come from the board and staff going through the process of trying to think more clearly about what needs to be achieved and what actions will be most effective.

A working paper I have prepared on this and related themes – “Acting Globally – Thinking Globally” – is available here.

Keith Johnston has served as Chair of Oxfam International since 2007 and is a partner at Cultivating Leadership.

This is the third of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs.

By Keith Johnston

A consistent endeavour is for each organisation to be more representative of the whole world in which it is working and to be able to draw on a much more international range of thinking in its leadership. All the major INGOs are moving to be more diverse at multiple levels. Governance has been one of the slower areas of change. Here it no longer works to be just “male, pale, and stale” (Author’s disclosure: I am male, pale – although tending to pinkish – and trying hard to be more ripe than stale).

The drive to greater diversity brings its own challenges. First it is not always easy to achieve a practical working diversity given the current structures and locations. Different INGOs are taking different approaches. These include: establishing national affiliates in a wide range of countries, including all of the elements of the network in governance, or changing the makeup of boards and committees, or relocating key international offices to be more global.

Having changed the forms of the organisation to be more diverse, how does it work in practice? Often a central paradox arises. The INGO needs to be more diverse to be more global but including more diversity in the group means it is harder to achieve coherence and especially the coherence needed to take on the large global issues of eliminating poverty or injustice, advancing human rights, tackling climate change, and protecting the environment.

Also different forms of diversity bring differing challenges. How much are board members there to represent different constituencies? How might differences in money and power be dealt with? How are conflicts best addressed?

Having built in necessary diversity you want the spectrum of views to work for your alliance. This can often be very hard, and literally ‘disagreeable’, work. We pay lip service to diversity yet often underestimate the depth of the differences that exist in culture, values, experiences, and mindsets. To build a trusting and truly diverse board takes conscious and consistent efforts.

It is also the case that diversity is, in part, valuable because it increases the possibilities of conflict . The INGO needs to lift its game to use that conflict constructively. However, because INGOs tend to put less time into their governance than national NGOs (it is often harder to get people together) and the board members often know each other less well, they are less well equipped to create the trust and mutual understanding needed to achieve cohesion amid diversity. These practical difficulties and the pressures to take a representative approach can drive INGO boards to make lowest-common-denominator compromises. These are LCDs that do not light us up!

Managing these paradoxes will be central to the longer-term success of INGOs. Leaders need to be explicit in addressing these governance issues and also in equipping their board members, the new ones and the old hands, to take a whole-of-alliance view.

A working paper I have prepared on this and related themes – “Acting Globally – Thinking Globally” – is available here.

Keith Johnston has served as Chair of Oxfam International since 2007 and is a partner at Cultivating Leadership.

This is the first of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs.

By Keith Johnston

American folk icon Pete Seeger, when he encourages his audiences to sing along with him, often notes that by the time you have learnt the words of one of his songs you have got to the end. He says, “It’s like life really, isn’t it. But with a song you can sing it over again.” In my experience it is much like this being on the board of an international non-government organisation (INGO).

One friend, with a few years on an INGO board, says he wondered: “Should I speak from my heart first, before worrying about if that could be counter-productive? In a world of strangers, it’s always less risky to reserve frank opinions and try to establish some rapport first. But in the context of an INGO, there really is not much time for board members to establish rapport that is rooted in extensive and intensive interaction.”

On any board a new member’s challenge is always how to get to know the people and the issues fast enough to begin to engage effectively. For the person stepping up to the board of an INGO alliance these challenges are amplified in three ways.

• Firstly, the board is likely to meet less frequently (at least face-to-face) so it is harder to get to know your colleagues.
• Secondly, because the issues involved are global they are generally more challenging than those facing national boards.
• Thirdly, you may have less time overall because many INGO boards are made up of people who also serve on the boards of national bodies and by the time they make the international body they may have a limited term to serve.

Too often by the time we get clear about our role and start to develop a global perspective our term is up, people are saying nice words at our farewell, and another newbie is in our seat blinking at an alphabet soup of new abbreviations and acronyms and grappling to get a grip on what is expected of them.

This is tough on individuals and it is way less than ideal for INGO alliances. INGOs have expanded rapidly in the past 20 years. They are trying to become more global and diverse (and less ‘Northern’). They strive to be more influential in global debates. They face challenging issues about their roles and priorities, effectiveness and accountability, and how they can best organise themselves. The governance agenda has expanded dramatically.

