doing dev better

Things I believe in #14 – writing all your documents in clear, simple language

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

There are two big reasons that clear writing is important. First of all, it lets as many people as possible understand what you have to say. Secondly, writing clearly forces you to think clearly; it improves the quality of your ideas.

Using jargon-free writing appeals to the largest possible audience. Experts in your field can still comfortably read your reports, but non-experts can understand them, too. It takes a little more work to find understandable terminology for technical ideas, but doing your best is well worth it. Your donors, staff members, and the people you serve probably don’t have the background to read a jargon-dense article, and these are your most important audiences. There may be a few highly-targeted documents that need to be heavy on technical terms, but even then you can still write well.

Using jargon-free writing also forces you to think about what you’re saying. Jargon makes people’s attention – even your own – slide away. If you write that you are going to “include stakeholders in decision-making,” you don’t have to stop and think about who, exactly, you will include or how you’ll make them part of your decisions. Jargon is an obstacle to good planning. Clear, specific language, on the other hand, leads to clear, specific thinking and plans.

(Here’s a tip: if you are so far into the belly of the beast that you can’t tell what is jargon any more, read your writing out loud. Anything that stumbles off your tongue should be removed.)

Ethics and International Development

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |


On the surface, relief and development seems like the simplest, most ethical work in the world. Helping people in need looks easy. Like most work worth doing, though, it’s extraordinarily complicated.

These are just a few, representative, ethical dilemmas:

1. Giving stuff instead of training and capacity building creates a culture of dependency. People rely on what you are giving them instead of finding a way to get it themselves. They get in the habit of looking outside their communities for positive change. And when you stop providing aid, they’ll have lost the skill of providing for themselves. Providing training and technical assistance requires huge amounts of money to be paid to outside experts, while leaving immediate needs unmet.

2. Hiring your staff locally and paying them well distorts the local labor market and pulls local talent away from government, local NGOs, and other domestic institutions. Paying market average salaries makes it hard to recruit and retain staff. It leaves your staff struggling to survive, and guarantees resentment of expatriate employees. Programs based on expat labor don’t help the local economy, and they cost a fortune.

3. Following host government policy will often require you to move so slowly that people suffer, waiting for your programs to get going. You may be forced to use outdated models for your programs. Ignoring host government policy erodes local capacity and weakens the government, which can lead to mass suffering if the government loses control of the country.

4. Paying bribes to get things done promotes a culture of corruption and is illegal under US law. Refusing to pay bribes will get you kicked out of the country, abandoning your partner communities.

5. Working with institutions such as orphanages and homes for the disabled provides help to the most vulnerable segments of the population. Orphanages and institutions, however, have been conclusively demonstrated to be the worst approach to care. Your assistance in improving these places may help to keep them in existence and encourage placing children in them.

I am not telling you to get depressed and give up. I’m really not; doing nothing also has terrible consequences. I am telling you to think about the choices you make and what those choices mean. Look for the unintended consequences of your programs. Do your homework. Red about similar efforts, what went right and what went wrong. Talk to your local staff and other NGOs.

You will have to make choices that cause damage. Make sure your positive impact is exponentially greater.

(photo credit: edmittance)

The rule of three

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |


I was talking to someone from USAID the other day, and he told me that in his opinion, there are only three kinds of development work, and a good project has to include all three. These are the three kinds of projects he described:

1. Projects that improve the government environment to make the sector as a whole work better.

2. Practitioner training. Projects that improve the skills of professionals so that they can do their jobs better.

3. Community mobilization. Efforts to teach people about the issue so they can make decisions to improve the situation.

For example, a project to reduce the infant mortality rate might work to encourage the government to place more doctors in underserved areas (policy), training pediatrician and obstetricians to provide better care (practitioner training) and educate parents on good childhood nutrition and the importance of vaccinations (community mobilization). A project on improving elections might advocate changes in election law (policy), training local officials to better manage and monitor elections (practitioner training), and encourage people to get out and vote (community mobilization).

