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How YOU would make aid better!

We want to thank those of you who took the time to churn out a few hundred words and go through the 5 or so mouse clicks necessary to add your thoughts to our collection of blog posts on how you would make aid better. For those new to the conversation, read the original call for posts here.

Altogether seven bloggers managed to get a post written and added to the collection by the deadline (see the whole collection here) with Jennifer Lentfer adding a post several days after the deadline (good thing no donor funding was on the line) and Wayan Vota sharing some predictably smart-aleck advice on our Facebook page.

mmullen gave us six suggestions for how to make aid better (we’d only asked for 3, so bonus for us!). Read the whole post here. All of his suggestions were good, but we particularly liked suggestion #5:

There are three things that dictate success of a project: a) what is in the proposal meaning the actual program design, b) the mechanism by which the decision is made about the destination of the funds and how the funds are given out, how quick or slow this process is, reporting and sign-off responsibilities, indirect, management lines, head office/donor location, transparency, and c) how committed and vested the implementor is to the project design. Stop fetishizing the first one and ignoring the second two. (Emphasis added)

Our good buddy and AidSource member Timo Luge reckons that it’s all about abolishing earmarking, strengthening coordination and reforming the security council (!). He expounds here. Of course all of those are awesome, but we found ourselves applauding the very first one:

I think it is ridiculous and against the intentions of most non-institutional donors, that some disasters are overfunded, while others barely have money at all. The problem, which many people don’t understand when donating money, is that money earmarked for disaster A cannot be used for disaster B, even if all needs in country A have been met. This leads to absurd situations where the affected population in some countries benefit from “aid deluxe” while beneficiaries in other countries get nothing.

Go Timo!

One of our very own bloggers and co-founder of AidSource, J., also gets in on the action here. Tales From the Hood might be closed, but J. is still with us:

It doesn’t matter if you or eventually will end up as a finance officer or an IT specialist or a marketer. It doesn’t matter if you immediately move back to DC and spend the rest of your career in life-saving InterAction meetings. It doesn’t matter if you just left a senior exec role in the for-profit sector in favor of ‘giving back’ in the NGO sector: If you’re in the aid world and you want to supervise other staff, exercise financial authority, fill some externally-facing representation role, or have final say in decisions over “this, not that”, “here, not there”, “these people, not those”, you have to have spent at least six months on the front lines (not in a nice regional office in Johannesburg or Singapore) interacting directly with the core business of the aid industry. You have to have put in six months dealing firsthand with both the chaos and uncertainly of the field, as well as the realities of decisions made over your head which run counter to the obvious from your point of view. Before you sit in a cubicle and direct others, you have to have proven yourself capable of doing the basic, unsexy grunt work of helping programs run.

Dominic Haslam of Sightsavers shares seven ideas, and it’s a good thing because our favorite comes in at his #4:

INGOs should treat development resources as belonging to the poor, not to themselves. If you can’t spend it properly and with quality outcomes (or you don’t know whether it’s working or not and aren’t trying to find out), either don’t raise it or give it to someone who can.

We’re just saying.

AidSource member extraordinaire, Zehra Rizvi takes it to the limit one more time (here) and hits us with her best shot right out of the gate with her first (and in our opinion best) piece of advice: Get HR right. In her own words:

If you don’t meet qualifications or do a bad job, you should be fired. We fret so much about firing people. But seriously, if you suck at your job, why should you be hired again? In line with this is of course, that organizations should be training their people better. Train people seriously. Look at what their real gaps are and put them in situations where they CAN succeed. Too often we just stick people in positions since the position is empty and it needs a body in there. That is SO irresponsible. I could go on about this forever and people are looking at certification in aid work now but I still think there are some real gaps there.

The biggest gap for me and the question I feel like no one wants to touch is: Not everyone is suitable to do this work. Spare that person and let them know that. Accountants make a lot of money but I’m not suitable to be one so therefore, I am not one. And if someone is doing aid work, support them as much as possible to succeed. We tend to be the least humanitarian to ourselves when doing this work.

