field life

Things I don’t believe in #6 – All powerful expatriate leadership (June 2008)

By Alanna Shaikh | | 3 Comments |

rainbow jesus

 

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.

 

This is the first thing – expats don’t stay forever. In two or three or four years, the expat will leave. If your whole program depends on her, or the staff believes that it does, things will go to pieces when she leaves. This is the second thing – it’s disempowering. You don’t want your staff, or your stakeholders, to believe change only comes from outsiders. You want people to find their own power and their own capacity to influence their lives and communities. You don’t want them to sit around waiting and starving for the Dutch to come back and rebuild the irrigation canals.

This is the third thing. You want your staff invested in the process. You want everyone involved to know your select your pilot schools because they meet the qualifications for your program. You don’t want them thinking the schools were selected because Mr. Thomas feels really bad for the villages, or worse yet, because he thought the teachers were pretty. You want people to know you’ve got a system and your apply it fairly.

This is the fourth thing. Country Directors who allow themselves to be seen as having and exerting that kind of power end up isolated. Staff members won’t be comfortable being part of a collaborative decision-making process. They won’t offer opinions on how to make things better, and they won’t go to the CD if they identify a problem.

Good programs come from good teams, not from little gods and their adoring worshippers.

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Photo credit: celinecelines
Chosen for the shiny rainbow.

What we can learn from missionaries

By Alanna Shaikh | | 46 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.

The rollercoaster of field life

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

There is another thing I’d forgotten about being so close to my work. It’s a constant rollercoaster. When you’re in DC – or the wealthy capital of your choice – you get monthly reports. Possibly a weekly progress update, but not necessarily. Your teams in the field are too busy actually doing their work to report to you every day. Your big data sources are periodic phone calls and monthly and quarterly reports. That kind of time span evens things out. It lets you see the broad trends.

In-country, though, every success and back-step hits you right in the gut. Your life feels like a series of wins and losses. It’s hard to have any sense of overall progress when you just had a terrible meeting with the Ministry of Agriculture and your training just got cancelled. On the other hand, when things are going well, you’re so full of energy and creativity and passion you can push your work to whole new levels of impact. My own project is seeing major progress right now, and it makes it a joy to go to the office.

The answer to this, of course, is decent monitoring and evaluation. If you 1) know your overall goal 2) Know the steps to get to that goal and 3) are collecting data on your program, then you can stop every so often and examine your progress. You can see what work you’ve done so far, what effect it is having, and if that effect is making progress toward your big goal they way you want it to.

M&E data tends to end up only in the hands of project directors and the M&E people. I’d love to see it widely available, so that everyone in the project could see what was moving ahead and what was bogging down. It would require training everyone in how to read and understand M&E data, but that would be useful for a lot of reasons.

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(photo credit: gaelenh)

Chosen because – they are either laughing or screaming – who can tell? And that’s pretty much how it feels most of the time.

Anger, control, and finding the zone

By Alanna Shaikh | | 6 Comments |

I have, once again, given up substantial amounts of control over my life.

Living overseas does that to you. Part of it is the expatriate experience. The language barrier makes it hard to know what’s going on much of the time, and the cultural gap means that even when you’ve got the language skills, you’re still missing most of the nuance of everything that’s happening around you. You don’t get to customize your environment like you would in your home country – you accept whatever flavor of juices is offered to you, and you let them paint the walls any color your landlord likes. Doing anything else is an exhausting and unpleasant way to spend your time. People who can’t give up control should stay home.

The loss of control runs deeper than being an outsider, though. The fact is that poor people have less control over their lives. This is the damage done by poverty. They cannot easily change jobs or locations, they are less resilient in the face of crisis, and they are at the mercy of often autocratic governments.

And when you go to live in a poor country, you accept those same limitations. You get special treatment for being an expat, yes, but there are limits to this. The police officer will do what he wants regardless of the facts of the situation. There is no treatment for HIV. The government just repossessed your house and now it will be torn down. Women can be beaten for undercooking dinner. That is how it is and your foreign passport can’t fix it.

It’s a fine line between realistically facing limitations, and accepting the very conditions that you are there to change. If you’re working for an anti-corruption project, you need to stay angry at cops who require bribes. If you’re trying to improve health, you need to identify the obstacles to HIV treatment (generally lack of funds and inability to write decent Global Fund grant, coupled with provider inexperience) and find a way around them.

If you push too hard and get too angry, you burn out, fast. It hurts you and it doesn’t do much for your projects. It could get you kicked out of the country. But if you are too laid back and do too little, you’re just a waste of funding that could be used for something that matters. You have to find that sweet spot, somewhere in between, where you don’t mind a late plane but you do mind physicians who must be bribed to provide care.

Finding that mental space is hard. Staying in it is harder. But it’s one of the many things you have to manage if you want to do things well.

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(photo credit: Ko:(char *)hook)
Chosen because it’s a nice harmless photo of a control room – searching Flickr for “control” brings you freaky, freaky things.

Four skills I would never have acquired if I hadn’t lived abroad

By Alanna Shaikh | | 5 Comments |


1. How to open a can of food with a knife

Place the knife straight down on the top of the can, with the tip of the blade resting where you want to make your puncture. Choose your location carefully; the farther from the edge you are, the easier it will be to puncture the can, but the harder it will be to get the food out once open. Whack the handle of the knife with a blunt object (another can works). It takes less pressure than you would think. Once you’ve pierced the can, saw at an angle through the can to get the kind of hole you want.

