Pulling for the Underdog

Diffusion of Innovation - Prius Edition

2012-01-26T08:28:00.003-05:00

Last week I got in a taxi at Union Station here in Washington, DC and was surprised that it was a Toyota Prius. Though I like the efficiency of the Prius, what I really appreciate is the ride - so much better than the rickety old jalopies typically lying in wait for passengers at the station.

I asked the driver whether he liked the car, and he replied immediately "Love it. Just love it." I asked him about gas mileage, and he said that he gets good mileage in the winter, but he takes a hit in the summer. "What does that mean exactly?" I asked. "Well, in the winter I get about 52 miles a gallon, but in the summer it goes down to 47 or 48."

When I expressed my amazement, he told me that he saves $1,000 per month in fuel costs alone compared to the old beat-up sedan he used to drive. "Good lord, if that's the case, then why don't all drivers use hybrid cars?" I asked. "Two reasons," he replied. "First, most people believe that hybrid cars break down a lot and are expensive to maintain. And second, they can buy a beat up car for $700, whereas this one costs $24,000 new."

"Actually," he went on, "this car has needed nothing but oil changes in the two years since I have had it. My old car was in the shop for expensive repairs every month or two - and I couldn't drive it during that period. So this car is actually cheaper. With the fuel savings alone, I can pay off the car in two years, and that doesn't even count the repair costs I avoided. And even after my car is paid off, it is still worth $10,000 or more."

I sat there with my economist's hat on, wondering why all taxis in Washington weren't hybrids.

"They'll come," said the driver, reading my mind. "It just takes time for people to realize what a good deal they are."

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 17: The GlobalGiving Team

2012-01-09T12:51:00.000-05:00

GlobalGiving is catalyzing a global market for ideas, information, and money that democratizes aid and philanthropy. In the process, the unbelievable team there has helped 5,200 qualified organizations in 129 countries raise $57 million from 248,000 donors and some of the world's most innovative companies and foundations. (And this does not include the $15 million they have helped Pepsi distribute to hundreds of US-based organizations.)

I could go on and on about their achievements, tenacity, and exploits. Or about the pathbreaking feedback loops they are creating that provide incentives for ever-increasing quality and impact. Or...

But instead, I just want to show the video below, which is worth a thousand words and more. As we begin a new year, I want to say thanks to them all. What a pleasure and privilege it has been to work with you. And the best is yet to come.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 16: Sombit Mishra

2012-01-03T10:39:00.001-05:00

Many years ago, we hired a young guy named Sombit Mishra. He brought to GlobalGiving a nice three-piece suit but pretty much zero experience. In those days, we had little money and a lot of unskilled labor.

Shortly thereafter, I was out in Palo Alto at the offices of Kleiner Perkins talking with our advisor Randy Komisar. "Do you have a dashboard for keeping track of your progress against targets?" he asked. "Of course we do," I replied. "I'll send it to you when I get back."

Upon my return to Washington, I called Sombit into a conference room and said, "Sombit, I want you to put together a dashboard for us." His bottom lip trembled, and he said nothing. Finally: "What's a dashboard?" "It's progress against targets," I replied. "Just do what you think makes sense, but be ready with a draft for the staff meeting next week."

Thus was born the GlobalGiving dashboard, which has been the centerpiece of GlobalGiving's weekly staff meetings for the past eight years. The dashboard started off crudely, but Sombit made steady improvements. Every week after the staff meeting I gave him feedback and pushed him to create analytics that he had no experience with. In retrospect, I was a little hard on him - I probably put him under a little too much stress, which I regret. But Sombit never said never. Head down, he pushed ahead.

After a couple of years, Sombit went on to business school at MIT and founded a company, EveryFit, of which he is now CEO. But he left behind at GlobalGiving an exceptional legacy of focus and discipline. When he created our dashboard, we had facilitated just a few hundred thousand dollars of donations. We closed the year 2011 with a cumulative total of over $85 million raised for 5,000 organizations in 129 countries.

All of us owe Sombit a tremendous debt of gratitude. As the year 2012 opens, I want to say this publicly: Thank you.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 15: Weekends in WV

2011-12-05T15:13:00.001-05:00

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 14: Bill Easterly

2011-11-29T17:38:00.001-05:00

If there were a Top 1 List of Thinkers about Development Aid, Bill Easterly would probably be on it. There are now several excellent development economists publishing (and doing!) micro-level work on a variety of subjects, but none is influencing the overall debate more than Bill. His birds-eye, macro-level take on the aid industry is slowly but surely changing the way people think.

Bill joined the World Bank in 1985, and over time he realized what many of us did: namely that many of the most ambitious aid projects were failing to have much impact. And then, in the late 1990s, he did what none of the rest of us had the guts to do: he wrote about it, in a seminal book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, and in an article in the Financial Times. His courage led to his involuntary departure from the World Bank soon thereafter.

Over the past decade, Bill has tirelessly and relentlessly picked apart - on both theoretical and empirical grounds - the idea that top-down and expert-driven projects work. He coined the term Searchers vs. Planners, and drew analogies to how well functioning economies work compared centrally planned economies. His work offended not only his former employer, but also many of the new foundations that were created with money from very smart and successful entrepreneurs.

To draw attention to the debate, Bill has employed a number of rhetorical devices and flourishes that have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. But I am struck by how often people in big aid agencies have told me that, to be honest, they agree that their own institutions - and leaders - are stymying new ideas and experimentation. "If only they would let me try X," is a frequent lament. And over the last few years, I have noticed a significant increase in the number of people in big agencies (especially the World Bank) giving access to new ideas from different sources. There is increased understanding that innovation comes from iterated, experimentation; and that failure is necessary for success.

This week, a Kenyan economist published the results of a randomized controlled trial of a Millennium Village Project (MVP) in her country. The MVPs are (hopefully) the last hurrah of the big top-down approach to development. The study found, in the words of Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development:

Because this project is large and intensive, spending on the order of 100% of local income per capita, it is reasonable to hope that it might substantially raise recipients’ incomes, at least in the short term...Wanjala and Muradian find that the project had no significant impact on recipients’ incomes.

