Author: Alanna Shaikh

Things I don’t believe in #10 – Donating stuff instead of money (June 2008)

By Alanna Shaikh | | 6 Comments |

Pile of used clothes

Note: August is looking like a crazy and stressful month for me, with no time to blog here. To make sure no one gets bored and abandons me, I am going to re-run some of my favorite posts from the past.

Give money. Don’t send food, bottled water, clothing or useful-seeming stuff. Give money.

Your old stuff costs money to ship. It is almost always cheaper to just buy it in country, and doing it that way benefits the local economy. It’s also more respectful to survivors of humanitarian emergencies, and allows relief agencies to procure exactly what is needed instead of struggling to find a use for randomly selected used junk. Disaster News Network talks about the used clothes problem in “The Trouble with Trousers.” which features a really depressing anecdote about Hurricane Hugo.

Your food costs money to ship, too. It is probably not food anyone in the recipient area would recognize. How exactly will the people of Burma know what to do with canned refried beans or artichoke hearts? Sending donated American food doesn’t drive income to local farmers or help local retailers start selling again. Buying in-country gets food people will actually understand how to cook and supports the local economy.

Here’s another example – some people wanted to send their old tents to China to house earthquake survivors. A sweet idea – provide quick, free housing. But every different kind of tent would have different set-up instructions, and how many people save their tent instructions once they’ve learned how to do it? It would take a huge time investment in figuring out each type of tent, and then training for the people in China who had to set up the tents. All of this time translates to a delay in providing housing, and it’s time used by paid staff, which means it is also squandered money.

Interaction, the coalition of disaster-relief NGOs, has a nice piece about why cash donations are most effective. They mention needs-based procurement, efficient delivery, lower costs, economic support, and cultural and environmental appropriateness as advantages of cash. World Volunteer Web has a good explanation too, breaking down the myths about post-disaster aid.

Usually people end these kinds of articles with links to the three or so places who will take your old clothes and possessions for international donation. I am not going to do it. Don’t waste everyone’s effort that way. Give your old stuff to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or St. Vincent de Paul; they’ll make the best use of it. They’ll sell your things locally and use the money for their charitable purposes.

Giving stuff instead of money is easy for you, it’s cheaper for you, and it’s quick. It is not quick, easy, or affordable for the NGOs who are actually trying to help people.

If you want to help, give money.

[Picture of old clothes in Haiti from Flickr by Vanessa Bertozzi]

Things I don’t believe in #6 – All powerful expatriate leadership (June 2008)

By Alanna Shaikh | | 3 Comments |

rainbow jesus

 

Note: August is looking like a crazy and stressful month for me, with no time to blog here. To make sure no one gets bored and abandons me, I am going to re-run some of my favorite posts from the past.

 

This is the first thing – expats don’t stay forever. In two or three or four years, the expat will leave. If your whole program depends on her, or the staff believes that it does, things will go to pieces when she leaves. This is the second thing – it’s disempowering. You don’t want your staff, or your stakeholders, to believe change only comes from outsiders. You want people to find their own power and their own capacity to influence their lives and communities. You don’t want them to sit around waiting and starving for the Dutch to come back and rebuild the irrigation canals.

This is the third thing. You want your staff invested in the process. You want everyone involved to know your select your pilot schools because they meet the qualifications for your program. You don’t want them thinking the schools were selected because Mr. Thomas feels really bad for the villages, or worse yet, because he thought the teachers were pretty. You want people to know you’ve got a system and your apply it fairly.

This is the fourth thing. Country Directors who allow themselves to be seen as having and exerting that kind of power end up isolated. Staff members won’t be comfortable being part of a collaborative decision-making process. They won’t offer opinions on how to make things better, and they won’t go to the CD if they identify a problem.

Good programs come from good teams, not from little gods and their adoring worshippers.

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Photo credit: celinecelines
Chosen for the shiny rainbow.

May 2008 – What’s the difference between relief and development?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 6 Comments |

Palestinian Refugees

Note: August is looking like a crazy and stressful month for me, with no time to blog here. To make sure no one gets bored and abandons me, I am going to re-run some of my favorite posts from the past.

May 2008 – What’s the difference between relief and development?

The simplest breakdown goes like this:

Humanitarian relief programs are focused on rapid start-up, and rapid impact. Implementers of humanitarian programs need to gear up as fast as possible, and start providing necessary assistance as fast as possible. Their primary focus is not building local capacity, sustainability, or monitoring and evaluation. Their primary focus is getting help to people in need. They end when the emergency ends. Relief can come from the outside, and it is a response to some kind of breakdown or disaster.

Development programs are focused on achieving long-term change of some kind, with the intent of improving people’s lives and the lives of their descendants. They involve rigorous planning and ongoing operational research. They are rooted in local capacity building, because they are aimed at change which continues after the project ends. Even if it has outside support, development in the end has to come from inside.

