by valuingvoicesjin | Dec 30, 2013 | Africa, Evaluation, International aid, Local Participants, Results, Sustainability, Youth
Is Development Doomed? No! Youth and community input are key to sustainability
Paul Theroux has a deeply depressing, if quite realistic, view of how development has failed Africa. "Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo calls aid a "debilitating drug," arguing that "real per-capita income [in Africa] today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population — over 350 million people — live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades." He notes that our desire to help is the very death knell for Africa: "50 years later, the education system in Malawi is still faltering. Why? Because teaching as a profession in Malawi, and many parts of Africa, is undervalued, if not despised, and poorly paid. Besides, you can always find a foreign teacher willing to do the work: American, British, Japanese, Australian." Later he notes that in our desire to help, we can harm: "A mud hut and thatched roof is, in fact, renewed every few years; the cement structures and tin roofs built by well-meaning NGOs create maintenance problems." If we keep doing things For Africa and the 'developing' world and don't support their own self-development, who wins? If we keep designing development projects because we know what they need, how sustainable will they be?
So what is to be done? What already exists is the OECD's DAC. It has lovely and broad-ranging criteria for evaluating impact at project's end. They use five kinds of measures. Now we need African, Asian, Latin American evaluators to see how relevant these are and how they'd change the measures with communities. I suspect that looking at projects from the participants' viewpoint rather than the donors could change how we look at these categories, and measure them:
1) Relevance (e.g. are the activities and outputs of the programme consistent with the overall goal and the attainment of its objectives and intended impacts and effects?)
2) Effectiveness ( (e.g. to what extent were the objectives achieved / are likely to be achieved and why?)
3) Efficiency (e.g. were activities cost- and time-efficient?)
4) Impact (e.g. what real difference has the activity made to the beneficiaries?)
And this is key:
5) Sustainability – "measuring whether the benefits of an activity are likely to continue after donor funding has been withdrawn. Projects need to be environmentally as well as financially sustainable… e.g. to what extent did the benefits of a programme or project continue after donor funding ceased? What were the major factors which influenced the achievement or non-achievement of sustainability of the programme or project?")
Some organizations use these measure for final evaluation, the worse news is that there are very few of them, there is pretty faulty knowledge sharing within organizations and across projects, so there's no guarantee that lessons from one project will be learned by the next. Even worse, no communities are at the helm of these evaluations, and the very way in which they are structured lead to skewed results. What can go wrong? In Ashoka's great Feedback Labs, project participants' "feedback was excessively positive. In focus group discussions we asked participants how comfortable they felt giving us feedback, including criticisms and suggestions. Their message was consistent: “you are our benefactors, we are grateful for any help provided, we would never criticize you"
We can:
* Minimize respondent bias by using national evaluators independent of project or donor staff, working with communities;
* Involve community feedback on its effectiveness from the project's start, building their buy-in ONLY if we make changes during implementation based on it, and use it to shape future projects.
* Involve youth as key respondents as their lives and livelihoods depend on vibrant communities who have been supported to create their best futures (rather than implementing projects that we international donors feel they should have and that help us get more funds while feeding our development industry). We can use SMS technology to crowdsource and inform what works versus what doesn't as UNICEF Uganda did to check on aid received, and we can use it to inform knowledge youth need to know as Pathfinder International for Mozambican family planning knowledge.
Why should we do that? Because they are the future. As Forbes cites a new Ashoka Article on youth as changemakers: "Currently, 70% of Africans are under the age of 30. By 2040, 50% of the world’s youth will be African, most of whom will be women and girls. With nearly half of the youth population in Africa currently unemployed or inactive—and 72% living on less than $2 per day—communities are finding it more urgent than ever to enable new avenues and solutions for the creation of quality jobs that make way for youth livelihoods and productivity. How these communities address this challenge could shape the future of the world in unprecedented ways….[one path is supporting] community-rooted innovators, social entrepreneurs with a long history of working to help communities become “unstuck” and help youth become changemakers. These innovators build solutions based on a deep understanding of the socio-economic context within their specific communities. They weave initiatives that flip problems into cross-sector, sustainable, community-driven solutions." We can support this through having them be the key engines for innovation in communities, shaping our development projects to meet their current needs.