The reasons for the failure (you can read the whole post here) is one that many aid workers have learned over the past decades of traditional aid projects. The reason would have been obvious to the villagers, if their views had been genuinely solicited. But it is surely a surprise to the planners who designed the project. Too bad they did not consult Bill.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 13: Laika

2011-11-27T08:58:00.001-05:00

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 12: Extended Family

2011-11-25T22:07:00.001-05:00

circa 1965

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 11: Nancy Mellon

2011-11-02T09:11:00.001-04:00

My son has severe-to-profound hearing loss. For the first three years of his life, he had little access to sound. About six months ago, we got him hearing aids, which enabled him to hear some, but not all sounds (he had especially trouble with the high pitches, including sounds like "sh" and "th", which are critical for understanding language.)

Recently - at age 4 - he received a cochlear implant at Johns Hopkins. The implant gives him excellent access to the full spectrum of sounds. But now he faces the monumental task of learning to associate those sounds with meaning - and to turn around and make the same sounds back to other people in conversation.

Most babies start the process of understanding oral language and beginning to speak from day 1 of their lives. Playing catch up is very difficult for kids who are more than a year or two old. Fortunately, Nancy Mellon, who faced a similar situation with her son 18 years ago, decided that she was not going accept what was then seen as inevitable - i.e., delayed and impaired language acquisition for her son. So she went out and did the research and found the most experienced and enlightened people in the field and decided to start a school specifically dedicated to kids like her son and mine.

Nancy and her team founded the River School in 2000, initially with only five students. It is now a thriving community of well over two hundred students, ranging from infant to third grade. Instead of segregating kids with hearing loss in separate classes, Nancy decided her school would mix them in with very verbal kids without hearing loss, while providing intensive language coaching to the kids with hearing loss. The goal is to get the kids with hearing loss mainstreamed into regular schools by third grade.

Nancy's own son just recently graduated from high school and headed off to one of the best colleges in the country. My son is just starting, but so far so good. He likes it, has great teachers, and is making steady progress. And for that, I am extremely grateful to Nancy.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 10: Kyle Peters

2011-10-19T08:50:00.000-04:00

"This movie is terrible," Kyle told me as he tossed the six-part VHS boxed set onto my desk.

"What do you mean? I thought it was great," I replied.

"I watched it six times, and the South never won once."

It was 1991, and I was working at the World Bank's office in Jakarta. Kyle Peters - a Virginian - was a colleague, much senior to and wiser than me. I had lent him Ken Burns's The Civil War, which had just come out the year before.

As a young economist, I felt bewildered by the arcane jargon and knowingness of the Bank's culture. There were a lot of things that did not make sense to me, and I felt as though I were simply not smart enough to understand.

Over the couple of years that we worked together, Kyle kept me sane. Though he would never admit it, he took the mission of the Bank very seriously. But he made merciless fun of the bureaucracy and had no fear of skewering pompous people who wielded rules as if they were divine revelations or who pretended to know more than they did.

Along the way, Kyle taught me how to tell a coherent story about an economy instead of writing in the "this is up and that is down" style that our boss Russ Cheatham hated so much. He also taught me the ins and outs of the Bank's mysterious economic modeling tool, called RMSM, which required the user to make a judicious judgment about productivity to balance the books (Kyle would pretend to be deep in thought for 10 seconds before hitting a key, and when I would ask him about his thought process he would tell me it was a secret).

To the Bank's credit, Kyle is now the Director of Operational Policies, in charge of trying to align the processes with what makes sense for the Bank's mission. I guess this means that he has to make fun of himself now. In any case, I am most grateful to Kyle - a mentor, colleague, and friend - for teaching me how to keep caring about core issues even when bureaucracies sometimes conspire to make one cynical. Thanks, Kyle.

PS: Please don't tell him about this, because he will make fun of me for writing it.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 9: Keith Yamashita

2011-10-18T09:35:00.000-04:00

Keith Yamashita

"This is hard, isn't it?" Keith asked.

"Painful," I replied.

"Excruciating?"

"To say the least."

I went to visit Keith Yamashita, co-founder of SYPartners, in 2003, when we were struggling. We had about $50 in the bank (I had no idea how we were going to make payroll the next week), the site was struggling, and I felt incredibly lonely and isolated.

Keith and I sat in the lounge of his office talking for about 45 minutes, as he tried to get his arms around our challenges. Just having someone understand was therapeutic. But more than that, his firm helped us out periodically over the next several years. First Keith and his colleagues helped us change our name (from the wonky DevelopmentSpace, which I loved, to GlobalGiving, which I initially disliked intensely, but proved to be much better for users). And then they helped us refine our strategy and vision.

The bulk of the credit for our success goes to our awesome team. But along the way, over the last eleven years, there have been a couple of people whose encouragement and understanding kept us going at junctures when we could much more easily have given up. Keith was one of them. Thanks, Keith.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 8: Dave Goldwyn

2011-10-07T13:51:00.001-04:00

I met Dave in graduate school in 1983. I kind of stumbled into grad school by accident. By contrast, Dave was one of these whiz kids who was getting not only a Masters Degree, but also a JD at the same time. He went on to work at the US State Department, UN, and Department of Energy, where he was Assistant Secretary for International Affairs. Most recently he was the State Department's Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs, before stepping down to run his own firm. Along the way, he spared the time to help Mari and me found GlobalGiving as its first Board Chairman. His counsel, advice, and moral support during the first years of our existence were pivotal to our survival and eventual success. But most of all Dave has been a good friend, through thick and thin, over the years. And for that I am most grateful. Thank you, Dave.

