Asking more from our Funders

I’ve been running across a lot of though provoking ideas regarding the relationship between donors and grantees.   The following are my interpretations of what I’ve heard.  I could be misunderstanding something or taking things a step further.

The following quote is from Bob Giloth’s Blog underNonprofit Leadership. Here he examines capacity building on the part of donors.

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 sparked some thinking about how donors view themselves in the ecology of the nonprofit/NGO sector.  I’ve spoken with several heads of nonprofits who speak of their long suffering dedication to educating a donor about how their nonprofit business works.  I often ask the question, ‘How did this change 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 get more liberty.  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 so they can fund the ‘right’ things.

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 related 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.  NFF distinguishes between administrative (existing activities that are a norm) and investment (new areas of growth and development) funding.  Based on this distinction associated questions include: what are the reporting requirements when you are investing in an NGO as opposed to funding existing activities?

Once we begin a discussion on donor requirements/conditionalities it’s easy to begin examining 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 higher rates because they got pregnant.

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’ve got one innovation that I can remember and it’s NFF’s Building For the Future.  It happens that some NGO’s/nonprofits do not recieve funding and/or set aside funds for building maintenance.  They don’t touch the roof until it’s ready to cave in and then they do a ‘desperate’ capital campaign and show 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.

Playing Well With Others

After a couple years in the field, especially if you are young and ambitious (read willing to be exploited and optimistic) you come to realize that there seems to be a lot of nonsense being served up.

Now I still remember my dad’s advice to play well with others but it seems as if there are a lot of people out there who didn’t get the same advice.

Some of my top learning to play well with others moments include:

- Being held up by workshop participants for petty cash.  I was so burnt out I asked them to just go ahead and cut me.  My logic, if I died, the absurtity of my life would be over, if I lived I’d be medi-vac’d out and sipping a martini in 48hrs.

-Being sent into a basement room with harsh florescent lighting and being asked, ‘who is your minder?’ by the lead donor on a project.  They kept me there an hour.

- Attending an expat party with very few Africans present.  (obviously I’m African) After politely rejecting the advances of an Eastern Euro mercenary type he proceeds with oh so logical, ‘Why don’t you want to sleep with me?.  Then after some tough (as much as you can muster when you are seeing two of me) self reflection he says, ‘oh yes now I understand, every one of you has a price’.  <<sigh>>  I would have retorted that he couldn’t afford me but working near the Congolese border and not knowing what he did for a living, I decided that I shouldn’t press my luck.

- The woman who dressed up her stunted baby after we showed some interest in the kid (read feeling guilt when you realize an 4 month old baby is actually a year and a half).  Your Arabic isn’t so good so it takes a while to realize she’s asking you to KEEP her baby.  You then spend 20 minutes explaining the intricacies of New York City apartment living.

All time favorite recuring moment:

- When a Minister/SG/PS/Chief  is finally able to trick you into an evening meeting at his office.  You realize you’ve been duped when he locks door and explains how happy he is that you’ve been assigned to work with him.  You now realize that your cute Hugo Boss/JCrew etc.. pencil skirt may – in retrospect – be too revealing.

So if you are young and feeling not so young (read still getting annoyed at the daily doses of nonsense) and you want to share an experience.  Please go ahead.

NGO legacy

On this particular issue; what NGO’s leave behind, I’ve but a few data points.  But since this is my blog I can go on briefly about it.

Question of the day: What is the impact of NGOs on the quality of the next generation of leaders in developing countries?

I’ve had the opportunity to train quite a few local staff .  And I’m noticing a trend.  The level of skills of my trainees is highly correlated to their previous work experience, most especially their experience in NGOs.  The donor habit of giving certificates and per diems for anything resembling a workshop notwithstanding, there does appear to be a relationship.

Oddly enough in my line of work the more experience a person has in a government institution the less likely they’re going to be good at the type of work I’m training them for.  Yeah, on this one, no comment.

NGOs who provide induction training not just technical training make my job a lot easier.  For example some of the best ’students’ I’ve had were recruits ‘poached’ from IFAD.  There was something about the integrity and seriousness of the way they worked (whether or not they were looking for their next hot cup of tea or not) that made me feel that they must have worked for an institution that trained them not just on the technical side but on the manner in which they should conduct themselves with the client.