Our mate over at WhyDev.org and AidSource group facipulator, Weh Yeoh, has a really good post on the WhyDev blog. Rather than try to copy/paste the entire thing, we’ll leave you with his first and best tidbit. Simply:

Let’s make aid and development truly about “beneficiaries”, once and for all.

Imagine!

And finally the fabulous Soledad Muniz weighs in here. It seems to us that her first and third recommendations (“Listen…” and “Learn…”, respectively) really resonate with each other in all the right ways.

I’m quite shocked to see the difference between the theory in participation and empowerment, the discourses written in the ivory towers, and the real thing happening in the ground. I’d love to see an aid & development sector that listen to those who know best: the main actors of their own development. Those to whom we serve really know their problems. They also most of the times know the solutions. So if a project would start by listening, then engage in a continuous conversation while implementing, to finish listening again (and not just measuring ROI like if we are producing candy), the world would be a much nicer place.

We could stand to see the world be a much nicer place, too.

And with that our call for posts on how to make aid better is a wrap. This doesn’t mean that you have to stop writing, though. If you want to share your thoughts on how to make aid better, go ahead and write your post. Add a comment to the thread below this post with the link to your post. We’ll tweet and FB the best ones!

Gender Based Violence and Livelihoods – How do we do better?

Yes, we know we’ve been delinquent about blogging here. We’ll publish a roundup of your posts about how to make aid better within a few days. First, however, we’d like to announce another blog link-up. This time on the topic of Gender Based Violence (GBV) in the context of livelihoods.

We’re especially pleased to host this blogosphere-wide meeting of the minds along with the Women’s Refugee Commission.

AidSource member Zehra Rizvi explains:

Do the economic empowerment programmes you design take into account risk that you could possibly be causing the women participating?

The Women’s Refugee Commission is raising awareness on a piece of work we’ve done on the intersection of Gender Based Violence and Livelihoods. Do your livelihood programmes cause more harm than the intended outcome of ‘good’—i.e: empowerment and protection?

We decided to link up with AidSource to have a blogger series that featured not just our comms people and social media experts (though we LOVE them!), but a series that featured YOU. We’ve asked some bloggers, journalists, practitioners to blog about this issue for us by taking a look at the tools we’ve produced but we would love to hear your perspective on the issue. We asked them to look at our 2009 report: Peril or Protection: The Link between Livelihoods and Gender-based Violence in Displacement Settings which was followed by the guidance manual Preventing Gender-based Violence, Building Livelihoods, and an e-learning course providing in-depth instruction on how to make work safe.

We also had an hour long interactive webinar on the 25^th of July 2012 on the issue with Dale Buscher of the WRC and Mendy Marsh of UNICEF which over 350 signed up for from all over the world:

Take a look. Take a listen… and then tell us.

What do YOU think?

Anyone can be a part of this blogger series. In addition to being linked both here on AidSpeak and inside AidSource, WRC will also link to the posts on their website.

Here’s how it all works:

1) Write an original post on your blog about any aspect on the intersection of GBV and livelihoods. Some potential ways to think about the issue are listed below. Publish your post.

[Extra credit: publish first on your AidSource profile blog (you're a member of AidSource, right?). Extra-extra credit: publish only on your AidSource blog! Extra extra extra credit: talk about the WRC materials! ]

2) Click the goofy lizard icon at the bottom of this post, follow a few prompts, and add the link to your post to the collection. Takes two minutes, max.

3) Read posts by others, comment, debate, get your AidSource member friends to write posts, tweet famous aid pundits to persuade them to post, etc. (Inside AidSource, you can get things rolling in the Livelihoods group or by adding a blog post.)

4) This collection closes on Oct 15^th which is when our campaign ends on raising awareness on the issue. We will be having a photo contest as well so be sure to keep checking the WRC campaign page .

We welcome ALL perspectives on how to make #SafeLivelihoods for women. Some potential questions to think about…

- Would you change or add anything to the WRC safety mapping tool? (We really want to know…we love feedback and the tools are meant for YOU to use!)

- Have you used livelihoods as a tool for protection? How has it worked out?

