Our Global Community and Baseball

So I recently saw the follow post and was inspired.

Hi all,

I’ve already introduced myself in this forum, but because of the expansive participation across the globe I wanted to reach out to you all with a request.

I have used baseball gear I would love to ship to the far reaches of the world with the idea of introducing baseball to kids who would not normally have the chance. You don’t need to be a baseball expert, just put the balls, bats and mitts in the hands of the kids and let them play. They’ll figure it out, all kids do.

I’m doing this because baseball and sports in general have been a big part of my life and I hope to inspire kids to play and enjoy games to improve their lives.

If I send the gear to you I would ask that you send me pictures of the kids playing.

Thank you,

Michael Green
Founder – Executive Director
The Sports Family Club
www.thesportsfamilyclub.org

It gave me a different perspective on development. Influence and change can just be about people sharing their passions. And it made me wonder where the great stories are of African’s sharing their culture (and what works in their communities) abroad.

We can not only be the recipients of this sharing. Who are the doer’s out there?

William Easterly: NYU RDI – ‘New Directions In Development’

Friday March 4th, NYU’s Development Research Institute brought Chris Blattman, Kevin Davis, William Easterly, Raquel Fernandez and Yaw Nyarko together to discuss their research and provide overviews on different aspects of development.   I’m including a summary and some comment on William Easterly’s presentation ‘ From Skepticism to Development’.

Easterly’s analysis on autocracies shows that a) autocracies are rarely benevolent and b) autocracies are very risky.  His two themes on the benefits of healthy skepticism and innovation/surprises did not translate perfectly into a new direction in development.  Individual rights, experimentation and innovation are good but how can they be harnessed for economic growth or even forge a new path for development?

Easterly wanted the audience to rethink the notion of the benevolent autocrat.  He argued that we have four biases that cause us to believe in this idea.  1 – mixed probabilities.  We see that about 90% of big success are autocrats and never pay attention to the fact that only about 10% of autocrats get to be big successes.  2 – the availability bias.  Google provides 271, 687 schollarly citations of successful autocrats but only 19,628 citations of autocrats failures.  3 – leader attribution bias.  We tend to attribute success to the leader even if he is merely riding on the coat tails of strong institutions and an economic upswing.  4 – Bias of the hot hand.  We assume that just because someone has been lucky before they will be lucky again.  This in spite of the fact there is more often a regression to the mean.  In other words, autocratic economies go on to become average.

Easterly went on to provide four facts ,(some more robustly supported by data than others) which demonstrate that autocraties do not always do so well.  For example their is no evidence that autocracies result in higher growth but there is evidence of a higher variance of growth.  This means that autocracies are a more risky path.  Easterly’s doubts about autocracies include the old standby of imperfect information regarding pro growth policies and autocrats ability to plan innovations.   Easterly describes a surprise factor.  Success depends on the unknowable.  For example who could predict that Egypt would become successful selling toilets to Italy and Slovakia selling TV’s?

In his final push against autocracies Easterly examines the notions of individual rights.  Quoting Hayek, he said “It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.”

Should we be skeptical of individual rights?  Easterly argues no, there is no strong evidence against individual rights and long run trends support individual rights.  So if autocrats lack the local knowledge needed to be successful, then top down does not work and bottom up solutions are needed.  We can only assume that individual rights complement bottom up approaches.

Near the end, Easterly argues that people vote/act/decide based on their values.  Thomas Jefferson, he says, did not make his decisions based on analytical research from the Journal of Economics.  It is unavoidable that people make decisions based on values.

Easterly sums up his philosophy against autocracies and for individual rights with several Lincoln quotes the final being: 

“I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

 

 

In the end I found his presentation to be good enough to debunk a myth but almost too fatalistic to help development practitioners find a way to move forward.  Like post-modernist critics which argue for very localized knowledge it is tricky to determine how to bring about wide spread change.  No multi-ethinic developing nation will stand for successful experimentation in the north or west and failures in the south or east of the country.  People want policies that work, that are scaled up and adapted to their needs.  The benevolent autocrat may be a risky myth.  But it’s not clear who will take his place or how multiple individuals will figure out how to develop and implement new solutions.