100 Days of Gratitude -Day 7: Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T02:45:00.001-04:00

Why I May Quit Facebook (and Why They Don't - and Shouldn't - Care)

2011-10-03T12:52:00.001-04:00

The envelope of the future?

I had a sinking feeling. As executor of my mom's estate, I had just compiled a list of all sorts of things on Google Docs and intended to share them with my siblings. Instead, I accidentally hit the "Public" button. This would not have been such a big deal a few months ago until Google+ was launched. But now things are different. My fear was that I had just published these private items on my Google+ public feed.

Fortunately, I noticed right away, and changed my settings. But how often am I in a hurry and don't realize what I have done? It used to be that the most you could do was accidentally email things to a few extra people in your address book. It is now getting easier and easier to inadvertently "email" something to everyone in the world.

It would not have been a disaster if my mom's estate details (including some correspondence with my siblings) had been made public. There were no trade secrets involved. But it would have been an inadvertent breach of trust on my part vis a vis my relatives. And the things in there are really no one's business but ours.

Many things in our lives are no one's business but our own. All but the most extreme proponents of social media would say the same. We have all read about the folks who put a live web cam in their house to let the world see their every movement. But those are in the minority. The rest of us like some degree of privacy.

Don't get us wrong: we do like the way that social media enable us to share and stay in touch with various concentric circles of friends and acquaintances. We just don't want to have to worry that every time we go on line that we are inadvertently sharing with more than the people we want to. We don't want to develop a twitch when it comes to communicating, fearful that we have spoken too loud and others have overheard our private conversations.

The other night at dinner, I was extolling the virtues of Spotify to my friend C. I wanted him to listen to some music I had discovered. Instead, I got a blast from him: "I tried to sign up for Spotify, but they would only let me do so if I signed up via Facebook, so I told them to go to hell." Sure that he was wrong, I told him to stop being such a Luddite and go back and read the fine print to find where he could sign up by email. I heard nothing, so the next day I went and looked at the site myself. Low and behold, he was right. Spotify had made some deal with Facebook whereby all new users are now required to sign up via Facebook. (I got in under the old regime.)

Spotify got some blow back for its new policy, and in response made clear that new users could opt out of sharing all their music automatically via Facebook. But this was the exception (the opt-out) vs the rule (the default). And more and more this requirement to actively opt out has been adopted by Facebook and others.

And you know what? From a business point of view, what Spotify and Facebook are doing makes sense because of the power of network mathematics. Most social media sites make money from the number of items viewed. The new default of open sharing increases geometrically the number of items shared and the number of people who view them. Someone will soon (if they have not already) do some little back of the envelope calculations on this, but I would bet that the new open sharing policy increases the number of item views on each platform by a factor of 100 or more. Not all of those views are high quality views, but you get the idea. This increase in views for the system as a whole far outweighs the loss to the system if a few people drop out.

The bottom line is that, unless people leave Facebook and Spotify in droves, it makes sense for these companies to stick to their guns. Sure, there will be people like my friend C who never signs up in the first place, and possibly me, who decides to delete my account because I don't want to develop a "twitch." But the loss from us will be minor, comparatively speaking. The more I think about it, the more I want to become an investor in Facebook and Spotify, and the less I want to be a user.

If you are feeling old...

2011-10-02T12:55:00.000-04:00

Spruce Gran Picea #0909-6B37 (9,550 years old; Fulufjället, Sweden)

Rachel Sussman has been compiling a portfolio of the world's oldest living things.

In my own travels, I have seen a few things (mostly trees) dated at roughly 2,000 years old.

But this spruce in Sweden is over 9,500 years old.

[HT: Patrick Whittle]

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 6: Jon Katz

2011-09-30T10:40:00.000-04:00

Jon Katz and Rose

Jon Katz writes fantastic vignettes about his animals, including cows, goats, ewes, cats, and donkeys. His latest, The Perfect Day, is about the waning days of Duke, a border collie/shepherd mix.

His pieces always make me smile, or even laugh. And it is rare when something he writes doesn't make me think about my own life, and what is important.

Thank you, Jon.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 5: Yukon Huang

2011-09-26T11:30:00.003-04:00

Yukon Huang

"Dennis, can you come into my office for a couple minutes?"

"Sure, I said," and I walked in my boss's door, closed it, and sat down.

It was March 1993, and I had recently returned from a five-year stint in the World Bank's Jakarta office to start work in the Bank's new Russia department. My new boss was Yukon Huang.

"I've been thinking about you," said Yukon.

"Great," I replied, and smiled. I was flattered, because Yukon was known to be a pretty tough character.

"You know, I 've been looking at your file and I see you haven't done a damned thing since you started working at the Bank seven years ago."

I was stunned. "What? What do you mean?" And I started blabbering, listing things I had worked on over the years, many of them prestigious Bank initiatives.

Yukon replied, "Sure, you have worked on various reports and projects. I know, I read about them. But you haven't really DONE anything. You are one of these guys who knows how to talk in meetings, how to dress, how to act, all that. But what have you really achieved? Nothing, as far as I can tell."

Silence. I didn't know what to say. So I just sat there for a minute or so, anxiety rising in my gut.

"So why are you telling me this?" I finally squeaked.

"Because we have a problem with [one of our projects] in Russia," Yukon replied. "And I want you to fix it."

"But I am not an expert in that area."

"I know that," he replied. "And that is why I picked you to fix it."

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked.

"Just do what makes sense," he replied.

So that's what I tried to do, with a great team, over the next couple of years. We did not solve all the problems (far from it), but we made some progress and had an impact.

That conversation, seven years after I started working, marked the beginning of my real career, and it has heavily influenced my trajectory (and life) ever since.

For that, I could not be more grateful. Thank you, Yukon. Everyone should be so lucky as to have a boss like you sometime (hopefully early) in their career.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 4: Ann Corwin

2011-09-19T04:37:00.000-04:00

"Why are you looking so down?" Ann asked.

"Dunno," I replied.

"Where are you going to work next year?"

