Author: Alanna Shaikh

Jargon – Emergency acronyms

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

ECHO – ECHO is an acronym that doesn’t seem to stand for anything. It’s the European Union humanitarian aid department. ECHO actually gives grants to NGOs for humanitarian response, but everyone hates taking their money because they only provide 7% overhead. http://ec.europa.eu/echo/index_en.htm

GBV – Gender based violence, which means exactly what you think it does. Also referred to as SGBV, sex or gender based violence. A major problem in emergency situations, and may be perpetrated by the aid workers who are there to help.

HDR – Humanitarian daily ration. Produced (or purchased, anyway) by the military, each HDR will feed one person or one day. They are designed to feed large populations such as refugees or displaced people. http://www.dscp.dla.mil/subs/rations/programs/hdr/hdrabt.asp

MUAC – Mid Upper Arm Circumference. A measure which can indicate malnutrition. Very frequently used by aid agencies to determine eligibility for feeding programs. http://www.unsystem.org/SCN/archives/adults/ch06.htm

NEHK – New Emergency Health Kit. The old name for the Interagency Emergency Health Kit. Assembled by Mission pharma and sold to NGOs and other emergency responders, the NEHK has all the medicines necessary to care for 5000 people in an emergency situation. The drugs contained are all far from their expiration dates and the cartons are clearly marked, which makes them very efficient for emergency use. WHO often provides NEHKs to governments and NGOs during emergency situations. http://www.missionpharma.com/content/us/about_us/news/news_archive/nehk_under_revision_198-05

OCHA – United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. OCHA is supposed to coordinate all donors in emergency situations. Since they don’t have any enforcement power, that rarely actually happens, even though everyone agrees that donor coordination is a good thing. OCHA’s annual budget for 2007 was $159,079,639. http://ochaonline.un.org/AboutOCHA/tabid/1076/Default.aspx

OFDA – Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. An office within USAID that functions essentially autonomously. It is responsible for US government-funded emergency response overseas, including war, natural disasters, and other emergencies. Most emergency-response NGOs based in the United States receive all or some of their funding for their work from OFDA. OFDA is known for its ability to quickly identify an emergency and make funding available. OFDA support is especially valued because it has 100% line-item flexibility – organizations can make changes to their budgets as needed in rapidly changing emergency situations, as long as they stick to the correct total amount. OFDA focuses on immediate disaster response; therefore sustainability is not a priority and money comes from OFDA in a 6 or 12-month funding cycle. http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/humanitarian_assistance/disaster_assistance/

Wednesdays are for Jargon – Emergency acronyms

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

Wednesdays are for jargon is a new weekly feature where I define and discuss the vocabulary of the international development field.

ECHO – ECHO is an acronym that doesn’t seem to stand for anything. It’s the European Union humanitarian aid department. ECHO actually gives grants to NGOs for humanitarian response, but everyone hates taking their money because they only provide 7% overhead. http://ec.europa.eu/echo/index_en.htm

GBV – Gender based violence, which means exactly what you think it does. Also referred to as SGBV, sex or gender based violence. A major problem in emergency situations, and may be perpetrated by the aid workers who are there to help.

HDR – Humanitarian daily ration. Produced (or purchased, anyway) by the military, each HDR will feed one person or one day. They are designed to feed large populations such as refugees or displaced people. http://www.dscp.dla.mil/subs/rations/programs/hdr/hdrabt.asp

MUAC – Mid Upper Arm Circumference. A measure which can indicate malnutrition. Very frequently used by aid agencies to determine eligibility for feeding programs. http://www.unsystem.org/SCN/archives/adults/ch06.htm

NEHK – New Emergency Health Kit. The old name for the Interagency Emergency Health Kit. Assembled by Mission pharma and sold to NGOs and other emergency responders, the NEHK has all the medicines necessary to care for 5000 people in an emergency situation. The drugs contained are all far from their expiration dates and the cartons are clearly marked, which makes them very efficient for emergency use. WHO often provides NEHKs to governments and NGOs during emergency situations. http://www.missionpharma.com/content/us/about_us/news/news_archive/nehk_under_revision_198-05