New Year’s Resolutions for Development Practitioners

The Center for Global Development has a great posting called: Ten Zero-Cost Ideas for Development Progress in 2011.  Click on the 2011 link to read their foreign policy suggestions.

I think it’s fantastic idea to have some aspirations for 2011.  Here are three suggested resolutions for development practitioners.

1) Get feedback (no matter how informal) from your clients/beneficiaries at least four times this year and commit to following through on one response in 2011.

2 ) Take time out at least once a quarter to write up an idea.  Use this time to think through a problem or issue that has been nagging you.  Focus on any issue, for example: how to deal with a difficult personality in the office,  how to revamp an indicator that is not quit right or even what your organization should be doing in order to stay relevant.   Writing will organize your thoughts and provide a solid basis for action.

3) Network.  It is easy to get into the grove of doing the work, taking care of home or putting out fires. Networking can be a rejuvenating experience as you share ideas and just get exposed to more than the world you have created for yourself. Linkedin groups are a great way to start.  You can join a local professional group or just reach out to a recent contact and have coffee.  Great ideas and unexpected support in times of need may appear.

Hope these three things spark ideas about what you like to do professionally in 2011.  Well see in December if I was able to keep to them!

Human Rights – Has the movement lost it’s way?

On Dec 31st the Guardian posted an article criticizing Human Rights Watch and similar organizations for loosing their way.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/31/human-rights-imperialism-james-hoge

According to Stephen Kinzer, the promotion of ‘secondary’ human rights such as right to multiple political parties and a free press, detract institutions from focusing on primary human rights like access to water and education.

It’s a tough call. If one is not a local then transformational ideas may be imperialistic because they come from non-indigenous values.

At the same time in conflicts where both sides can share the blame, Stephen sites Darfur, foreign support can cause agonizing stalemates in the same way humanitarian aid can make war ‘bearable’.

So what to do? Give up on humanitarian aid and human rights?

How about:
1 – Look at the work from the perspective of longer-term country engagements so there is time to figure out what is really happening.
2 – Rethink what impact means so there is the flexibility to pull out or change ones focus based on the complexity of the situation.

Lessons in Health Programs

Over the last few years I have noticed some truths about health programs.

1 – The users of health services need time to adopt new behaviors and try new services.  I’ve been in multiple communities where the main complaint is that by the time people go to receive services, the health center is no long providing them.  On the health center’s side, their complaint is that they start new programs but no one comes for several months so partners/government requests they close the program down.  There is a mismatch in the time horizon of the community and health program designers.

2 – Peer advocacy works.  I’ve helped implement and researched multiple short term and medium term health projects and having the community take ownership for it’s health awareness and support each other in changing habits works.

3 – There is a serious problem of management at the community health center level.  The complexity of the funding sources and the financial and administrative requirements to run a health center far outweigh the often times 6th grade education level of the valiant nurses and doctors who are asked to manage these centers.  Performance targets and other incentives only mask the need for more sophisticated management skills.

My question for health practitioners is what have you noticed over the years about what works and what does not work?

Coaching for Leadership

As development agents technically we’re all in the business of change.   Some of use change outputs (number of schools built), some of us change outcomes (number of girls graduating with a degree).

Regardless of the focus, I think we all come up against that linchpin of success (read ultimate reason for failure) leadership.  I just had a conversation with someone taking a leadership coaching course at Middlesex University (UK) who said that the job of the leader is to manage and push forward:

• vision/mission
• organizational culture
• capabilities of the staff
• execution or the delivery of results (outcomes)

Now I do ‘good’ work that I’m proud of, but the sustainability of the results isn’t always there.  I used to think it was a question of bandwith, we did too much for the leader to be able to sustain once we were gone.  Then I started thinking it was a question of values; the senior leader has a logical framework in-mind that is counter/contrary to the sustaining the new results.  Read ‘Herbal tea and a hot shower will prevent HIV/AIDS’ or ‘If I communicate to my staff like human beings all hell with break loose’.

But is it just a question of coaching; guided leadership development on HOW to move forward the vision, culture, capabilities and results of an organization?  The nice thing about coaching is that it take into account the behavior, thought processes, comfort level of the leader.  It’s not about what s/he must do, but setting expectations and figuring out how to get there.