"Dunno."

"Well, where have you applied?"

"I haven't really applied for any jobs yet."

"Dennis, you have to apply for jobs to get them," she said, looking down over her glasses at me. "They aren't going to just fall from the sky for you."

"Maybe. Yes, I guess you are right."

"So what about the World Bank. Why don't you apply to the World Bank?"

"Are you crazy? The Bank takes only PhDs. They haven't hired someone with only a masters degree like me in years. The application even says PhD strongly preferred."

"Well, Dennis, I've never noticed that you have particularly great respect for authority or for any of the rules around here. I would say stop your whining and apply to the World Bank. What the heck, the worse can happen is you waste a few hours."

The date was late 1985, and the scene was the placement office at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. I was sitting in front of the desk of Ann De Marchi (now Ann Corwin), who was then the secretary to the placement director (now she is the director).

"Now go away; I am busy," Ann told me, and she handed me an oatmeal cookie from the large glass jar she kept filled on her desk.

I did go away. And I filled out the application. And nine months later, I was sitting in an office at the World Bank, beginning the career that has brought me to where I am today.

Ann has been a good friend and colleague ever since. And for that, I am very grateful.

Why Entrepreneurship Matters

2011-09-19T04:13:00.002-04:00

This nice "whiteboard lesson" from the Kauffman Foundation explains why entrepreneurship is critical to the US economy. I wonder how many other foundations are able to convey the importance of their mission so convincingly in three minutes?

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 3: Debra Dunn

2011-09-08T14:50:00.001-04:00

Debra Dunn

Soon after starting GlobalGiving with Mari more than ten years ago, I showed up in Debra Dunn's office at Hewlett Packard, where she was a senior vice president for corporate and global affairs. I drew three circles on the board to represent what we were trying to achieve. That was all it took: Debra had been thinking along the same lines and had already started some related work to deliver business services in poor communities around the world.

From that moment, Debra played a pivotal role in the evolution and success of GlobalGiving. She helped connect us to our first software engineers, introduced us to other progressive companies in Silicon Valley, and helped us meet funders. In 2002, she decided that HP employees should be able to give to causes not only in the US but around the world. She took a chance by asking us, a very new organization, to provide an online platform to do this.

Our work with HP led to similar work with many other innovative companies over the subsequent years, during which time we were extremely fortunate to have Debra join our board and help lay the foundation for what GlobalGiving has become. But most importantly, over that time, Debra - who is now teaching at the Stanford d. School - became a friend. Thank you, Debra.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 2: Randy Komisar

2011-09-05T08:29:00.003-04:00

Randy Komisar

In the summer of 2000, when I was trying to decide whether to leave the World Bank to start GlobalGiving with Mari, I read a book called The Monk and the Riddle, by Randy Komisar. After I finished, I sent Randy a long rambling email describing the general idea. Though we had never met, Randy responded immediately with encouragement, ideas, and an offer to help.

That note from Randy helped give me the courage to leave a high-paying, secure, prestigious post and take a leap into the unknown. And over the past decade, Randy's steady presence in the background has been a guiding force for us through both good times and bad. His experience at Apple, General Magic, Lucas Arts Entertainment - and most recently Kleiner Perkins - gives him insights few others have. Often he pushed us to do something two years before we realized it needed to get done.

His most recent book, with John Mullins, is Getting to Plan B, which Bob Sutton describes as "more than the most useful book I've ever read on entrepreneurship." I am most grateful for Randy's friendship and support over the past decade. Thank you, Randy.

100 Days of Gratitude - Day 1: Lee Whittle

2011-08-30T09:28:00.001-04:00

Mom and me, 1979.

The only plan I had for this series was to save the best for last. I did not expect my mom to die suddenly a few days after I wrote the prelude. All of us were stunned, since her doctor had seen her a few days before she died and said she was doing better than any time during the last decade. At least my mom got to spend a lot of time with her kids and grandkids this summer. She was overjoyed to meet her latest grandchild - my son - and watch him play with his cousins.

To say my mom was an iconoclast would be an understatement. She came from a hard-scrabble immigrant family that did not know how to provide warmth to children. For some reason, my mom decided that she would be different, and she set out to create for herself and her kids a life of love and affection. Sometimes she drove us crazy with her compliments and encouragement, especially since it was never offset with any criticism. It was only later in life that I realized how rare it is to grow up with such a mother. Last week my sister found my mom's calendar, and on it was an entry for the following week that said "Wednesday: make sure to compliment [one of my siblings] on her photographs." That pretty much summed up my mom.

Let there be no mistake. Mom could be irascible and stubborn. One thing that drove me crazy earlier in life was her almost pathological inability (or unwillingness) to acknowledge the downsides of life. But one dark day a few years back, when I was struggling with a setback, my mom called me on the phone and read me the following poem by Langston Hughes. She knew the score. And I will miss her something fierce.

Mother to Son

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted with the permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

Source: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Books, 1994

100 Days of Gratitude - Prelude

2011-08-20T06:20:00.000-04:00

This year I turned fifty, which I expect is about the half-way point for me. I have had my share of pain and struggles and failures and disappointments. But on balance, I have had a rich and rewarding life, with great friends and a loving family. And hopefully I have given something back along the way.

As I wrote recently, some of what I have achieved has been under my own steam. I have worked reasonably hard (though not as hard as many people); I have a decent brain (though it's not the biggest around); and I am a fairly nice and thoughtful person a lot of the time (those who have seen my temper will snicker, rightfully, at this).

But I have also been lucky. And in particular I have had many wonderful family members, mentors, colleagues, and friends along the way, and I have gotten at least one big lucky break for every several bad breaks. For all of these, I am grateful, since they are in large part responsible for whom I am, and for the rich life I have lived.

