Tag: international development

Time for a top-down bottom-up development challenge?

2 Comments

Earlier last week I stumbled into a post on Chris Blattman’s website provocatively titled ‘Is this the most effective development program in history?‘ It in, he shares the story of how, in 2011, the Nigerian government handed out $60 million to 1,200 Nigerians – that’s about $50,000 each – to help them create, run and/or scale a business. “Three years later there are hundreds more new companies, generating tons of profit, and employing about 7,000 new people”. Not bad for a reasonably modest amount of money.

Although I see this as more of an investment program rather than a development initiative, I come to similar conclusions to Chris. What if we channelled more funds to the middle and the bottom, and let market forces and entrepreneurialism in-country take over?

Today I read another post, this time on the Guardian development professionals network,  which poses a not-too-dissimilar question. In ‘Five reasons funding should go directly to local NGOs‘, Jennifer Lentfer – creator of how-matters.org and Director of Communications at International Development Exchange – argues that we should channel more funding directly to local innovators, NGOs and social entrepreneurs on the ground in developing countries. To put things in context, only about 1% of humanitarian aid goes directly to local actors in the global south at the moment. The rest goes through what Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah calls ‘fundermediaries’. In other words, larger global development players who then ‘trickle’ it down (or so the theory goes).

Jennifer’s call for more local funding is based on five key arguments:

1. While outsiders struggle with concepts such as ‘community participation’ and ‘local empowerment’, there are often “dedicated and embedded local partners who are working hard to understand and address their own problems” who do get it.

2. Local organisations, by their very nature, are intrinsic to the local communities they serve, and are part of the social fabric. They belong there, and are often more vested in developing meaningful, sustainable, long-lasting solutions.

3. The larger the (outside) institutions, the more funds they need to divert internally to sustain themselves and their staff, offices and operational budgets.

4. Most local institutions are free from the burden of annual reports, log frames and three year funding models meaning that many have greater staying power than outside, larger institutions who come and go based on a range of external factors.

5. There is proof, albeit in low quantities (because of the lack of direct funding at this level) that “grassroots grantees get results”.

In a separate post, Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah shares five excuses donors give for not funding local NGOs directly. Among these are that local NGOs don’t have the expertise or capacity to fill in all the forms; it is too expensive to administer the smaller grant amounts suitable for smaller organisations; that funds need to be channelled through ‘trusted partners’ to manage risk; money laundering and anti-terror rules make it hard to give to ‘non-trusted partners’; and a pressure for funds to be put through organisations in their home country (i.e. organisations which, more often than not, are also in the global north). 

I’ve been arguing for more direct support for local innovators, social actors and NGOs for well over a decade, so each of these posts resonated strongly. It has also been a central part of my argument that we build tools that local organisations can take and use on their own terms, again something I’ve been speaking about on the ICT4D circuit since 2003.

Of course, not all international NGOs are the same, and not all grassroots are the same, either. But if there’s evidence that in certain circumstances local players have better chance of achieving a desired impact, often for less money, then it’s right and proper that we investigate further.

fixingdevelopment

So, how about a new Development Challenge, modelled on the same types of competition where investors start with the same amount of money (not real money, mind you) and aim to turn it into as much as they can within a fixed period of time? It would need to be a fairly long-term experiment, and it could go something along the lines of:

1. Identify half-a-dozen international ‘fundermentaries’
2. identify half-a-dozen grassroots NGOs
3. Determine a modest starting budget – the same amount for each organisation
4. Allow them to dictate where and how they spend the money via a short proposal
5. Using an independent evaluator, take some baseline data based on (4)
6. Disburse the funds (real money in this case)
7. Come back in a predetermined period of time (at least three years)
8. Using an independent evaluator, carry out some monitoring and evaluation

Which projects are still running? What impact have they had? What changes have they helped facilitate? How sustainable are they? What changes have there been in the community? How did the approaches of the local organisations differ from the others? What conclusions can we draw from all of this?

We wouldn’t have much to lose by trying out an experiment like this, but a whole lot to gain. Of course, if it was shown that grassroots designed and managed projects performed better, the international development community would have some awkward and difficult questions to answer.

And if the international community does better? Well, then it’s just business as usual.

A version of this post also appeared on the Stanford Social Innovation Review

International development: A problem of image, or a problem of substance?

1 Comment

The world has problems. Big problems. They need big answers, ambitious projects and innovative solutions. And that costs money. Lots of it. Three trillion dollars over the past sixty years, if the research is to be believed. Fixing stuff is big business.

