“Writer”

At one point early in my aid career, it was my job to be based in an HQ cubicle but to travel frequently to the field for the express purpose of writing primarily USAID grants. It was one of those jobs that was all about “customer service” out to our country offices, “empowering local counterparts”, and “flowing accountability downward.” Which meant, basically, that I was the fresh-faced, fresh out of grad-school, fresh meat thrown to the country-office wolves on a regular basis.

One colleague, based in a barren and mostly godforsaken country that I found myself getting repeatedly sent to took obvious delight in the fact that it was my job – not his – to craft the proposal language, develop the theory of the argument, ensure “good flow.” He was good with the numbers and so would look after the budgets and tables, he explained. But the word-smithing was my territory.

He dubbed me the “text bitch.”

* * *

If you want to work in aid, as much as anything else (and more than most other things) you need to be able to write well.

Yes, you need to have a degree and some technical or general skills related to aid, and you need to get experience. But when it comes to the actual day-to-day work, more than anything lese, you’ll find yourself writing.

Very often the tangible outcome of aid work – at least the tangible outcomes that stick around for posterity in head office files – are written documents. And those written documents – those briefs, those evaluation reports, those strategy documents, those white papers – all have to be written by someone. In the aid world (but not just), written documents are currency, and the ability to write well frequently translates into power. You take it for granted until what you need is 10 pages or 5 or maybe just one page of well-written text.

And it seems that writing, that act of transferring the substance of conversations into text – whether those conversations happen in a board room, around the coffee makers, at the pub – that act of magically solidifying ethereal concepts into tangible form is very often seen as the grunt labor of aid work. Everyone wants it to be his or her job to have deep conversations with traditional healers under the mango tree, to look appropriately dusty and haggard on CNN, to help fleeing little old ladies make it across the border, to pull typhoon victims from the rubble… By contrast, no one really wants to be the one whose job it is to miss happy hour in order to hunch over a keyboard pounding out a report or budget or opinion paper. Writing has become menial labor. Something to be weasled out of whenever possible.

Writing has become something to be pushed onto the desks of our text bitches.

* * *

Once you have a few years of USAID proposal-writing on your CV you can never really totally escape from it. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. You become one of those in your organization to whom people come when they need something written. And despite annoyance with some people who seem to be worse about dumping their writing, I’ve basically made a measure of peace with it all.

You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t get it written down it’s practically the same thing a not having it. You can have the most astute, penetrating insight on – well – anything. But if you can’t somehow turn that analysis into text, then, it benefits no one. I’ve sat innumerable fascinating discussions, led by sometimes absolutely brilliant people, many of which for all practical purposes might as well have never happened once the first after-hours round began to take effect… because nobody wrote any of it down.

I’ve been a lot of places and held a number of different positions since that colleague out in the desert gave me that inappropriate nickname. I am not the least bit disappointed that my current job does not require me to write USAID proposals as a core task (sometimes I have to jump in and do it if the team is stretched). I’ve been a technician, a manager, a team leader, an advisor… It’s been my job to explain budget deviances, to persuade boards, to negotiate with host governments, to fanangle agreements with partners… Sometimes I’m a cubicle-dweller, sometimes I’m a globtrotter, sometimes a cowboy. But the most constant constant across all of that is writing: email, reports, proposals, strategies, white papers, skype conversations, Facebook updates, this blog…

Don’t you dare call me “text bitch.”

But I’ll always be a writer.

The Cliffs of Insanity

Yes, I know. It’s horribly un-hip these days to compare Afghanistan and Iraq with Vietnam.

But if you’ll indugle, see the table below:

	Vietnam	Afghanistan	Iraq
Pretext for War 1	Prevent the spread of Communism	Prevent the spread of “Militant Islam”
Pretext for War 2	Gulf of Tonkin incident. Later acknowledged to be at least partially fabricated (President Johnson admitted that the US Navy had “probably been shooting at whales out there…”	9/11 / harboring al Queda	9/11 / State sponsor of terrorism and producing weapons of mass destruction. The former is almost certainly false; the latter proven false conclusively.
Overall strategic assumption	Initial invasion/tour de force. Command and conquer.	Initial invasion/tour de force. Command and conquer.	Initial invasion/tour de force. Command and conquer.
Reality on the ground	Prolonged occupation; lukewarm “partnership” by host government; growing insurgency. Any civilian who can leave, does (see southern California).	Prolonged occupation; lukewarm “partnership” by host government; growing insurgency. Any civilian who can leave, does (see Iran…).	Prolonged occupation; lukewarm “partnership” by host government; growing insurgency. Any civilian who can leave, does (see Jordan and Syria).
Overall civilian assumption	Build capacity. Private business investment. “Win hearts and minds.”	Build capacity. Civil society. Besides the Iranians, few private businesses crazy enough to open up shop in Afghanistan.	Build capacity. Civil society. Private business investment.
Tactic when initial military gains were/are lost to insurgency	Escalation: more troops, unrestricted bombing of North Vietnam.	Escalation: re-focus on Afghanistan as central in the war on terror.	Escalation: “Surge.”
Popular sentiment in the US	Nearly universal non-support by the end.	Rapidly diminishing support. Everyone wants it to be over.	Rapidly diminishing support, except for a few lunatic fringe-types.
Humanitarian stance	Loathe to view as “emergency” despite massive population movement, loss of livelihood, crimes against humanity (by all sides): USAID programming focused primarily on “development interventions”	Strong push to articulate Afghanistan as a post-conflict “development” context, despite the fact that the conflict seems to actually be growing… Full-time OFDA rep. in Kabul is a recent development.	What-ev: USAID ready to fund almost any kind of program run by almost any western NGO crazy enough to set up shop outside the green zone.
Regional fallout	Depending on interpretation of history, US involvement in SE.Asia helps to enable the rise of the Khmer Rouge – one of the most horrifically murderous regimes since WWII. At least 2 million Cambodians die. More than that leave.	US involvement enables regional sentiment in favor of the Taliban (how do you spell “P-A-K-I-S-T-A-N”?).	If Iraq wasn’t ground-zero in the war on terror prior to the US invasion, it sure as heck is now.
End result	Total meltdown. Untold human tragedy on all possible sides. US pulls out, ass having been soundly kicked by the NVA. It takes nearly 20 years to normalize relations with Vietnam.	To be determined…	To be determined…