So I want to devote a few posts - one hundred of them - to recognizing some people and things that have made a big difference in my life. This is an experiment that may fizzle out fast. Or it may go on beyond one hundred, who knows. (In any case, I am sure that I will miss many people and things that have made a difference, and for that let me apologize in advance.) There will be no rhyme or reason to the order in which the posts come.

In Defense of Aid

2011-08-18T18:50:00.000-04:00

Someone asked me the other day if I believed in aid. "You have been so critical of the aid system," he said. "Why don't you just do something else?" In response, I related the following.

In the 1970s, a combination of factors left a ten year-old boy living on and off below the poverty line, with four siblings at home and a single mother. His mother stayed at home to take care of his pre-school age sister, because child care would have cost more than any salary she could make; she did not have a college degree and had few marketable skills. The small city he lived in had few economic opportunities; it once had been prosperous, but its main industry (textiles) had moved away, and the city was down at the heels and felt grim. The boy delivered newspapers and scooped ice cream to make a little money, but it was not enough to make a fundamental difference to his circumstances.

Fortunately, there was a school lunch program that enabled the boy to get reduced price meals at noon. He had to stand in a separate line with a separate color ticket, which he found humiliating, but there was nothing he could do if he wanted lunch. As the impact of inflation reduced the real value of the family's fixed income, the school system even allowed the boy to get free lunches. Free lunches involved yet another color ticket with even greater stigma, but the boy used them when he had to, and he ate decent lunches.

In a couple of years, when the boy's youngest sister was able to go to school, the boy's mother enrolled in a government-funded job training program. It was not particularly well run, but it did give her some basic skills, and provided a structure for her to search for a job. Eventually she got a few jobs, not great ones at first, but she kept at it, and after a time she found an excellent employer with whom she eventually stayed for many years. Her paychecks helped stabilize the family's income, and helped make up for the effects that the big inflation of the '70s had taken on it.

As the boy moved up through the grades, he was determined to make something of himself and he studied hard. But he also got lucky. A private school thirty miles away offered him a full scholarship, including room and board. This was a big break for him. The school was good academically, and it made the boy much more worldly by introducing him to networks that would make it easier for him professionally in the future. He was not the top student in the class, but he did well enough so that a private foundation offered him a full scholarship for four years at an excellent state university. The foundation was so open-minded that they even gave him a grant to travel around the world one semester to study international development.

When he decided to go to graduate school, that school offered him a generous scholarship funded by a private donor. And the school helped the boy (well, he was 24 years old by then), take a year off to work in the Philippines to get some real experience, so that he would be more marketable on the job market.

At age 25, after finishing his graduate degree, the boy got a real job - a good job - where he was able to pay his own way. He spent the next 25 years in international development, (hopefully) doing some good in the world.

That boy received a lot of aid along the way. Some of it was public aid, and some of it was private aid, some in the form of loans, but most in the way of grants.

That boy was me. And that success story is why I remain optimistic about aid, despite its many failures and disappointments. I think that if we try hard, think critically, and work together, we can make aid as effective for millions of others as it was for me.

More Art than Science

2011-07-26T11:51:00.006-04:00

Today, during my annual physical, my doctor, who is well known and widely quoted in the Washington region, asked me what I did for a living.

I said "Oh, I work in international development." And then, after a pause, I said, "We are trying to become more scientific, by doing more randomized controlled trials like you do in the medical field."

He looked up at me sharply and laughed. "Are you crazy?" he replied. "Only a very small proportion of what I do is based on randomized trials. In fact, most medical treatments are not based on rigorous evidence at all.Whatever anyone might tell you, people are just too complex and too different to do lots of good randomized trials."

"Well, then, why do people say you are such a good doctor?" I asked him.

"I guess I may be better than other doctors at trial and error. I just get people to try things, and if they don't work, then I get them to try other things. Being a doctor is really much more of an art than a science."

World Bank as Convener 1st, Lender 2nd?

2011-07-25T15:37:00.001-04:00

"Are you sure we should do this in the World Bank atrium?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "Why not?"

I tried to act confident, but I was terrified. It was February 1998, and on the phone was a managing director, second only in power to the president of the World Bank. He was known for asking questions that were actually orders. Arguing rather than obeying was considered ill-advised.

"Well," he said, "we may have outside visitors that day. Do you think they should see some of those crazy ideas that staff may come up with? What if we relocated the event to the basement, out of the way?"

A small innovation team, with encouragement from Jim Wolfensohn, the Bank's president, had decided to launch the first-ever Innovation Marketplace, a one-day event when any Bank staff member (regardless of title or seniority) could propose an idea for helping the Bank better fight poverty. We would award $5 million to help fund the start-up of the most promising ideas. We had decided to hold the event in the atrium of the Bank, a beautiful space that soars thirteen stories.

The only problem was that the atrium was almost never used for public events; it was always eerily quiet and deserted, even sterile. You never wanted to linger there - you always hurried through. The culture of the Bank at that time was such that everyone worked behind closed doors, beavering away on in-depth country or sector studies designed to find out the right answers to various development challenges. Staff emerged only for the occasional review meetings, or to go on mission to the countries they worked on.

My, oh, my how the world - and the World Bank - have changed since then. A couple of months ago, I went back to my old stomping grounds to witness an Apps for Development competition. Not only was the Bank's atrium a beehive of activity, but there was even techno music pumping up the mood of the crowd before the announcement of the event's winners.

Stephanie Strom recently wrote a nice article in the NY Times about how the Bank is opening its "treasure chest of data" for researchers and others around the world to use. The articles has good insights into the benefits of making data public; and the fact that the World Bank (previously among the most secretive of aid institutions) is now making such huge strides is sure to encourage other agencies to do the same. (The UNDP also created a very impressive open data portal for some of its projects.)

Sharing data is a big leap, but there is now a window of opportunity for the Bank to do something much, much bigger. Back in 1998, with my heart pounding, I stood my ground with the Managing Director, and the Innovation Marketplace was a huge success; by cutting through the usual layers of bureaucracy and giving everyone an equal voice, the event allowed all sorts of good ideas to bubble up, any many of them soon became major strategic. In some sense, we were democratizing the World Bank, even if for only one day.

