Things I Believe In

Things I don’t believe in #3 – most kinds of evaluation (July 2008)

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

Indecipherable graph

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.

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)

Things I don’t believe in #10 – Donating stuff instead of money (June 2008)

By Alanna Shaikh | | 6 Comments |

Pile of used clothes

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.

Give money. Don’t send food, bottled water, clothing or useful-seeming stuff. Give money.

Your old stuff costs money to ship. It is almost always cheaper to just buy it in country, and doing it that way benefits the local economy. It’s also more respectful to survivors of humanitarian emergencies, and allows relief agencies to procure exactly what is needed instead of struggling to find a use for randomly selected used junk. Disaster News Network talks about the used clothes problem in “The Trouble with Trousers.” which features a really depressing anecdote about Hurricane Hugo.

Your food costs money to ship, too. It is probably not food anyone in the recipient area would recognize. How exactly will the people of Burma know what to do with canned refried beans or artichoke hearts? Sending donated American food doesn’t drive income to local farmers or help local retailers start selling again. Buying in-country gets food people will actually understand how to cook and supports the local economy.

Here’s another example – some people wanted to send their old tents to China to house earthquake survivors. A sweet idea – provide quick, free housing. But every different kind of tent would have different set-up instructions, and how many people save their tent instructions once they’ve learned how to do it? It would take a huge time investment in figuring out each type of tent, and then training for the people in China who had to set up the tents. All of this time translates to a delay in providing housing, and it’s time used by paid staff, which means it is also squandered money.

Interaction, the coalition of disaster-relief NGOs, has a nice piece about why cash donations are most effective. They mention needs-based procurement, efficient delivery, lower costs, economic support, and cultural and environmental appropriateness as advantages of cash. World Volunteer Web has a good explanation too, breaking down the myths about post-disaster aid.

Usually people end these kinds of articles with links to the three or so places who will take your old clothes and possessions for international donation. I am not going to do it. Don’t waste everyone’s effort that way. Give your old stuff to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or St. Vincent de Paul; they’ll make the best use of it. They’ll sell your things locally and use the money for their charitable purposes.

Giving stuff instead of money is easy for you, it’s cheaper for you, and it’s quick. It is not quick, easy, or affordable for the NGOs who are actually trying to help people.

If you want to help, give money.

[Picture of old clothes in Haiti from Flickr by Vanessa Bertozzi]

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.

—————–
Photo credit: celinecelines
Chosen for the shiny rainbow.

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.

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

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Things I believe in #44 – Camels

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |


Once upon a time, I was at a dinner in rural Turkmenistan. I’d been invited home by a local health official, after an award ceremony for the visiting health nurses in the district who did the best job of educating parents of young children about diarrhea. The meal was huge, and multi-course, in keeping with Turkmen tradition. Towards the end, as we were all starting to list a bit on our floor pillows, the official began to talk about camels.

You see them everywhere in Turkmenistan, camels. They’re as common as cows in American farm country. You get used to them quickly. Once I’d gotten over the novelty, I hadn’t thought twice about camels until that dinner. The official had grown up in the rural district which he now served as head doctor. As a young boy, he’d been in charge of his family’s camels. They had 15, which he swore were easier to care for than just two cows. He spent a good 30 minutes telling us about the special and wonderful characteristics of camels.

Once I started learning about camels, though, I realized I should have been paying attention all along. Camels can handle changes in body temperature and levels of dehydration that would kill any other mammal. Camel milk has better nutritional value than cow’s milk – more milk and more fat. It makes fabulous yogurt. Camel meat is flavorful and lean, if a bit tough.(1) Contrary to commonly-held beliefs, camels are patient, good-tempered, and placid by nature.(2) They’re intelligent enough to be trained like horses, and can carry up to 990 pounds.

During the 1984-85 African drought, cows, sheep, and goats died but the camels made it through. Their owners, in turn, were more likely to live through the famine. Camels are good livestock. They’re hardy, long-lived, cheap to feed and easy to care for. They are the kind of livestock that can lift a family out of poverty.

(1) I’ve never tried camel dairy, but I’ve eaten camel meat. It’s chewy and spicy.

(2) Though I have been told they are puppy killers.

(no photo credit – I took this one with my own hands)

Things I don’t believe in #10 – Donating stuff instead of money

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

Give money. Don’t send food, bottled water, clothing or useful-seeming stuff. Give money.

Your old stuff costs money to ship. It is almost always cheaper to just buy it in country, and doing it that way benefits the local economy. It’s also more respectful to survivors of humanitarian emergencies, and allows relief agencies to procure exactly what is needed instead of struggling to find a use for randomly selected used junk. Disaster News Network talks about the used clothes problem in “The Trouble with Trousers.” which features a really depressing anecdote about Hurricane Hugo.

Your food costs money to ship, too. It is probably not food anyone in the recipient area would recognize. How exactly will the people of Burma know what to do with canned refried beans or artichoke hearts? Sending donated American food doesn’t drive income to local farmers or help local retailers start selling again. Buying in-country gets food people will actually understand how to cook and supports the local economy.

Here’s another example – some people wanted to send their old tents to China to house earthquake survivors. A sweet idea – provide quick, free housing. But every different kind of tent would have different set-up instructions, and how many people save their tent instructions once they’ve learned how to do it? It would take a huge time investment in figuring out each type of tent, and then training for the people in China who had to set up the tents. All of this time translates to a delay in providing housing, and it’s time used by paid staff, which means it is also squandered money.

Interaction, the coalition of disaster-relief NGOs, has a nice piece about why cash donations are most effective. They mention needs-based procurement, efficient delivery, lower costs, economic support, and cultural and environmental appropriateness as advantages of cash. World Volunteer Web has a good explanation too, breaking down the myths about post-disaster aid.

Usually people end these kinds of articles with links to the three or so places who will take your old clothes and possessions for international donation. I am not going to do it. Don’t waste everyone’s effort that way. Give your old stuff to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or St. Vincent de Paul; they’ll make the best use of it. They’ll sell your things locally and use the money for their charitable purposes.

Giving stuff instead of money is easy for you, it’s cheaper for you, and it’s quick. It is not quick, easy, or affordable for the NGOs who are actually trying to help people.

If you want to help, give money.

[Picture of old clothes in Haiti from Flickr by Vanessa Bertozzi]

Things I believe in #40 – Oral Rehydration Salts

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

Eight ounces of clean water. One pinch of salt. One teaspoon of sugar. Mix well. Give it to your child who has diarrhea. Save her life. It doesn’t cure diarrhea, but it’ll prevent fatal dehydration until the illness passes.

It’s not a perfect solution. Not everyone has access to clean water. You need to have a clean container, too, and you need to be able to measure. And it’s not the best possible fluid for rehydration; it’s merely very good.

But it’s cheap and finding the water, the container, the sugar, and the salt is something almost everyone can do. It is something a mother or a father can do at home to heal their child. You don’t need a doctor, a hospital, an expert of any kind. Oral rehydration salts will not hurt a healthy child, and they won’t make a sick child sicker, even if they don’t heal. No one goes broke providing them, or ends up dependent on an expensive foreign-made drug.

To the parents of a sick child, oral rehydration salts are nothing short of miraculous.

Put the water in the glass first. Add the salt. Stir well. It should be no saltier than tears. Add the sugar. At least a teaspoon; more is okay. Help your little girl drink it.

There. You just performed a miracle, yourself.