I have been fortunate to be chair of Oxfam International, the confederation of 17 Oxfams who do humanitarian, development, and advocacy work in about 90 other countries and at many international fora. Like many other alliances we have been going through a period of rapid change. I am also lucky to get to share INGO leadership experiences with the chairs and executive directors of many of the other development, human rights, and environmental alliances when we meet at the annual Vision Works meeting organised by the Berlin Civil Society Center. From these discussion over that past four years I have thought a lot about how new board members might more easily make the step up from national to international boards.

In a recent working paper I have prepared on the topic “Acting Globally – Thinking Globally” I suggest new board members can take steps to prepare themselves in response to six questions:

1. Where have we come from?
2. Do we have the diversity we need to govern our alliance and how can we draw these diverse views into an effective whole?
3. What are we trying to become?
4. How do we work at a global scale?
5. What are we accountable for internationally and to whom?
6. What is my role and how might I grow in this role?

I will address some of these questions in more detail in subsequent blogs.

A copy of the working paper can be found here.

Keith Johnston has served as Chair of Oxfam International since 2007 and is a partner at Cultivating Leadership.

Until recently, branding was a dirty word in many nonprofit organizations. Not anymore.

Branding used to conjure up images of profit-driven marketing executives sitting in high-rise offices of the likes of Coca-Cola and MacDonald’s. The few nonprofits that adopted branding early on were suspected by others to compromise their ethical values and to loose track of their social mission.

That was yesterday. Today, an increasing number of nonprofit organizations are embracing the concept of branding. These organizations believe that a brand is not only a tool to enhance their fundraising and visibility but also a way to drive their mission and impact more broadly.

This is the conclusion of a newly released study by the Hauser Center on Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. Based on an 18-month research project involving 73 interviews with practitioners and scholars in 41 organizations, the study analyses current attitudes and branding practices in the nonprofit sector. It proposes a valuable framework to think about the specific role that brands play for nonprofit organizations.

As Nathalie Kylander and Christopher Stone write in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “the models and terminology used in the nonprofit sector to understand brand remain those imported from the for-profit sector to boost name recognition and raise revenue. Nonprofit leaders need new models that allow their brands to contribute to sustaining their social impact, serving their mission, and staying true to their organization’s values and culture”.

Kylander and Stone, in collaboration with colleagues at the Hauser Center, developed a conceptual framework designed to help nonprofit organizations do just that. The framework is called IDEA, which stands for Integrity, Democracy, Ethics and Affinity. In short, Brand Integrity means that the public image of the organization is aligned with its mission. Brand Democracy means that the organization trusts its constituencies to communicate the organization’s core identity, without the need of centralized control on how the brand is presented. Brand Ethics means that the brand reflects the core values and culture of the organization. Finally, Brand Affinity means that the brand promotes collective interests and attracts partners and collaborators.

The study should be commended for analyzing and framing the features of branding in a way that is palatable to the non-profit sector. It is a welcome and fresh look at branding, which will surely help drive the conversation forward.

However, as I was reading the various case studies, a number of questions arose, which are left unaddressed by the study:

1- The cases analyzed in the study look at large, Northern-based, well-resourced organizations, coalitions or campaigns (Amnesty International, WWF, Publish What You Pay, The Girl Effect). These are backed by tens of millions of dollars coming from public and private donors. It is crucial to expand the analysis to include the role of brand for groups based in the global south. Can any organization afford the efforts and expertise needed in developing an iconic brand? Are the benefits of a good brand equally important for all organizations, operating under widely different political, cultural and economic circumstances? Is it more important for international NGOs than for local, service-delivery type of organizations?

2- Another, related question is: Is it always worth the effort? Could it be counterproductive to have a strong brand, especially for organizations operating under authoritarian regimes? Operating under the radar – rather than building credibility with the government or donors – may be the key to the long-term survival and effectiveness of NGOs operating in adversarial legal environments. I am thinking of for instance groups working to promote women’s empowerment in Islamist countries.