Building on that success, in early 2000 we went on to launch the Development Marketplace, which allowed anyone in the world (not just the Bank) to propose an idea for funding. The planning of this event also generated a lot of controversy (and not only from senior managers this time), but it was a big success, too. And though I left the World Bank shortly afterwards to co-found GlobalGiving, the Bank went on to replicate the Development Marketplace many times, including in some seventy countries around the world over the past decade. Country directors would sometime report that it was the first time they had been able to get civil society groups and government officials in one room together talking about ideas and solutions rather than just arguing.

Nonetheless, despite their success, these marketplaces have remained peripheral to World Bank's main business. In the decade since my departure, many former colleagues complained to me that the Bank was failing to innovate in ways that would keep it relevant for a changing world.

That may be about to change. Bob Zoellick, the Bank's current president, recently talked in a speech about the "democratization" of development, where the Bank and other aid agencies no longer pretend to have a monopoly on understanding problems and devising solutions. Bank experts would still have a great deal of technical expertise, but the role of Bank staff would shift. Instead of trying to find and hire the elusive "best expert in the world on subject X," the Bank would hire very good experts who are capable of leading a conversation among other experts, government officials, and regular citizens about the most pressing problems and the most viable potential solutions. Bank staff would in a sense become "hosts" of conversations about what to do, and then would have the ability to financially support the initiatives and approaches that arise from these conversations.

Hosting effective conversations is hard, and it may be the most in-demand skill at the Bank in the decade ahead. If the Bank can make progress in this area, however, the payoff for the institution could be large. In addition, by modeling openness and an ability to listen, the Bank would be putting indirect pressure on governments around the world to do the same. If regular people are able to comment on and even contribute to the design of World Bank projects, they are surely going to begin demanding the same treatment from their own governments. The resulting increase in citizen voice and government responsiveness could end up having a far more important impact than any particular Bank project(s).

Zoellick has assembled a solid team to help the Bank remake itself. Sanjay Pradhan, Randi Ryterman, Aleem Walji, and others are helping lead a conversation within the Bank on ways to cultivate new thinking and approaches. As the NY Times article notes, significant culture change is going to be required, and that is always tough. And change will also demand hard thinking about the World Bank's business model, which currently relies on generating a spread on its loans and other financial instruments. Incentives within the institution remain tied to the ability of staff to make loans and help the institution generate the income that it needs to operate.

The good news is that the best staff at the World Bank are leading the way. A while back, some of my former colleagues hosted an informal all-day Saturday session for health officials in a Latin American country. No ties were allowed, and there was no rigid agenda. When I told one of the Bank conveners that I was sorry he had to work on a Saturday, he told me that it was one of the most productive days of his career. "For once, we did not give them a long lecture," he told me. "We just served them pizza and kept the conversation headed in the right direction, injecting bits of information but not pressing my own views too hard."

As a result, the health officials swapped stories about what was working and what wasn't in their country. They were able to be candid about their failures as well as their successes. The conversation was not about What is the RIGHT ANSWER? Rather, it was about What are some reasonable things to try in our country, and how can we best evaluate the results? The participants liked the experience so much that one of the officials present hosted a similar session, with Bank help, for other countries in the region. The effort led to a great deal of social capital that allowed successes and failures to be honestly shared, thereby speeding experimentation and improving feedback loops.

My friend told me he felt he had helped advance reform more on that single day than in months of formal meetings and expert presentations. Instead of being a Bank expert pushing for the RIGHT policy, he was helping a country's own experts iterate toward an approach that would work in their context. Furthermore, the trust and social capital that emanated from these meetings led the countries involved to seek several hundred million dollars of funding from the Bank to support their reform agendas. The revenue from these loans in turn enable the Bank staff to provide additional intellectual support, including hosting more conversations.

Got to Admit it's Getting Better

2011-07-21T12:40:00.000-04:00

Over the last one hundred years, the physical well being of the world's population has improved far more than in all of the previous natural history of humankind.

Charles Kenny's recent book Getting Better is an antidote to the pessimism many of us feel about the state of the world. Those of us in international development f are frustrated we have not been able to find a toolkit of approaches that reliably increases growth in poor countries. Kenny acknowledges this frustration, but shows that many indicators of wellbeing have improved rapidly even in the absence of consistent economic growth:

Global average life expectancy increased from around thirty-one years in 1900 to sixty-six by 2000.

In terms of GDP, there is an increasing divergence among countries in the world, with many of the poorer falling further and further behind. But with respect to other indicators of wellbeing, there is a striking convergence. Infant mortality has plunged by over half in eighty percent of the world's poor countries in the last fifty years. Literacy rates in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 28 to 61 percent from 1970 to 2000. Some very poor countries such as Vietnam have achieved 95% literacy. Democratic ideas and practices are spreading rapidly (notwithstanding big setbacks and uneven progress), and violence is way down: global homicide levels, for example, are about one-third of what they were in England in the Middle Ages.

How can this be? It turns out that it is not very expensive to improve these aspects of wellbeing. This is because of tremendous innovation in technologies and ideas in some domains, ranging from vaccines to understanding germs to oral rehydration therapy to increased agricultural productivity. In the old days, even the wealthiest and most powerful of kings died early for lack of the cheap modern vaccines that keep the most vulnerable and poor people alive today.

The state of Kerala in India, with a per capita income of $300 per year, has been able to achieve a life expectancy of 72 and a literacy rate of 91%. By comparison, the US has a per capita income of $29,000 and has a life expectancy only five years greater than Kerala. Lest we think that achieving those extra five years of life expectancy requires huge resources, take the case of Costa Rica. Life expectancy in Costa Rica is two years greater than the US, but income per capita is only $6,500, and Costa Rica spends only $305 per capita per year on health, compared to $5,711 in the US.

