doing dev better

Fund People, Not Concepts

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |

Leader on sand dune
(photo credit: Hamed Saber)

Have you ever seen a really great project run by a terrible leader? I never have. I’ve seen competent development work done by bad leaders, but not great work. I’ve never seen it in a company, either. No amount of quality systems can make up for a lack of good leadership at the top.

But we give our grants and contracts to development work based on the structure of the project, as though the logframe and the staff chart are all that matter. This is a problem. It’s not the shape of the staff chart that matters, it’s the names you find in the chart.

We should give money to people who can do good things with it. I once worked with a Ministry of Health official who ran one small department of the Ministry of Health. He was committed to his work, and to his country, and he was flat-out brilliant. He was my go-to advisor for everything my project did, not just the stuff that involved his center. He had ideas – great ideas – about how to improve health in a whole range of different ways.

He should have been running a project. Some donor should have been bankrolling him to improve his department and then the health of the people in his country. With appropriate safeguards, of course. Reporting on how the money was used and what impact it had and so on. But he could have done amazing things with the right support.

The project I work for now, which I won’t name because nothing I write here is their opinion etc. etc. blah blah blah, does really good work. I am proud to be part of it. But our chief of party is the smartest human being on earth. She leaves Marilyn Vos Savant in the dust. She could be doing anything, and she’d do it well. Someone should give her the development equivalent of a MacArthur genius grant (note to self – find way to nominate boss for MacArthur grant) to use her big brain to attack development problems any way she wants to.

Instead of supporting people who can get things done, we support structures. Some of that is an effort to support fragile states and build democratic institutions, and we should keep it up. Some of the support for structures, however, is just intellectual laziness, and a desire to do things how they have always been done. That needs to change. I know this sounds like a recipe for corruption, but anything is a recipe for corruption if you do it badly. We can still ask for financial accountability, and for proof of results.

Innovation comes from individual people with ideas and passion. We should find and support those people to bring change in their countries and communities.

Honesty as Policy

By Alanna Shaikh | | 7 Comments |

Anti-USAID graffiti
(photo credit: dlisbona)

Right now, when donor governments give foreign aid, they do so on the basis of friendship and altruism. While that is certainly one reason, it’s not the whole story. Focusing only on that motivation leaves our partners filling in the gap with their own often destructive theories. In most cases, a powerful motivation for supporting development aid is the desire to live in a safer world. Helping other countries grow healthy and prosperous will makes us all safer. That is a perfectly acceptable reason to give aid.

If we speak honestly about the role of self-interest in international development, it would help us do our work better. It would empower host countries, reduce the idea that aid is basically a bribe to get something from the developing country, and improve community acceptance.

Empowering Host Countries

If we’re giving assistance for no reason other than the kindness of our hearts it puts us in a superior position. We’re the wealthy generous people, helping the poor who need our help. It is inherently disempowering to the people we work with – governments, communities, and individuals.

But, if we both have something to offer and something to gain – that is a partnership. Example: Haiti needs peace and prosperity. The US needs Haiti to stop exporting refugees and start buying the stuff we make. We can work together to make that happen. I think this explains, to a large degree, the success of social entrepreneurship. If you take generosity out of the equation, everyone is equal. And equality is a much better place to start.

Changing the Government View of Foreign Aid

Many, many, many foreign leaders see the world from a pure cold war realpolitik perspective. They assume that development aid is a quid pro quo and it’s given to win their geopolitical support. They genuinely don’t believe that aid could be given for another reason.

If development aid is just barter for geopolitical support, then it doesn’t matter if the aid projects are effective. It doesn’t matter what kind of work is supported. In fact, it doesn’t need to be development aid at all. It could just as easily be helicopters, weapons, or a new set of gold toilets for the dictator’s palace. Especially in countries where top-level leadership is corrupt, this doesn’t lead to host country support for development efforts.

While increased GDP and national prosperity benefits everyone, plenty of the short term efforts needed to bring that about have losers. Corrupt elites in particular tend to suffer, and they can and will oppose development projects for that reason. Strong support is needed from the host country is required to push past that. Knowing that the donor country values successful development efforts because it’s also dependent on the outcome helps to generate that support.

A caveat. Making donor interest in development clear could also lead to host government efforts to hold aid impact hostage. “If you care so much about regulatory reform, we’ll keep it from happening until you buy seven gold toilets.” But even that kind of gamesmanship is a game that takes impacts seriously, and is a form of empowerment, however unpleasant. And a donor can take the long view and refuse to play.