3- One could argue that the organizations and campaigns described in the study have governance arrangements and financing mechanisms that are quite similar to those of for-profit corporate entities. Their top executives often come from the private sector. Corporate lawyers and investment bankers sit on their board. They are primarily concerned about the long-term sustainability of the organization’s finance and image. In this context, it makes sense for them to adopt a concept – branding – that was developed in the private sector. It is a language that speaks to them. But what about the hundreds of thousands of grassroots charitable organizations? What types of challenges may they face in convincing their staff, executives, board members, partners and constituencies of the necessity of adopting a strong brand? Is this framing useful at all to them?

4- Finally, more rigorous research needs to be undertaken on the impact of branding on an organization’s effectiveness. Under what conditions will a brand successfully foster the implementation of the organization’s mission? There is no internationally agreed standard against which to measure organizational effectiveness in the non-profit sector. However, it would be interesting to assess in more detail the extent to which good brands encourage organizational cohesion, public mobilization, member engagement, public recognition, movement building and sustainable social change.

Branding in the nonprofit sector is a work in progress. Eight years ago, I worked as a program officer at WWF. On a sunny afternoon in September, I boarded a private cruise boat in the Baltic Sea with our special donors and board members. We were all wearing life jackets with the emblematic panda and trying to spot an endangered species: porpoises. The purpose of the trip fitted well with the image most passengers had of WWF: on organization dedicated to species conservation. They were surprised to hear that my job entailed securing an international agreement at the International Maritime Organization in London for safer shipping on the Baltic Sea. The objective was to protect the marine ecosystem needed for the porpoises to survive. Yet the link wasn’t obvious to our most ardent supporters. The powerful brand of WWF – the panda – was failing to capture and communicate the evolution and the breadth of our work.

As the case study conducted by the Hauser Center shows, WWF has made some remarkable progress since then. And so have many other organizations. Much remains to be done though to align one’s internal identity with external image, values and mission. The challenge for WWF and others will be to convey increasingly complex socio-economic and political issues through a simple and compelling idea – the brand!

Elisa Peter is a mid-career fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School.

On February 24 2012 Bill Drayton (CEO and Founder, Ashoka) shared his views on social entrepreneurship during a talk at the Harvard JFK School of Government. It is clear that the concept entrepreneurship was established a long time ago and that the word social has brought the concept to a new dimension. But what defines the next generation of social entrepreneurship?

Bill Drayton talks about social entrepreneurs as “the change agents for society, in a world where everyone is a changemaker”. He refers to “individuals that have the freedom, confidence and societal support to address any social problem and change society for the better”. Social entrepreneurs must have a clear vision, they are ambitious, persistent and solve problems by changing the system, spreading solutions, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.

Like business entrepreneurs respond to business opportunities, social entrepreneurs respond to social challenges. I wonder if social entrepreneurs and business entrepreneurs are that different? They both are seeking for effective solutions to existing problems. Will the next generation of social entrepreneurship be defined by a narrowing gap between both sectors?

In both sectors there is an increasing demand for transparency and reporting to measure performance and maximize value. Social entrepreneurs can realize their vision by following a strategic model or value proposition that would link their own activities to the social results they like to achieve. These are measures of success that are most relevant for the organization and its stakeholders.

On the other hand, increasing practices in corporate social responsibility show that the industry is now also more focused on social challenges. Some leading corporations expanded their practices of mitigating negative impact by taking on the role of social changemakers. Driven by changed demands from stakeholders they aim to contribute to society, the environment, and the economy.

Furthermore, sharing knowledge between both sectors is of great importance and collaboration can contribute to achieving the desired outcomes.

With a masters in Sociology and work experience at an international company and NGO, Nicoline Blokzeijl is currently focussing on the challenges and opportunities that face corporate social responsibility at the Harvard Extension School.

The 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held December 2011 in Busan, South Korea, was a landmark event where civil society participated in negotiations on the new direction for international development cooperation on an equal basis with governments and donors, the first such time in the history of these OECD-led events.

It concluded with a compromise and mixed results for civil society organisations (CSOs) (1). One important gain is the acknowledgement in the outcome agreement of the International Framework for CSO Development Effectiveness, as a reference on best CSO practices and conditions required from governments and donors.

Accompanied by two Toolkits to help CSOs put it into practice, the International Framework is the outcome of a three year consultation process with thousands of CSOs across the globe and the first ever global statement from civil society on the effectiveness of its work in development. As such, it represents a legitimate reference for CSOs at national, regional and international levels.