They say that to do the same thing over and over, even when that this clearly doesn’t work, is the very definition of “insanity.”

I’m thinking that we can guess how these stories end…

We Mean Business

I’ve just spent two days in intensive meetings meant to take to the next level my employer’s in-house conversation about tapping into corporate support for relief and development work.

My prior grumbling clearly has not worked. And I find myself being worn down…

For-profit sector interest involvement in aid work is fully a reality of the world we live in now. We (and I say this for my own benefit as much as for the benefit of anyone else) need to acknowledge and deal with this reality.

Thinking out loud about what this means…

Just like bilateral, governmental and large institutional donors, corporate donors represent a very wide range of motivations and objectives, and also technical rigor. We must never allow ourselves to lose sight of the fact that, regardless of any community benefit language that they may use, benevolent programming that they might support, or even as good as they might actually be, the for-profit sector and for-profit companies exist precisely for the purpose of making profit. Which means that they will come to the humanitarian aid conversation with a set of assumptions, priorities, goals and tolerances that do not necessarily overlap with ours.

I do not write this out of cynicism or distrust (although there’s justification for both), but simply as a statement of fact. We’re quite used to talking about this divergence of interests between NGOs and donors when it comes to bilateral government donors or funding from institutions like the World Bank. But it seems we’ve been initially somewhat naïve on that point when it comes to corporate donors. Maybe we’ve allowed ourselves to believe, wrongly, that because the proposal formats, approval processes and reporting requirements for corporate funds seem almost endearingly simple in comparison to government grants, that corporate grant-making is somehow less calculated towards end goals. Donors fund aid work based on what they believe will advance their own interests. Period.

As well, after several decades now of NGO engagement and push-back and “donor advocacy” towards our more traditional governmental and institutional donors, we seem to have achieved a level of comfort with those relationships. We know very well where the areas of divergence and overlap are, and we know from experience where we can push-back and how. We’ve kind of made peace with the fact that we have to agree to disagree with those donors on some points. But now we’re having to start the process of getting to this point from the beginning with our corporate donors. It feels redundant, like going back to square one, and that’s frustrating.

We need to view and talk about and interact with the for-profit sector fully as an “aid actor” – and I mean “aid actor” in the same sense that we talk about ourselves, the UN, big bilateral donors like USAID or the EC, and relevant host government entities. Whether they participate in coordination meetings or not, whether they engage in the kind of analytical, strategic or competitive bidding processes that other aid actors do, the for-profits are increasingly a central part of the big picture, the “aid environment.” Corporations are fully part of the aid environment (they have been for some time, actually – what’s changed recently is that they themselves articulate that they are), and we need to engage them directly on those terms. We do everyone, including ourselves and our beneficiaries less than full service if we segregate out the for-profits in our overall thinking.

NGOs and perhaps particularly INGOs need to remain clear, internally and externally, about their/our role in the aid conversation. I see the role of NGOs becoming specifically more about advocacy, representation, championing the cause of the poor. Both the traditional donors and aid-involved corporations now increasingly employ aid professionals and maintain social responsibility units with immense technical capability. Our resource constraints will eventually mean that we cannot keep up with them on that front. Yet of all of the aid actors and non-aid actors in the aid conversation, NGOs are the only ones whose primary interest is (or should be) benefit to the poor on their own terms. For donors, whether governments, foundations, corporations, or individuals, helping the poor is a means to another end: advancing foreign policy, gaining market share, a tax write-off or accumulating treasure in Heaven. For NGOs, helping the poor is itself the end. We should be careful to not  understate our importance on this point.

Maybe we need to mean business about our core business. Maybe we need to get back to our roots of essentially telling donors what to care about and how to spend their money. We did it USAID and DFID and the EC and AusAID and the UN (and many others). Now we need to do it with the corporate sector.