- Have you seen livelihood programmes cause more harm than good and how would you do it differently now?
The WRC recommends that men be involved in GBV and livelihood programming as part of minimizing risk to women—what do you think the best way is to do this?

- A key gap noted in the WRC research was on M&E for protection outcomes for women in livelihoods programming. Do you have good practice to share or how would you go about ensuring this happens?

- What organizational capacity needs to be in place? WRC recommends multi year funding, the hiring of GBV specialists and the mentoring of local partners—what else do you think we need?

Anything else that comes into mind once you look at the research, guidance, webinar and course?

You can email Zehra (ZehraR@wrcommission.org, or inside AidSource using the built-in email function), Senior Programme Officer for Livelihoods at the Women’s Refugee Commission for more details.

Happy blogging!

Meaningless Fractions

This is a guest post by AidSource member Fredrick – he’s not an aid worker himself, but rather the partner of an aid worker, and so offers an interesting perspective on our world. Fredrick has written for us before in the Work & Life section of AidSource.

Today he shares his thoughts, as a true expert, on the meaningless fractions that aid agencies like to use in their marketing and publicity materials.

* * * * *

Aid Agencies and Meaningless Fractions

Since becoming a partner of an emergency aid worker I have spent quite a lot of time learning about the different organisations. This entails looking at their web sites. You learn a bit from this. One of the things is that they seem to compete over who spends the largest fraction on humanitarian activities, programs or whatever they call it. So CARE is happy to report that more than 91% all resources go directly to programs. Save The Children, for example, use 90% of all expenditures on program services. Oxfam UK reports 83% used on aid, development and campaigning. Medecins Sans Frontieres is happy to report that they use more than 80% on direct humanitarian services. Oxfam America, clearly the laggard, uses slightly less than 80% on program services.

All these NGOs report that the rest is used on administration and fund raising. The main point it seems is to demonstrate that the fraction of income spent on administration is low and this should somehow be indicative of the agencies’ efficiency.

I happen to be a bit of an expert on efficiency and the measurement of productivity, so I know what numbers are important and what numbers are not. And the fractions happily reported by all these aid agencies are totally meaningless as indicators of anything beyond their definition. What any person who knows a little bit about productivity measurements will tell you is that you have to relate the amount of outputs to inputs. The numbers reported by aid agencies relate, in a manner that is quite arbitrary, the fraction of costs of a particular input to total cost of inputs. It is like a farmer bragging about using as much as 90% of the total of cost running a farm on fertilizer and only 10% on seeds. Who cares? What you should care about is how much the farmer produces for a given cost.

This really had me stumped. So I asked a few people who work for aid agencies about why these numbers are reported and if they thought that they carried any valuable information.

The answers were quite depressing. The numbers were acknowledged to be meaningless. But it looks good for potential donors that a large fraction of their money isn’t “wasted” on administration, so the numbers are basically reproduced for marketing purposes. Whether aid agencies know that these numbers are meaningless and just report them in order to fool donors or they actually think that these numbers is a measure of efficiency I have no idea and I really don’t care. Corporations fib in their advertising all the time and are often clueless about what they are doing and there is no reason why professional aid agencies should be different. But the question is whether this practice does any harm. I believe it does.

Administrative support is an input like any other.

If aid agencies compete over making this cost as low as possible relative to total costs, it does not take a genius to see that this can result in too little support from an understaffed and underpaid head office. Further, the practice provides incentive to transfer tasks better executed centrally to individual programs.

I’ll provide what I think is an example. Many aid agencies have a group of experienced aid workers employed centrally. These aid workers are supposed to be first responders or augment local staff in programs when programs must be rapidly scaled up, i.e. in extraordinary situations (like disasters). I have been told that there has been a shift in how these employees are treated. Where they previously were given substantial breathers when they we’re not needed, they are now sent to work for programs on tasks of a much less critical nature. I have no proof of intention, but one effect is that these workers spend longer periods being paid for by programs and less time being paid for by the head office. Thereby they shave a couple of percentage decimals of what is considered administrative costs and inflate the fraction of costs that is charged to programs.

Great! Mission accomplished for some clever accountant somewhere. This does however mean that these aid workers get less time for recovery and professional development, which will surely diminish their efficiency over time or induce them to find a different job.

