NGO Collaboration and Specialization for Systemic Change
Posted on 22 September 2010 | 2 responses
By Joe Stuckey
Following the thread of Sherine Jayawickrama’s September 6 post and Sarah Stroup’s September 20 post, I offer the following.
Summarizing the thread:
- Sherine argues that “the advancement of the missions of [NGOs] requires much greater coordination and collaboration,” and asks “Are there realistic limits of collaboration?”
- Sarah notes that collaboration has produced imperfect results and asks, “Why is collaboration the answer? Why isn’t specialization a viable alternative? …Why [do] many practitioners speak of creating shared standards and coordinated campaigning rather than of dividing up the formidable task of combating poverty…[?]“
In my mind, collaboration and specialization can and should work together. An organization’s values, vision, mission, and operating culture, along with its total wealth of assets and opportunities (contacts, knowledge, and position or niche in the world) uniquely identifies it and defines what it should specialize in.
Collaboration is only valuable when the costs are less than the added benefit that collaboration will bring to fulfilling the organization’s mission. In other words – first you define your identity so you can specialize (i.e., in your mission), then you collaborate if it makes you more effective.
NGO Collaboration: Limited or Limiting?
Posted on 20 September 2010 | 4 responses
By Sarah Stroup
In her September 6 post, Sherine Jayawickrama argues that “the advancement of the missions of [NGOs] requires much greater coordination and collaboration.”
This got me thinking about my most recent homework project – I’ve been reading up on studies of international NGOs from the 1970s and 1980s to understand continuity and change among relief and development NGOs.
In 1977, John Sommer wrote in Beyond Charity: US Voluntary Aid for a Changing Third World that NGOs “should seek ways to overcome their traditional tendency to act alone and instead collaborate more constructively with each other and with local organizations in recipient countries.”
In sum, it’s a little depressing to think that experienced NGO analysts have been calling for greater NGO collaboration for decades with seemingly little change.
Images and the Slow Response to the Flooding in Pakistan
Posted on 13 September 2010 | No responses
By Jennifer Rubenstein
Why has the international response to the flooding in Pakistan been so stingy and slow? Commentators have offered various explanations: donors’ concerns about aid benefiting the Taliban; “donor fatigue” after the recent earthquake in Haiti; the relatively low number of immediate deaths (about 2,000), compared to the number of people affected (about 14 million).
Slate contributor Nicholas Schmidle offers a different (though not incompatible) explanation, however:
If only it had been a tidal wave. One giant swell that, in a matter of moments, arrived from the Arabian Sea and washed upcountry, into the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains. Such a disaster would have had the flash-bang effect of an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or a hurricane. One violent act of nature.
A first question is: is Schmidle right? Is the slowness of the response due, at least in part, to the slow-motion onset of the disaster? (He does not offer any evidence either way.)
If the answer to this question is “yes,” (and I suspect that it is), then the next question is: why? Why might a slow-onset disaster be less compelling to third parties watching from a distance than a rapid-onset disaster? There are several possible explanations, but a slide show accompanying Schmidle’s article highlights one possibility in particular.
Aid as an Industry and a Delivery System
Posted on 10 September 2010 | No responses
This is the second in a series of blog posts on the work and findings of the Listening Project, which explores 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
In countless conversations, people have described international assistance as a delivery system and an industry. People have described how the systems and structures of international assistance (the “business model”) have become too focused on the quick and efficient delivery of goods and services.
People in all places talk about how donors and aid agencies are more focused on spending money quickly rather than on spending it well, and that in this haste they often do not spend enough time to establish and maintain effective relationships with their local partners (whether governmental or non-governmental) and those they are intending to help.
As the coordinator of a Lebanese NGO said, “We need strategic, long-term partnerships with donors. The impact doesn’t come overnight. We need to know that we can rely on their support not only tomorrow. If they want to make a change that lasts, they need to start taking longer breaths.”
When NGOs Collaborate: Progress and Challenges
Posted on 6 September 2010 | 2 responses
By Sherine Jayawickrama
The lively exchange on NGO collaboration on this blog has me thinking about the variety of ways in which NGOs collaborate and coordinate, what drives them to do so, and what keeps them from collaborating more systematically.
NGOs (especially large humanitarian NGOs) and other actors in the international humanitarian system took a lot of flak in the 1990s for failures to coordinate. The past 10-15 years have seen an upsurge in collective efforts (from setting shared standards to developing advocacy coalitions and from establishing issue-based programmatic partnerships to engaging in joint fundraising). I’m thinking of the following examples.
The Sphere Project was established in 1997 by a group of humanitarian NGOs and the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement to define and then uphold standards to guide emergency response. The articulation of shared principles and standards was a complex, collaborative process. The process of putting these standards into action and continuously updating the Sphere Handbook has shown real commitment to collective accountability. Other NGO initiatives like the Humanitarian Accountability Parnership (HAP International) and ALNAP have complemented Sphere by building mechanisms for increasing learning, accountability and self-regulation.
Listening to People on the Receiving End of Aid
Posted on 1 September 2010 | 9 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 | 1 response
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.”
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