No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man

I was late checking for my flight today.

No matter how convenient the time that I need to be at the airport and no matter how far in advance – how many weeks prior – I know that I’ll be traveling, the morning of there is always some extenuating circumstance, some reason why I rush out of the house at the last minute…

* * *

It’s not easy to balance aid work and a family life. When, for a variety of family-related reasons it becomes necessary to come back “home”, to relocate to a first-world city for an HQ job there’s the expectation that things will be somehow easier.

But they never are.

You’re here, but your real work is over there. Your heart is over there. You’re constantly torn, pulled in multiple directions. No matter where you are physically, there’s a nagging, tormenting notion that you should be somewhere else. At home, you need to be out in “the field”; out in “the field”, you know you should be home. …At “home.”

*

My wife puts up with a lot, bless her. It can’t be easy being married to me. Or to any itinerant aid worker, for that matter.

I scheduled this trip after a previous one fell through at the last minute. Apparently the generals in Myanmar didn’t see fit to give me a visa to their fair country. At least not this month.

And it’s a good thing: see, I was going to miss Halloween.

Not that Halloween is any big deal. Until it seemed that I would miss it. And then there was drama. My daughter (8 going on 15) had a meltdown: Apparently I’m never there. I miss everything…

And then the trip to Myanmar fell through and all was well. Until this trip – the one I’m on as I write this - came up. I knew about it and discussed it a full ten days in advance. There was full disclosure on this one. No ambiguity; no, “well, I’m still sorting out the ticket…” And so, after some discussion and finally booking a ticket at the last minute – one that departed and arrived at decent hours – and after a day of all being well, and then an evening of watching “must see” TV with my wife, I confess that I was a bit grumpy when at 11:03 PM she looked at me with the “you’re never here” eyes and demanded to know why I’d booked travel to be away on my son’s semesterly parent-teacher conference.

I am currently overseeing more than ten grants in eight countries. I meet every reporting deadline, get the no-cost-extension paperwork in on time. I meet my in-house administrative obligations, too. I submit my electronic labor-accounting reports, I do performance appraisals of those I supervise, I review and give meaningful feedback on proposals and strategies and plans and policies. People depend on me for a lot, and I follow through for them. I am dependable. I can deal with the big picture without losing the details. I get stuff done.

But at 11:03 PM last Wednesday, I had no answer for my wife. If I’d ever even been aware of it to begin with I’d totally forgotten about that damned conference.

*

My daughter (8 going on 15) sometimes has her little friends from the neighborhood come over to play. I try to be cool with her and them: Let them have their tea parties in the backyard or organize their “Littlest Petshop” figures on the dining room table.

I think I’m a pretty good dad. Okay, maybe not as over-the-top involved-in-the-minutae-of-their-child’s-lives as some. I don’t personally participate in the backyard tea parties… But, still, I’m a heck of a lot better than many.

Sometimes, though, I need to weigh in as a parent. Sometimes meals just have to be eaten, baths taken. Sometimes SpongeBob has to be turned off so that homework can get done. And very often those are moments when my sweet little daughter morphs into the Wicked Witch of the Wild West.

In the course of a single week I might make financial decisions equivalent to the gross annual budget of some smaller NGOs. I make recommendations on strategies for entire regions and that will affect hundreds of employees, thousands of beneficiaries. I participate in discussions in different forums that are relevant globally. I have hired and fired people who depended directly on me as their supervisor for their livelihoods. I have handed relief items to refugees fresh from a third-world war zone, haggard and frightened. I have personally made decisions about where hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of aid would go and not go.

But when my daughter doesn’t like what I want her to do, I suddenly become temporarily a nobody. And I have to swallow a level and quality of attitude and disrespect for which I am utterly unprepared.

* * *

The hardest part of this job, hands down, is just trying to stay balanced. Being a whole person. Not totally losing yourself in the work. You learn, soon enough, that there kind of are multiple worlds that we’re required to inhabit simultaneously. There’s the world of aid: the high stakes, the pressure, the intense debates, the even more intense subject matter.

Then, there’s the world outside of aid. Family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors who cannot begin to comprehend the stuff that we see and deal with. Not because it’s so complicated or technical, but because it is so heavy. I long ago stopped trying to explain what I do to the soccer moms and dads on the sidewalk outside my daughter’s school waiting for the bell to ring. If the subject of my travel comes up, I stick to stories of shopping, weird food, and how hot it is there.

I think this is the least acknowledged paradox of aid work, actually. The fact that we do inhabit multiples worlds (some of us more expertly than others). We act globally in the full sense of the term, hopefully for the better, as our “job.” And then, after hours, we’re extraordinarily mundane.

My 8-going-on-15 year old daughter helps keep me very well-connected with that reality.

* * *

My flight this morning left late. Around 11:00 AM. Enough time for me to walk my daughter to school, about two blocks away. She walked on ahead. Didn’t really want to talk with me, beyond a few strongly-worded directives about how I’d better be back for Halloween.