With these kinds of resources, what could go wrong? The problem is, many development initiatives have gone wrong, and continue to. Somewhere along the line development has lost it’s way. For many people it is so lost that it’s now become part of the problem.

While donors and other more senior professional development practitioners might disagree, many of the people I know who work in the various guises of ‘development’ admit that – on the whole – it’s not working, that resources are mis-focused, and that the majority of international aid initiatives are not fit for purpose. That’s not to question the motives of those who work to make the world a better place, it’s just that often they choose the wrong vehicle in which to do it. As Bill Easterly says:

The fondness for the Big Goal and the Big Plan is strikingly widespread. It’s part of the second tragedy that so much goodwill and hard work by rich people who care about the poor goes through channels that are ineffective

There’s no shortage of debate, of course. Many academics spend most of their waking hours disecting and analysing the big data on big aid, only to come up with different conclusions. The more practical among us choose to just get on with it, and choose to do it outside the system. Rather than taking jobs in large development structures, we go about it on our own terms. This is the approach featured in my recent book, “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator“.

There’s no better example of big development than the Millenium Development Goals which, at the time of writing are about 450 days away from ‘maturing’. Progress has been sketchy. Given that it can sometimes take years to collect and analyse the kind of data needed to measure them, it may be some time beyond the 2015 deadline before we know how many were met. And then we’ll never really know whether it was development policies, or simple economic growth, that was responsible. As with most things development, few things are that clear cut. If they’re met it might not be clear who to thank, and if we fail we’ll not know who to blame, either.

That all said, it’s far easier for critics who sit on the sidelines and say how rubbish it all is. It’s much harder coming up with actual answers, and harder still acting on them. I, for one, have always tried to balance my criticism of the technology-for development (ICT4D) sector with suggestions, ideas and thoughts on how we might improve our effectiveness. Just last week I announced my Donors Charter, an attempt to bring some harmony to how technology-for-development projects get funded.

Going by a recent article in the Huffington Post, many donors are becoming increasingly concerned about how aid – and their work – is perceived outside the sector. That concern has lead to the birth of the Narrative Project, whose goal is “to reverse the decline of public support for our work” and to counteract “fatigue” among rank-and-file supporters of these charities, many of whom increasingly view aid as “a good idea, done badly”.

Reading between the lines it might appear that many of the donors involved believe that aid is fundamentally “a good idea, done well” and that the problem is simply one of PR. Let’s hope this isn’t the case. While aid definitely does have a PR problem, there’s also plenty wrong with how it’s executed – and we can only hope that those present at the meetings accept that, and have committed to addressing it, too.

The Narrative Project does include a call for “a co-ordinated development sector”, and donors hold many of the cards (as I argue with the Donors Charter). It also makes the point that independence and self-reliance, i.e. people in the developing world solving their own problems, should be key development objectives. And that people need to believe they can make a difference. None of this is new, but it’s refreshing to see it being discussed at such a high level.

One huge red flag, however, are the parties to the work. The UN Foundation, Bond, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ONE, Oxfam, Comic Relief and others. All large international players. Let’s hope that somewhere along the way they consulted smaller organisations, local organisations, local innovators, small projects and low-level grantees. We all know what happens when you talk in silos. And this looks like an international donor silo to me.

Like many colleagues and friends, I’ve grown increasingly despondent with the international development sector, and have only managed to stay positive thanks to my early decision to ‘go it alone’. Aid does do good, but it could do so much better if it got it’s house in order. And that’s the frustrating thing for me. In a career spanning 21 years, many of the bigger institutional problems persist, with no-one seemingly having the energy, the influence or the political will to fix any of it.

In my ICT4D world, there are some very simple (and I’d argue, obvious) things, for example.

  1. Focus more on enabling environments – genuine empowerment opportunities for those who own, or who are closest to, the problem.
  2. Seriously get behind, and support, projects that we know are working, or know have the best approach. Stop always looking for the next big thing.
  3. Have at least a few innovators on staff. Don’t head up innovation teams with people who have never built anything.
  4. Adopt best practice, along the lines of the Donors Charter.
  5. Give local innovators a voice.

The world needs a strong international development sector, particularly when it’s called to deliver emergency aid in times of greatest need. But beyond that it needs to work for the people it seeks to help, not in the interests of itself. It needs to be bold, be brave, and do things that might not always be in its best interests.

And it needs an exit strategy. Without one, how is anyone expected to have confidence that they’re doing the right thing, the right way?