I’m not sure I agree with this framework, but I might. What do you think?

Photo Credit: Zed.Cat

Things I don’t believe in #3 – Most Kinds of Evaluation

By Alanna Shaikh | | 3 Comments |

Most forms of monitoring and evaluation annoy me. Instead of serving their true – and vital – functions, they are pro forma decorations created externally and staple-gunned onto a project once it’s already been designed. Usually a clean-looking table featuring a timeline and a list of indicators they plan to measure. I loathe those tables, for a lot of reasons.

Monitoring and evaluation are not the same thing. The purpose of monitoring is to observe your program as you do it, and make sure you’re on the right track. The purpose of evaluation is to determine whether you are meeting your goals. These should not be confused.

Let’s use a hypothetical project. Say you’re trying to reduce infant mortality rates among young mothers in rural Bangladesh. That’s your goal. You need to start by defining your terms. What’s a mother? Just women with children, or pregnant women too? And exactly how old is young? So, decide you want to work with pregnant women and women with young children, and they must be under the age of 25. How do you want to keep these children alive? You decide to teach young mothers how to take care of sick children, and how to prepare nutritious food.

Your monitoring should make sure you’re reaching as many young mothers as possible. It should make sure that your educational efforts are well-done include accurate information. It should make sure you’re reaching young mothers, and not grandparents or childless women. Are you actually doing the stuff you said you would? Are you doing it well? That’s monitoring.

Evaluation is about whether you’re reaching your goal. You could be doing great education on children’s health and nutrition. Your young mothers could love your trainings, and lots and lots and lots of them could attend them. Your trainings could be amazing. But improving mothers’ knowledge may not actually decrease infant deaths. That’s what your evaluation will tell you – if your program actually achieving your goal.

What do these questions have to do with the neat little table on page 17 of your proposal? Very little. Monitoring, to be useful, needs to be constant. It can be based on very simple numbers. How many teachers/doctors/lawyers/mothers have you trained? Are the trainings still attracting participants? When your master trainers observe trainings, do they still like them?

Once you start getting answers to these questions, you need to use them. That’s why it’s better if managers collect monitoring data themselves. If participants don’t like your trainings, find out why, and fix it. If you’re not training enough people, maybe you’re not scheduling enough trainings, or maybe you’re not attracting enough participants. Monitoring is like biofeedback. Observe. Measure. Make your changes.

Evaluation happens less often. You’re not going to see impact in a month, maybe not in a year. Annually is usually often enough for evaluation, and you can get an outsider to do it. The important thing about evaluation is that your team needs to believe in it. If you get to the second year of your project, the project your team loves and you’ve given your blood and sweat to it, and the evaluation says it is not having any impact – your heart breaks into a million pieces. It is tempting and easy to simply decide the evaluation is wrong and keep wasting money on a project which just doesn’t work. You need a rock-solid evaluation you can trust so that if it tells you to change everything, you actually will.

(photo credit: leo.prie.to, chosen because I have no idea what it means)

What I learned from reality TV

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

I spent the 4th of July weekend watching television. The weather was muggy, we all had colds, my dad can’t walk much, and my car is on summer vacation with my mom. That translated to a weekend spent sleeping and staring at the box. I didn’t expect to get anything out of my three days off except eliminating a sleep deficit. It turns out, though, that you can find insight almost anywhere, even on “The Next Food Network Star.” I did promise, after all, that I’d look everywhere I could for ways to do international development better.

This is what I learned: It’s all about relationships. Even when people are competing head-to-head, they still want to like others and be liked in return. Everyone wants a human connection, even when that desire works against their immediate self interest. It’s an obvious lesson, but one that’s easy to forget or ignore.