The bell rang, I called out to her, she looked embarrassed and ran inside. 8 going on 15 years old.

I wanted to hurry back, but my son was busy shuffling through the leaves piled up along the sidewalk. I stifled impatience. I know I’m gone a lot. I don’t want his childhood memories to be of me being on his case to hurry up so that I can leave.

Taxonomy of Aid

I have not seen anyone else come out and say this in so many words…

Whether we’re critiquing or defending or just theorizing “aid”, we probably need to be clearer, define our terms better. We use language that sounds the same, but we don’t always mean the same things. There is aid, and then again there is aid.

Here are the kinds of aid that I see and tend to write about. Maybe there are others (some of you, I’m sure, will be stoked to point out obvious ones that I may have missed…).

Age of Empires: Like the game Ages of Empires, this is high-level, 35,000 ft. view, big-picture Aid. This kind of aid happens predominantly in places like Geneva and Rome and Brussels and New York and Washington DC and London… the “Humanitarian Capitals.” It also happens in air-conditioned, well-guarded compounds in places like Singapore, Panama City, Nairobi, or Baghdad. This kind of aid moves billions of dollars around like poker chips, considers the fates of hundreds of thousands of people at a time as simply part of a day’s work. This is the aid that deals with big theories and tries to tackle big problem like malaria or “hunger.” This is the aid that asks big questions like, “is aid a good thing? Or is it simply a modern recapitulation of colonialism?”, “What does ‘poverty reduction’ really mean?”, or “does Bono matter?”

The real work of Age of Empires aid is primarily pondering and arguing about structural issues. And that pondering and arguing happens a lot in institutions like New York U., Princeton, Yale, and the LSE, by people like Prof. Bill Easterly, Jeffery Sachs, Jim Collier. You can find their book on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble.

Practitioners of this kind of aid – if they make it to “the field” – usually wear Kevlar vests while riding in their white Landcruisers or helicopters.

Looking closely at this kind of aid can be incredibly jading, mainly because it is so hard to draw clear, straight lines between budgets and material capacity, on one hand, and community-level change in the field on the other hand. Despite the mind-boggling numbers talked about in the context of this kind of aid, it can be tough to get a firm grasp on what this kind of aid actually does in tangible terms. By and large, this is the kind of aid I was thinking of when I wrote

Gran Tourismo: This is fast-paced, fervent and frenzied kind aid. This kind of aid is so competitive, take-no-prisoners, and flat dangerous in different ways that I almost called it “Grand Theft Auto.” Like the racing game, Gran Tourismo, aid at this level looks technical at first, but is surprisingly heavy on strategy and patience once you get into it. This kind of aid tends to happen predominantly in two places: Large, household charity INGOs; and because so much of this kind of aid as much about talking and discussion as actually doing, it is increasingly happening on the internet – which is to say blogs and twitter. It tends to happen physically in INGO HQ and field offices, coordination meetings, and the curtained “pubs” of places like Banda Aceh. (It is important to note that this kind of aid exists in the field as much as at HQs).

Much of the effort expended in Gran Tourismo aid is around making NGOs work, and so tends to take on issues such as advocacy, aid effectiveness, good donorship, the relationships between HQs and “the field”, and coordination in the field. This is the kind of aid that asks questions like, “what does humanitarian space look like in Afghanistan?”, or “what are the base criteria for implementing micro-credit in community X?” People involved in this kind of aid argue about minimum standards and protocols and multi-directional accountability and reporting formats and definitions of “value-add.” This kind of aid deals with millions of dollars, rather than billions, and tens of thousands of beneficiaries, rather than hundreds of thousands.

The cool, in-crowd of aid bloggers out there right now seem to write primarily about aid at this level: Alanna, Amanda and Kate, TiA, Transitionland,  Saundra, Michael… Most of these bloggers have not written books, so Barnes & Noble won’t help you (unless you just sit there and use the free wi-fi).

Practicioners of this kind of aid frequently ride in Landcruisers, but never with Kevlar vests. They may also use public transit because they can and also because it helps them feel closer to “the poor.”

This kind of aid feels more practical. The discussions here are frequently more obviously applicable to what one must actually do in the field that those that happen in “Age of Empires” aid. While it’s certainly possible to become jaded here, burnout from the bureaucratic malarkey is a far greater danger (and this danger exists regardless of whether one sits in an HQ or in a large field office).

DOOM III: This is the in-the-trenches kind of aid that happens at ground level. This is aid “the field.” And much like the game, DOOM III aid is about overcoming a seemingly endless series of life-or-death obstacles, challenges and puzzles… all within budget. This is where midwives learn about safe birthing, where micro-credit applicants practice basic accountings, where logisticians or M&E officers curse erratic internet speeds. This is the kind of aid that many aspire to (or front about having done), but comparatively few actually do: this is the direct, daily contact with beneficiaries aid. This kind of aid requires you to either know a local language or use a translator (if you’re an outsider). And for expats, this kind of aid can also be about just staying healthy/alive.

