Paula Deen, Sexual Harassment, and International Development

American celebrity chef Paula Deen is getting sued in a big way by a former employer of Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House, a restaurant that’s part of the Paula Deen empire. The Uncle Bubba in question is her brother, Bubba Hiers, and he’s been accused of sexual harassment and racial discrimination in a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Deen and her company[i]. Tonight I read Ms. Deen’s deposition in the lawsuit. The entire thing.[ii] And it made me think about the important of process and regulatory structure.[iii]

Institution-building has been taking some hits lately from some very smart people. (And also from me) Lant Pritchett has a particular insightful take on it in Folk and the Formula, where he differentiates between institutional structure and institutional competence. It’s easy to abandon institution strengthening, and its cousin, supporting good policy, as pointless exercises in isomorphic mimicry. It is certainly true that regulations on their own have no value.

It’s also true, unfortunately, that you can’t build a health system – or a justice system – or even an enjoyable football tournament – without getting some processes in place. You need clearly defined roles for stakeholders. You need a way for errors to be identified and corrected. You need everyone to get paid on time. Even if every single person involved is doing their very best to produce something good, that doesn’t happen without regulations, job descriptions – institutions, in fact. And the bigger the task you’re trying to achieve, the stronger and more complex the institution needs to be.

Which brings us back to Paula Deen. Based on the deposition, her restaurants don’t appear to have professional managers, a coherent financial management system, or defined roles for staff. Now, let’s assume for the sake of this blog post that 1) Ms. Deen is a well-meaning person who doesn’t want her employees to be harassed or abused[iv] and 2) the charges being brought against her are true.

In a best case scenario, Paula Deen gave her brother a restaurant to run and assumed everything would be fine because he was a good guy. And he was a good guy, but the shambolic lack of structure in her restaurants led to many employees being subject to racial and sexual harassment in a hostile work environment with no way to report the harassment and get help from well-meaning managers before it hit million dollar lawsuit level. In a worst case scenario, Paula’s brother is a sexually abusive jerk and the lack of structure allowed him to deliberately abuse staff.[v]

If you take a look at Yelp, Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House produces a solid meal of fried seafood.  But according to the deposition, it’s also hemorrhaging money and being carried by the profit centers of the Paula Deen empire.[vi] It probably won’t get to provide seafood for much longer, and if it does it will drag down the quality of the other Paula Deen enterprises. Much like public university that graduates lots of students but doesn’t educate them, or a hospital with high patient satisfaction and terrible health outcomes.[vii]

Writing job descriptions and setting up a management structure won’t get the oysters fried or the tuberculosis treated. You need competent people. But competent people can’t do their jobs without a structure to do it in, whether that structure is a restaurant or the Ministry of Health. We’re not very good at building institutions that possess actual capacity. We’re still finding out what works. But we ignore the topic to our peril.

(photo credit: Bob E. Brown)



[i] The former employee is named Lisa Jackson and the deposition makes her sound like the sanest person in the whole mess.

[ii] Did you spend your evening alternating between nursing and rocking a cranky teething toddler? If not, you don’t get to judge my reading material.

[iii] It also made me think that Paula Deen is a sad, racist relic of a bygone era and she doesn’t sound like a happy person, but that’s not the point of this blog post. And reminded me of how much I dislike her from a public health standpoint. But that’s not the point of this blog post.

[iv] My personal theory is that she doesn’t recognize an abusive environment because of point #2 but that doesn’t contribute to the discussion.

[v] I suspect this one, sadly.

[vi] Mostly Ms. Deen herself. Apparently people buy tickets to hear her talk.

[vii] Yes, it happens. A shocking amount of patient satisfaction comes from quality of television programming in the hospital and whether the food is any good.

Three Ways to Spot Bad Data

suspicious graph

Warning Sign #1: When government officials use the data to set targets like an increase in vaccination or a decrease in cancer numbers, they always use percentages, not absolute numbers. That’s a sign that people know the numbers are wrong and don’t want to rely on them. (Of course, sometimes it just means that the percentage is the right way to look at it. Increasing the number of people in the district with access to clean water by 20% conveys more information than saying you want to increase it by 330,000 people. You need to use your judgment. (as always)

Warning Sign #2: The disaggregation doesn’t make sense. This is a judgment call again – sometimes the data are weird because there is something weird going on (Such as India’s missing girls. We only wish that data was fake.) For example, pregnancy is a major risk factor for anemia. If your rates of anemia in pregnant women are lower than the rates in the general population, something is wonky.

