Tag Archives: uhhh… not helpful

Ménage à trois

8 Nov

Here’s how aid works:

1) Someone pays for it. We call this person or entity a “donor.”

2) Someone else implements it. We call this person or entity an “aid provider” – usually, but not necessarily and NGO.

3) And someone else receives what the first one pays for and the second one implements. We call this person the “beneficiary”, usually for lack of a better term.

Some of us go on about the different kinds of donors, the extent to which their level of understanding and their motivations matter, what their rights are or should be in the grand scheme of things, or the extent to which they should be allowed to meddle in the workings of aid providers.

Some of us go on stridently about the different kinds of aid providers: Who should or shouldn’t be allowed to be one, what it takes to be a good one, the extent to which aid providers are or aren’t unduly influenced by the motivations of their donors, or the extent to which they should be required to share certain kinds of information.

Some of us go on passionately about the beneficiaries. What their rights are, what they can reasonably expect from donors and aid providers, what their capacities are, and the extent to which they have a role to play in the overall picture of aid.

These are vigorous, often vehement debates. And rightly so, as they all touch on important issues.

But just so that we’re all clear, none – not one – of these debates challenges the basic aid formula. None of these debates address in any substantial way the global reality of aid: that it is a giant ménage à trois between donors, aid providers and beneficiaries, each of whom approaches relationship with diverse needs and expectations, and where the aid providers’ role is primarily brokering the relationship between donors and beneficiaries.

And so you’ll forgive me, gentle reader, when I come off as more than just a tiny bit jaded with the rhetoric coming out of, say, the Cannes G20 summit. Or statements from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about their “innovative financing.” Or when I juxtapose what comes up when I click “draft agenda” for this year’s HLF-4 in Busan against the stated purpose of the forum “…review global progress in improving the impact and value for money of development aid and make new commitments to further ensure that aid helps reduce poverty…”

I get jaded because none of these forums or discussions addresses the basic nature of the aid formula. The ménage à trois. What the Gates Foundation calls “innovative financing”, isn’t. It’s simply the latest attempt to modify the parameters of how traditional donors work and maybe change up the kinds of strings attached to donor funding. It’s also the basis for a lot of HRI-style workshops and meetings and junkets. If you want truly innovative financing for foreign aid, find a way to pay for it that doesn’t involve donors. Simple as that.

Or bringing together 2,000 representatives from around the world to review the Paris and Accra declarations for the purpose of making development aid more effective.  Am I the only one who reads “High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness” as an oxymoron on multiple levels? For one, 2,000… coming together… to make progress on aid effectiveness… wait.. what? For another, the key to aid effectiveness is not something about the legal frameworks of a bunch of developed countries. This is focus on but one of the members of the torrid little aid ménage à trois. You want aid effectiveness on some kind of global scale, you have to deal with all three.

If you want to truly change the way aid works, you need to find a way to change the ménage à trois formula. PPP and CSR are just new kinds of donors. Mixing bilateral aid with traditional development aid, government to government capacity-building, and all of that simply adds complexity around who is a donor, who is a provider, and who is a beneficiary at the ground level. Technological and programmatic innovations (awesome as they might be) simply re-tool the ways in which aid providers continue business as usual. Humanitarian accountability and basic good process are “musts” (and I sincerely believe that they make aid better). But let’s not delude ourselves into believing that they confer any real change in status to the benefiaries of aid.

You want to be “game changing”? Find a way to change up the ménage à trois. Otherwise, you’re simply using new words to describe the same ol’.

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No Kidding

22 Apr

The list of articles and blog posts related to Three Cups of Tea-gate, as of this writing, is at 110 and counting. I don’t suspect there’s much original content I can add to this conversation.

Actually, you know what?  There was not much original content to add to this conversation before it even got started. Outside of the details of how the Central Asia Institute (CAI) proved itself incompetent to the mission that it set out for itself, in my opinion there is really nothing new here. Certainly nothing really surprising, and certainly nothing that hasn’t already been said many, many, many times before.

Thanks to all those awesomely intuitive peeps in the mass media, what, exactly, are we learning from all of this? Well…

It turns out that doing long-term programming, and doing it properly is hard. It takes commitment. It costs a lot of money. Who would have thought? No Kidding.

Going someplace where there are a lot of brown people and having an epiphany about how simple the needs of the poor are is easy. Doing something about it takes a lot of knowledge and skill and experience. No Kidding.

… And even with a lot of knowledge, skill and experience, there are no guarantees of success. Sometimes programs fail. Even ones that are well-planned, resourced and executed. Sometimes they fizzle or deliver marginal results. No Kidding.

Greg Mortenson is a big, lumbering, completely disorganized (according to a “friend”) oaf who thought this was all nice and easy, but who – as it turns out – was just plain wrong.  No Kidding.

A famous journalist who thought he understood aid better than he does (I know, almost never happens, right?), whose own career has been made by inaccurately portraying the issues (“it’s simple, really”) in the name of “raising awareness”, and who got all misty over Three Cups of Tea… is now heartbroken and covering his own ass. No Kidding.

[“But let’s not forget that even if all the allegations turn out to be true, Greg has still built more schools and transformed more children’s lives than you or I ever will.”

Err... well.. 1) Impossible to prove; 2) not an excuse for fraud.]

Oh, wow. It’s all more complicated than we thought. Very few programs, strategies, ideas, or contexts are cut-and-dried. No Kidding.

