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.

Ms. Goddard has been President and CEO of ChildFund International since 2007.  Prior to that, she served in a variety of positions at CARE over a period of twenty years, including as Chief of Staff at CARE USA, County Director in CARE Egypt, Deputy Regional Director for East Africa and Project Coordinator in CARE Bangladesh.  Ms. Goddard began her career as a social worker, was a PeaceCorps volunteer in northeastern Kenya, and worked for World Learning in Somalia in the mid-1980s. 

ChildFund International works in more than 30 countries assisting more than 15 million children and family members, without regard for race, creed or origin. The organization has served children since 1938.

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.

NM:  You say it’s available for all organizations.  Is there any need or interest in keeping proprietary any of the methods or tools that Mercy Corps uses?

RA:  Not at all!  We want to get this out there for a couple reasons:  a) to better the practice of our entire field; and b) to give Mercy Corps staff the tools and resources needed to continue their work and innovate.  Mercy Corps feels like this is a methodology that we’ve really embraced.  We’ve helped move the field forward significantly, and we wanted to put something out there that celebrates that, and acknowledges it for all the people that have been doing the hard work in countries around the world.

NM:  There’s one particular diagram that I think is helpful to mobilizers and program managers.  It describes the various levels of community participation and recognizes that all communities, all people, are not starting from the same place.

RA:  Yes.  That’s right.  When asked “where do most community members start?”, our field staff in a number of different country programs said that it’s a mix, even within a given community.  So being flexible with people and going through a process where they’re able to make more decisions together, prioritize things more efficiently, take more leadership, up to the point where people don’t need an external group. They don’t need a Mercy Corps or one of our partners to facilitate that process.  They’re facilitating it themselves, and we’re there either as a safety net or in an advisory capacity.

NM:    The manual talks about training staff in several key areas, including procurement and finance.  Can you talk a bit about Mercy Corps’ approach to training and community mobilization?

RA:  I think the thing in the manual that you’re referring to is getting staff trained in a wide variety of skill sets.  There were recommendations from a number of different country offices saying “we need to have people who are agile enough to move from working with a community, to facilitating a prioritization meeting, to having a conversation with the local administrator.”  It’s also helpful for mobilization teams to be able to understand budgets and have monitoring skills, both for overall project implementation and to help community members participate in and lead these same processes.  Mobilizers are often in community leadership roles well after projects end.  So staff capacity building in all these areas is a major part of community mobilization.

NM:  Prepositioning was an interesting section, because it’s powerful when you say “we need to be clear about expectations.”  It’s the first step in the mobilization process according to the manual.

RA:  Often, people who design programs have the luxury of thinking about the best case scenario, and then you get to the actual implementation and realize circumstances may have changed – there are daily practicalities that proposals just can’t take into account.  So, getting a program team together and on the same page before engaging community members is just good practice – being reflective, thoughtful practitioners as opposed to launching into something that may or may not work in the current context. And this becomes an ongoing part of the mobilization process.  Our staff said that reassessing multiple times throughout implementation is helpful because you constantly have to re-strategize to facilitate getting people from passive mobilization to being able to implement things without the assistance of a Mercy Corps or one of our partners.

NM:  What else should people be aware of regarding this new resource from Mercy Corps?

RA:  It is important to Mercy Corps that the whole community mobilization approach is grounded in the human rights perspective.  It’s fundamental that we find ways to get multiple actors to work together.  The community mobilization approach has proven effective at doing that.  It’s about being responsive to communities, rather than coming with external development agendas.  That’s a really important thing that isn’t new to this guide, but is clearly communicated in the guide.  The tools and conceptual frameworks to plan, implement and evaluate community mobilization are housed here.

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?

What most surprised me at first was how quickly things go to scale at BRAC. Mr. Fazle Abed, BRAC’s CEO, is a man who takes great risk.  He does not believe a program needs to be perfected before being expanded. In his view, the bugs inevitably work themselves out along the way. This sentiment ran counter to my inclination to perfect a pilot and then expand, but I was constantly reminded that while small is beautiful, big is necessary, especially in a country of 153 million people.

Mr. Abed has been BRAC’s CEO since its inception. As his retirement looms, I wonder what course BRAC will take as he and other senior-level directors retire. Will the change in management cause drastic differences in BRAC’s vision and approach?

The ordinary nature of the BRAC office also struck me. Employees work reasonable hours in simple conditions, yet what they produce is nothing short of extraordinary. To date, BRAC’s education department has touched the lives of more than 3.8 million children, 93% of which come from rural areas. BRAC is largely divided into silos of expertise, and I was impressed by how such differently focused branches could streamline their agendas in such a seamless, efficient way.

While at BRAC, I came to realize that many other NGOs in Bangladesh are doing similar work with adolescent girls. To my surprise, however, very few of the project heads and CEOs were talking to each other and sharing their experiences. This exasperated me, and I tried to meet with as many NGO leaders to talk about similarities between the projects. If so many people are in dire need of help in Bangladesh, why are institutions repeating each other’s work instead of seeking synergies and expanding access? To what extent is this lack of collaboration donor-driven?

BRAC is in the midst of impressive global expansion: it now provides health, education, financial, disaster relief and other services to Afghans, Pakistanis and citizens of several African countries.  I am fascinated as to whether BRAC’s Bangaldeshi model, implemented elsewhere by interim Bangladeshi directors, will achieve the kinds of results it has in Bangladesh. Can the BRAC model be adapted for broad international expansion with diverse populations in a variety of contexts?

Lauren Murphy, second year Master in Public Policy student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government reflects on her summer internship at BRAC in Bangladesh. BRAC is one of the largest poverty-fighting NGOs in the world and now has offices in Afghanistan, Tanzania, Pakistan, Sierra Leone and Liberia, among other countries.