The practice of this kind of aid very often encapsulates the outcomes of conversations had in Gran Tourismo and maybe even Age of Empires aid, but tends to focus day-to-day on very immediately practical things: how to maintain the cold chain; how to conduct relief distribution in an area known to be under the control of a belligerent militia; how to convince this community to use bednets properly for long enough to see a result.

Practitioners of aid at this level sometimes blog under catchy titles or handles like Pyjama Samsara or Itinerant and Indigent or Chasing Carly. They sometimes write books, too, but these are almost always technical – go straight to Amazon or some other online source. They’ll rarely ride in a Landcruiser unless they’re being kidnapped or evacuated.

DOOM III aid can feel incredibly thankless, and so also jading in it’s own way. Frustrations with bureaucracy seemingly “imposed” from higher in the organization are a common and frequent complaint. Having a trusting relationship with one’s counterparts at HQ is absolutely critical here. On the other hand and for obvious reasons, this is the kind of aid in which it is easiest to see the direct result of one’s contribution to community level outcomes. A challenge here, though, will be to maintain the ability to step back at least temporarily and see the bigger picture. Practitioners at this level will want to intentionally ask the bigger, theoretical questions on a regular basis, and not get bogged down in practice or sheer survival.

(In case you didn’t catch it, these headings are all from popular video games…)

Miscellaneous pronouncements, ranting and grumbling…

Nothing new, here. This stuff is obvious to me. But some of you very clearly did not get the memo (or maybe you just didn’t read it):

Outside-in: Aid is about bringing things, ideas, people in from the outside. It just is. It is time for you to deal with that basic reality.

Development is often about outsiders identifying problems that were not immediately apparent to locals. It is also often about those same outsiders bringing in ideas for solutions that hadn’t previously been thought of by those same locals. Not saying the locals weren’t or aren’t capable. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to identify problems and solutions.

I’m not saying don’t critique Aid. But stop pointing that ideas, solutions, approaches are “from outside.” Of course they are. That reality is not a new one. Neither is it necessarily a bad one.

Critiquing critique: And while I’m on the subject of critique. First, aid and medicine are such vastly fields different that comparing them is practically not useful. I mean, if ever there was a discipline that was about imposing solutions unilaterally from the outside –  anathema to the ethical aid worker – it would be medicine. “I’ve run some diagnostic tests. Here’s what’s wrong with you. Here’s the cure. If you take my word for it and do what I say, all will be well. Otherwise you’ll die.” And there are a whole bunch of other dis-similarities as well. Medicine is highly regulated; aid, not at all. To practice medicine, you need a medical degree and also certification; to practice aid, you only need someone willing to hire you (or a visa to Cambodia). I could go on, but you get the point…

Pardon the imposition: Maybe I’m the aid-world equivalent of the Prince of Darkness, but I don’t see that very much development is actually being imposed on anyone. I have personally walked out of more communities than I can specifically remember where the local leaders said straight up that they didn’t want the kind of help I was in a position to offer. In fifteen or so years of doing this job, I have never interviewed a single beneficiary who was pissed off because she or he had been forced to receive aid or participate in a project against her or his will.

A far greater concern than something being imposed from outside is simple INGO laziness or unwillingness (for whatever reason) to follow best practice. For every hair-brained solution a problem can be found which can be spun in a manner which warrants the delivery of said solution. For every container of used clothing donated to help “the poor”, a third-world community can be found that will take possession of it. Is it bad development? Yes. Does it annoy the hell out of me? Yes. Should it be stopped? Yes. Imposed on anyone? No.

Love your Mothership: Yeah, see.. HQs are a reality of INGOs. I don’t know about all organizations, but everyone on my HQ-based team has at some point in the past worked in the field. And at least 80% of those in the department that my team is located in have worked in the field. And I mean, speak-another-language, maybe even married someone from there, years-long stints in the field – not just short, little visits. By contrast, nearly every field colleague who whinges and moans to me about how those sitting in the HQ “don’t get what it’s like in the field” has never him/herself worked in an HQ.

You’re seeing the irony here, right?

Enough with the complaining about HQs.

Aidsluts: One thing that really makes me grumpy are high-maintenance donors. Even worse are NGO staff who interact with these donors on a regular basis but who fail to put the smack-down on their nonsense…

To Private Donors: uh, hello… aid is for the beneficiaries. You do not own anything. Stop making a “feeling of ownership” a condition of your donation. And stop being so high-maintenance: we get half a million USD from the Gates Foundation on the strength of a few phone calls and a short proposal; We get $1.9 million from OFDA on the strength of a proposal that takes two days to write. Stop yanking our chains for your measly $50,000.

To NGO Private Fundraising Staff: Stop coddling the donors. When they come to you with positively dumb-ass ideas, say so. Stop making me do your job and end up looking like the bad-guy in the process. Stop believing that if we play along now, they’ll come around to our way of thinking later. Analogy: remember that if you go out with the guys you meet while working as a stripper, they will always think of you as a stripper…

Overhead: I must have been running with the nerd-herd for too long. I thought the issue of overhead as an indicator of efficiency had been resolved and fallen by the wayside. Apparently not. Get it through your head now: an organization’s claimed overhead rate tells you absolutely nothing about how effective or efficient or how cutting edge that organization is or isn’t. Don’t let some charity rating website or fancy NGO “efficiency” statement convince you otherwise.

