Author: Alanna Shaikh

US Congress Discovers Urbanization – director’s cut

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

I try to keep my blog posts to one major point. If I have a lot to say, I turn it into a series. So when I wrote my most recent UN Dispatch post, about Congress and USAID, I ended up cutting the last paragraph. It was a good last paragraph, though, so I’ll put it right here. Kind of like a DVD extra:

Finally – maybe our legislators should consider letting USAID do its job. We know that development works best when programs are integrated and part of a larger strategy. Holding USAID programs hostage to every trendy new stand-alone topic – avian flu (remember when it was a USAID top priority?), job creation, rebuilding Iraq, basic education, drug resistant TB and so on ad infinitum – is the exact opposite of the kind of coherent long-term planning we need for development.

Me, in other places

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

What if we renamed Chagas to “blood sucking assassin bug disease?” I sexify NTDs over at End the Neglect.*

Just to demonstrate that I have range, I also have a post up at UN Dispatch, looking at the possible outcomes of the events in Kyrgyzstan.The scenarios range from almost good to very, very bad.

*Clever description stolen from Kathleen McDonald

A Kyrgyzstan Cheat Sheet

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

This is way off my usual topic, but I have been living in Central Asia on and off since 2001. I love this region, and I love Kyrgyzstan (my mom and I had actually been planning to go to Bishkek this week for a long weekend). I don’t have a whole lot of insight to offer on the situation in Bishkek right now, but I thought some background might be useful. Your Kyrgyzstan cheat sheet:

  1. Kyrgyzstan was part of the Soviet Union, and became independent in 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The president of the Kyrgyz SSR, Askar Akayev, became president of independent Kyrgyzstan.
  2. Initially hailed as the “Thomas Jefferson of Central Asia,” Akayez grew less committed to democracy and more corrupt over time. His family, particularly his children, began to dominate all forms of commerce in Kyrgyzstan.
  3. In March 2005, Akayev’s party swept the parliamentary elections in an election that nobody thought was free and fair. It was criticized by the OSCE and led to massive protests all over the country. On March 24th, there was a bloodless coup and Akayev fled the country. This was known as the Tulip Revolution.
  4. The new president was Kurmanbek Bakiev, a former prime minister and leader of the People’s Movement of Kyrgyzstan. He expressed his commitment to a freer, more democratic Kyrgyzstan.
  5. That didn’t happen. His term in office has been marred by state-sponsored violence and widespread corruption. The protests against him began in April 2007.
  6. Here and now, April 2010, the protests are starting again. The media is reporting that the State TV station has been occupied by protesters, and approximately 10,000 people are gathered in the nation’s main square. At least four people have been killed. Two provincial government offices have been occupied. Twitter is reporting that the Interior Minister was killed. Friends in Kyrgyzstan tell me that more people are on the move from all over the country to Bishkek to support the protesters, and their goal is revolution.

Easy

By Alanna Shaikh | | 11 Comments |

easy button

I get a lot of questions on how to succeed in international development. How to make an internship turn into a job, how to use a bad job to get a good job. I give the same answer, every single time. Be easy. More than anything else – more than being skilled, more than being high performing, more even than brilliant – be easy.

This is a small world. You see the same people over and over again over the course of years. Hierarchies turn sideways and upside down in the space of months – every time a new grant gets awarded. My friend Simon has been my boss, my HQ backstop, my subordinate, and my colleague working at another NGO.  If you screw up your relationships with colleagues, you don’t get to leave your job and never think of them again. They’ll pop up in the future – maybe working for the donor that funds you, maybe managing you.

You will work with a limited pool of people. If it’s a good project, you have a big national staff and a small expat staff. Even the largest project is smaller than your average corporation. You need to be able to manage the complexity of the national-expatriate balance. If you can’t manage that, you can’t do your job – no matter what else you have going for you.

That means that when people are hiring, the thought at the front of their minds is, “Will this person be easy to work with?” Because it doesn’t matter how good you are if you’re hard to work with. I remember recommending a colleague for promotion and getting the rapid, muttered response: “We can’t move him up. He doesn’t play well with others.”

I have burned my share of bridges. You can’t be easy all the time. I have ex-colleagues that hate me, I am sure. At least one of them comments on this blog to express his disdain for me. But I do my best to be easy.

Four ways to be easy:

  1. When given a task to do, don’t complain to your boss about it. Just smiled and go do it, even if it’s awful.
  2. You can complain to your colleagues a little, but not all the time. You’re aiming for “this sucks but I can handle it” not “this sucks and I’m miserable.”
  3. This part is kind of awful: you can complain to your expat friends a little, but not all the time. Because very often your friends are the ones who tell you about job openings and float your resume around. They’re not going to do that if they think you’re whiny or bad at your job. (Though, honestly, it occurs to me that if you want to complain all the time you probably need a new job better suited to your skills.)
  4. It’s inevitable that your personal and work life will get mixed up, because living overseas does that. Keep them as separate as you can anyway.

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Photo credit:  Jason Gulledge

Chosen because I was trying to be a little edgy with the word “Easy,” not over the top.

Why you can’t understand global health

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |

This is another reprint from my sadly abandoned Global Health Basics blog.

If you are reading this blog post, you can’t really understand the most important dynamic in global health: poverty and ill-health. They go together in a powerful vicious cycle. When you are poor you lack access to medical care and are you exposed to environmental factors that put you at a hugely increased risk of getting sick.

