Come visit me at ValuingVoices.com/blog or Valuing Voices on Facebook!

The giraffes have migrated!

Come visit me at ValuingVoices.com/blog or Valuing Voices on Facebook!
Thanks,
Jindra and her twigas

Moving blog to Valuingvoices.com/blog this December

Dear readers -

Am moving my blog to its full home- Valuingvoices.com/blog. Please go there to see the full range of Solutions and Services I am developing. Join the discussion! Join me!

I have posted today's blog on Time being ripe to change incentives but soon will no longer cross-post.
Please become my follower there, share my blogs, share yours, guest blog, etc!

Thank you for joining me on this journey with local participants at our center... as WhatCouldWeKnow without Valuing their Voices!
Warmly, Jindra

Time is ripe for incentives to change

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[1]

•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 Ghana’s Esoko, 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 and extreme (to get mroe funding by proving excellent results fast) 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, benefitting many people, 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 (by our measure), 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 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.

Mercy Corps - early leader in evaluating sustainability... and what donors are funding

Mercy Corps - early leader in evaluating sustainability... and what donors are funding

Mercy Corps shared their work in post-project sustainability early on, inspiring me it was possible. As they put it, "clearly, a sustained ability for collective problem solving offers the best path to lasting improvement in people's lives and, for donors, the best return on investment" in two conflict resolution projects in Kyrgyztan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan: Peaceful Communities Initiative $6.5 mil (2002-2007) and Community Action Investment Program $11.8 mil (2002-2005). These two projects were complex community mobilization programs with aims "to empower communities to work together in a participatory manner to address the infrastructure and social needs [while] developing sustainable skills in problem solving, consensus-building and accountability. The process also empowers communities to begin to identify and utilize existing resources within the communities and not to depend only on external assistance."

So what happened? Their report on sustainability in 2007 random-sampled and interviewed youth leaders and in community action groups, 55% of the communities and found promising results: 

According to the evaluation:  
* 93% of surveyed projects are still being actively used by the community after programs closed. 
* 73% of members of the community action groups (CAG) felt it was still easier to approach local government at least one year after the programs ended and 68% witnessed local government becoming more involved in community activities after the end of the programs as compared with before the programs... [participants and partners had] implemented almost 100 infrastructure projects by themselves and independent of donor funds.  
* 72% of youth report that they continue to use at least one skill they learned during the programs. Those cited most often include teamwork and communication, as well as practical skills such as sewing, construction, roofing, journalism and cooking
* 57% of the communities studied continuing to use one or more of the decision-making practices promoted during the program.
* 42% of CAG members, representing 35 of the 51 communities, reported that the community had worked collectively on new projects or repairs to existing infrastructure 
* In total, 40% of general community members interviewed reported that youth had initiated community activities since January 2007, and 68% of these community members recognized that some or all of the activities had not taken place prior to Mercy Corps’ program

This appears excellent! They interviewed youth and key local stakeholders (CAG), used country nationals to evaluate (both of which are wonderful as it is their country) and they distilled best practices in community mobilization in accessible reports shared within the international non-profit world via the web.  Quibbling only a little, a difficulty is that while the report states that they "Identified factors that influence sustainability, through both positive examples and non-sustained projects and practices" our ability to learn from what didn't work was hidden.  Mercy Corps discussed what didn't work only by recommending what to do, rather than discuss the extent to which specific activities simply didn't work.  While focusing on the positive is the best path forward, ideally MErcy Corps would have also shared what failed, possibly why and whether they had seen this elsewhere (thereby suggesting such activities may not be promising to replicate). Further, what would be valuable is to gauge roughly the percentage of the program value these successes represented versus those that did not work well. Sucha cost-effectiveness ratio would benefit our industry.
 

Overall, such successful national-level capacity building and program effectiveness learning is terrific, and new focus may lead funding to follow. Two major foundations have lately said that they have an interest in supporting national capacity building and empowerment (Rockefeller) or cost-effectiveness (Bill and Melinda Gates), respectively.