Next book I’m going to read: ‘Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan and Stephen Drotter.  Hopefully it’ll help me set some targets for my own development.

So what is it you actually do?

It’s not so much about a revelation at the big picture level.  It’s about the sublties of how people are actually practicing development in different contexts.

This thought came up in a conversation with an ADB staff member discussing the different development methodologies and theories out there.  It got me thinking, how are people actually practicing development?  Are people moving more slowly, taking the time to listen, to think before they speak, hear before they act?

Are they actually using their own “transformative” tools within their own organizations?

Or is it about vision?  Is every man, woman and child out there making his/her mark with a vision of how things should be?  What’s happening people?  What’s going on in your day to day lives?

Mine is a simple Venn diagram.  There is what the beneficiaries want, there is what the client wants, there is what my boss wants, and there is what the stakeholders want.  Then there is me.  A young lady with a magnifying glass working frantically to find the shared space in the middle and getting people to act with in it.

The Nation State and Relief (Angel and Demon on My Shoulder)

This one is a quickie.

I had a friend mention that everything in Haiti was such a shame: to have an earthquake in a country with a weak and ineffective government and poor infrastructure.  As if things were not bad enough.

I can’t say I know anything about Haiti at all.

However, it’s easy enough to be jaded and say, right now the only nation accountable to the people of Haiti is the global nation of NGO’s, bi-lateral AID agencies and common men and women who are volunteering time, money and resources to Haiti.

One could argue that this isn’t the type of event that destroys a government who isn’t doing much for their country to begin with.  Worse case scenario it’s an opportunity to take credit for the next 1 to 2 years of ‘free’ support and resources flowing into the country.  A respite from deflecting the blame about their inadequacies and – if this were certain other nations – a time to restock on arms and leverage ‘profits’ from the business of AID that is about to boom in the nation.

Is this too jaded a view?  Should I consider the bright side, simply thank whomever that it isn’t me or do what I can to give my money, time and resources to people with so much ‘need’ and so little state to fall back on?

Asking more from our Funders

I’ve been running across a lot of thought provoking ideas regarding the relationship between donors and grantees.   I have put together a summary of some of the ideas that stood out.

The following quote is from Bob Giloth’s Blog underNonprofit Leadership. Here he examines donor capacity building.

One contrast of approaches is whether capacity building should focus on individual organizations or on fields — collections of diverse organizations or parts of organizations devoted to spreading specific type of program element or innovation. These approaches represent very different ways of getting to scale. Most attention has focused on the former. Building fields requires grantmakers to realize that they are a part of fields — but not necessarily the leaders of the field.

Bob’s idea made me wonder how donors view themselves in the ecology of the nonprofit/NGO sector.  I’ve spoken with several nonprofits Directors who share stories of their long suffering dedication to educating a donor about how their nonprofit works and how they should be funded.  I often ask the question, ‘How did this change in donor behavior come about, was it advocacy or just simply trust over time?’  Everyone says trust; the donor trusts that we can spend the money wisely so we are given more freedoms.  While that’s well and good it may suggest that donors don’t have a mechanism to begin on the footing of a relationship of trust.  I imagine, they lack the ‘correct’ indicators, innovative models of funding and maybe even types of staff to do the due diligence needed to understand nonprofits business models better.

Another idea I heard from Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) is that funder conditionalities or a funders ability to require certain types of documentation should be directly correlated to what they fund.  In simple terms if you are giving money for an existing and established program, your requirements should be less complex than a donor giving a nonprofit/NGO money for a new untested program.  The Nonprofit Finance Funds distinguishes between administrative (existing activities that are a norm) and investment (new areas of growth and development) funding.  If there is a difference between administrative and investment programs one may ask, what are the ‘right’ reporting requirements for each?