So let's get started! Where have you seen success? What are the dangers of these approaches?
by valuingvoicesjin | Dec 22, 2013 | Accountability, Bilateral organizations, Evaluation, Governance, International aid, International non-profits, Local Participants, Results, Sustainability
The 'causes and conditions' are right for sustainable impact… $100 billion of funding in 2014 alone needs it!
Many of us know that when the time is right, things click into place and manifest, but when they are not yet ripe for change, they won't. It is time to evaluate the sustainabilty of development programs; $20 billion of US assistance in 2014 and $80 billion of EU program assistance in 2014 alone. Valuing participants voices for how sustainably this is spent depends on us.
The Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action are powerful statements by donor countries and recipient countries to share responsiblities as one inter-ministerial coordination site says:
Country-led development is the responsibility of both countries and development
partners. A country, through its senior government leaders, and with input from development partners, civil society and other constituents, must articulate sound policies and advocate for them to become common priorities. Development partners must be willing to listen to and support those priorities. If both parties take a shared role and hold one another accountable, then a relationship built on trust emerges and the outcome is something everyone wants…"
Were the conditions not right for country-led development to appear, the push for strengthening national Monitoring and Evaluation Systems and national evaluator capacity building could not have appeared. Had we not reached a capacity to evaluate at least some projects with a deep desire to understand our impact, our community could not have begun powerful initiatives aimed at understanding impact evaluation – such as multiple-donor-suppored 3ie(albeit focusing on looking for impact within the 'box' of what we expect to see from our project activities). Had funding not appeared to manifest Paris through initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa's Development (see blog on incentives) and research called Time to Listen (see blog on grassroots evaluation), we could not begin to see paticipants as our true clients and real partners for great programming.
Finally, were these all not present, I could not have put myself into the shoes of the Malian woman, looking across the breadth of our 52 year-long-lives. I imagined her seeing projects coming and going from her community, most doing good for the years they were there, but with none of them there long enough, or being designed to achieve what communities felt the sustained impact their projects should have. Until now, few asked her opinion on what activities helped her most and designed flexible-implementation projects that she kept informing with feedback based on what worked best amidst change. No one had asked her and her community to evaluate projects themselves, and tell us what they wanted, what had made them the most resilient and 'developed' to never need our assistance again. We can and must value the voices, ask 'her' during current implementation, at close out and long after projects end. The causes and conditions are right. Now.
by valuingvoicesjin | Dec 19, 2013 | Africa, Evaluation, Local Participants, mobiles, Sustainability
Bringing Mandela to grassroots evaluation
After South Africa's Nelson Mandela died, accolades flowed as did deep sorrow for a passing of a man of such forgiveness and peace. I too was one of millions who went to anti-apartheid rallies and rejoiced when he too stood before us after he was freed.
What struck me most were the posts that looked at how we could continue to manifest him: 1) South African business leader and head of GAIN, Jay Naidoo "…our beloved Madiba, our founding father of democracy… pledged 'Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another…'
Madiba exuded the same serenity which in his life had filled the hearts of everyone he touched – the billions of the poor, marginalized and oppressed in the world…. even in death he was able to call out the humanity within each of us; to care, to embrace our people with integrity, humility. Leaving this solemn shrine I sensed the disciplined determination. We connected back to his fiery commitment and vowed not abandon dream of a better life for all. As we descended the stairs the helplessness and the fear evaporated. The streaming column of humanity was united by a single-minded focus on reclaiming the legacy of Mandela. They are reclaiming our shared past. And we were unafraid again.
We should not be looking for another Mandela. This week is an opportunity for us to search for the Mandela within each one of us. We want our leaders to live up to the morality of Madiba. We want our leaders to be honest. And to do what the father of our nation did so well: listen. Listen to the people before they stop listening to you; because the people have found the courage and fearlessness of Mandela to demand the promise of freedom now."