OCHA – United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. OCHA is supposed to coordinate all donors in emergency situations. Since they don’t have any enforcement power, that rarely actually happens, even though everyone agrees that donor coordination is a good thing. OCHA’s annual budget for 2007 was $159,079,639. http://ochaonline.un.org/AboutOCHA/tabid/1076/Default.aspx

OFDA – Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. An office within USAID that functions essentially autonomously. It is responsible for US government-funded emergency response overseas, including war, natural disasters, and other emergencies. Most emergency-response NGOs based in the United States receive all or some of their funding for their work from OFDA. OFDA is known for its ability to quickly identify an emergency and make funding available. OFDA support is especially valued because it has 100% line-item flexibility – organizations can make changes to their budgets as needed in rapidly changing emergency situations, as long as they stick to the correct total amount. OFDA focuses on immediate disaster response; therefore sustainability is not a priority and money comes from OFDA in a 6 or 12-month funding cycle. http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/humanitarian_assistance/disaster_assistance/

Depo Provera is not infected with HIV

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

The poor public affairs officer must be really frustrated to give interviews on a subject this ridiculous. There’s a rumor spreading in Zambia that the USAID-distributed Depo Provera (injectable contraceptive) is infected with the HIV virus. A rumor being promulgated by the Minister of Health, Brian Chituwo. There is a BBC article from 2006 that says he’s been moved into the Ministry of Education, but apparently he wasn’t.

I am not really sure what lesson to learn from this. Well, one maybe. In a well-educated society with access to information, these kinds of rumors are not able to take flight.

Two on Tuesday – Systems Failure

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |

Two on Tuesday is a new feature where I find a couple examples of a phenomenon or issue that I find interesting, and try to learn something useful from them.

I recently ran into two examples of systems failure, both of which offer useful lessons in organizational function.

Example #1 – New Orleans. A community program to identify and report blighted houses gets canceled. Why? Because they never connected the web-based reporting system to the team which investigated. It would have been very simple to synchronize blight investigations with the complaints logged on the web, but it simply never happened. My guess is that the web site was designed by an IT department who had little or no contact with the people who actually did investigations.

Lesson learned: Don’t create a communications interface if you have no way of using the information you get from it.

Example #2 – the FAA. Safety investigator Mark Lund discovered that Northwest airlines mechanics were so incompetent they couldn’t close a cabin door or test an engine. When he tries to ground the planes, the FAA retaliates against him, not the airline. Why? Because the FAA was invested in its role as an agency that keeps American aviation flying, more its role as safety watchdog.

Lesson learned: You can’t be all things to all people. Give your investigators the independence they need to do their jobs right.

I spend a lot of time thinking about systems, and setting them up for success. Nearly as much as time as I spend thinking about behavior change. It’s easy to blame individual people when things go wrong, but we should design important process to help people make the right choices, and to catch errors. No system should ever depend on everybody doing their job right, because human beings just aren’t consistent enough.

Is the tipping point dead?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

Is the idea of the tipping point dead? In this article, Fast Company explores the research of Duncan Watts. Watts, using social modeling, looked at the tipping point theory, and came to the conclusion that it just doesn’t work.

The tipping point has been marketing gospel for years now; expounded in a book by Malcolm Gladwell, it argues, in short, that “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social skills.” (Summary here.) Tipping point theory has been very influential in viral marketing, particularly Gladwell’s “Law of the Few,” meaning that rare, highly connected people shape the world.

Watts disagrees. I if you want the details, read the article. It’s a well-written summary of the research, and the people who disagree with the research.

I think the article should be required reading for anyone interested in behavior change or social marketing. It’s got some really great stuff on how trends are born. Considering how much of the work we do in development relates to getting people to adopt something new, it’s extremely relevant. The comments on the article are really useful, too – they are a nice microcosm of the current debate on marketing and influence.

Lolita beds?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

Any time I hear about the importance of making sure everything you do is culturally sensitive, I think of problems like this. We can’t even manage to be sensitive to our own culture, more often than not. (For those who read the article – I shall refrain at this point from discussing the British educational system.)