If you can read this, that’s not you. By definition, you speak English and you have access to the internet. You earn more than a dollar a day. You can’t understand.

It’s all well and good for people to opine and analyze global health issues. We can obsess about behavior change, system strengthening, and maximizing the value of dollars spent on health. But when you are poor, your life is a zero-sum game. Everything you do has a trade-off somewhere. There is no give in the system. It’s a level of decision management that is impossible to fully understand from the outside.

Among other things, that’s why bad treatments are destructive, even when they aren’t physically harmful. They cost money that is needed elsewhere, and take time that poor people need to spend doing things that support their basic survival. There is nothing unimportant that they can give up. Everything opportunity cost is brutal.

I can’t actually understand what it’s like to live that. Neither can you.* It is very important to remember that when we design programs. That’s the real reason that consulting with your communities is best practice. It’s not a new trend, a way to appease the donor or local government, or a belief in social justice. It’s because nobody except the poor knows what their lives are like. There is a role for outside experts to see opportunities and combinations, using their larger base of outside-the-system knowledge. But they don’t know what it’s like to live in poverty. Nobody does, except poor people.

*Unless you started your life that poor and accumulated wealth now. My dad did that; it’s not impossible. It is, however, rare.

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(photo credit: cooperniall)

Is Bill Easterly useless?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 7 Comments |

Bill Easterly’s blog, Aid Watch, is taking some criticism in the development blogosphere right now. I normally try to avoid discussions like this because, honestly, my opinions change every 35 seconds about what the right way to blog about development is. (Or, for that matter, to do development.) We all have different ways of writing, and different motivations for our blogging. But I’m an occasional contributor to Aid Watch, and some people have questioned why. I feel like I should get into this one, at least a little bit.

For those of you who don’t obsessively follow (like I do) the RSS feed of every existing development blog, Transitionland, The Big Push, and Siena Anstis have all recently called out Aid Watch for not contributing to discussion about international development in a useful way. They’ve called it a pointless echo chamber and an unproductive and mean-spirited use of time. Prof. Easterly has responded by linking to their critiques, and defending the use of satire.

I see both sides. I think that Prof. Easterly is too quick to blame aid agencies and NGOs for problems that are systemic. He blames individual actors for doing things that are incentivized by the development industry. I would like him to write and think more about fixing the system than attacking the individual organizations. And I agree that his tone can be snarky to a degree that stops being funny and makes you tune the post out.

On the other hand, the system needs someone who will speak truth to power (or, in this case, development money). And I know from my own experience that the blunter and snarkier you are when writing about development, the more people listen. How many times have I written about the damage done by poorly considered in-kind donations? But I never got any attention until I wrote a post called “Nobody wants your old shoes.” Then all of a sudden, I was getting quoted in the NY Times.

Prof. Easterly is nasty because being nasty makes people listen. People listen because he’s willing to say things no one else will, and he says them loud and mean. Sometimes he crosses the line. But sometimes he says exactly what needs to be said.

I think that your view on the Aid Watch blog depends on where you’re standing. If you are working in development, actually doing the hard jobs and fighting to make an impact, then Aid Watch feels like one more attack on your efforts. If you are in DC, though, or Geneva or London, exposed on a daily basis to the ugly business end of development funding, then Aid Watch is like watching Dorothy unmask the Wizard of Oz. Sometimes, behind the rhetoric, there is nothing but an empty space. We need somebody to point that out.

I’m in Dushanbe now, it’s true. And I’m fighting to support a project I care about. But my last job was Washington, on the donor side, in one of the deepest and most obscure nooks of the development bureaucracy. The memory hasn’t faded just yet.

My take on Aid Watch varies from day to day. Sometimes it offends me, sometimes the thinking seems shallow, sometimes I want to stand up and cheer. But I wouldn’t call it useless.

Drinking Our Own ORS

By Alanna Shaikh | | 12 Comments |

(This is a reprint of a post I wrote for my Global Health Basics blog, which it turns out I have neither the time nor the technical prowess to maintain.)

In social media, they talk about eating your own dog food. In global health, I think the equivalent would be drinking our own Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS). We need to do a lot of that. It’s important to think about what we ask of people because it gives us a much clearer sense of why we get ignored. Here’s the starter list for how to drink your own ORS:

1. Drink an entire glass of ORS from a packet every time you get the runs, not the tastier homemade kind. Don’t take Imodium.

2. Boil and cool all your water before drinking it.

3. Never spend a single cent on a treatment or cure that hasn’t been proven to work. No vitamin C for a hangover, no Preparation H, no Neosporin on your cuts.

4. No antibiotics when they aren’t strictly necessary. That means nothing for your bronchitis or your child’s ear infection.

5. Use a condom every single time you have sex, even with your spouse, even if your spouse doesn’t want to.

6. Take your child to the doctor immediately if she is showing any of the IMCI warning signs, but don’t take her if she is less sick than that.

7. Breastfeed exclusively until six months, and continue breastfeeding until at least age 2. If you have to work, then express milk by hand into a jar and store it in a cool place. But never feed your child with a bottle. Use a cup and spoon.

8. Choose your food on the basis of what is cheapest and most nutritious, without regard for flavor or cultural tradition.

9. Don’t see the doctor you are most comfortable with; instead, see the doctor that your government recommends.

10. When caring for your sick child, don’t follow the advice of your mother or mother-in-law. Instead, follow advice from a government doctor you may only have met once.

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(No antibiotics for her! photo credit: rabble)