Author: Alanna Shaikh

Field Notes from the Development Industry: 1/13/2013

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

1. Someone asked me if the new State Department Global Health Diplomacy office is likely to be hiring. Unfortunately, I’d guess no. All the major positions will most likely be staffed with career foreign service officers. They may be hiring support staff. They could pull that staff from existing government administrative employees, or they could hire using a contractor that places people at the State Department. They’ll probably do a mix of both. I don’t know which contractors the State Department is using for personnel right now, but spending some time on clearancejobs.com would probably help you figure it out.

2. After a chance meeting with someone working for a faith-based organization (one of the little ones) I started thinking about their funding model. As far as I can tell, people fundraise in their home countries from their own churches, and use the funding to pay for their overseas time. While overseas, they donate their time to faith-based projects developed by other expats. This means that the projects themselves have a great looking balance sheet. All their (theoretically) expensive labor is volunteer.  This is a similar model to secular projects that require you to pay them if you want to volunteer overseas.

3. As I’ve mentioned before, monitoring your project implementation is useless if you can’t actually change your intervention based on the results. That’s what matters in a project designed to improve people’s lives. (A research project is a different animal, and changing the intervention would defeat the purpose.)  Bottom Up Thinking recently published a nicely nuanced take on the issue.

4. We’re posting three times a week over on Tomorrow Global. If you’re not interested in the exploration of my deepest fears for the future, you might like Danielle Parsons’ in depth looks at HIV issues or Lorea Russell’s explorations in social entrepreneurship, emergency relief, and other international development topics. Please come by and leave a comment.  The commenters make Blood and Milk a thousand times better than it would be with just me. I’d love to see that at Tomorrow Global.

5. I am learning to use video as part of my job, which means I spend a lot of evenings watching YouTube videos about global health. (You envy me my exciting life, I know you do.) I’ve been putting them up with brief comments at Global Health Videos. The site is really just meant for me (thus the total lack of design) but I offer it in case it’s useful to someone else.

6. My husband just left for a two month guest worker stint in another country. My mom does all our cooking and has a totally different view of healthy food than I do. Also, she and I are sharing a winter coat so we can only go out one at a time. Apparently I’ve lived in the developing world for so long I no longer have First World Problems. (note: I’m not that broke. I have a winter coat coming soon in our shipment from Dushanbe and I’m too cheap to buy one just for the next two weeks.)

 

(Photo credit, me, from my new daily photoblog)

Starting a Land War in Asia: the Five Classic Aid Worker Blunders

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

Vizzini

1. Thinking you’re the only one who’s ever tried to do what you’re doing.
2. Brushing your teeth with tap water.
3. Believing all problems have solutions.
4. Mistaking the capital city for the country as a whole.
5. Building a lot of technical capacity without making sure that someone is ready to use that capacity.

Advice needed – charitable giving on TB

By Alanna Shaikh | | 11 Comments |

Last year, my husband and I decided to organize our charitable giving. Instead of making haphazard choices all along, we now give a set percentage of our income at the end of every year. Any smaller donations through the year don’t count toward that amount. That means that I can give to my friends’ pet causes without guilt or doing tons of research – it doesn’t take away from the real charitable giving.

This year, we’re giving to fight drug resistant tuberculosis. I think it’s one of the biggest threats to global health, and we’re really at a point now where investment can avert a disaster. We haven’t chosen our recipient yet; we’re just starting our research and I could use some help. Here’s who we’re looking at:

Partners in Health was one of the first organizations to recognize the threat of MDR TB and look for ways to stop it. Giving to them would be support for patient care.

PATH is doing a whole range of anti-TB activities, and I like their focus on health systems and service integration.

The Stop TB partnership is the big global group that provides grants, works on policy, and does advocacy work on TB issues. It’s closely connected to the WHO. Giving to them would address everything at once, but we’d also be funding (admittedly possibly important) bureaucracy.

MSF – Doctors without Borders – was also quick to recognize the threat of MDR TB, and they ran some of the first MDR TB programs in the former USSR. They explicitly don’t do development work, though, and I worry about how that philosophy fits with the need to integrate TB care into overall health services.

The TB Alliance supports science and research for better TB care and treatment. So giving to them would help stop TB at its source. On the other hand, they seem to be pretty well funded already.

We could chose a small NGO project on TB from Global Giving, and totally make their day.

Finally, we could go one level up and give to the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics. They support research and policy on antibiotics in general, not just for TB.

I’m starting my research now – everything I outlined in this old blog post, plus talking to TB experts I know and people who work for the NGOs I’ve mentioned. I tell everyone that the commenters on this blog are way smarter than me, though, and I’d love your input. Who should we give to? Why? Am I missing any good organizations? Would you argue for something other than TB?

photo credit: isafmedia

 

Happy new year!