Warning Sign #3: The math doesn’t work. If you know a few true numbers, you can use them to ground-truth the rest of your data. For example, if you know the perinatal mortality rate for the smallest babies, then you can use it to determine whether the reported infant mortality rate makes sense. (This slide deck has the detailed instructions, starting from slide #20.)

Field Notes from the Development Industry 2/28/2013

1) A reader wrote in to ask for advice on an NGO that packages and sends rice and beans to “starving people.” I though my answer might be useful for others:

It’s a lot better for the local economy to procure the food there. The reason hungry people need food is not because it isn’t present in their country, but because they can’t afford it. If you buy food in country then you are supporting the (generally poor) farmers who grow the food as well as the people who can’t afford to buy it and you are also saving shipping cost.

You want to look very closely at the cultural acceptability of the food you’re shipping. A lot of cultures don’t understand or consume many kinds of beans.

Finally, I really dislike the way their website doesn’t talk about how the meal shipping actually works.

2) Today on twitter, someone asked why all aid workers are rich and white. My answer: they’re not. Most aid workers are nationals of the country the project is in. The reason we think otherwise is because we have racist ideas about who “counts” as an aid worker and because the media focuses on rich white people. Cough, cough, Nick Kristof.

3) I haven’t forgotten the M&E series, but I wanted to get this up while it was topical.

Ten Common Monitoring and Evaluation Mistakes

As you may have noticed, monitoring and evaluation is a topic near to my heart. One thing I’ve noticed is that we repeat the same errors, over and over and over. I’ll elaborate on these in my next three posts, but for now, I will tease you with some lists:

The Top Three Monitoring and Evaluation Mistakes Experienced NGOs Make

  1. Using the same indicators they’ve always used, even as projects change
  2. Too much evaluation, not enough monitoring
  3. Leaving M&E up to the M&E team

The Top Three M&E Mistakes New NGOs make

  1. Choosing really great indicators that are nearly impossible to measure
  2. Confusing a program with an RCT
  3. Focusing on the donor’s data needs when choosing indicators

The Top Four M&E Mistakes Everyone Makes

  1. Too many indicators
  2. Not focusing on data use
  3. Too many process indicators, not enough impact indicators
  4. The IKEA effect

 

(photo credit: tgkohn)

Snail’s Faith: on M&E and the pace of change

 

Things get better slowly. Achingly, painfully, snails-race-past slowly. They got better slowly in the US. As Chris Blattman recently pointed out, Andrew Jackson was a child soldier and genocidaire. My parents were married in 1969. If my mom hadn’t insisted on finishing her graduate work first, they would have needed to choose their wedding location with care. Anti-miscegenation laws weren’t eliminated in the US until 1967.

Things get better slowly in development. Sometimes at a speed invisible to the naked eye. Often at a speed invisible to our careers. That’s why we do monitoring and evaluation; it’s meant to catch the accretion of tiny changes that will eventually add up to something that matters. You don’t need to be able to see it when you have numbers to track it.

Of course, not all projects have M&E that works. Sometimes you’re tracking the wrong stuff, and you don’t capture slow change. Sometimes you’re not doing a very good job of tracking anything. That doesn’t mean the intervention isn’t working; it just means your M&E isn’t working. Sometimes it’s not working because it’s not well designed, and sometimes it’s not working because the trade-offs aren’t worth it.

Sometimes you stand there, throwing rocks down a well with no visible change. Just plop, plop, plop. Then, all at once, the water overflows in a big splash. You can’t see that with your naked eye, and the wrong kind of M&E will only capture how many rocks you’ve thrown, not the infinitesimal increases in the water level. But sometimes paying the money to measure the water level means you can’t afford enough rocks to throw.