Getting Better is full of facts and figures such as these. Kenny neither minimizes the remaining problems (poor people do have fewer opportunities and poverty does equal misery for millions of people), but he does want to zoom out and take the long view so we can see we are making progress. He does note that the spread of even the cheap and effectives innovations he discusses has been uneven - and thus there is great scope for further progress.

Progress must often come on the demand side rather than the supply side, Kenny argues. In many (not all) cases, there is enough money in the budget for education and health programs, but people don't demand the right services for lack of knowledge about their potential effects. How to do better marketing is thus a key challenge for the aid business - an area in which we have made only modest investments. Relatively small investments in transparency measures can also help stimulate demand as well. Local people are often told that there are not enough resources in the budget to do X, Y, or Z, but once local people are able to see what the money is actually being spent on, they are able to bring to bear pressures to get what they need.

Kenny closes the book with suggestions for how to catalyze the flow of ideas and hasten the uptake of innovations in health, education, and other areas. This is the weakest part of the book, but at least he is offering a framework for further analysis and experimentation. The bad news is, as Kenny says, we don't know how to make people financially richer. The good news is that we do know how to make them better off, and that fact should motivate us all.

Bad News for Foxes?

2011-07-18T16:04:00.000-04:00

My friend April Harding sent me this talk at the Long Now Foundation by Philip Tetlock, who has spent many years studying how well experts perform at predicting future events. Tetlock's research shows that foxes are better than hedgehogs at predicting the future.* And interestingly, the less confident people are about their predictions, the more likely their predictions are to be accurate! (Foxes also tend to be less confident than hedgehogs.)

This result makes many of us (myself included) happy, because we consider ourselves foxes. The only problem, according to Tetlock, is that even foxes barely edge out simple mathematical algorithms** when it comes to accuracy.

----------------
* Isaiah Berlin famously defined hedgehogs as people who have one big idea through which they interpret everything they see. Ideologues of all stripes are examples of hedgehogs. Foxes, by contrast, bring an eclectic set of perspectives to bear on their interpretation of events and phenomena.

**For example, things will continue unchanged. Or, things will continue to change at the same rate as in the recent past.

Your Worst Fear Realized

2011-06-15T20:22:00.001-04:00

My friend Keith Hansen sent me a link to Conan O'Brien's recent graduation speech at Dartmouth. The speech is a refreshing change from the "Follow your dreams" and "Whatever you can conceive, you can do" pablum that we hear and read in so many places.

Here is an excerpt:

Nietzsche famously said "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But what he failed to stress is that it almost kills you. Disappointment stings and, for driven, successful people like yourselves it is disorienting. What Nietzsche should have said is "Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you watch a lot of Cartoon Network and drink mid-price Chardonnay at 11 in the morning."
Now, by definition, Commencement speakers at an Ivy League college are considered successful. But a little over a year ago, I experienced a profound and very public disappointment. I did not get what I wanted, and I left a system that had nurtured and helped define me for the better part of 17 years. I went from being in the center of the grid to not only off the grid, but underneath the coffee table that the grid sits on, lost in the shag carpeting that is underneath the coffee table supporting the grid. It was the making of a career disaster, and a terrible analogy.
But then something spectacular happened. Fogbound, with no compass, and adrift, I started trying things. I grew a strange, cinnamon beard. I dove into the world of social media. I started tweeting my comedy. I threw together a national tour. I played the guitar. I did stand-up, wore a skin-tight blue leather suit, recorded an album, made a documentary, and frightened my friends and family. Ultimately, I abandoned all preconceived perceptions of my career path and stature and took a job on basic cable with a network most famous for showing reruns, along with sitcoms created by a tall, black man who dresses like an old, black woman. I did a lot of silly, unconventional, spontaneous and seemingly irrational things and guess what: with the exception of the blue leather suit, it was the most satisfying and fascinating year of my professional life. To this day I still don't understand exactly what happened, but I have never had more fun, been more challenged—and this is important—had more conviction about what I was doing.
How could this be true? Well, it's simple: There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized. I went to college with many people who prided themselves on knowing exactly who they were and exactly where they were going. At Harvard, five different guys in my class told me that they would one day be President of the United States. Four of them were later killed in motel shoot-outs. The other one briefly hosted Blues Clues, before dying senselessly in yet another motel shoot-out. Your path at 22 will not necessarily be your path at 32 or 42. One's dream is constantly evolving, rising and falling, changing course. This happens in every job, but because I have worked in comedy for twenty-five years, I can probably speak best about my own profession.
Way back in the 1940s there was a very, very funny man named Jack Benny. He was a giant star, easily one of the greatest comedians of his generation. And a much younger man named Johnny Carson wanted very much to be Jack Benny. In some ways he was, but in many ways he wasn't. He emulated Jack Benny, but his own quirks and mannerisms, along with a changing medium, pulled him in a different direction. And yet his failure to completely become his hero made him the funniest person of his generation. David Letterman wanted to be Johnny Carson, and was not, and as a result my generation of comedians wanted to be David Letterman. And none of us are. My peers and I have all missed that mark in a thousand different ways. But the point is this : It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It's not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention.
So, at the age of 47, after 25 years of obsessively pursuing my dream, that dream changed. For decades, in show business, the ultimate goal of every comedian was to host The Tonight Show. It was the Holy Grail, and like many people I thought that achieving that goal would define me as successful. But that is not true. No specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you. In 2000—in 2000—I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.

If Not Randomized Trials, Then What?

2011-06-01T12:05:00.002-04:00

The above chart shows the returns to various approaches to keeping kids in school, according to research conducted by the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT. The results are striking. Spending $100 on public awareness in Madagascar yields a whopping 40 extra years of student attendance. $100 spent on deworming in Kenya generates an additional 28+ years of student attendance. Public awareness and deworming campaigns are 10 to 40 times more cost effective than providing school meals, scholarships, or uniforms.