In practice, however, it’s not that simple. (it never is, is it?) Sometimes the emergency doesn’t end. Situations that look like short-term humanitarian emergencies can go on for years, or even decades. Somalia, for example, Afghanistan, or Sudan. Programs designed to provide immediate assistance become a way of life for people in crisis. It would be nice if those programs could be converted into development programs, but it’s very hard to turn a relief program into a development program. The skill sets for the staff are different, for one thing. Building latrines and building community capacity can be a long, long way apart. You can hire new staff, though, or retrain your people. The other hurdle – usually the big one – is that relief programs and development programs have different donors.

Relief programs are generally funded by private donations and specific government donors. The US government, for example, funds emergency relief through the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Relief. Development programs are far less popular with private donors, and they’re funded by a different set of government agencies. If you want to change the focus of your program, you have to get different different donors. Which mostly you can’t do. Donors don’t like to take over each other’s programs, you won’t be familiar with the new donor’s procedures and evaluation requirements, and development donors plan their financial priorities a long time in advance. They often won’t have money to pick up your newly transformed relief project.

Everyone’s perfect ideal for relief is to give aid that empowers the communities who receive it. Immediate assistance that also builds skills and improves quality of life for the long term. You could, for example, truck in water to a community struck by drought. Then you could dig wells and turn the wells over to local management. You could train a local engineering association or the Ministry of Water on well-digging and irrigation management and safe drinking water. We just need a funding structure that makes it happen.

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Photo Credit: Castielli
Chosen because the Palestinian refugee camps are a classic example of emergency relief that has been going on far, far too long.

Dear Enough Project, refugee kids are people

By Alanna Shaikh | | 28 Comments |

(photo from Enough blog)

Updated on July 13 – Enough has issued an apology for this poorly handled distribution, and committed to doing better in the future. You can see their apology here. I was impressed; it was like a case study in how to take criticism with grace.

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The Enough project works in advocacy against genocide, particularly on Darfur. All well and good. I don’t know much about the intricacies of Darfur, or the intricacies of advocacy. I know some people think Enough is too heavy on the celebrities, and others think they do good work. That’s not what this post is about.

This post is about the idiotic, dehumanizing, tacky stunt they pulled in a refugee camp in Eastern Chad. They brought a limited number of New York Knicks jerseys on a visit to the camp, and made the kids fight for them. You don’t believe me? I will quote the blog:

“(We) separated the children into groups based on which blocks in the camp they lived. Then we began to hand the jerseys out as evenly as possible. The scramble began, and within minutes the jerseys were devoured. Though we informed them that we had no more to give, the children still scrambled up to us to peer into the empty bag to ensure a jersey had not escaped our notice.”

Okay, not fight – scramble. And note the dehumanizing language – devoured – like the kids are starving animals. This makes me mad. Refugee children are human beings with human dignity who should be treated as such. Enough just came and taught the kids that there isn’t enough for everyone and the good stuff goes to the strong and fast.

Now you ask – what would I have wanted them to do? Well, first of all, I would posit that there is no reason to bring New York Knicks jerseys to a refugee camp except to feel good about yourself. If you are determined to bring the jerseys I still have three suggestions:

  • Bring enough jerseys for all the kids (a lesson many of us learned in kindergarten)
  • Give the jerseys to schools to use as prizes or rewards for high-performing students
  • Use a transparent lottery system to select parents to be given jerseys for their kids

All of these would take more time and effort than just carrying basketball jerseys to a refugee camp and throwing them at kids. It’s worth it.

At this point, I would like Enough to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I’d like them to develop guidelines on appropriate donations and methods of donations for visitors to camps. They should refuse to visit camps with any group or individual who does not follow those guidelines. And they should publish those guidelines on their blog for public review and comment.

PS – If you don’t want my advice on how to handle a distribution to refugee children, may I recommend the Sphere standards?

I’d appreciate it if anyone who reads this post would go over to the Enough post, tell them what you think of this dumb stunt, and leave a link to this post.

Last note: Before you post a comment telling me that Enough means well and we shouldn’t criticize them, read this post.

Fund People, Not Concepts

By Alanna Shaikh | | 3 Comments |

Leader on sand dune
(photo credit: Hamed Saber)

Have you ever seen a really great project run by a terrible leader? I never have. I’ve seen competent development work done by bad leaders, but not great work. I’ve never seen it in a company, either. No amount of quality systems can make up for a lack of good leadership at the top.

But we give our grants and contracts to development work based on the structure of the project, as though the logframe and the staff chart are all that matter. This is a problem. It’s not the shape of the staff chart that matters, it’s the names you find in the chart.