But while putting the International Framework into practice is now a priority for civil society organisations across the globe, the enabling environment in which they operate continues to deteriorate in many countries.
Indeed, the issue of an enabling environment proved to be one of the stumbling blocks for civil society at the Busan forum. “By participating in high level negotiations on aid and development for the first time, people’s organisations can take credit for cementing democratic ownership and human rights in the Busan Outcome Document – but more work needs to be done on advancing favourable conditions for civil society,” said Open Forum co-chair Emele Duituturaga in response to the newly agreed Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation.

One of the key civil society expectations from Busan was a firm, clear and explicit commitment towards providing an enabling environment for civil society, in the face of a wave of restrictions and attacks on CSOs across a wide range of countries.

“The evidence was clear and compelling. Since 2008, although governments made explicit commitments to provide an enabling environment for civil society, civil society around the world has seen a regressive trend of shrinking space, and is facing various legal, policy and regulatory barriers as well as unwarranted harassment and persecution” explains Netsanet Belay, Policy and Research Director at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation.

After intense advocacy and lobbying by civil society, the Busan outcome document, in paragraph 22(a), made reference to agreed international rights as the basis for defining an enabling environment for civil society. CIVICUS applauded this move, but remains unconvinced about the likelihood of impact on the ground.
Evidence suggests that key principles of the aid effectiveness dialogue, including the principles of alignment, harmonisation and domestic ownership of aid are being used contrary to their intention by governments to justify restrictions on CSOs’ access to funding and their right to operate without unwarranted interference.
Belay explains, “We are dissatisfied about the lack of specific minimum standards on a civil society enabling environment in the Busan outcome document. We were also concerned about the overemphasis on governments’ understanding of development results during the negotiations.” Paragraph 11(b) of the Busan outcome document stipulates that all development actors, including CSOs, should ‘align their efforts with the priorities and policies set out by developing counties’. We hope this statement will not lead to governments encroaching upon the independence of CSOs, their role as watchdogs and their pursuit of innovation.”

When it comes to measuring the provision of an enabling environment by governments and donors, civil society also highlights the failure of Paragraph 22 to refer to compliance with internationally agreed rights ‘in law and in practice’, which can only hinder efforts to hold governments accountable to these commitments.
CSOs, as recognised development actors, have shown their commitment to improving their effectiveness in development through their constructive engagement in the Busan process, and must continue to be included in the dialogue. However, global partnerships and international negotiations will only be successful when the enabling environment for CSOs is fully respected.

Without guarantees for an enabling environment which respects the fundamental freedoms of civil society, CSOs are unable to play their full role as development actors.

(1) See civil society reactions to the Busan Partnership here.

CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation is a global civil society alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society across the world.

Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness is a global fully participatory space run by and for civil society organizations to improve the impact of their development work and advocate for more favourable government policies and practices for CSOs according to the globally agreed International Framework for CSO Development Effectiveness.

Several years ago, I saw a presentation by Yale School of Management Economics Professor Mushfiq Mobarak about encouraging poor populations in Bangladesh to adopt clean stoves. Traditional stoves pollute air inside the home, causing respiratory illnesses and increasing cancer risk. However, households refused to adopt the stoves. Dr. Mobarak suggested several reasons households may choose against using a product that is good for them: perhaps the male household head makes all purchasing decisions, but he is least affected by polluted air and thus miscalculates the benefits of the purchase. Perhaps the health returns of the clean stoves appear too far into the future for households to value the product at its price today. Or perhaps the taste of food from the clean stoves was different – worse – than the taste of food cooked on traditional stoves.

If economic theory describes the first two reasons households did not purchase these stoves, the third reason, taste, seems to be a clear design flaw. Why was an economics professor conducting research to encourage households to use a product they simply did not like? Should the product not be redesigned to produce tastier food?

In fact, the problem that useful and important products fail to capture the attention of target audiences is not uncommon in international development. Economic theory can often explain, and eventually resolve, the unpopularity of these products. But development practitioners often find themselves pushing a product that nobody wants to use. This is not laziness on the part of designers for development. Rather, I would argue that successful innovation methods and the practice of international development are uniquely incompatible.