Another case in point, TechnoServe (TNS).  I’ve been trying to support them on one of their initiatives and I’m seeing that the longer TNS works in a country the more likely that their previous staff will be taking on key positions in the industry TNS is providing support.  There seems to be a huge opportunity here that may push TNS outside their original mission.

TechnoServe’s legacy may be to affect the quality, integrity, values and vision of future leaders in key industries.

When World Bank graduates become presidents we are all content with the knowledge that they have some baseline technical skills. But what about the values of the institution they were indoctrinated in?  Was it an institution where political back fighting, sleeping your way up, you race, creed or degree, instead of competency, effective team work and long-term professional development were valued?

If it’s more of the former is Africa in for another 40 years of failed development where more ‘this-is-the-way-it’s-done’ justified greed, incompetence, poor planning, weak human development is unleashed by an army of PhD and certificate holding graduates of the current NGO community?

Oh well, maybe we hand over the reigns to all those community members we used our participatory, gender balanced, performance based methods on?  May be they know what real integrity and institutional building looks like?  Or am I just being a tree hugger again?

Capacity in Africa

In my current job Capacity is a word that floats around as freely as hot air.  - So before I wrote this piece I looked up the word in the dictionary and it went on about one’s potential to experience and appreciate as well as facility or power to produce, perform or deploy.

Of course no good definition of capacity exists without examining the work of Sen.

If I’m correct he argued something to the effect of a person’s capacity to vote is more than just  function of a legal write, but level of literacy, awareness of issues, ability to travel to a voting booth etc… In the space of Capacity building and Development, I find that Sen sets a high bar.

I wonder (not being an expert) does Sen’s conception of functioning (all those things that impede a person from acting)  include plain old values?  What if people just don’t want to vote?  What if they don’t value voting above some other form of access to the political and administrative systems in their countries?

The reason I’m obsessed is that right now I’m working in a country that has an institution mandated by parliament to coordinate capacity building efforts in government institutions (among other things).  This institution lives and breaths capacity transfer, capacity building etc… But how do they measure their success?

Assume that development is inherently about change, and while it will happen organically it’s quite focused on specific ends.  Development agents work so that people do vote, not so they just have the option to vote.  We work so that girls attend school, not just so that they have no barriers to attending school.

I say this because we don’t seem content with only removing all obstacles to a persons functionings.  We determine success or failure through outcomes, the number of people who vote, the number of girls getting a good eduction.

Still, if all the ‘obstacles’ are removed and people still don’t vote and girls still don’t attend school then what?

Well I posit that the underlying issue could be question of value.  People may be more likely to act on issues they care deeply about.  Consequently, success isn’t just about the outcomes but also the much needed shifts in behaviour required to support the change.  Shifts in norms and values mean that people will pressure their government to vote, will sell of their land to send their girls to school.

Obviously, I’m not the first to examine the role of values in development.  Most marketing gurus know the benefits of shifts in preferences.  Some African governments have their own internal initiatives to shift values in their countries (and no not just for political gain).  But, what about all those people involved in capacity building? What’s the use in training a pianist if he hates to play piano?

Thinking for the Future

The International Research Center in Canada has a new think tank initiative for which they’ve asked for expressions of interest. The ad is below and I found it on www.eldis.org.

So what’s so innovative and new about a think tank initiative? It’s not that African think tanks don’t have needs, some are too small, some need money, some need fresh talent, some need the grace of God and visionary leadership.

But even with all their ‘needs’ the most important thing is that Africa needs them to stay and grow. We can’t complain about unworkable foreign ideas if we’re unwilling and/or unable to support our own development of critical thought, ideas and innovations.

To do this we will need more than just money. We should be strengthening think tanks’ leadership, developing their internal capacities to produce quality research that addresses real needs, takes into consideration real contexts on the continent and produces work that is DIGESTIBLE by the people and framed in a way to make it easier for leadership to take action. Tall order, I know.

But anything is possible. In Jamaica a small group of people have taken on this very task. They have launched a think tank called CAPRI to develop (non partisan) policies for governments. Bravo to those who realize that local ideas need to be fostered at more than just the community level. Their mission is to: ‘…encourage the independence of thought of the ordinary Jamaican citizen by providing citizens with the opportunity to make their decisions on the basis of evidence, not political persuasion – thereby encouraging the persons to take responsibility. We also seek to be a way for the Caribbean diaspora to contribute their intellectual resources to the governance of and policymaking in this region.’