The happy propaganda (some bloggers insist on calling this “the narrative”) that aid providers of all sizes and colors feed to their constituents bears somewhere between zero and very little resemblance to what they really do and what the issues really are. No Kidding.

Aid workers – even the really really altruistic ones – are not above Botox-ing their own “narratives” for the sake of a good story. No Kidding.

Maybe we shouldn’t put eccentric visionaries in charge of practical things. Like designing and running programs in other countries? No Kidding.

D.I.Y. aid based on larger-than-life, cults-of-personality is almost always bound for total lameness. No Kidding.

OMG. They read books and have the internet in Pakistan. No Kidding.

[Insert your own snarky, cynical wrap-up paragraph here...]

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#epicFail

6 Mar

I’m intrigued by what feels like a recent upsurge in calls for aid organizations, aid providers to admit failure. Two very quick examples (there are many others): Daniela Papi calling for NGOs to show her their failures; and a whole organization Admit Failure (@admitfailure), dedicated specifically to – you guessed it – admitting failure.

The overall tenor of these calls for aid organizations to admit failure seems to imply that, in fact, aid organizations have something to hide, that they’ve been dishonest, that they’re trying to somehow dress up botched programming as success. And fair enough: whether organizationally or personally, we’re as self-interested as anyone else.

I get it. Aid failure is the trendy issue du jour in the aid-watching world. But I think that before NGOs admitting failure becomes the trendy PR scheme du jour, it’s important to remember a couple of things about aid failure:

Not everyone agrees on what failure is. I and others have written before about the great divide between marketing and programs in NGOs. And it is hard to overstate the importance of that divide when it comes to understanding the differences between what NGOs typically tell the public and what they actually do. As @shotgunshack put it (in reference to the World Vision 100k T-shirts controversy):

“People forget that the gap between program and fundraising teams is huge and very contentious. I bet some people are secretly cracking up (over secretly consumed alcohol) at all the blogger heat World Vision USA’s marketing and PR teams are probably under for those 100,000 loser shirts. And secretly dreading the shaming they will face at the next INGO meeting with their program peers.”

It’s safe to assume that for every questionable aid program an NGO touts on it’s website which incurs a blogosphere dogpile, there is a wide range of internal opinion – not publicly expressed. I don’t just mean between marketing and programs, but within programs, too. There is often wide divergence of opinion about what works and what doesn’t among practitioners. NGOs are rarely unified internally (and I say “rarely” in order to give the benefit of the doubt, although I’ve never met one that was internally unified). And so whether NGO A is publicly admitting failure or publicly claiming credit for having made the world a better place, either way you can assume there are people working there who feel that the real truth is, in fact, the opposite.

Most aid programs are neither full successes nor total failures. This one is equally difficult for critics and cheerleaders alike. Despite many, many PR and advertising campaigns which convey the message that “your donation changes a life”, the reality is that most of the time aid gains are incremental: reducing malnutrition or improving maternal mortality rates in district X by a few per cent over a number of years. And while those kinds of gains are incredibly important, they represent slow, visually almost imperceptible change to the outsider. To the untrained eye, a village with a U5MR of 15% does not look that much different from one in the next province where five years of Child Survival have lowered the U5MR down to 9%.

And by the same token, very few of those programs that get slammed on the aid pundit blogsites can truly be linked to measurable harm. Sure, there are those famously harmful, spectacular aid failures that everyone knows about. The whole mess than ensued following the Rwanda genocides, for example. But my honest opinion is that more often than not those programs we all like to rant about – all the BOGO, GIK “win-win”, celebrity aid worker, church volunteer groups, shoe-and-bra-collecting, losers-without-borders dumbassery – are just lame, inefficient, distractions. More often than not, the real harm they cause is simply that they perpetuate incorrect thinking about poverty and the remedies to it, rather than that they directly contribute to some kind of local system failure.

* * *

I’m not going to try to defend NGOs.

We do need to be more transparent in general and open about the non-uniform and too-often marginal success of our programs specifically. We can do far better than we do. And while what we do does matter, it is also a reality that most of the time what we actually accomplish is far more bland than what our glossy propaganda makes it all out to be.

On the other hand, I’m also not going to go totally cynical (for a change) and make it seem like it’s all bottom-line driven, money-grubbing marketing. Although there’s certainly some evidence to support that perspective, too, most of the marketers who I know and work with personally are (I believe) honest people who genuinely want to be part of making the world better. Unfortunately they mostly do not really understand in any real depth the product that they’re selling. They don’t know what they don’t know.

And to me, that is the real failure. How in the world can we ever hope to educate our donors (as Saundra is so valiantly trying to do), if our own colleagues do not even really get it?

Those of us who know programs and who implement stuff in the field need to share what we know with our colleagues in marketing, comms, and PR – colleagues who, in many, many instances are eager to learn and are even more excited by the reality of what we do than they were at their previous beliefs in the happy propaganda (and why wouldn’t they be? Good aid, properly implemented, makes good sense and, more importantly, works).

I believe the day is coming when it will be standard practice for NGOs to publish unedited program evaluation and financial data on their websites, open for review by anyone who might be interested. Ms. Papi along with everyone else will see our failures, as well as our success, and everything else in between laid out in plain text and numerical data with a few mouse clicks. But if we don’t get our own non-practitioner colleagues on the same good aid page as us, if they don’t understand what we do and why so that they can represent that on to Our constituents, we will be in for a world of hurt…

That would be an #epicFail.

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