We should give money to people who can do good things with it. I once worked with a Ministry of Health official who ran one small department of the Ministry of Health. He was committed to his work, and to his country, and he was flat-out brilliant. He was my go-to advisor for everything my project did, not just the stuff that involved his center. He had ideas – great ideas – about how to improve health in a whole range of different ways.

He should have been running a project. Some donor should have been bankrolling him to improve his department and then the health of the people in his country. With appropriate safeguards, of course. Reporting on how the money was used and what impact it had and so on. But he could have done amazing things with the right support.

The project I work for now, which I won’t name because nothing I write here is their opinion etc. etc. blah blah blah, does really good work. I am proud to be part of it. But our chief of party is the smartest human being on earth. She leaves Marilyn Vos Savant in the dust. She could be doing anything, and she’d do it well. Someone should give her the development equivalent of a MacArthur genius grant (note to self – find way to nominate boss for MacArthur grant) to use her big brain to attack development problems any way she wants to.

Instead of supporting people who can get things done, we support structures. Some of that is an effort to support fragile states and build democratic institutions, and we should keep it up. Some of the support for structures, however, is just intellectual laziness, and a desire to do things how they have always been done. That needs to change. I know this sounds like a recipe for corruption, but anything is a recipe for corruption if you do it badly. We can still ask for financial accountability, and for proof of results.

Innovation comes from individual people with ideas and passion. We should find and support those people to bring change in their countries and communities.

Honesty as Policy

By Alanna Shaikh | | 7 Comments |

Anti-USAID graffiti
(photo credit: dlisbona)

Right now, when donor governments give foreign aid, they do so on the basis of friendship and altruism. While that is certainly one reason, it’s not the whole story. Focusing only on that motivation leaves our partners filling in the gap with their own often destructive theories. In most cases, a powerful motivation for supporting development aid is the desire to live in a safer world. Helping other countries grow healthy and prosperous will makes us all safer. That is a perfectly acceptable reason to give aid.

If we speak honestly about the role of self-interest in international development, it would help us do our work better. It would empower host countries, reduce the idea that aid is basically a bribe to get something from the developing country, and improve community acceptance.

Empowering Host Countries

If we’re giving assistance for no reason other than the kindness of our hearts it puts us in a superior position. We’re the wealthy generous people, helping the poor who need our help. It is inherently disempowering to the people we work with – governments, communities, and individuals.

But, if we both have something to offer and something to gain – that is a partnership. Example: Haiti needs peace and prosperity. The US needs Haiti to stop exporting refugees and start buying the stuff we make. We can work together to make that happen. I think this explains, to a large degree, the success of social entrepreneurship. If you take generosity out of the equation, everyone is equal. And equality is a much better place to start.

Changing the Government View of Foreign Aid

Many, many, many foreign leaders see the world from a pure cold war realpolitik perspective. They assume that development aid is a quid pro quo and it’s given to win their geopolitical support. They genuinely don’t believe that aid could be given for another reason.

If development aid is just barter for geopolitical support, then it doesn’t matter if the aid projects are effective. It doesn’t matter what kind of work is supported. In fact, it doesn’t need to be development aid at all. It could just as easily be helicopters, weapons, or a new set of gold toilets for the dictator’s palace. Especially in countries where top-level leadership is corrupt, this doesn’t lead to host country support for development efforts.

While increased GDP and national prosperity benefits everyone, plenty of the short term efforts needed to bring that about have losers. Corrupt elites in particular tend to suffer, and they can and will oppose development projects for that reason. Strong support is needed from the host country is required to push past that. Knowing that the donor country values successful development efforts because it’s also dependent on the outcome helps to generate that support.

A caveat. Making donor interest in development clear could also lead to host government efforts to hold aid impact hostage. “If you care so much about regulatory reform, we’ll keep it from happening until you buy seven gold toilets.” But even that kind of gamesmanship is a game that takes impacts seriously, and is a form of empowerment, however unpleasant. And a donor can take the long view and refuse to play.

Community Acceptance

In my own career, I have been asked over and over by community leaders, local government officials, and plenty of other people why the US is funding the project I work for. They are curious, and they’re suspicious. They’ve seen enough American movies not to think Americans are saintly and loving. We must have a reason for doing something so good. But what is it? Having no clear answer makes us look suspicious.

Think of the famous case of the Nigerian religious leaders who refused polio vaccines. I strongly suspect that one reason they refused was that were looking for ulterior motives. Why would Americans want to send vaccines for Nigerian kids? Altruism alone didn’t make sense as an explanation, so they found another – the vaccines causes AIDS and sterility. They had also already been mistreated once by the international pharmaceutical industry, deepening their doubts. What if we’d said in the first place, “We want your kids to grow up strong and healthy so that they work hard, get rich, buy American products and don’t become terrorists.” That’s an ulterior motive that makes sense.