Embracing the “F” Word in Development
Posted on 18 January 2011 | 3 responses
By Sherine Jayawickrama
Fighting poverty (or improving education or health outcomes, or enhancing rural livelihoods) is a complex process. Sometimes, in the process of making these complex issues accessible and compelling, NGOs make them sound easy to address. Sponsor a child! Give a loan! Buy a goat! Websites of NGOs and donor institutions alike are awash with success stories and testimonials to lend a sense of hope and optimism to the complex issues that these organizations confront.
In principle, leaders and staff of these organizations know that advances are made slowly and even the most effective investments involve two steps forward and one step back. However, there is great resistance to calling a spade a spade. There are plenty of “lessons learned” and “setbacks”, but there are rarely “failures.” There is a real fear that donors, supporters or policy makers will associate failures in development projects or initiatives with a lack of competence or accountability on the part of the organization.
Against this backdrop, it is heartening to hear about the Admitting Failure website launched last Friday by Engineers Without Borders Canada. The site is meant to be a place where the international development community can honestly and publicly share their failures. The idea is that innovation and improvement stem from embracing and learning from failure. It’s a pretty intuitive concept!
Empowered Engagement vs. Enforced Engagement
Posted on 19 November 2010 | 3 responses
By Dr. Ramaswami Balasubramaniam
Community participation is no longer a buzzword in development. Decades ago, it was something that you spoke about and wrote in the proposals that one submitted to donor agencies.
Gradually, as many development NGOs began to understand and internalize the power and potential of this paradigm, they made it an integral part of their programs. The Government also did not lag behind. They have been providing legitimate and official space for different forms of community engagement in many of their programs. So much so that today many anti-poverty programs of the State necessarily include a major role for communities to participate and partner.
But are things happening as envisaged? Are communities actually participating to the desirable extent? Can the extent of this participation be measured and, if yes, what would be the metric? Will a mere program output being accomplished mean that communities actually participated in the program?
Is There a Failure of Imagination in International Development?
Posted on 18 November 2010 | 4 responses
By Jennifer Rubenstein
Vision! Imagination! The ability to dream up new and better worlds! Surely such capacities are essential for development practitioners.
Or are they?
“To imagine” is to make present to one’s mind that which is absent to one’s senses. Imagination is in this way the opposite of perception: if I perceive a fire truck (say, by seeing it barrel toward me, or hearing its siren, or feeling the rush of air as it speeds past), then I am not imagining it, and vice versa.
Now, consider these seemingly disparate examples:
- Congressman Frank Wolf’s proposal that new members of Congress be taken to visit international development or humanitarian aid programs in poor countries.
- The Listening Project’s efforts to elicit feedback directly from people affected by international aid.
- Aung San Suu Kyi’s statement, soon after being released from house arrest, that she “want[s] to listen to people. This is one of the first things I have to do…”
- Responses to Nicholas Kristof’s article on “The D.I.Y. Foreign Aid Revolution,” by Dave Algoso, Jennifer Lentfer and others, emphasizing that what Kristof calls a “combustible mix of indignation and vision” on the part of well-meaning foreigners is unlikely to significantly improve poor people’s lives.
These diverse statements and initiatives have one thing in common: they implicitly suggest that the human imagination is relatively weak and needs to be supplemented (or perhaps supplanted) by direct experience: Wolf wants Congresspeople to go visit aid programs because even with the help of photos and expert testimony Congresspeople cannot adequately conjure these programs in their minds. Read more
The Frank Wolf Proposal
Posted on 12 November 2010 | 2 responses
By John Coonrod
Congressman Frank R. Wolf, of Virginia’s 10th district, recently made a bold proposal for what we (the ending world hunger and poverty crowd) need to do in this political environment. But first, some background.
Thursday morning after the mid-term elections, the Alliance to End Hunger organized a fascinating presentation on Capitol Hill by Republican and Democratic experts (Jim McLaughlin and Tom Freedman). They presented an analysis of exit polls, including where voters stood on issues of ending world hunger.
The basic analysis was sobering but not surprising: a highly polarized U.S. electorate in which a large number of independents had swung to the right. A vast majority fearful about the economy.
Here are my seven favorite findings from their hunger questions:
- Just 1.7% think ending world hunger/poverty should be a top priority for Congress (vs. about 55% saying the economy). Climate change also garnered 1.7%.
- A sobering 63% prefer the statement “In our current economy, it’s important that the U.S. looks first to help its own citizens before trying to help others in the world” as compared to only 33% who prefer “Even in this economy, America should look to help those around the world in desperate need even as it tries to help the neediest citizens at home.”
- Read more
What’s Missing from the DIY Aid Debate? Overlooking the Capacity of Local NGOs
Posted on 10 November 2010 | 4 responses
By Jennifer Lentfer
Cross-posted on the How Matters blog.
Professional or amateur? Skills and experience or passion and new ideas? These are riveting questions indeed, but I’m concerned that in the development discourse, we continue to miss a key piece.
Well-intentioned do-gooders of any sort must recognize that in the developing world, local people with that same “combustible mix of indignation and vision” that Nicholas Kristof describes, are often already organized and doing something about the issues facing them in their communities, though their initiatives are often ignored and under-resourced. Unfortunately, this is something big aid and those new to international engagement continue to discount and/or overlook.
A deeper understanding of the organizational dynamics of local, indigenous, community-based groups directly serving vulnerable families in the developing world is key to unleashing their potential. In fact I believe that larger-scale support of local initiatives, grassroots leadership and small, often “informal” movements, could be the true revolution in the international development sector. As Dave Algoso writes, “After all, the ultimate DIY efforts are grassroots initiatives by poor people in their own communities.”