Aid optional: Go ahead. Write your strategies, plans, goals, SMART objectives, and process, proxy, output and impact indicators. Intellectualize about the nuanced meanings of “empowerment” or “sustainability.” But remember: at the end of the day, aid is about increasing the options open to the poor. The option to go to school. The option to take a sick child to a clinic where it can be properly cared for. The option of living in a place where there is not an ongoing war. The option to work for a fair wage. The option to not be trafficked and forced into sweatshop labor or sexual slavery. The option of life instead of death. If you cannot articulate the results of your program or project in terms of expanded options to the poor, then you’re either inarticulate or you’re not doing aid work.

Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you say

There is just no way around the critique that aid is ultimately about imposing change from outside. If you want to be involved in aid work, you’ve got to make your peace with that reality. If you want to be in this business have got to come, intellectually and emotionally and philosophically to the place where you’re okay with the assumptions that a) things need to change in community or country X; b) for whatever reason those changes are not going to happen without some sort of input from outside; b) that you/your organization is capable of somehow providing at least part that input.

This is not license to be ethnocentric or arrogant or rude of bull-headed in our approaches to relief and development work. This is absolutely not an excuse cut corners, to be sloppy in our planning, implementation or monitoring. This is not a green light to wantonly impose one-sided and/or self-serving programming.

We absolutely must appropriately involve the recipients of aid in the aid conversation from start to finish, even when donors or host government or our own internal policies do not require it. But I think the time has come to be a little clearer with and among ourselves about the purpose of that involvement, what it looks like and what it leads to.

We need to think through and have a more focused picture of what we mean when we talk about “bottom up.”

* * *

I can’t decide whether I’m genuinely piqued or just bored by this post over at AidWatch. As with the innovation conversation, I find myself struggling to emotionally get behind a yet another push for “bottom up approaches.” The idea if far from new, and of course intuitively I want to agree that those bottom up approaches work (as should anyone who’s been paying attention to the aid sector for – ohhh – the last 20 years).

But then again, what bottom up means, it’s purpose and what we can expect from it is far from cut-and-dried.

“Turtles all the way down.” “bottom up” can really mean a myriad of different things in different contexts. To the UN Mission Director, bottom up might simply mean local + non-government. To the INGO project manager running a maternal/child health program, bottom-up might mean focus on a level of analysis below the district level. In the district health office, bottom up might mean village councils, while in village councils it might mean individual families. And within families it might mean the youngest child…

And so, while at some level I want to intuitively agree with statements like,  “Development is BOTTOM-UP…”, that pronouncement by itself is too vague to be useful in the context of an actual program or project. How far down is the bottom? Who is at the bottom? Leaving aside for the moment the problems of implying a hierarchical relationship with the term “bottom up”, what is the hierarchical starting point of a bottom up assessment, program design, etc?

Some ideas are just bad. It is absolutely critical that we do not take bottom up to an extreme. Not everything that a local community or partner or informant tells us should be taken at face value. Some ideas really are just wrong and should never be seriously considered, regardless of the source. The local suggestion of a “guns for work” project in Kosovo is one example. A local official in one district of Nagorno-Karabakh once looked me in the eye and in all seriousness recommended that I take a gun to the US Congress and “force them” to allocate money for Armenia. A government health officer in Cambodia (several years ago) felt than HIV infection in that country was simply part of a Vietnamese plot to take over his country. The proposed solution? Arrest and imprison all the Vietnamese sex workers.

Just because a local person says it doesn’t mean it’s correct or true. Just because a local person recommends it, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Creativity is all good and well. But I’m pretty sure that funding local people to just sort of creatively come up with novel solutions without any kind of external framework is neither effective nor ethical.

Why do it? I fear that most of us do not have more than a sort of vague notion of why bottom up approaches are “good.” We’ve been taught to defer to local knowledge, local wisdom as a matter of principle: “Those people know what they need better than anyone else.” We defer, perhaps, more out of politeness than anything else (politeness, not a bad thing necessarily).

We need to be clear with ourselves. Bottom-up approaches (assuming we can agree on a definition of the “bottom”) give us two specific, practical things:

1) Knowledge and information. About the community. About the environment. About the general context. This knowledge and information helps us better understand, define and prioritize the problems to be addressed by aid programs. This knowledge and information should, further, contribute to and help to shape solutions to those problems.

2) Assurance of “fit” and “ownership.” If we do the bottom up thing correctly, we come away with strong assurance that the program we’re working on planning actually “fits” and will actually work in the context. And even more importantly, if done correctly, bottom up can ensure that “local stakeholders” – by whom I specifically mean those who will benefit if the project succeeds and also suffer if the project fails – will understand the rationale for the project, want what it promises, and are engaged with project cycle processes appropriately throughout.

