Author: Alanna Shaikh

Reader question: When is it okay to start an NGO?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |


Hi Alanna,

I have been reading your blog for some time. I was particularly struck by your entry on founding NGOs. While in the context you are speaking I completely agree with you, I am curious about your opinion on something:

I am part of a (very) small NGO whose mandate is to help a small village in rural Bolivia. We have one partner in the village and several of us volunteering in the evenings/weekends to raise money in order to fund income generating projects in the village. Our ultimate goal is to develop these projects until they are capable of sustaining themselves as well as a small school that has been built in the village, at which point we would like to walk away. I am curious whether this type of operation even falls under the term NGO as you are using it, and what the feeling of the development world is with regards to these small operations? Does your opinion stand that we would be better off contributing our resources to a larger organization (even though our overhead is approximately zero)?

Thanks,

PB

Dear PB,

I can’t really answer your question without knowing more about your organization. I think, though, there are questions you can think about to decide for yourself:

• Do you have a clear idea of how you’ll measure success, or are you just assuming something good will result from your project?

• Do you have an identified funding source that does not involve applying for grants?

• Are you deeply familiar with the village you work in, and the theory and practice of the work you are doing? And I would not call one or two visits deeply familiar with a place.

• Is there no existing NGO who could do the same work in the same place? If you can commit to ongoing funding, even huge organizations can be willing to run little projects. You can actually go to Save the Children or Mercy Corps and say “I have $20,000 a year, can you support this specific school/clinic/agriculture center for that amount?” They may not be able to, but they will listen, especially if you want to work somewhere that doesn’t get much attention or funding.

• Are you starting a new organization because of ego? Do you think it will be cool/exciting/glamorous/make your mother proud to be head of an NGO? Do you actually know enough to do this well or are you just convinced in your heart you’ll do a better job because you are special?

If you feel comfortable with the answers to these questions, you can be pretty sure that your organization is value-added and not just noise.

You’ll notice that there is nothing in there about overhead. People have a problem with overhead costs because they feel that it makes money donated have less impact. But inexperience and mistakes also erode a program’s effectiveness. A skilled organization that spends 15% of the money it raises on accounting, budget transparency, and experienced headquarters oversight may well have just as much impact for every donor dollar as a no-overhead group who ends up doing training that has no impact on actual behavior, or buying supplies that are wrong for the situation.

Best,
Alanna

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(photo credit: Alexander Drachmann)
Chosen because I loved the muted colors and the weathered look of the ground and the cement.

Things I believe in #17 – recognizing and learning from failure

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |


There are a whole lot of ways you can screw up a development program. I’ve talked about some of them in the past. You can make bad choices with the best of intentions, you can discover your every choice has unintended consequences, and you can just be flat out stupid. Luckily, we’re not houseflies. We have the capacity for learning. And if we’re willing to genuinely examine our failures, we can avoid making the same mistake twice. It’s hard, but it’s possible.

Determining what went wrong is actually the easy part. There are so many moving parts in any development project that many, or most of them will not turn out how you expected. Making a list of what could have gone better will be distressingly easy.

The hard part comes next. You have to sort through your list to figure out which factors were actually the deal-breakers, and which were annoyances. Then you identify what you can actually avoid or compensate for next time. You have to figure out the right lesson to learn.

For example, if your agriculture program failed because of insufficient rainfall, you need to design a program flexible enough to adapt to multiple weather projections. Knowing that you need rain is not a useful lesson to learn. Knowing you need to have different options for different weather conditions is a useful lesson. Vasco Pyjama has a great entry about learning from something her organization failed at.

Being able to recognize and accept our failures is what makes future success possible.
To take this discussion from the theoretical to the concrete, here are two of my own programmatic failures, and what I learned from them:

1. Nutrition pamphlet for women in Turkmenistan. Literacy is high in Turkmenistan, and people seem to genuinely love brochures and pamphlets. When we focus-group tested health pamphlets, we got responses like “this should be longer.” When a Peace Corps volunteer applied for a small grant to produce a brochure with nutrition information and healthy recipes, it seemed like a good fit.

This is what I learned: Turkmen women don’t cook from recipes. They think the whole idea is weird. They feed their families by buying what’s cheap and in season from the bazaar, and then cooking it using traditional techniques. The nutrition information was useful, but women had no way to act on it. Our next attempt at nutrition education focused on cooking methods to make Turkmen dishes higher in nutritional value. That one was much more successful.

2. Community website for Baghdad. This was a proposal I helped to design and write. We were going to set up a community website for Baghdad, kind of combination between Craigslist and Yelp. It would allow for violence mapping, to help people avoid dangerous areas, and offer ways to discuss things like whether a particular doctor or lawyer would take clients across sectarian lines. We were going to combine that with increased wifi access using repeaters, and providing cheap laptops to large households. In an environment too dangerous for community-building in person, it was meant to help give people a unified identity as Baghdadis once again. Just about everyone who heard about the idea loved it, but I never found a donor that would pay for it.

This is what I learned: no donor will fund a program that gives people to the chance to say anything they want. As one person told me, “The first time the New York Times runs an article about Islamic militants posting to a US/UN/UK (insert donor here)-funded website, we’re all screwed.” I still love the idea of the Baghdad site, but it’s going to take some very innovative funding to make it happen.

Failure feels really, really bad. It’s a blow to your ego and you feel like you’ve let down the people who rely on your organization. If you can get past that, though, it’s the best teacher you’ll find.