For Aid Effectiveness, People Matter
Posted on 9 November 2010 | 7 responses
By Dayna Brown
I have been thinking lately about the importance of the people who are involved with international assistance efforts – and their knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviors and values. There is much discussion about the need for “professionalization” of the field, with some suggesting certification should be required for people who want to do humanitarian or development work. Others are debating the merits of volunteers versus “professionals” (see here for a compilation of views).
While local people in aid recipient communities did not directly talk about these issues, the Listening Project did hear about how staff of international and local organizations shape people’s experiences with aid efforts and their perceptions of aid agencies and their effectiveness. Some noted that even the best designed programs can fail due to bad leadership, weak staff or poor relationships, while other programs succeed largely due to the people involved. Selecting and supporting good leaders and staff is particularly important when programs involve significant capacity strengthening.
I have had the honor of working and listening with many very talented and courageous local and international staff in a number of countries. Those who were most successful certainly had some level of skills or knowledge which could potentially be “certified.” However, just as importantly, they had great attitudes, deep commitment and a desire and willingness to learn – particularly about the local people, contexts and cultures.
Should the Microfinance Industry Be Regulated?
Posted on 8 November 2010 | 4 responses
By Sujeet Kumar
Two weeks ago, at the Economic Editors’ conference, the Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee appealed to the microfinance industry to self-regulate. He was responding to a growing ongoing debate in India on the need to regulate micro-finance lending and to put a cap on the interest rates charged by microfinance institutions (MFIs).
The debate was triggered by a spate of suicides of farmers and borrowers, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, blamed by some on the strong-arm tactics employed by the MFIs in loan recovery. “The confidence of the people in microfinance model of development has been shaken by the practices of unscrupulous microfinance institutions functioning in the rural areas of the country,” Assocham, a leading Chamber of Commerce, had said in a press release. The Central Bank of India has also constituted a sub-committee to look into the functioning of MFIs.
On the other hand, Vijay Mahajan, president of the Microfinance Institutions Network, which represents 44 of India’s leading microfinance lenders, warns that the microfinance industry would collapse, if regulated. He also has refuted any charges of harassment of poor.
Measuring “Development”
Posted on 26 October 2010 | 2 responses
By Dr. Ramaswami Balasubramaniam
People are obsessed with measurements. Each one of us wants to constantly measure everything around us. Whether it is our own personal wealth, or our academic performance or a movie that we want to see or just saw, or the service that we received in a recent flight that we took, we want to constantly measure and rate.
It is now become such an integral part of our lives that we do not pause to ask why are we measuring and what are the metrics that we are using. Being in the development sector, I have been fascinated by the evolving obsession of practitioners, donors, academia and the community in measuring and evaluating.
The tools, methodologies and the people involved in this activity are getting better and better. Everyone seems to be so preoccupied and engaged that many consider a program a failure or bad, if some acceptable form of measurement is not undertaken. I have written numerous proposals and implemented many projects in different sectors of health education, and community development that I have found myself questioning not just the validity but also some of the metrics and the fundamental premise that drives these measurements.
I am not saying that measurement is wrong; all I am pointing out is that we need to understand the program being measured, the competence of the people measuring, the tools deployed and the metrics of measurement and more importantly the context, before one indulges in this activity.
Why INGOs Should (Maybe) Be Generalists
Posted on 21 October 2010 | 4 responses
By Jennifer Rubenstein
Should international NGOs (INGOs) focus narrowly on one activity, or be “jacks of all trades?” I want to propose one reason why they should be jacks of all trades—more precisely, one reason why they should develop the capacity to effectively respond to a wide range of needs and operate in a wide range of political contexts.
The reason that I have in mind is based on the idea of reducing INGOs’ moral hazard (roughly speaking, their risk of engaging in activities that are morally objectionable). This argument seems right to me, but I’m a political theorist, not an aid worker: I hope that aid practitioners who read this blog will tell me where I’ve gone wrong.
Research suggests that once INGOs start providing aid in a particular location, they tend to continue providing aid in that location, for psychological, moral, institutional, and/or economic reasons. I will refer to this phenomenon as INGOs being “geographically sticky.”
Geographical stickiness is good when INGOs stick for good reasons, e.g., because they can fill an important need that no one else can fill. It is bad when INGOs stick for bad reasons, e.g., aid workers’ desire to stay in a particular location, or an INGO’s wish to access funds only available for a particular purpose. The worry in these latter cases is that INGOs that will undertake projects that are unnecessary, counterproductive, or for which they are unqualified, just so that they can continue working a particular location.
Foreign Aid as “Soft Power” (in India, Brazil and China)
Posted on 20 October 2010 | 3 responses
By Sherine Jayawickrama
The embrace of foreign aid as an instrument of “soft power” and as a pillar of foreign policy has been notable in the United States – and it is increasingly so in India, Brazil and China as well. It is a reflection of how the landscape of global development and aid financing has changed in recent years. I’m not sure that NGOs are yet fully coming to terms with what these changes mean.
Vijaya Ramachandran at the Center for Global Development blogged a couple of weeks ago about India’s emergence as an aid donor. She noted that, although India was the largest recipient of foreign aid in the mid-1980s, it is now the fifth largest donor to Afghanistan and its aid to Africa has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 22 percent over the past ten years.
The Economist recently argued that Brazil was, in search of soft power, turning itself into one of the world’s biggest aid donors (see Speak Softly and Carry a Blank Cheque – subscription needed to view the complete article). Although the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC) has a relatively small budget, there are a plethora of Brazilian institutions that provide assistance to developing countries. The total value of all Brazilian aid could be close to $4 billion a year – similar to donors like Sweden and Canada (except for the strong upward trend in Brazil, compared to stagnant levels in many countries that are more traditional donors).
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