Community Acceptance

In my own career, I have been asked over and over by community leaders, local government officials, and plenty of other people why the US is funding the project I work for. They are curious, and they’re suspicious. They’ve seen enough American movies not to think Americans are saintly and loving. We must have a reason for doing something so good. But what is it? Having no clear answer makes us look suspicious.

Think of the famous case of the Nigerian religious leaders who refused polio vaccines. I strongly suspect that one reason they refused was that were looking for ulterior motives. Why would Americans want to send vaccines for Nigerian kids? Altruism alone didn’t make sense as an explanation, so they found another – the vaccines causes AIDS and sterility. They had also already been mistreated once by the international pharmaceutical industry, deepening their doubts. What if we’d said in the first place, “We want your kids to grow up strong and healthy so that they work hard, get rich, buy American products and don’t become terrorists.” That’s an ulterior motive that makes sense.

What we can learn from missionaries

By Alanna Shaikh | | 40 Comments |

missionary kids

I’m going to start with #9, because a lot of you asked about it. And I don’t want people thinking I was suggesting we convert people to, well, anything. No pith helmets, bibles, Korans, or books of Mormon here. Development has nothing – nothing – to do with salvation.

But missionaries do have a model we can learn from, at least the ones that I have met. They come into a country with a long-term commitment. They don’t just want immediate results; they want souls. Missionaries bring their families and children with them, and those children go to local schools. They live in houses that are nice by local standards, but not in the expat palaces your average foreigner inhabits. They bring their stuff with them in suitcases, not container ships.

Missionaries don’t try to do any soul-saving at first, spending a minimum of six months learning local language and culture. Mormons are renowned for their language skills. And once they have learned it, they stick around, spending years or even decades in country. They devote themselves to work in one particular place.

Compare that to your average expatriate working in development, for a donor or implementing a project. The expat lives in a little bubble of fake-home, cushioned by consumable shipments, huge shipping allowances, and hardship pay. With air conditioning and heating to ensure they’re even in a different climate. And they stay in one place for approximately 35 seconds.

Good people don’t have time to get great, and average people don’t even have time to get good. Complicated programs suffer as a result, and funding is biased toward things that are easy to implement and understand. No one has time to learn local context.

Donor governments rarely have people in place for longer than five years. In some cases, it’s not even allowed. Implementers are the same way. Three to five years, on average. The incentives are to keep moving from place to place. If you get a job in, say, Hanoi, while you’re already living in Hanoi, do you get housing and shipping and expat allowances? No. You get brought on as a local hire, and whatever salary they think you’ll settle for. If you want the big package, you apply for a job somewhere else.

And the ambitious, hard-working people who are good at running programs are usually chasing that big package. Think of the one guy you know who’s been in country for ten years, taking jobs with different projects as he can find them. Is he full of useful his skills and local knowledge? No, mostly he’s just a loser. Usually he doesn’t even have language skills to show for his decade of residence. If you set things up so that the ambitious people need to hop, then they will hop. The only ones who stay in place will be the people without the ability to move on. That doesn’t support good program management.

It’s even more painful with the donor types. At least program staff are bound by the specific terms of their grant or contract. An incompetent or philosophically opposed country director can only do so much damage. Every two or three years, someone brand new comes in, with the authority to radically alter all current programs. There’s a six month learning curve while they sort out their job and get some clue about the country. Then a nice two years, at best, of reasonably competent donor oversight, and then they’re emotionally checked out and focused on the next posting.

I’ve seen USAID country directors come in and kill programs that they thought weren’t working. And they were, but they were also hard to understand. Too hard to figure out in a couple weeks of reading reports.

Host country donor staff make a major difference in institutional competence, but it’s a rare donor who lets national staff run their programs. The fear is corruption, mostly, but there is also a capacity problem. The people with the education and skills to really run a donor program aren’t working for USAID, World Bank, or CIDA salaries.

Two years of reasonably competent donor oversight is a depressing best case scenario. When you have a really good donor representative, they are like an extra brain for your efforts. They can help you dodge problems, adapt quickly to challenges, and negotiate different government relationships. It’s a synergy that can make all the difference.

And it pretty much never happens. More often than not, your funder’s representative doesn’t speak the local language and doesn’t even know the nation’s major cities before they land. No matter how smart or committed you are, you don’t have time in a few years to get up to speed enough to be really useful. One of the very few things we know about what works in development is that your interventions need to be precisely targeted to the local context. We can’t do that if nobody knows enough about the local context to make that happen. And how do you take a long view on development when no one stays for enough time to think that way?

