New Brand, New Strategy: Forging a New Identity as an NGO
Posted on 14 September 2009 | 2 responses
Anne Lynam Goddard, President and CEO of ChildFund International, will speak at Weil Town Hall (Belfer Hall, Harvard Kennedy School) on Friday, September 25 at 11.30 am about the experience of steering an international NGO through a major re-branding exercise. This seminar is organized by the Humanitarian & Development NGOs domain at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, as part of its NGO Leaders Seminar Series.
Ms. Goddard will speak on September 25 about: what drove the re-naming and re-branding; how the organization’s new strategy will shape its impact in the future; and what challenges and opportunities arise in forging a new identity in the NGO world. Until early July 2009, ChildFund International was known as the Christian Children’s Fund. Read more
Guide to Community Mobilization Programming: A New Resource from Mercy Corps
Posted on 11 September 2009 | No responses
At the end of August, Neil McCullagh sat down with Ruth Allen, Mercy Corps’ Global Advisor for Community Mobilization, Governance and Partnerships, to discuss the release of Mercy Corps’ Guide to Community Mobilization Programming. This valuable guide, grounded in over ten years of Mercy Corps’ practical experience in supporting community-led development, can be found here.
NM: Mercy Corps has been doing this for so long. What does this new guide give Mercy Corps practitioners or other practitioners that they did not have before?
RA: Mercy Corps has been working on community mobilization since the mid-‘90s and formalized our approaches in the late ‘90s. What happened at that point was the amazing adoption of this philosophy – this way of putting participation at the forefront of leadership at the community level. There was rapid uptake by our staff and different teams implemented, expanded and created – whether by finding ways to mobilize communities during an emergency as our Georgia team did or revising tools designed for rural communities and applying them in urban Indonesia. The new guide is the consolidation of all that creative adaptation in the field. It draws on all the tools that have been created across the Mercy Corps world, and puts them all within easy reach. It is also for people who aren’t doing community mobilization, but are coming to this as a new concept or are partnering with Mercy Corps and wanting to understand this methodology. It’s an easy entry point to understand some big concepts which are rarely defined in one place. Read more
Learning From BRAC: Reflections and Questions
Posted on 11 September 2009 | No responses
By Lauren Murphy
My time spent at BRAC in Dhaka, Bangladesh, reframed my perspective on a surprising number of development and humanitarian issues. After experiencing life in both the city and rural areas of Bangladesh, I came away with a more nuanced understanding of women’s rights and equality, religious frameworks and development, and informal labor. I worked on an expanding financial solvency and social empowerment project targeted at adolescent girls, and I witnessed the inner workings of an NGO behemoth that runs parallel to the Bangladeshi government.
Unlike Grameen Bank and other microfinance institutions, BRAC loans money to adolescent girls for income-generating activities. I traveled to Bangladesh to assess the effectiveness of this somewhat controversial lending model.
BRAC Center is a 20-story office, and BRAC employs over 100,000 people, the majority based in Dhaka. I quickly came to realize that my most meaningful analysis would come from getting out of the capital city. I had the opportunity to observe BRAC’s many programs, from ultra-poor village organization meetings, to school houses, medical services, and even their retail stores. My village experiences allowed me to observe the adolescent girls’ impressive skillfulness with embroidery and handicrafts. I was often frustrated by their hopelessness and lack of market linkages for their products. I felt they lacked exposure to positive female role models and often could not conceptualize how best to use their loans from BRAC.
After multiple visits to the field, the following questions came to mind, and I am still formulating my responses to them:
How do we ensure that appropriately aged girls are using loans for their own income-generating activities? Are girls really escaping poverty or are microfinance institutions creating future dependent borrowers?
Is lending to adolescent girls effectively delaying marriage, eliminating dowry, and promoting more years of education?
Is lending to young girls ethical? Considering that most villagers do not have valid birth certificates, how can we innovate flexible monitoring and evaluation techniques? Read more