More specifically, Nancy Macpherson of Rockefeller Foundation states the Foundation is "committed to evaluation practices that are rigorous, innovative, inclusive of stakeholders’ voices, and appropriate to the contexts in which the foundation works." This is done by "integrating the views of developing-region evaluators" as well as:
* "strengthening developing country evaluation practice and ownership of results...
* developing innovative methods and approaches to evaluation and learning...
* the empowerment of people; and
* the effectiveness of development interventions by national governments and international partners and, increasingly, by non-state actors—foundations, philanthropists, and agencies that promote investing for impact."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation mentions cost effectiveness
* "When evidence is needed to fill a knowledge gap or evaluate a significant policy decision. Evaluation can help to resolve uncertainty and determine the relative cost-effectiveness of different interventions, models, or approaches" (Gates) and
* "Both quantitative and qualitative data are relevant in evaluating processes, operations, cost effectiveness, key stakeholders’ perceptions, and enabling contextual factors" (Gates)

USAID seems not to have done any ex-post evaluation since a single one on a Philiiipines loan in 1980, whereas parts of the EU seem to be doing many more such evaluations in agriculture and rural development (2002-06), industrial technologies (2009-11) as recently as 2013 for ICT.  Given the size of its portfolio of development assistance, $20.4 billion in development and humanitarian programs in fiscal 2014, learning about sustained impact seems imperative from a return on investment (ROI) perspecive.

Supporting national capacity and evaluating programs' return on investment is pivotal. In Mercy Corps/ USAID's funding case alone, this comes to over $18 million dollars.  But Mercy Corps paid for this evaluation themselves, from private funds. If we are in the process of fostering country-led and eventually country-financed development, they need to know how much such investments get them - as we do.  

Does anyone know of such great program learning that begins to teach about return on investment? Can you share?

Unintended impacts - LWR and Gates Drought Resilience in Niger

Unintended impacts - LWR and Gates Drought Resilience in Niger

Unintended development program impacts - how much do we know about what they are and how we could learn from them for future programming? How often do we even question our assumptions about what we meant the programming to bring and result in, versus what actually happened?

I had the privilege of consulting to Lutheran World Relief from 2005-2007 in Niger on a drought resilience and rehabilitation project.  IIED's PLA Notes just published my write-up of this baseline and slightly ex-post (6 months after closeout) final evaluation funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  I led a team doing mixed-method interviews (that means tracking numbers finding out how many, how much impact we had, combined with listening to words explaining why things worked out this way, or not).  There were numerous lessons lessons learned from targeting sheep, wells and animal fodder to 600 of the poorest women in 10 communities in northern Niger.  Among them were that LWR's programming did some real good, especially due to great knowledge of the herding communities via national staff.

The main two project goals had to do with whether the communities were more resilient against future drought and were they more sustainably food secure thanks to the assets (sheep, water, fodder), income (future sheep, sale of fodder) and training (management of sheep and maintenance of water points).  The answers seemed to be generally yes.  We found that women's share of household income increased from 5% to 25% in some households. This was due to the sheep, as well as time savings used for income generation (a staggering 7-10 hours every other day saved from not having to go fetch water far away or bring animals to drink).

We also found several completely unexpected benefits: resources + time savings generated in harmony and peace. Women reported far more inter-ethnic harmony thanks to collaboration across tribes during the sheep management training and water sharing, and ethnic groups attended each others marriages and baptisms.  Households also were far more at peace, some saying "our husbands don't beat us anymore", thanks to increased respect, cleanliness and their ability to be home for their husbands, children and mothers-in-law. Men reported that they sat with women by project's end and there was more intra-household collaboration.  Were these planned at all? No! We need to return to learn about what our work engenders, and bring those lessons forward, see if they're replicated or not. What else has emerged in the years since the project ended? What was valued enough to be sustained by the communities themselves?

Finally, a fascinating flaw in our logic which is interesting for international development staff to consider was whether our participants shared the two large goals at all (drought resilience and sustained food security). Some women sold the sheep to buy food, pay their childrens' school fees or their daughters' dowries, even buy themselves beds or pots and pans immediately.  Some had their sheep sold by their husbands who used them to buy other animals, pay for ceremonies or other expenses.  Spending assets on immediate needs is not at all illogical for a community who can feed itself only 4 months a year; for some households, their pressing needs far outweighed the luxury to wait and buffer seasonal food insecurity way down the line. So while overall the project brought benefit - many saying they didn't have to resort to worse survival strategies during the next hungry season- it illuminated that donors' goals may differ greatly from participants'.  These people didn't sign a contract agreeing to abide with donor expectations, yet that is what the evaluation looked for. We need to learn not to assume, and instead explore what goals they do have as expectations of impact.  Looking beyond within useful but narrow 'boxes' generated by logical frameworks of inputs-outputs-impacts can help us learn what communities really value and what they got from what we offered.

Valuing their voices is key. What projects have you seen voices valued? What have you learned?