So that’s what we can learn from missionaries. Stick around until you know what you’re doing. Project managers, and donor representatives, should have regional knowledge and language skills. They should be deeply steeped in local culture. We need incentives to get good people to stay in one place and become experts at it. Well, first we need it to be permitted. Then we need incentives.

If we’re uncomfortable keeping country directors around for the long haul because of corruption concerns, then we could keep other people in country instead. Technical people, for example. You could have some just-rotated-in manager making the final decisions, guided by a team who’s been working in this context long enough to know what works. You also need host country nationals in as many positions of authority as possible. Get past those corruption fears with good financial controls, ethics training, and employee mentoring. (Yes, it’s an incomplete solution, but so is rotating people constantly to keep them from getting attached.)

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Photo credit: bp6316
Chosen because they look exactly like the missionary kids I see in Tajikistan.

Ten ways to make development work better

By Alanna Shaikh | | 17 Comments |

skeleton

This is the heart of whatever it is I am writing – my ten core principles for improving the provision of international aid and the implementation of development projects. I have decided to just keep writing while I figure out what form this document takes – white paper, article, book. For now, I offer you the skeleton. I’ll expand on each of these ten in future posts.

I realize there isn’t a whole lot to comment on, or for that matter, read, here, but I’d love any comments you have on my basics here.

1. Evidence-based development.
2. Fund people, not concepts.
3. More, smaller programs, more flexibility to change.
4. Longer funding cycles.
5. Focus on self-interest in international development.
6. Get real about donor coordination; it occurs primarily through individual relationships.
7. Recognize not all governments have the best interests of their populations at heart. You can’t have general policies for host country collaboration.
8. Tags, not categories.
9. Forget the private sector; learn from missionaries. Cultivate regional and technical expertise.
10. Kill off the development studies programs.

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photo credit: perpetualplum
Chosen because it was going to have to be either a skeleton or a big 10.

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A Request for Useful Information

By Alanna Shaikh | | 15 Comments |

empty jar

Some time ago, in a time and place I’m not going to specify, a middle-aged woman brought me a human uterus in a jar. She was a pathologist, and she’d stolen it from her place of work. It was a healthy uterus, she said, with a healthy fetus inside, that had been removed by a gynecologist under pressure from the government to keep birth rates down.

Needless to say, my project could do nothing to help her. We didn’t even know where to begin. We weren’t a human rights project, or even a reproductive health project. We didn’t have the contacts with the government to make them stop this kind of behavior. I thanked her for her honesty and passion, and gave her the contact information for Human Rights Watch.

Until today, that was the worst story anyone had ever trusted me with. I’d heard worse things in the media, of course. But that was the worst story some had asked me to help with.

What really got to me was that it wasn’t her uterus she was carrying around. (And, it turned out, she took it everywhere, for fear the government would steal it and she’d lose her evidence.) It belonged to a stranger. But this pathologist saw a systemic wrong, and she wanted to change that.

I don’t think anything has changed in that country. I think she is still carrying that uterus in her purse.

That woman is my hero. She’s more than a little bit nuts at this point. She sleeps with a human organ under her bed. She’s Don Quixote with a scalpel and a supply of formaldehyde. But she’s not complacent.

And that’s why I’d like to slap both Bill Easterly and Jeff Sachs upside the head. There are human lives at stake here. There are people suffering and dying and risking their lives to help others. And nothing the big guys are saying right now is useful to me.

I want to know how to do my work better. I want to know whether it’s useful to have the EU pull its funding from the country whose name I won’t mention or if it’s more effective to keep pushing small changes and hope they add up. I want to know if supporting democratic institutions actually leads to democracy.

The high level debates about theory and the middle-aged guys mud-wrestling about African aid do nothing for me. You are very, very smart. You know more about aid than just about anybody. Please, give me something useful.

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photo credit: caro’s lines
Chosen because the jar is somehow sad.

Why size doesn’t matter

By Alanna Shaikh | | 7 Comments |
flat tire
flat tire

The most recent installment of the Notes from the Field series on the Aid Watch blog was written by a “veteran NGO leader” from Nepal, Scott MacLennan. In it, he decries the absentee management and outright deceptions of large NGOs, arguing that “Only small NGOs it seems are able to actually get out in the field and get their hands dirty making things happen.”