Secondly, amidst the chorus of accolades, a practical suggestion appeared, one which speaks to me about the longing for Africans to evaluate Africa. A leading member of AFREA (the African Evaluation Association), Issaka Traore suggested: "What about a Nelson Mandela Award for all upcoming AfrEA Conferences starting with the next one in Cameroon. We can do this in two ways:
1. Nelson Mandela Award for ‘Made in Africa approach to Evaluation’. With this Award at every conference AfrEA will give an Award to any Evaluator or group of Evaluators including Scholars, who have produced an Evaluation Paper or Evaluative Research Paper on ‘African communities knowledge, know-how or practices/skills in Evaluation’.
2. 7th AfrEA Conference Nelson Mandela Evaluation Prize. The organizing committee could launch a Prize for any Evaluator, group of Evaluator, National Evaluation who/that will compile all messages on Madiba following his death, pointing out content of these messages related to: the Relevance of his struggle, the Impact of his fight in South-Africa and Worldwide and finally the Sustainability of his vision."
Yes! How do we do this? There are newly appreciated participatory methodologies and studies such as Empowerment Evaluation and “Who Counts? The Power of Participatory Statistics.. New ways to understand development project participants includes 6,000 participants on aid impact research Time to Listen, plus other research that is fundamentally shifting the focus to “customers, clients, co-creators, or my current favorite, constituents”.
We need to incorporate their voices more strongly now — international development projects can use national evaluators to independently evaluate projects with communities, even if that adds a few days to current evaluation timelines. There is encouraging evidence that international projects are prioritizing the use of national evaluators, as Eval Partners' VOPE (a pairing of international and national evaluators) promotes, and a recent SIDW/ Charney review of USAID-funded developmental evaluation attests to. We can use mobile text/SMS technology to crowdsource feedback from participants on project impact and sustainability throughout current project implementation, as non-profits such as CRS, Mercy Corps and the CORE health consortium are successfully doing.
For as we try to manifest Mandela, we need to hear the voices of our participants. A Tanzanian friend reminded me that "we Africans have a saying. 'Until Lions have their own historians, the history of the jungle will always glorify a man'." So we need to support country-led evaluation, locally-led impact determination, designing and shaping their own development and history.
by valuingvoicesjin | Dec 17, 2013 | MIgrants
In Lampedusa
Neatly, in a row, on the docks, they lay.
Green plastic squeaking with soaked flesh
dreaded witness to events
stretching too far down the pier
right in front of the rescuers leaning
against the tired wall
sunk into the edge of the sea
in Lampedusa
last week.
From Paris
the journalists tell us how
those souls set fire to a sheet.
When the water started seeping in.
After the engine failed.
They don’t mention the name of the boat –
or explain why there was no flare –
don’t describe the immense drama –
or talk about the absolute terror
whipped up by kerosene bedclothes ignited
aboard an unseaworthy vessel.
Instead of telling us how
instinctively
as one body
hundreds of bodies edged…back…
from bright wild lash of flames
then how
all that shifted weight
tipped the heap into
cold Mediterranean blackness
they shift too:
lean
into the Commerce of it all.
How many euros the poor travellers paid
to board the falling apart boat.
How many of the desperate make their treacherous way away
from Africa’s Horn each year.
How many people the overcrowded wreck held.
How many rescued from the nightmare.
How many corpses recovered.
How many still missing presumed dead.
They love the numbers.
Some simple mathematics could even tell
exactly how much the businessmen made
on this row of green plastic bags
and those swollen limbs
piled so deep somewhere
in the watery Tunis-Palermo-Tripoli triangle.
After the numbers
they take their cameras to
a room full of reverence
of men in robes
to quote the new Pope.
Une honte, the journalists in Paris report: a disgrace.
The word that comes to Francis’s mind
when he comes to Lampedusa.
With the slightest of shifts
the cameras could show us
one of those small cities floating
here monstrous buoyant pleasure machines
vacationers dining gambling swimming shopping playing
thousands of them cruising in one gigantic party.
They do no such thing of course.
