There has been an interesting blogosphere discussion of crowdsourcing in the last few days. The usual crew of people who think about aid – this time humanitarian response in specific – seem to be polarizing slowly into pro and anti-crowdsourcing camps. I linked you to the calmest posts there. There are positions staked out all the way along the spectrum from “crowdsourcing is evil and will hurt innocent people” to “crowdsourcing is going to change the world all by itself.”
As always, I’m somewhere in the middle on this. Crowdsourcing is just a tool. It’s not a miracle cure for anything. It’s a good tool, and sooner or later most competent emergency response groups will find a way to use it. Some will be early adopters, some will trail in at the end. Eventually it’ll get trendy with donors and everyone will start mentioning crowdsourcing in proposals, whether they have a decent plan for it or not. (I’d also like to point out the remarkable similarity between the rhetoric on crowdsourcing and the discussion of the last big miracle, microfinance.)
But this post isn’t actually about crowdsourcing. It’s about change.
Look, we all know international aid is a mess. The system is not selecting for efforts that work. Bad programs get rewarded. Useless programs get extended. Good programs vanish for no apparent reason.
There are a whole lot of reasons that aid doesn’t really work. Personally, I like to blame democratically elected governments and their need to control where taxpayer money goes.* You can also look at international politics, the challenges of data collection in poor countries, and the sheer complexity of the system. Just for a start.
Anyway, everyone who works in this field knows it’s deeply flawed. The chance to work for an effort that really works is like gold. It’s what we all dream of. We cling like barnacles when we find it. Because it’s too rare. (Too rare, but does happen. Let me make that clear. A broken system means inefficiency, not utter failure. There are development efforts that succeed, and we don’t want to lose them. That’s one reason that feelings run so high.)
Something has to give. We can’t make this broken system keep flailing along forever. Heck, even Rajiv Shah knows it. And when the system changes, it’s going to hurt everyone invested in the status quo. I don’t know if it’s going to be a formal system shift like Cash on Delivery aid, or a disruptive innovation born of some technical advance. But it’s going to hurt, and everyone that’s part of the current system is going to struggle to adjust.
So when tempers flare over whether SMS messaging has actually been proven to save lives, I think what we’re really looking at is fear and hope. Is this the disruptive innovation that’s going to change everything? And if it is, is that good or bad? What if the change makes a flawed system worse?
* No, I am not arguing for dictatorship. But I am saying that most democratically elected representatives aren’t going to be aid experts, and they do control the purse strings. This leads to inevitable mess.
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Chosen because barnacles were the only decent visual in the whole blog post.
Good post. What are some of the efforts that you think are really worth fighting for?
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Pernille Bærendtsen, Alanna Shaikh. Alanna Shaikh said: New post at Blood & Milk: Change Hurts http://bloodandmilk.org/?p=1640 […]
Alanna, your comments/posts are great! I hope your husband adjusts to your great blogging mind and voice–!
Rebecca – I’ll work on a post about that!
Barbara – My husband is generally my toughest editor and biggest fan. But this post he just didn’t agree with, and he doesn’t think my logic is rigorous enough to prove my point.
I wonder if perhaps the fear and hope around innovations like SMS messaging is that these will be the little changes in aid that mean big political changes don’t have to happen. Like you said, one of the biggest inefficiencies in aid comes from the politicians who decide where funding goes. In DC there is a lot of talk about aid reform, both on the Hill and from within USAID, but neither institution is going to change the fundamental inefficiency of funding.
I’ve had a chance to meet with different USAID and Capitol Hill people here in DC, and I’m often reminded that many of them want the same thing, but just disagree on the means to achieving it or what can be achieved with certain allocations of USD. I would love to read a guest post by your husband on his perspective on this issue, and his response to your comments.
Solid post. The connection to microfinance hysteria is important. Could you mention links to the less ‘calm’ entries on the topic? Many thanks if possible
Amanda – as a USAID employee, he’s not allowed to do media, even blogs, without a lot of approvals.
Andrew – I’d rather not – I prefer to bring attention to the people acting like adults…
Crowdsourcing is just a tool. It’s not a miracle cure for anything. It’s a good tool, and sooner or later most competent emergency response groups will find a way to use it.
I agree with the first two sentences, but the third sentence just raises questions for me – what’s your evidence that it’s a “good tool” for this specific purpose?
So when tempers flare over whether SMS messaging has actually been proven to save lives, I think what we’re really looking at is fear and hope. Is this the disruptive innovation that’s going to change everything?
Discussion of “disruptive innovation” (by people more enamoured of crowdsourcing than I am) appears to be the result of importing inaccurate assumptions based on what’s happened to journalism (as evidenced in Patrick’s original post).