To be fair, it is possible that better measures are hard to compute, possibly for lack of resources. Also, it is possible that these numbers, although in themselves meaningless, send a signal about the frugality of the aid agencies. Even if this is true, it does not validate the use of measures with no informational value. It is a very general rule that if you establish silly criteria for success you get suboptimal outcomes. On top of this, it is a dubious strategy to base your marketing on the stupidity of you donors. At some point they will catch on and you end up looking silly.

5 Comments

by aidsource on May 22, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Aid, Aid Industry, Aid Marketing

Tagged administration costs, aid efficiency, Aid Marketing, overhead

Posted by aidsource on May 22, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/meaningless-fractions-guest-post/

Aid as entertainment

In Empire of Illusion: the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle, Chris Hedges makes a convincing, cogent case that American culture has been bankrupted and reduced to six-grade level meaningless fluff, obsessed with celebrity culture, coddled by the simplistic imagery and messaging of the entertainment industry, and having neither the taste nor the stomach for the nuanced complexity of the real world.

I’m glossing over. Hedges excoriates.

I don’t see myself particularly as a critic of American culture. I consume. I watch prime-time television. But Hedges touches nerves with me. What he says rings true. And it especially rings true after my own years of trying unsuccessfully to put into words what disturbs me about the way the aid industry talks about what it does. It rings true as I try to describe the deep chasm the separates aid marketing from aid action.

On page 26 of Empire of Illusion, He writes:

“The veterans saw their wartime experience transformed into an illusion. It became part of the mythic narrative of heroism and patriotic glory sold to the public by the Pentagon’s public relations machine and Hollywood. The reality of war could not compete against the power of the illusion. The truth did not feed the fantasy of war as a ticket to glory, honor, and manhood. The truth did not promote collective self-exaltation. The illusion of war peddled in The Sands of Iwo Jima, like hundreds of other Hollywood war films, worked because it was what the public want to believe about themselves.”

He might as well be talking about aid. He is talking about aid. Myself as a veteran of the aid enterprise, I react viscerally to what Hedges says here. I know it’s true.

There is the real world of international humanitarian aid and development. Then there is the world that the public consumes. And here let us be very clear: “consumes” is precisely the right word.

Because aid is entertainment.

Regardless of what we might or might not do in “the field”, in the context of the modern culture that constitutes our donor public aid is entertainment. It is scripted, produced and sold to a consuming public who consumes it precisely because it is entertaining. They consume entertainment aid because the produced, marketed product delivers an illusion which corresponds to what they want to believe about themselves. Like a visit to Disney World, the interaction between a household charity and an individual donor is increasingly scripted and “produced” to maximize the donor’s “experience.” This is not only what I like to call “the cult of the donor.” Whether they’re receiving a letter of thanks (signed by the CEO), “buying a well” from the gift catalogue, or going on a guided tour of a project they’ve supported in a foreign country, ordinary citizens who support relief and development charities are increasingly purchasing a product, specifically and experience.

The perception of international aid and development in popular culture, too, is carefully scripted as entertainment, as prime-time reality drama that anyone can be part of. Like American Idol or The Fear Factor, “helping the poor” and “making a difference” are just new arenas where anyone can have a shot at 15 minutes of fame. You can collect T-shirts or shoes to send to Africa, you can start a #socent cause that goes viral, you can invent a new widget that will make poverty history, you can start a 501(c)3 with it’s own website and mission statement. In the entertainment world of aid, you, too can be remarkable. You can change the world! Or so the script goes.

Aid is entertainment.

When President Barak Obama wanted a humanitarian perspective on such matters as, say, how to prevent mass atrocities or reduce the amount of sexual violence against women, he didn’t go to the community of professional humanitarian organizations and practitioners. There are surely plenty of real aid workers with significant expertise and experience, not to mention organizations who implement US-grant funded programs to address these exact issues within easy walking distance of the White House. No – in order to get the inside scoop on what’s really going with violence against women in other countries, the leader of the Free World held a private audience with a couple of actors.

Aid is entertainment.