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(photo credit: Quod)
Chosen because I think that tiny apple on the right represents hope.

Things that do damage

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |


Badly planned, badly thought out NGO operations hurt the communities they attempt to serve. We’re all aware of that in the big ways, like allowing food aid to be turned into a weapon by dictatorships, or sexually abusing aid recipients. Aside from the big blunders, though, we also undermine in smaller ways. Here are two:

1. Using highly visible security where it isn’t called for. Seeing the foreigners ride around in armored cars or helmets is scary. It makes everything seem like a war zone.

In an actual war zone, people are in a war mindset. Using war zone precautions in other contexts generates fear. It actually makes people feel less safe in the place where they live. Maybe your expatriates are genuinely more at risk than local inhabitants (though Michael Kleinman has his doubts and honestly so do I) but how are people supposed to know that?

Security precautions should be appropriate to the level of risk, and as unobtrusive as possible. Considering how much of safety is about population support and acceptance of the work, this benefits NGO programs as well as the communities they work with.

2. Living visibly lavish lifestyles. There is research showing that inequality makes people unhappy. Poor people feel less happy with their lives when they’ve got rich people making them feel deprived. Don’t be those rich people. In addition, no local community is going to feel like a partner if you roll around like wealthy big shots. They are going to feel like the recipient of charity, with nothing to do but wait and accept it.

Expatriate employees need to be fairly comfortable and fairly happy to function and do their best for the organization. I know that. But don’t fly in their cheese or give them palaces to live in.

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(photo credit: Cayusa)
Chosen because it feels like the big white car is shoved right into your face.

Jargon of the day: Cash for Work

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |


I have always thought the phrase “cash for work” was kind of crazy. Isn’t cash for work called employment? In practice, however, cash for work is a specific kind of disaster relief where people affected by the emergency are paid to engage in reconstruction activities. That might include cleaning or rebuilding schools and hospitals, clearing roads, or digging latrines. If well-designed, cash for work programs support the rebuilding of a community and provide a much-needed cash infusion. If badly designed, they can disempower communities by not giving community residents a stake and a voice in how their own space is restored.

This job is not always fun

By Alanna Shaikh | | 3 Comments |


There are an awful lot of good things about a career in international relief or development. You accumulate great stories for parties, you sound cool as all get-out at high school reunions, and you have a valid reason to get extra pages in your passport. Plus, you know – you do meaningful work that you care about in amazing parts of the world. Based on the email I get, it’s a field lots of people want to get into.

For contrast, here are three things that suck:

1) You’re always understaffed. Pressure to keep overhead costs low means that you never, ever have enough people to do the work you are supposed to be doing. This means working overtime for free, or doing your work badly. Sometimes it means both working free overtime and doing things badly.

2) You know you’re a drop in the bucket. Actually doing something to solve global problems brings you face to face with the complicated and painful nature of global problems. It’s a whole lot easier to feel miserable about Somalia and then donate a lot of money to WFP than it is to be in Somalia and run a food program. Giving money to the organization of your choice feels like you are doing something with impact; working for that same organization will often feel completely futile. Perspective is not always a good thing.

3) You’re a bureaucrat. An awful lot of every expat’s job involves paperwork. Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.

(photo credit: pondspider)

Baghdad

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |


Just to be absolutely clear, I was only in Baghdad for a week, more than a year ago. A cushy week, at that, where I stayed in our compound, ate freshly-baked pastries, and asked the Iraq team a lot of questions about their work. I left the compound once to go to the green zone. We went directly back afterward. I had no close calls, no kidnap attempts, and no experience with live fire of any kind. I saw Baghdad through the window of our battered Mercedes and briefly from the roof of our apartment building.

I know an awful lot of people who’ve been to Iraq. Just about everyone at IMC, for one thing. My friend Kerry, for another. A monitoring and evacuation specialist who got sent home because it was too dangerous for non-permanent staff. My cousin, a Kuwaiti, who translated for UPI. A contractor who carried a secret gun so that “he wouldn’t end up in a video in CNN.” I am not trying to say I have anything in common with them.

I’ve just got me, and my experience. I went to Baghdad, I ate a lot of carbs, I listened to a lot of music on my laptop to drown out the explosions I could always hear in the distance. I was there the week the surge started and the Iranian ambassador was taken. I heard two bazaar bombings. I discovered mortar fire sounds just exactly like it does on M*A*S*H (the mortar fire is much louder near the green zone).

I remember every tiny detail of that trip. What the detergent in the sheets smelled like. The flavor and texture of the little cookies the cook made. And the music I played. One song in particular, I listened to many, many times. Love is the Movement. I’ve got it on my iPod. I still love the song, but it gives me nightmares. I flinch when I see it on my playlist, and I always listen to it anyway.

Iraq was real. We were doing work that really, really mattered there, and it was some of the best work that can be done in Iraq. If we hadn’t been doing it, no one else could have. (You don’t, honestly, feel that way all that often. Usually you know that if you don’t do it, World Vision or CARE probably will.) I talked to my colleagues in that office – who were, to a person, traumatized and shell-shocked – and they were utterly committed to what they did. They knew their work had damaged them and they thought it was worth the trade-off.

If I didn’t have my son, I’d still be in that office today.

I heard Love is the Movement on my bus ride home. I donated some money to my former employer this evening, and I did the thing I hate and designated it for Iraq programs. I’m going to wake up crying tonight.

(image credit: GlobalCop)