common sense

Sixteen Ways to Tell a Health Project is Doomed

By Alanna Shaikh | | 14 Comments |

weird scary stencil of a scary guy

1. It focuses on AIDS, TB, or malaria but is not coordinating or harmonized with global fund activities in country.
2. The staff are all clinicians, with no public health people.
3. The staff are all public health people, with no clinicians.
4. There is no plan to involve local or national health authorities in the project.
5. The project director is a clinician with no management experience.
6. It is planning on developing its own training content instead of adapting existing curricula to the current situation.
7. It depends on practicing physicians to serve as trainers, but has no plan to teach them the skills they will need to become trainers.
8. There are no women on staff.
9. It ignores the role of nurses in health care.
10. The underlying conceptual model doesn’t make any sense or staff have trouble explaining it in a way that makes sense.
11. The only monitoring indicator is how many people were trained.
12. Training success is identified by pre and post tests of participant knowledge instead of testing their skills and whether they are actually using new skills in practice.

Special guest additions:
13. Local partners/beneficiaries cheerfully insist that another expat program manager is the ONLY WAY to make the next phase sustainable… (from Tales from the Hood)
14. It’s a two-year contract and the only local staff are secretaries and drivers. (from Texas in Africa)
15. You visit the public health office and they want to know why you’re taking away their public health volunteers. (from Good Intentions Are Not Enough)
16. The per diem for your capacity building event is less than that for the World Bank project just down the road. (from Ian Thorpe)

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Photo Credit: REDRUM AYS
Chosen because searching for “doom” on flickr gets scary quickly, and my initials are AYS

How I’m Judging You

By Alanna Shaikh | | 24 Comments |

Statue of Justice

These are my (arbitrary, personal, non-evidence-based) rules of thumb for identifying good development work:

Bad signs

  1. Starting out by buying cars.
  2. Claiming to work in “Africa” without specifying a location.
  3. More than four partners in your implementation coalition.
  4. A local to expat ration of less than 5:1 (10 or 15 to 1 – or more – is far better).
  5. Planning/budgeting for more than 4 visits from HQ a year.
  6. Extensive use of international interns.
  7. Using program staff as translators and interpreters.

Good signs

  1. National staff in management positions over expats.
  2. Terrifying, highly experienced financial staff and a rigorous financial reporting system.
  3. Close collaboration with government on its lowest level – with city, town, and village authorities.
  4. Sharing of monitoring and evaluation data with the communities the projects works with, and training those communities on how to review the data.
  5. A clear vision of what the target area (group, community…) will look like once the project is over and what will have changed. Approval from the target area/group/community of the vision, and support for it.
  6. Extensive use of paid local interns.
  7. Specific rather than standardized indicators for monitoring and evaluation.
  8. Translators on staff.

PS – Thanks to Brendan for reminding me why I write.

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Photo credit: Citizensheep
Chosen because, you know, judging, justice…look, it’s not easy choosing images.

Not everyone is a sociologist (July 2008)

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |

Teddy Roosevelt in a pith helmet

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.

You can’t just choose any random person to be your cultural guide. It makes me completely crazy when people say “My Luisitanian colleague says our poster and brochures are fine” and then assume their messages are acceptable in Luisitania. One person cannot vouch for everyone in the country.

Most countries are multicultural, including different ethnic and linguistic groups. Not to mention differences between rich and poor, and city and country. It’s not easy to know the tastes and opinions of an entire nation. There’s also a training issue. Your average engineer or doctor from the capital city isn’t in the habit of thinking about the attitudes and mores of everyone around him. An accountant is not an anthropologist.

Most of us can only speak for a limited number of people like ourselves; coming from a developing country doesn’t give you any magic ability to speak for everyone who holds the same passport.

ETA: One great example. The Indian Vogue fashion spread discussed here was designed and shot by Indians.

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Photo credit: sakraft1
Chosen because to me, pith helmets reflect everything that is culturally clueless. For all I know, teddy Roosevelt was a very culturally sensitive man…