Hedges continues: “Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity.”

The real world of international aid and development is not a perfect world. There’s a lot that goes wrong in there, a lot that needs to change and get better. But at least it’s real.

And as unpleasant as it might be we have to make the public understand the reality.

12 Comments

by aidsource on January 18, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Aid

Tagged aid, celebrity activism, celebrity advocacy

Posted by aidsource on January 18, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/aid-as-entertainment/

What do the poor deserve?

What do the poor deserve? Ask yourself.

How you answer will depend at least a little on why you think they’re poor. Why do you think the poor are poor? Do you think they’re poor because they’re lazy? Is their poverty part of cosmic retribution for wrongs committed by their ancestors? Do they deserve to be poor?

Or maybe you think is poverty something imposed on them against their will, from outside? Are the poor simply the pawns of evil people who perpetuate global systems of oppression based on race, ethnicity, class, culture, language and geography? Are they innocent, yet nonetheless helpless victims?

* * *

It’s been written before that how we think about aid and rationalize it emotionally mater. What’s been written less often before is that how we think about aid is inextricably bound up in how we think about poverty and about “the poor.” More specifically, how we think about what good aid is and how to do it, where we’ll cut corners in the name of expedience, or whether or not we’ll hold the line on technical standards and insist that our staff meet minimum qualification requirements before we hire them, all come back to why we think the poor are poor.

If we think the poor are poor in some way due to their own negligence, then it is far easier to justify poorly planned and implemented aid as “good enough.” If we think, even in a small way, that the poor are poor because they deserve to be, then how we market aid, how carefully we manage the edges of appropriate CSR, how rigorously we evaluate not just the value for our balance sheets but also the raw need for our GIK, or sending a troupe of Western teenagers to spend two weeks “doing disaster response” all become less important. We may not articulate it to ourselves in these exact words, but the I’d like to suggest that our collective tolerance for bad aid – from the amateur orphan-huggers, all the way on up through NGOs and INGOs and BINGOS to the UN to the hallowed halls of USAID and ECHO to the gilded halls of Busan – is in direct inverse proportion to what we think the poor deserve from us.

I don’t think that anyone of us is competent to pass judgment on what anyone else deserves in any kind of cosmic, universal sense. But I think that it’s important that we ask ourselves this:

What do the poor deserve?

Do they deserve our cast off clothing, our old shoes? Do they deserve our discarded bicycles and old soap? Do they deserve our church youth groups coming to practice on them for two weeks? Do they deserve us shutting them out of our planning processes or delivering aid based, not on their priorities and need, but on the priorities of donors, foreign governments or for-profit corporations? Do they deserve celebrities popping in for a few days of “humanitarian assistance”, perfectly coiffed, cameras rolling? Do they deserve foreign journalists plastering their faces on mass media in the name of “raising awareness”?

Whether as amateurs, as students hoping to enter the industry workforce, or as professionals who have been in the game for a while, we most commonly rationalize and justify our participation in the humanitarian endeavor in our personal terms. That is, we explain it in terms of what we feel compelled to do. Our motivations. It’s about us. We want to make a difference, see the world, atone for something, maybe accrue some good karma.

We need to change this. We need to be talking about relief and development work in terms of what the poor need and, if you will, what they deserve. Not deserve in the sense of something they somehow earned. But deserve in the sense that they’re human beings, just like us. Personally, I believe that the poor deserve the best we’re capable of, if for no other reason than simply by virtue of their humanity.

Aid blogger and AidSource co-founder Alanna Shaikh once wrote about the danger of allowing ourselves to believe that the poor have nothing. That danger is specifically that if we believe that “they” really have “nothing”, then anything we give is “better than nothing”, and therefore “good.”

I think there’s at least as much danger in believing that the poor deserve their poverty, or on the flip side, that they somehow deserve less than the best we can provide.

AidSpeak

All posts by aidsource

How YOU would make aid better!

Gender Based Violence and Livelihoods – How do we do better?

Meaningless Fractions

Aid as entertainment

What do the poor deserve?

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Meaningless Fractions

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Aid as entertainment

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What do the poor deserve?

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