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |

It’s a little early to say happy new year, but this week is full of family time and I’m not sure I’ll be able to blog again before 2013.

2012 was a rough year for me. I lost my dad this August, and we had a terrible health scare in February. Those traumas, though, also reminded me how very lucky I am. I am surrounded by good people, both in person and online. I am tremendously grateful for their love and support, and for the gifts I’ve been given by the world at large.

I want to say thank you. I’ve thanked my friends in person. I’ve thanked my twitter friends. I’ve done careful and loving charitable giving.

But, like the Little Drummer Boy, I don’t have enough money to make much difference. I need to give of my own skills. And what I can do is blog. So I dragged two of my smartest friends kicking and screaming onto the web and we started something new.

Here’s our blog: Tomorrow Global. It’s an attempt to shape a better future by thinking seriously about what comes next. Blood and Milk is designed to be useful to me; it helps me think. Tomorrow Global is meant for the reader. We’ve got a global health and development focus, but that’s a big tent. We update Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with new posts.

I hope you like it. I hope it’s useful. Right now, it’s my best gift.

What to buy for your aidworker: the Blood & Milk holiday gift guide

By Alanna Shaikh | | 8 Comments |

I realize most of you reading this are aid workers of one sort or another, and therefore already know what you want as gifts. But maybe your family and friends could use a little help. Now you can just send them this link and avoid the awkwardness of actual communication…


Light their way to the bathroom.

Make skype calls better

Protect their files

Save their ears (I saved up the money I earned from IDCL to buy these and I love them so much.)

Make travel better. (I own this, too. It seems like a ridiculous gimmick, but it’s a lifesaver on small planes.)

Protect their skin – zinc sunscreens are nice for heavy travel because you don’t have to stress out about leaving chemicals on your body if you don’t have time to wash them off. And zinc protects your skin from more then just the sun. (Many diaper lotions use zinc.)

Keep life tasty

Nothing clever to say about a luggage scale, it’s just really useful to have

Keep their suitcase dry

Okay, now I need reader input. What’s the most useful gift you’ve ever received?

Field notes from the development industry: 12/12/12

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

UK aid logo

1. An awful lot of people in the aid system are bad at many parts of their jobs. The skills that get you promoted aren’t necessarily the same skills that lead to good aid programs. That’s good news, I guess, for young people who want to work in aid. Otherwise it’s depressing to think about.

2. Being boxed up in high security buildings isn’t doing US foreign assistance any favors, but after Benghazi I don’t see how the US ever gets to step down security.

3. We’re stuck with aid branding. Every donor wants it – they need it too badly for domestic support to do without. Complaining about  branding requirements is a waste of time. I want to see a discussion of how we can minimize harm done by poor branding efforts and use it as a tool for transparency.

4. A lot of people think mHealth is a fad, but I’m seeing more and more TB experts get excited about the ways mHealth can improve individual patient care and the whole health system.

 

photo credit: dfid

 

Data is Not Information

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |

lt. data from star trek

I just spent three days in a training on data use. The trainer made a distinction between information and data. Data is the stuff you collect – raw numbers and observations. Information is what data turns into after you analyze it. Information is stuff you can act on.

The distinction affects most of what we do. I’ve written about this before, but monitoring and evaluation is a constant struggle to actually use the data we collect. Your indictors are useless if you don’t know what their results mean for your program.

It’s also the reason I get less excited than other people about crowd-sourcing data tools. Trues, at times we have a genuine shortage of data. But we always have a shortage of information. Adding crowd-sourced data doesn’t fix that unless it comes with the analysis to make it information.

When we talk about evidence-based medicine, or evidence-based policy, the same things come up. How does a physician use a new study to guide his clinical practice? If a Ministry of Health official reads a report on urban health, what should she do next?

Sometimes, it is clear who should turn data into information. In any project or intervention, the person(s) responsible for monitoring and evaluation should translate monitoring data into something that can be acted on. A crowdsourcing project, though, may have no plan from processing or analyzing data; they may just make the dataset available for others to analyze.

For health care providers, it’s more difficult. When study authors include practice recommendations in published papers, they can’t they hope to cover every medical specialty and client population. Sometimes professional associations step in, developing practice guidelines. In publicly funded systems, the government can development treatment regulations. Sometimes outside organizations like the Cochrane collaboration get involved.

And for policy? Well, think tanks try. And lobbyists, advocacy groups, industry collaborations, trade associations, and dozens of others. We expect, somehow, that government officials will weigh it all and make the best choice. Does that work? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

photo credit: T

(yes, I am an enormous geek)