Successful innovation is the union of a vast and uninhibited universe of solutions with identifiable goals. Ideally, these two bodies of knowledge – the goal and the methods – reside in the same population. The iPod derived from Apple engineers’ passion for music and frustration with available portable music players. These engineers may not have known ahead of time that they sought a small rectangular device with a round control pad, but when they hit on it, they knew they had what they wanted.

This ideal union is perhaps rare. InnoCentive understands that people or firms who know what they want may not have the technical knowledge to design it and has built a successful business around connecting these two populations. Yet the InnoCentive model fails when users cannot accurately identify their need. Steve Jobs’ statement that it is not the consumers’ job to know what they want works for a company like Apple, whose designers are also its users, but presents a challenge to those designers working for a population to which they don’t belong.

Communication between users and developers becomes particularly disconnected in international development, where policy and social programs originate from engineers and economists who are quite different from the populations they aim to serve, regardless of how much time they have spent living (even growing among) with their target users. When the objective is to develop a clean stove for poor households in Bangladesh, engineers focus on making that stove affordable to poor populations and functional in difficult weather conditions and low-tech societies. It is easy to understand how the question of taste could be overlooked.

More difficult to understand is why, once identified, resolving the issue of taste fell to a behavioral invention rather than to the product-development team. Presumably going back to the drawing table was too expensive for developers of a social product with limited budget. Dr. Mobarak’s paper ultimately concludes that his behavioral interventions can influence short-term take-up of the clean stoves in question, but not long-term use. Perhaps innovation-for-development methods need some innovating of their own.

UPDATE (February 20): Rema Hanna presented ongoing research about an implementation of clean stoves in India that had similar take-up problems at the Harvard Kennedy School last week. Her research, joint with Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone of MIT, concludes similarly that this is a design problem. The paper is not yet released, but any updates will be posted here.

Sara Nadel is a Doctoral Student in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Hauser Center Doctoral Fellow for the 2011-2012 and 2010-2011 years. Prior to coming to Harvard, she was the Peru Country Director for Innovations for Poverty Action, an organization dedicated to rigorous research about development programs. Sara holds a BA in International Relations from Stanford University, and an MPA in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School.

The author, Myra Batchelder, in a conversation with Marisa Viana, AWID.
Photo credit: Cory Maxwell-Coghlan, Hauser Center

By Myra Batchelder

The revolution will not be foundation-funded, advocates sometimes joke, representing their frustration with the current funding structures for social justice efforts. However, the young women that spoke last Thursday at Harvard’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations highlighted an innovative new model of participatory grant making with the FRIDA – Young Feminist Fund, that has potential to alter these funding structures. The fund is committed to funding organizations led by young women aged 18 to 30 from around the world. Based on the Central American Women’s Forum model, at FRIDA the applicants are the ones who decide who should get the grant, turning the typical foundation power structure on its head. As Alexandra Pittman wrote in this blog back in December, “Using this participatory grantmaking model, FRIDA is democratizing the funding process and re-conceptualizing the role of grant maker and grant recipient.”

Betsy Hoody, a board member at FRIDA, explained at the panel they have just started their first grant-making rounds and have already had over 1,000 applicants! The sheer volume of grant applicants is a powerful response to the often-cited critiques that the younger generation is not involved in feminist activism. In fact, young women are involved all across the world, though their involvement may look slightly different from earlier generations, including the incredible amount of online activism.

As a young woman (slightly over the FRIDA age limit), I have worked in women’s rights activism for the past decade and have often been frustrated by the way that building young women’s leadership has not always been on the forefront of the movement’s agenda. In fact, in the United States, leaders of some women’s rights organizations have sometimes complained about the lack of young women’s involvement, while completely ignoring the fact that their organizations and others are made up of passionate young women in entry-level and mid-level positions!

Young feminist activists exist across the globe and are redefining the role of philanthropy and the women’s rights movement overall. They are working beyond just the realm of long-standing women’s rights organization and are starting their own organizations and changing the rules of how feminist activism should be done. One of the ways they are doing this is by using the internet to build connections and linkages between organizations worldwide. FRIDA’s idea of getting organizations to vote for one another online is not only redefining the way the grant process happens, but also providing a great opportunity for young women-led organizations to learn about related efforts happening in their region. They are committed to connecting these young women led organizations with one another. As Marisa Viana, Manager of the Young Feminist Activism Program at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), which helped start FRIDA, explained, they are not viewing young women as “just recipients,” they “want to invest in young women as leaders and as powerful agents of change!”