I disagree. I disagree passionately. Only competent, well-run NGOs are able to make things happen, and those factors are unrelated to size. It comes down to the skills and qualities of the people running the NGO. An organization can influence this by the way it selects people. This is wholly unrelated to size.

To further argue my point, I’ve made a handy list of the pros and cons of small and large NGOs:

Large NGOs:

Pros

  1. Have a certain base level of competence because of their broader experience.
  2. They can more easily expand or supplicate successful projects.
  3. They usually have enough staff that if a country director in Nepal leaves they can pull someone from, say, Sri Lanka rather than leave the post vacant while they hire.
  4. They are used to the requirements and mechanics of donor bureaucracy, and that lets them get started more quickly and not be bogged down in paperwork.
  5. They generally have more experience with financial controls and are usually better at it.
  6. They may have enough different projects to leverage their presence. For example, I once threatened a local official that we’d cancel laboratory skills trainings if they didn’t allow a child health campaign.

Cons

  1. They can be inflexible.
  2. They can have a lot of bureaucracy that stifles change.
  3. They may lose their personal touch – it’s just work to them.
  4. They generally have a higher percentage of funding from government donoirs, which limits their programmatic options.

Small NGOs:

Pros

  1. They tend to be more flexible and able to change directions quickly.
  2. They tend to be emotionally committed to their work.
  3. They are generally funded by small private donors, which means they have many more choices of how to use their money.
  4. They are often very connected to the communities they serve.
  5. They can be more innovative.

Cons

  1. They may be short on technical background, or have more good intentions than useful knowledge.
  2. They may not have enough experience to realize they are reinventing the wheel, or worse yet, reinventing a flat tire.
  3. They may not have dedicated finance and administrative staff, which means financial accountability is weaker.
  4. If a staff member leaves, they have to advertise and hire to replace them – no pool of people to draw on.

That list makes it pretty clear that it’s not the size of the NGO that matters. Different kinds of organizations have different strengths. What matters is now an organzation uses those strengths and overcomes its weaknesses. Size, in this case, doesn’t matter.

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Photo credit: Austin Tolin

Chosen because, well, it was pretty. And this is a hard concept to illustrate.

Low Hanging Fruit

By Alanna Shaikh | | 13 Comments |

You know what I would love to do? I’d love to start an effort devoted entirely to solving the easy problems in the world. Not a new NGO; you know how I feel about that, but a division within a major existing group. It would be funded by donations, not government grants, and focus on the low-hanging fruit in relief and development. Heck, we could call it Low Hanging Fruit, and live with the inevitable LHF acronym. We wouldn’t worry about sustainability, but we’d have a big focus on local involvement.

There are a million little ideas we all run into, that don’t fit with any expressed donor priorities, but would so obviously make a useful different in the world. LHF would work on those. We’d document everything to pieces, so it would also serve as research on what works. Every community we worked in would have a paired control community with similar demographics, and as soon as we could demonstrate an intervention was working, we’d extend it into the control group so they could benefit too.

Because the focus would be on simple solutions, I think it would be easy (well, easier) to get the kind of individual donations we’d need to keep our programs going. A hippo roller or better irrigation is an easy sell, and easy to illustrate in photographs.

I’m not arguing that these kinds of quick fixes are the answer to the world’s problems; far from it. International development needs long-term approaches to major structural problems. But sometimes a band-aid help your wound heal faster, and it’s frustrating to see someone hurting when a five cent piece of plastic and gauze could make a difference.

Here’s some of what we’d do:

Irrigation: Irrigation water all over the world runs in open ditches. Water is then lost to evaporation and seepage into the ground. LHF would cement and enclose drainage ditches. We’d do it if farmers in the community agreed to provide a certain amount of labor. We would know if it was working by measuring water flows.

Water and Sanitation: We’d support distribution of the hippo roller, and the playpump. We’d know they were working if we saw a decrease in waterborne illness, or a decrease in the average reported time spent on fetching water.

Health: We’d teach parents how to make ORS at home, and work with communities to help them establish emergency transport funds for health emergencies and pregnancy, and nutrition education. We’d support new mobile phone applications to improve access to data for health care providers and remind patients on ARV and DOTS regimes to take their medicine.

ETA: Thinking about this some more, any large NGO could establish an internal “low-hanging fruit” fund. Country directors could submit projects to be supported from that pool of funds, based on opportunities they have seen that no major donor is interested in supporting. The fund pool could come from dedicated LHF fundraising or general unrestricted donor funds.

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(photo credit: sebastien.b)