I believe that there is no disruptive innovation that’s going to change everything, precisely because these problems are systemic in nature and not process-based. I don’t have any fear or hope about crowdsourcing – I just think it stops people from focusing on the actual problems we face.
Paul – I have no evidence that it’s a good tool for this in particular, but I do think it’s a good tool in general and most aid groups will run into a need for it one way or another.
We’ll agree to disagree then 😀
Paul – fair enough, and you know a LOT more about humanitarian relief than I do!
Great post! I don’t think I can speak as confidently as Paul C in saying that there is no “disruptive innovation” in aid. I don’t know if we can tell for sure. Disruptive innovations come in all places and when they do, the improved process can lead to something bigger – including radical system redesign – but often not exactly when and how it is expected. (Thinking here of Own Barder and Ben Ramalingam’s blog posts about complexity theory, aid and the potential for collapse in the current system).
I think it’s right to say we don’t know if crowdsourcing or COD aid or aid transparency or conditional cash transfers or whatever will make a big difference – possibly they will just be incremental add-ons – but I think we need to wait and see.
What your post speaks to for me is more the emotional side of working in aid and desperately hoping for some disruptive change that will make things work better, but being confronted with i) the possibility that it will be more hype than reality after some initial enthusiasm and ii) the fact that whatever change it is might cause uncomfortable changes for me personally.
“We can’t keep this broken system flailing along forever.”
To me this is the key point: Aid is flawed at a macro level, at a system level. The system is broken (it wasn’t very well-designed to begin with). The system needs an overhaul.
I’d see ubiquitous-technology-enabled crowd-sourcing as but one small technique. A possible refinement to an eventually overhauled larger system. Much like micro-credit of a few years ago, or Child Survival a few years before that. It’s like upgrading a high performance racing suspension onto a 1960-something Ford dump truck…
J – great point. Adding small refinements onto a broken system won’t fix it – in fact they might keep it running longer than is really wise. (I’ll just upgrade the suspension instead of buying a new car because its cheaper and less disruptive).
Question is – how do you tackle system change? There are not too many options.
i) political will by those calling the shots in the interest of the greater good (not that likely given that for reasons you’ve well expressed on your blog – there are vested interests in keeping things the way they are).
ii) crisis, brought about by some disruptive change. This could be political (such as greater political voice of BRICs, war …), economic (such as the financial crisis), or technological (too many examples to cite).
I think the second of these is most likely, although I wouldn’t put any bets on what the actual disruption is likely to be.
To take the car metaphor – I don’t think we will decide to buy a new car until it really has broken down beyond repair, or until we realize that everyone else is riding a bicycle, or a jet-pack or whatever.
Ian, I share Ben and Owen’s interest in the application of complexity theory, but the point is that we foresee potential collapse in the system largely due to the macro-level flaws that J has mentioned. This is not disruptive innovation, which happens at the process level within the system, and what I am sceptical about is disruptive innovation that will magically resolve the system level problems. Certainly at the process level there’s an almost continual process of disruptive innovation – one of the problems is that people who are new to aid (not referring to you, but a lot of people writing about Haiti) are completely unaware of this.
i) the possibility that it will be more hype than reality after some initial enthusiasm and ii) the fact that whatever change it is might cause uncomfortable changes for me personally.
On i, all new technology is accompanied by hype; the trick is being able to see past it to the value proposition. On ii, I’m not worried about uncomfortable changes for me, I’m worried about uncomfortable changes for affected communities
Paul, I agree with you on this one – there is constant innovation in provision of humanitarian aid, and it’s not immediately obvious to a newbie or an outsider.
[…] Shaikh (Blood and Milk), in a post titled “Change hurts“, recaps a recent debate over crowd-sourcing via SMS, decides that it’s “just a […]
[…] successes, to be sure. But there is also a very long way to go to make it better. Like Alanna said, aid is like a big, flailing machine, whose output (in my opinion) is simply mediocre overall. On balance neither horrible nor […]
[…] I once wrote that the aid industry “is a very large, complicated machine…” And it is. No matter what my job description reads, the reality is that I spend at least two thirds of my time trying to make the machine run better. Even when I’m on the field, whether deployed as part of a response team or conducting a head office monitoring visit (yes, those monitoring visits are important), even when I’m calling on my knowledge of Sphere standards or the principles of humanitarian accountability, as much as anything else I’m dealing with organizational things. And by and large this has been my experience in every aid job I’ve ever had, now that I think about it. No wonder Alanna described the aid machine as “flailing.” […]