For more info see: www.takingresponsibility.org

_________

Eldis Ad:

Closing date: 19 August 2008

First Call for Expressions of Interest: East and West Africa

The Think Tank Initiative invites applications from independent African organisations that are committed to using research to inform and influence social and economic policy. The Initiative will provide multi-year funding to promising think tanks, and will work with successful applicants to improve their organizational performance.

For more details on the Initiative and the application process, visit the website by clicking on further details link.
Deadline: August 19, 2008
The Think Tank Initiative is a new, multi-donor program dedicated to strengthening independent policy research institutions – or “think tanks” – in developing countries, enabling them to better provide sound research that both informs and influences policy.
The Initiative will focus its activities in East and West Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.

Manifest Destiny

Initially this post was going to be a thought provoking piece on the world of capacity building and transfer but I had to give that up.  I came to some conclusions I just couldn’t shake. 

1 – Development is supposed be about and is measured by impact on the ground.  I.e. How much we get people to change the way they live an act.  (This dovetails into the whole development is about profound personal and social change belief.  It also begs the question of who decides what these indicators and objectives are).

2 – This means development agents should be goal oriented.  We’re not about building people’s capacities.  We build their capacities so that they can act a certain way.  We’re like missionaries with a manifest destiny in our hearts.  Missionaries don’t teach people to read because they care, they teach them to read so they can read the bible, understand it and become god fearing Christians. 

3 – At the end of the day, capacity transfer, M&E, implementation support, training, empowerment all our work should lead to a significant movement forward on some sort of development indicator like, GDP growth per capita, lower mother and child mortality rates, increased number of children immunized etc…  Anything less could just be a waste of time.

Itorero

Itorero is the Rwandan version of a Bar Mitzva, or for the Africans out there the Rwandan version of when young men go off into the bush for month to learn about being a man, their culture, and their communities. It is a cultural education program designed to build national unity. Rwandans have revived their tradition of Itorero to create trainer of trainers; that is take leaders of all forms throughout the country and train them on what it is to be a Rwandan so that they may better guide and lead others.

See: article in The New Times for a blurb

In New Times article the Minister of local government describes Itorero as a ‘a culture-based platform… through which people solve their problems, promoting national unity and executing all government development programmes at all levels. “It’s a way of pooling resources towards a common good,” he added.’

What I like about this programme is that it uses an old tradition that formed the foundation of Rwandan society before colonization and gives it a modern wist for the realities of today. No need to bring in experts to solve a problem, use what systems already exist and make them relevant again.

I had the pleasure of sitting in on the Itorero training of Sector Executive Secretaries for one day. On that day the Minister of Local Government spent the time to present an interactive module on decision-making and strategic thinking within the context of Rwandan values. I was impressive, from what little I’ve seen, Itorero is a pretty fantastic way of bringing up the next generation of leaders. Give them a ‘boot camp’ experience in a beautiful location for 25 days where they can problem solve real issues of leardership, build a sense of camaraderi and develop the self confidence and tools necessary to bring their communities together.

Performance Based Contracts & Politics

Right now I’m in Rwanda and it seems as if the government has performance based contracts with every possible institution. But central government ministries aren’t the only ones that have to sign contracts, a local government initiative has built on performance contracts with an idea they call ‘IMIHIGO’.

IMIHIGO is when a local government official publicly declares which initiatives he wants to pursue and makes a declaration that he will indeed complete these tasks. All initiatives must be accompanied by clear performance indicators. The connotations of IMIHIGO are meddled with pre-existing cultural traditions of Rwandan warriors staking a claim.

I have to say, I enjoy the obvious benefits of performance based contracts. On a good day (assuming the contract is based on tangible results and the means for implementation are accessible) real change and accountability should happen.

That got me thinking. In situations where politics impeded innovative leaders from separating shall we say the wheat from the chaff. Maybe, instead of sacking Ministers for corruption you have everyone sign results based performance contracts with an implicit understanding that in order to achieve results, corruption or elite capture will have to be curtailed or rerouted. Does anyone know of a situation were performance based contracts were used in countries where shadow governments and elite capture were high?

Consulting Services in South Korea

So the New Paradigm Center (NPC) in Korea isn’t a new endeavor, but it is interesting.  It was created by the Korean Labor Institute, a government agency, to provide consulting services to South Korean businesses in need.  NPC researches and consults specifically on people-centered management practices in small and medium sized enterprises.  According to published reports the NPC’s client firm have increased their sales by 7% and profits by 26%.