* * *

I’ll add my voice to those who have written and/or tweeted that it’s not enough to just say “bottom up.” Aid is necessarily a two-way street, a multi-party negotiation in which every party to the negotiation “wins.”

If you ask me, it’s less about “bottom up”, and more about meeting in the middle.

It’ll only feel kinky the first few times…

The heady rush of child survival and and integrated food security has already begun to wear off. Our heart rates are returning to normal. We peek furtively out of the landcruiser. We straighten our clothes, touch up our makeup. We’ll catch a quick smoke and then get on to the next new thing, the next new… innovation!

Yeah, yeah. Before you get all up in my business, let me just make clear that I’m not saying never innovate. I’m not saying that all change is bad all the time. Nor am I saying that the ways we currently think about and do development are unequivocally fabulous. Surely there is plenty of room for improvement. But I think that too often we look at some of the famous development failures and become too anxious to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We are too ready to scrap or overhaul the entire aid machine, when what it really needs is a simple tune-up.

We need to keep in mind that…

Aid very often works better than we think it does: There. I’ve said it. Horribly unpopular, I know, in this day and age of critical theory and investigative journalism and graduate programs in international development and blogs whose shtick is all about what’s wrong with aid.

 But –

For every boondoggle training program, for every mountain of donated expired pharmaceuticals that gets incinerated, and for inequity-reinforcing clueless-donor-driven make-you-cringe-and-burn-a-candle-for-forgiveness project, you can also find a spread of well-designed, properly implemented development programs that are quietly doing all of the things the watchdogs claim are not being done: changing rates of infant and maternal mortality for the better, raising literacy rates in remote and desolate places, improving the level of food and financial security in impoverished communities…

Development takes longer than we think it does: Community-level change takes time. You cannot force it. You cannot rush it. If you try, bad things will happen. It takes patient dedication.

After three and a half years, my 60GB iPod “classic” is totally outdated. It takes, like, 2 minutes to start up. There’s a faint grinding sound every time I switch AC/DC songs (or – ahem – deep, intellectual podcasts that enhance my professional edification while spending most of my time in a white Landcruiser…). A mere 10 years ago, a pocket-sized device that could hold 60GB worth of music, display photographs, and play movies for up to six hours was practically unfathomable. And now I get bemused/sympathetic looks from strangers in airport lounges as bang my battered old iPod on the floor, trying to make the sad face icon go away.  Probably time to toss it and get a new one. That’s how fast things change in the modern world of technology.

But we cannot apply the timelines of the technology industry to community development. We just can’t. It’s tough to steal oneself from this (maybe it’s an “American” thing?). But seriously, we need to be taking the decades-long view when it comes to thinking about impact, sustainability, strategy and technique up-front.

Or the fashion world… your dad still wearing polyester leisure suits from 1977? Uh-huh… how long do you think it’ll take to persuade an entire community to change a practice that’s been around for generations?

Development is exceedingly basic: We must not let the pressure to “innovate” steer us away from that fact. Yes, there’s a great deal that can be said about inequity of different kinds at a global level. But when it comes to reducing poverty, improving health, and increasing the range of options open to people at the community level, the challenges and to a large degree the solutions are now so familiar that they can almost be check-listed.

We know exactly what causes malaria. And we know exactly how to prevent it. That prevention is nothing hard, really, but it takes times. And patience. And more time.

And although there’s a high degree of context-specificity, it’s not hard to figure out exactly where the inequities in the local economy of community X. It’s not particularly hard to figure out who has power and who doesn’t, who has access to capital and who doesn’t, or what the barriers and enablers are. The range of possible interventions in such situations are quite well-known, also very basic.

Relief situations are really the easiest yet: People need potable water, shelter and food, in more or less that order, very soon, or they will start to die.

 

I know. It’s not the message you want to hear when passing your thesis defense or appearing to remain cutting edge depends on you coming up with some penetrating insight about a “new” thing or uncovering some gross but heretofore undocumented travesty of the aid world.

Sorry.

* * *

In my own experience as a practitioner, the hardest parts of aid work come down to patience and integrity.

Follow the best practices. Follow them correctly the first time. Don’t cut corners. Don’t skimp on either good planning or good evaluation. Take the time you need to understand the context you’re working in. When an issue is over your head, say as much and bring in someone with the right expertise. Adjust midstream where it is obvious (based on actual evidence) that you need to do so.

Still, you must innovate? Come up with a way to get donors to provide no-strings-attached funding for international aid. Or a way to regulate those organizations or people who practice sub-standard aid work when they should know better.

I’m With Stupid

One of my favorite aid industry paradoxes is the one about “Partnership”, in all of it’s various forms: consortia and umbrella grants…

Of the bilateral donors with whose funding I’ve worked, USAID seems to be the most bent on making us all “partner” (although they’re by no mean the only ones). And when I read those RFAs and APSs that have “partnership” as one of the core criteria for eventual funding decisions, I have to scratch my head and wonder, “what are they thinking???