FRIDA is meeting more than just the financial needs of these young feminist activist organizations. Young feminist activists are very eager to find ways to connect and learn from one another. Seven years ago, a friend and I were working in sexual and reproductive health and rights non-profits in New York City and became frustrated with the lack of opportunities to engage with our fellow twenty- and thirtysomethings interested in similar issues. We started up a monthly networking happy hour called “Repro Health Happy Hour” to connect young activists in the New York City area. The event now has a listserv of over 1,100 and the model has been replicated by young activists in over 12 cities, everywhere from Boston, MA to London, England to Nairobi, Kenya! Our effort is just one of many on Facebook, Twitter, and other vehicles that young activists are utilizing to connect with one another.

Young feminist activists from around the world have much to learn from one another and creating new avenues to build these linkages is an important way to strengthen the entire women’s rights movement. However, funding is needed to expand these efforts and to support the growing number of organizations led by young women. Funding mechanisms like FRIDA are incredibly important and much-needed vehicles for building these growing organizations and movement building efforts led by young women. FRIDA is providing an innovative new way to reexamine and redo the philanthropic model to better meet the needs and vision of the next generation of young feminist activists from around the world. However, it is only one part of the solution. With 1,000 applications for only ten grants of $5,000 each, there is still more work to be done.

Myra Batchelder is currently pursuing a masters degree in public administration at Harvard Kennedy School.

Nothing unusual in the title of the seminar that The Hauser Center at Harvard University put together just over a year ago. Everyone from academics to NGOs, government officials and even rock stars seem to have something to say on the topic. The innovation here was the choice of the lead panelist: Ndiogou Fall of Senegal, an authoritative and articulate representative of the burgeoning movement of Africa small producers who, in his words, “are both the prime victims of and the solutions to the problem of hunger”. Listening to the views of the actors most directly concerned by the problem sounds like common sense. But how often have you seen peasant leaders on stage at Harvard when food and development issues are under discussion.

Ending Hunger in Africa panel discussion, November 8. 2010, Harvard Kennedy School

The leap into uncharted dialogic territory paid off. Ndiogou Fall gave us the gift of a lucid, convincing and combative analysis of how African food security has deteriorated over the years and what is required for the continent to feed itself. The policies applied during and following the colonial period, from export-oriented specialization to structural adjustment and liberalization, have drastically dampened food production, barred small producers’ access to their own domestic markets, and reduced them to de-capitalized subsistence farming. The 2007-2008 food crisis and the attendant uprisings have had the salutary effect of dramatically exposing the failure of past approaches. What to put in their place? For Fall the horse to bet on can only be the small-scale family farmers who today provide food, employment and incomes for the majority of Africa’s population despite the neglect from which they have suffered for decades. With supportive policies and programs, and applying environment-friendly agro-ecological methods, it is possible to significantly increase smallholder productivity while helping to cool the planet and defend biodiversity.

But this requires a change of paradigm, Fall explains. African governments have to prioritize local and regional markets over the world market through trade policies that protect local producers, regulate supply, and build intra-regional exchanges. Agricultural policies formulated with the participation of all stakeholders are required. Infrastructure and communications need to be extended in rural areas and the rural economies strengthened by supporting producers to develop value chains that can generate employment and revenues. Small-scale producers need to access credit at reasonable terms – not the 25% interest rates they now have to contend with as compared with 5% in Europe. Land policies have to defend the right of rural people to the territories on which they live and from which they draw their livelihoods, blocking the galloping phenomenon of speculation and land grabs.

Ndiogou Fall passed away, prematurely and deeply mourned, on May 5, 2011. We pay tribute to his memory by making available the video recording of the Hauser Center seminar in which he participated. His message is an important one for Harvardians in a moment in which other voices advocate biotechnology as key to preventing hunger and news reports unveil the possible involvement of the Harvard endowment fund in land grabbing in Africa (The Guardian – June 9, 2011).

Nora McKeon was formerly responsible for civil society relations at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). She is the author of several publications on small farmers and food policies. Harvard Class of ’62.