Look at gay equality in the US. Years and years of discrimination and abuse. Court cases that went nowhere. Change that didn’t come. And then, apparently out of the blue, equality started winning. Now we’ve got gay marriage in Iowa. What do you measure to capture that slow change? The number of failed legislative efforts is a meaningless number; it’s not like you get to 139 and you’re done. Incredibly detailed public opinion polling would catch it, but that’s serious money. Money you could spend on strategic litigation instead.

You need to believe in your theory of change if you can’t measure what you need to.

That’s an act of faith. Faith is what we’re left with when M&E can’t answer our questions. Faith is a tricky thing. It can get you Freedom Riders or the Mayan apocalypse. You should save your faith for when it’s deserved. But it is, occasionally, deserved. Sometimes we just hang have to in there.

 

(PS: this one’s for you, Danielle)

photo credit

The BAMBAs, part two

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Best ICT Blogs

Wait…What? By Linda Raftree makes me understand what ICT has to do with my actual work

ICTworks updates frequently and has a knack for tying current events to ICT4D.

Best Anonymous Blog

Okay, so obviously the best anonymous blog is Tales from The Hood. But since it doesn’t update any more, we’ll have to go with AidSpeak. (Conflict of interest note: theoretically I am a contributor to AidSpeak but I have not yet actually contributed. I’m sorry, J.)

Best Blog to find out what the Millennials think

WhyDev

Best Complexity Blog

Aid on the Edge of Chaos that Ben Ramalingam really knows what he’s talking about

Best former best economics blog in South Sudan

Roving Bandit

Best Institutional Blog

From Poverty to Power

Best Institutional Blog that should update more

Uncounted

Best Blog That’s Finally Updating As Much As We Always Wanted it to / Best Pictures

Aid Thoughts

Best Link Round-Ups

Do No Harm

IH-Blog

Best Blog That Has Nothing to Do with Development But Will Make You Better at It Anyway

Sociological Images

Best Rectal Microbicide Blog

IRMA – I admit it’s a small category. But IRMA will keep you up to date on an important issue in HIV prevention

The BAMBAs, part one

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If Tom Murphy can invent his own blog awards, so can I. I therefore present to you the first annual Blood and Milk blog awards – the BAMBAs:

Best Writing

Owen Barder. No matter how complex the topic is, if Owen’s writing it, I can follow. He also seems like the blogger most commonly cited by entry-level folks on AidSource. Some of them don’t even realize he’s a senior-level professional working for CGD. They just think he’s brilliant.

Best Blogs by Academics

Chris Blattman pretty much owns academic blogging on international development, and for good reason.

Ed Carr Ed’s blog is tough, plainspoken, and willing to tell you the truth in a much firmer way than you might expect.

Marc Bellemare Marc focuses on food and agriculture, with a bit of everything else thrown in. He knows what he’s talking about.

Best all-around keeping up with the everything blogs

Humanosphere Everyone should read this blog. It’s an entertaining overview of everything that’s going on in international development. It’s written by a professional journalist, and it shows.

A View from the Cave Tom Murphy isn’t afraid to offer criticism when he thinks it’s called for, and he covers a huge range of development topics.

Best Global Health Blog that almost never updates any more

Karen Grepin makes complex global health topics understandable, and, as far as I can tell, she is omniscient.

Best Global Health Blog that does update

Sarah Bosely writes a global health blog as part of the Guardian’s excellent coverage of global health and development. This blog can occasionally feel corporate, but it’s full of great content and gets props for being the first mainstream media source to talk about the end of antibiotics.

Best TB Blog

Science Speaks is one of those blogs where you find yourself wanting to share every single post they write.

Best Malaria Blog

Malaria Matters I have a strong bias for blogs that have a voice, not a corporate identity. Bill Brieger’s Malaria Matters blog is a great one.

Best Malaria Blog that never updates, dammit

Topnaman Naman Shah hardly ever updates, but when he does it’s worth reading.

Best Antibiotics Blogs

Maryn McKenna at Wired talks about every new developed in drug-resistant bacteria. Including fecal transplants. Not exactly a beginner’s blog, but you can always google the things you don’t understand.

Antibiotics – the perfect storm is a very wonky, industry-focused blog on the development (or lack thereof) of new antibiotics.

Part two…coming up tomorrow!