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I think partnership is a bad idea in general or in principle. I do think that well-structured, strategic partnerships have great potential to accomplish a great deal of good, to accomplish genuine “synergy” (one of my other favorite development buzzwords). And I can see why the donors like them. Over and above any potential “synergy” or gap coverage (things that could ordinarily be accomplished by nothing more than good coordination), umbrella grants and consortia reduce a donor’s management burden and risk.

The problem is that the management burden and risk, then, flows down to us…

Moreover it does seem that to try to enforce partnership among NGOs as a matter of policy or as part of the decision to fund this application or that by a donor is to completely miss one reality of the aid industry. Namely, that it is a competitive industry.

Despite our best efforts at playing nice in the pubs after hours, never far from consciousness is a basic fact that needs to be acknowledged here: Every grant that CARE (or whomever) wins is one that Save the Children or World Vision or Oxfam (or whomever) doesn’t. It’s not quite a zero-sum situation, but in some cases it’s not far off. Anyone who’s been to a few InterAction meetings in Washington D.C. or a few coordination meetings in the field knows that, for all of our professed love for humanity, we can be a pretty ruthless bunch. In the global village, NGO street can feel a lot like south L.A.

I mean, really. Would the US government require Boeing to collaborate with Lockheed-Martin on some DOD contracts, while simultaneously requiring them to compete head-to-head for contracts on others? And would Boeing and Lockheed-Martin ever agree to such a thing? I think not.

And so why should we be put into that position? Beyond a base bowing down to the god of mammon, what would be our motivation for sharing our best plans, internal budgets, internal capacity analyses and policies of various kinds in the context of a local grant application, with a “partner” against whom we are a direct competitor globally?  Offhand, I cannot think of one.

Of course, the final evaluation should really be around whether or not required partnerships, consortia or umbrella grants deliver more effective, more efficient aid to the poor. Do they? Do umbrella or consortium grants accomplish this? I suppose there’s an argument to be made on the donor’s side about management cost being lower with umbrella or consortium grants. But first, I’d see grant administration as the donor’s job plain and simple. Good grant administration is part of being a good donor.

Second, I’d argue that there just is no appreciable increase in program quality or impact or effectiveness or efficiency at the beneficiary level with umbrella/consortium grants. I’ve not done or read a study that measured and compared. This is just my gut feeling, based on my own involvement in a number of umbrella/consortium grants, both as the prime and also as the sub. I’m open to conversation and debate – welcome it, in fact. Please debate in the comments thread. But I basically do not see that consortium grants, umbrella grants – or for that matter, funding through the UN cluster system – actually add value or increase efficiency.

Am I blowing this out of proportion? Should I just pipe down send my employer’s audited financial statement over to [UNNAMED HOUSEHOLD CHARITY INGO COMPETITOR-NOW-DONOR] in hopes finding favor in their eyes?

I’m guessing there are others out there who feel the same… maybe we can start a support group.

More than numbers

The number of confirmed dead is, and for good reason remains, one of the first things that we tend to look at when trying to gauge the relative size and impact of a disaster event. The problem is, firstly, that we tend to compare every disaster to every other disaster. And secondly, that an accurate and accepted death count can be extremely difficult to get. So, after Cyclone Nargis most every other typhoon or hurricane pales in comparison. 1,100 dead (or is it only 700-and-something?) in western Sumatra is but a fraction of the nearly 200,000 (depending on whose numbers one chooses to believe) who lost their lives in the Aeryawaddy river delta in May of 2008. Typhoon Ketsana was not even really trying with a measly 200-and-something in the Philippines. With death tolls of fewer than 100 and 20, Vietnam and Laos, respectively, barely register.

We sit in our cubicles in DC or Canberra or Bangkok or even Da Nang and quickly assess and rank the disaster zones on the basis of a few drops of ink on paper. We make sweeping decisions about where the resources go based on numbers. Out of context it’s too easy to let those number seem small. Only 20 dead…

In the United States’ Emergency Medical Service (EMS) system, a “disaster” is defined any single event that results in the death of over 100 people. More than 25 trauma victims is a “mass casualty incident” (MCI).

I don’t know about you, but even 20… 20 people is a number that I have a hard time wrapping my head around. I have hundreds of acquaintances, but I’m not sure that I can count 20 close friends. 20 dead – and that’s the lowest number in the spate of recent disasters – is already a big number. 20 dead, I cannot directly comprehend in real terms.

Or 100. That was more or less the number of people in the head office at my previous job. Getting a picture of the entire staff required the photographer to go up a hook-and-ladder. About 100 dead following Typhoon Ketsana in Vietnam feels huge.

What about 300? Or 1,100? Maybe 1,100 is but a fraction of 70,000-something who perished in the Sichuan earthquake. But small as it may be by comparison, it represents an ocean of human suffering nevertheless.

We were right to feel that the massive death tolls in Myanmar and China demanded our attention, our action. But we must not allow ourselves to be lulled into a sense of in-urgency by the smaller numbers that we’re seeing in Asia right now.

Whether by war or natural disaster or any other cause…

A death toll of only one is already a human tragedy.