Speculation on the ‘right’ reporting requirements dovetails nicely into a discussion on monitoring and evaluation systems.  At the Rapid Results Institute I’ve seen some advocacy for a more active M&E system; one that goes beyond identifying the status quo and moves towards creating systems which identify problems and innovations and then helps the organization react accordinging.  A participant at a recent conference I attended mentioned that both donors and NGO’s need to rethink M&E and the indicators that they track.  She boiled the most important indicators down to three:

1. Did the NGO reach their numerical target? For example, 100 girls are now going to school.
2. Did the NGO change the existing context?  Now parents are more inclined to send their girls to school.
3. Did the NGO make an [unexpected] impact?  Now girls are planning to go to college and but are dropping out at high rates because they get married.

A lot of food for thought.  I’m sure donors and NGOs have found some creative solutions to existing problems once they reach that level of trust.

I can share one innovation that I can remember and it’s Nonprofit Finance Funds (NFF)  Building For the Future.  It happens that some NGO’s/nonprofits do not recieve funding and/or set aside funds for building maintenance.  They avoid the roof until it’s ready to cave in and then they do a ‘desperate’ capital campaign; demonstrating how many sweet innocent children will suffer if the roof falls on top of their heads.  Let’s be honest this strategy works even if it is risky.  NFF has been able to get funders and their nonprofits together to create a mechanism by which money is set aside for building maintenance.  Not a radical thought but very radical to implement.

Africa Social Enterprise Forum – cell phones and health in South Africa

On Saturday I attended the ‘Africa Social Enterprise Forum’.  http://asef2009.weebly.com/

It was actually a two day event that began with the West Africa Investment Forum.  All this was hosted by Angel Africa, a nonprofit that wants to build the largest network of business and profesional leaders dedicated to promoting economic growth in Africa.  I may do more than one post on this event but right now I’m going to cover the keynote address by Andrew Zolli, curator of Pop!Tech.

Andrew was entertaining.  He understands how to get people going at 4PM; that witching hour, as he puts it, ‘between your last meal and your next drink’.  He provided some good advice for social entrepreneurs including something to the effect of ‘No one can blog, comment their way into change/impact’.  What he does suggest is that one needs to wear the cloak of their failures with pride.  Something he feels he embodies with his latest endeavor project Masiluleke.  http://www.poptech.org/project_m/

In brief his story goes like this.  HIV prevelance rates in South Africa are high for complex social reasons.  The challenge is to get to people early so you don’t burden the health system with people who have end stage AIDS complications.  For that to happen people need to get tested.  The target population of young men is tough to get tested for even more complex social reasons including the perennial favorite stigma.  Men don’t want to be seen waiting on line for a couple hours to get tested.  So Andrew and others come up with a brilliant solution which they presented and backed very publically; electronic mobile health stations.  Bascially, computer kiosks to help diagnose people and set them on the right path.

This idea was a profound failure on all fronts.  There was egg on face and humbling.  Taking those lessons learned they went on to to test a new idea based on the way people use mobile phones in South Africa.  As you may know most mobile phone usage in Africa is pay as you go.  But what happens when you run out of minutes and want to have Mary call you ?  You can send Mary a ‘call me’ text which is about two lines long leaving many characters free/empty in the message.

Lots of stakeholder building, drinks and meetings later, Project M was able to negotiate the empty space in 25% of the cell phone ‘call me’ traffic with public health messages on HIV which referred users to a hotline.  It worked, of the 114 million health messages sent, 371 972 were answered.  This without any incentives.  In complete privacy a person could reach out to the health centers and hospitals for testing and counseling.  Next big steps for project M, include making sure there are enough people to answer those hot lines and thinking about placing in the market an at home testing and counseling kit etc…

Success is sweet for project M.  So much so that you may see versions of this use of technology in the US in a couple years.  In the meantime Zolli, has the following advice for those entrepreneurs who want to create an impact:

1. Involve people or as he puts it eat first, solve later.  Take the time to really build trust and understand your audience.
2. Understand the motivations of your partners and fill them.  Not everyone is in it for the impact you want to create.
3. Use design as a tool for discovery not as a solution in itself.
4. Be ready to define your theory of change and your metrics early and often.  One needs to be flexible about changing theories if it makes sense to do so.
5. Failure is a measure of health.  If you are not screwing up then something is wrong.
6. Leverage the ambient infrastructure.
7. Choose the entrepreneur over the model every time.  Stick with people who have the creativity and drive to make things happen.  The ideas are secondary.