What does this mean for development projects? Well, when you are working to improve health care, you’ll see better outcomes if people have the same doctor every time. Teenagers are more likely to use drugs (or condoms – it goes both ways) if they believe their friends are doing so. People repay microfinance loans, and stand fast in the heat of battle, so they won’t lose face in front of their peers.

Lesson: When you are designing programs, take relationships into account as a major motivator.

Photo Credit: Obo-bobolina

Telling better stories

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |


Once, at a restaurant, I ordered “Crispy potato wedges with sweet and sour dipping sauce” as an appetizer. What I got was French fries and ketchup. The description on the menu was true, but not honest. I didn’t feel like I could complain to the manager, but it left me feeling disappointed and vaguely deceived.

Too much of our communication about international development is true but not honest. We boil complicated situations down into simple ideas. We pretend there are easy answers to problems so difficult there may be no answers at all. We use emotional impact and compelling photographs to avoid detailed discussion of the challenges of doing good development work.

And we need our stories, because our stories are what bring us funding. Whether it’s a government agency, a foundation, a corporate partner, or a little old lady putting a five dollar bill in an envelope, the people who give us money respond to stories. The government calls it reporting, corporations ask for success stories, and regular people just want reasons to give their cash, but they are all asking for stories to explain what we do and why we deserve their money to do it.

For a long time, were stuck with our oversimplified, easily digested stories. Our true-but-not-real stories were all we could get out to the world. Three minute spots on the evening news and press releases don’t leave much room for nuance. Even reporters from respected media outlets rarely have the time or expertise to research and relay a complicated article about the realities of international development.

The world has changed. We have now have a huge selection of social media tools we can use to shape our own messages and communicate directly. And – we can do more than just put a message out there in an electronic bottle and hope someone finds it. We can have conversations about what we do, how we do it, and how people can be part of that. We don’t have to spoon feed people easy ideas because we’ve got the time and space to talk about the hard stuff.

This is my challenge to you:

Think seriously about what social media can do for you. Don’t just use your Twitter account for mini-press releases; use it for genuinely new information as it happens. Imagine a country director in Darfur tweeting as he travels to a refugee camp. Imagine a collaborative blog by your HQ staff, talking about what backstopping actually entails. (People would be a lot more likely to pay overhead if they knew what overhead was.) Imagine your Sri Lanka country team posting their photos to Flickr and their videos to YouTube. Imagine your website as a portal to all of that, a place people go to get deep knowledge about what your organization does. Imagine turning all your donors into passionate advocates who encourage others to give too.

Better stories can do that for us, and we finally have a way to tell them.

Photo Credit: Miranda July at Modern Times, taken by Steve Rhodes.

Thinking about reconstruction

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |


I heard a speech the other day on post-conflict reconstruction and state building by an analyst from a prominent NGO, and it made me do a lot of thinking about the best ways to provide assistance during a crisis and afterward. I’m not sure it was on the record, so I can’t give you details, but I’ll pull out some of the salient points:

1. Contemporary conflicts cross borders. It’s almost their defining characteristic. We cannot afford to ignore small, obscure conflicts because they do not stay small or obscure for long.

2. The development of a competent, professional police force is key to rebuilding a post-conflict state. It is a strong police force, more than a strong military, that supports peace in a country.

3. If you build up the presidency and the military as the only strong and credible national institutions, you are pretty much just asking for a coup to take place.

4. The responsibility to protect is intended to prevent state failure, not trigger or respond to it.

5. Rwanda and Congo (Zaire) are examples of the devastating consequences of allowing state failure.

6. East Timor is a prime example of the challenges of state-building. It’s a small, ethnically homogeneous state, but is still constantly on the verge of failure.

7. Regime collapse and state failure are not the same thing. Regime collapse can actually prevent state failure by allowing for change.

What does this mean to us with regard to international development?

I think the big thing is that we have to think very carefully about the impact of any aid we give. Are we supporting a healthy government, or encouraging NGOs to take over government functions?

Photo by Yewenyi