And obeying
we fail to notice this failure
Complicit
somehow in a secret pact to
Never connect those dots –
a line too short for comfort:
the thought of these two ships
sailing the very same sea
too awful for any of us to hold
in a single thought.
B.G. Truan
10 October 2013
by valuingvoicesjin | Dec 13, 2013 | Accountability, Bilateral organizations, Food security, Governance, International aid, International non-profits, LIvelihoods, Local Participants, Results, Sustainability
Time is ripe for incentives to change….
There is so much promise now in returning international development to the hands of those who we mean to ‘develop’. Here are a few examples:
•Accountability has been proposed as a core feature of the new post-2015 development agenda, according to UNICEF.
•The UN’s 2011 Busan Declaration focused on improving sustainable development, aid effectiveness through international cooperation
•Major foundations (Rockefeller, Gates) are promoting participatory evaluation and program effectiveness (respectively), looking for long-term impact.
•An industry acceptance of how mobile technologies and knowledge sharing democratizes information and power, e.g. USAID’s mobile applications and the power of crowd-sourcing, evidenced by amazingly robust African applications of Kenya’s Ushahidi, and sectorally specific ones such as Ghana’s Esoko for agricultural value chains and Microplanet's microcredit, to name a few.
Many of us have come to sense that we’ve had the incentives wrong in development. While many of us go into international development feeling the strong need to work with communities, to support their own path to sustained well-being, it doesn’t often work that way once we begin. Following on another blog, we push ourselves to get more, do more, but we end up doing work for- or to- rather than with- our participants. Many of our projects still refer to them as beneficiaries (a more passive term was never coined). Many of our project timelines and result expectations are so rigid that there is no luxury to involve communities in the detailed design, implementation much less getting their feedback on how sustained impact of the project is likely to be (or how the project could be adapted to yield sustained results).
This is not to say our projects don’t do good! We do. We train participants and transfer a dizzying array of resources to them during the 2, 3, 5 even 10 years we intervene. We work within often dysfunctional national systems with scant resources. But how often have we built capacity for communities, regions and country-level nationals to continue doing development ‘right’ after we go?
Ironically, this lack of sustained capacity is in large part this is due to our deep desire to do it ‘right’. Right means getting as many resources out there as possible, getting to as many people as possible, getting as many projects done, and getting as many new awards for our firms to do more good as possible. And therein lies the problem. In our desire to do things right for ourselves, we leave our participants behind.
And most egregiously, we stack the deck against sustainability from the start. The incentives are framed by the Requests for Proposals written in donor offices in Washington, London, Paris, Tokyo and even Beijing. Today, USAID alone has 1075 opportunities on FedBixOpps.gov. Were these drafted with national governments, local community based organizations or communities? Unlikely. Mostly these opportunities are informed by updated versions of past work, sometimes by new policy directions, possibly by new think-tanks research or international non-profit fieldwork, yet the country Missions, implementer offices or community-based organizations can only do so much to ‘fix’ things in the field to retrofit what communities may actually want to do specifically but what was not a priority in the RFP. Having also been part of a few proposal development teams that wrote proposals answering RFPs based on little field research, this sadly exacerbates the original RFP-wasn't-drafted-in-country problem. It is again our lack of time, our rush to do good (including getting our overhead from projects to maintain our organizations) that is our barrier to actually doing it sustainably. With communities leading.
But "times are a changing" and new incentives and directions are appearing at USAID such as IDEA's Local Solutions or PPL's Evidence Summit. New opportunities have been used to engage countries in public-private-partnership agricultural livelihood collaborative programming such as via NEPAD's CAADP (and USAID's Feed the Future programs in a dozen countries). Combined with above-mentioned new funding for capacity building evaluation by Rockefeller Foundation, and new mobile technology ways to value and pass on grassroots voices are all promising. These provide ways to dramatically tweak incentives, to feed in local voices. Hallelujah.
What do you think? Are our incentives righter than I see? Are our Requests for Proposal actually mirroring more closely country-national desires for development their way? Please share your learning… so we can truly support their development their way.