Note: This will make your knife very dull, and you can’t do it with a penknife.

2. How to bathe in 3 liters of water

Fill two 2.5 liter bottles with water. Sit crouched or cross legged in your bathing location. Drizzle half a liter of water over yourself until you’re wet. Lather with soap as needed. Rinse yourself (drizzling again) with the other half of the bottle. The pour half the second bottle onto your head, wetting your hair. Do your face, too. Lather with shampoo. Rinse with the second half of the bottle. Stand up, rub a small amount of conditioner through your hair of you need it. Do not rinse out the conditioner – that is why you only use a tiny bit.

Note: The key here is pouring water from your bottles very gently, so that all the water you pour out is use to wet or rinse. If you just dump the water around willy-nilly, you will run out.

3. How to eat food you hate

Cut the offending food into the smallest possible pieces. Put it in your mouth, one piece at a time. Do not chew; swallow the piece whole. Put ketchup on whatever it is if possible.

Note: You need a lot of beverage to really make this work, but it really helps a lot with life’s truly gross foods, and it is subtle enough not to offend the cheerful host who just filled your plate.

4. How to light a gas oven

Start by looking into the oven ad finding the hole in the bottom where you can access the gas. Once you’ve done that, you can proceed in two different ways, depending on your tolerance for risk and what kind of hurry you are in:

a. Fastest, most risky: Close oven door. Turn on gas. Light cheap cardboard match (Do not use a wooden match). Open door, throw match into hole for gas, close door. Wait for “foom!” sound.

b. Much slower, much safer: Fill a cup with water and set it near the oven. Take a piece of paper, and twist it to make a taper. Light a candle. Open the oven door, stare in, and remove the bottom metal panel from the oven. Usually it just slides out. You will then see the gas tube snaking along the bottom of the oven.

Light the taper from the candle, turn the gas on, open the oven door, and then light the gas. You can put the taper anywhere along the tube to light, but toward the front of the oven is obviously safest. Extinguish the taper in your cup of water.

Notes: Yes, I generally use method A. If you’re using a taper, make sure you hold it at the very end – the whole point of making the taper is to stay as far from the flame as possible. You can light the gas with your candle, but wax drips everywhere. The cup of water may be overkill, but if you’re lighting the oven this way you have alredy proven you are a fraidy-cat. Why not be as safe as possible?

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(photo credit: leff)
Chosen because it included both cans and gross food.

Things that do damage

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |


Badly planned, badly thought out NGO operations hurt the communities they attempt to serve. We’re all aware of that in the big ways, like allowing food aid to be turned into a weapon by dictatorships, or sexually abusing aid recipients. Aside from the big blunders, though, we also undermine in smaller ways. Here are two:

1. Using highly visible security where it isn’t called for. Seeing the foreigners ride around in armored cars or helmets is scary. It makes everything seem like a war zone.

In an actual war zone, people are in a war mindset. Using war zone precautions in other contexts generates fear. It actually makes people feel less safe in the place where they live. Maybe your expatriates are genuinely more at risk than local inhabitants (though Michael Kleinman has his doubts and honestly so do I) but how are people supposed to know that?

Security precautions should be appropriate to the level of risk, and as unobtrusive as possible. Considering how much of safety is about population support and acceptance of the work, this benefits NGO programs as well as the communities they work with.

2. Living visibly lavish lifestyles. There is research showing that inequality makes people unhappy. Poor people feel less happy with their lives when they’ve got rich people making them feel deprived. Don’t be those rich people. In addition, no local community is going to feel like a partner if you roll around like wealthy big shots. They are going to feel like the recipient of charity, with nothing to do but wait and accept it.

Expatriate employees need to be fairly comfortable and fairly happy to function and do their best for the organization. I know that. But don’t fly in their cheese or give them palaces to live in.

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(photo credit: Cayusa)
Chosen because it feels like the big white car is shoved right into your face.

This job is not always fun

By Alanna Shaikh | | 7 Comments |


There are an awful lot of good things about a career in international relief or development. You accumulate great stories for parties, you sound cool as all get-out at high school reunions, and you have a valid reason to get extra pages in your passport. Plus, you know – you do meaningful work that you care about in amazing parts of the world. Based on the email I get, it’s a field lots of people want to get into.

For contrast, here are three things that suck:

1) You’re always understaffed. Pressure to keep overhead costs low means that you never, ever have enough people to do the work you are supposed to be doing. This means working overtime for free, or doing your work badly. Sometimes it means both working free overtime and doing things badly.

2) You know you’re a drop in the bucket. Actually doing something to solve global problems brings you face to face with the complicated and painful nature of global problems. It’s a whole lot easier to feel miserable about Somalia and then donate a lot of money to WFP than it is to be in Somalia and run a food program. Giving money to the organization of your choice feels like you are doing something with impact; working for that same organization will often feel completely futile. Perspective is not always a good thing.

3) You’re a bureaucrat. An awful lot of every expat’s job involves paperwork. Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.

(photo credit: pondspider)