J-PAL has popularized the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in development aid, a movement that has recently been highlighted by Nick Kristof in the NY Times. Kristof describes RCTs as the "hottest thing in the fight against poverty." And when you see striking results like those in the chart above, it is hard not to get excited.

Michael Kremer, a professor at Harvard, pioneered some of the earliest randomized trials, including those on de-worming in Kenya. He has gone on to help design and oversee USAID's new Development Innovation Ventures, which promises to seed a lot of new approaches on the condition that they be rigorously evaluated. Michael's common sense approach to finding out what works (who would have thought that de-worming would be such a high-return investment in education!) makes this USAID initiative potentially promising.

The good news about RCTs is that they can guide the design of development projects in some circumstances. For example, in the regions of Kenya where Michael did his work, the most rational allocation of education expenditures might be first to de-worm all the children. Only after that is done would it make sense to spend money on things like subsidizing uniforms. I also have argued that the expensive Millennium Village Project should be subject to an RCT "competition" with other approaches.

But promising new tools often get promoted as silver bullets, and RCTs are no exception. This inevitably causes a backlash, which in turn means that, after 15 minutes of fame, many good tools fail to be adopted to an optimal degree. Rachel Glennerster, the director of J-PAL, told Owen Barder last year that there was a risk of too much hype, and that RCTs were not feasible or desirable in all circumstances. For those interested in this topic, I recommend the full interview.

What are the limitations or even downsides of RCTs? Angus Deaton is one of the strongest critics of RCTs, for a number of conceptual and methodological reasons. He argues that any statistically valid RCT must be very narrow in terms of applicability. For example, the findings on de-worming in Kenya cannot be generalized even beyond the villages in which the experiments were run. To his point, J-PAL's chart above shows that the returns to de-worming in India are only about 10-12% of the returns to de-worming in Kenya. To the extent RCTs are so context specific, their usefulness is severely limited.

Deaton also argues that RCTs may capture the mean but not the variance of the effects that a project has on beneficiaries in the studied population. Though an initiative may on average have positive effects, it may have a negative impact on a substantial proportion (or even majority) of the beneficiary population. And vice versa: an initiative which shows a negative average impact might benefit many beneficiaries. Drawing any sweeping conclusions under these conditions, Deaton argues, is not warranted, and could even be dangerous.

Others, such as Arvind Subramanian at the Center for Global Development, argue that even if RCTs can shed light on the effect of a development project in limited circumstances, they cannot tell us anything about whether aid itself works or not.

A young researcher from within the RCT movement noted to me recently that randomized trials can only predict marginal impacts and cannot be extrapolated. For example, the effect of public information may have the effect of keeping individual kids in school one month more; providing 12 times more information will not keep the kids in school an extra 12 months, which may be the goal.

At some point, a clever economist will try to carry out a randomized controlled trial of RCTs. She will attempt to answer the question: Does the use of RCTs lead to changes in the design of aid projects that translate into improved well being for people in developing countries?

My guess is that such a meta-RCT would not show a strong positive impact, for several reasons. First is the cost of RCTs. Even if they are a gold standard (which Deaton disputes), the costs are such that they will only be able to be done on a minuscule proportion of development initiatives.

Second, the current incentive structure in the aid industry results in an attenuated link between evidence on impact and changes in project design. Aid providers face little competitive or other pressure to seek out the initiatives that have the greatest impact. In fact, Lant Pritchett argues that, under the current structure, it "pays to be ignorant" because confessing failure hurts you more than success benefits you (in terms of political and financial support).

The bottom line is that RCTs will become like Consumer Reports trials in the consumer marketplace. Consumer Reports is a useful adjunct to decision making for some things (although often I can't find the exact models they tested!) But innovation in service of improved quality and lower cost comes from market pressures arising from consumer feedback through purchasing decisions.

In the same way, the best hope for improving the impact of aid initiatives is to create much richer and more real-time feedback loops between beneficiaries and aid providers.

Instead of determining needs ex-ante through expert studies, we need to start with asking beneficiaries "What do YOU want?" New technologies and approaches enable us to do this on a far wider scale, at dramatically lower cost, than ever before. And then once a project is underway, we need to ask beneficiaries "How do YOU think it's going and what changes need to be made?" And once that project is finished, we need to ask "Given what we learned from the previous project, what is the next thing you want?" The faster we can iterate through these questions, the faster we will get to greater impact.

Naturally, experts should provide technical analysis such as RCT results to beneficiaries to help inform their responses. But in the end, we need to make the beneficiary king.

R.I.P. Aid Watch

2011-05-23T11:03:00.001-04:00

On May 19, Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi announced that their blog Aid Watch was ending, after running about two years. I was shocked, and (after checking my calendar to make sure it was not April 1), dismayed.

Who else, I thought to myself,was going to call B.S. on the foibles and failings (and sometimes nearly criminal negligence) of certain aid agencies? Who else was going to relentlessly debunk the egomaniacal schemes of certain self-styled aid messiahs? Who else was going to have the guts to speak truth to power? Who else was going to remind us that so many new programs had been tried in the past, with disappointing if not disastrous results?

Who else, I asked myself, was going to demand each day that aid simply "benefit the poor?" Who else was going to point us toward new ways of providing aid that actually take into account what the poor want? Who else was going to contrast the failures of closed, top-down aid systems with the successes of open-access systems that provide fast, rich feedback systems? Who else was going to redefine the debate about aid?

Aid Watch was controversial from the start. Bill and Laura did not hesitate to take on sensitive issues, and they did not cloak their criticisms in vague bureaucratic language. Typical evaluations of aid programs are dense and oblique, with shortcomings buried under mounds of data and jargon. After a couple hundred pages of analysis touting the benefits of a program, official evaluations often tip their hat to failure with a paragraph beginning "But challenges remain..." And then phase two of the same program begins with only a modest modification to a fundamentally failed design.

Aid Watch specialized in cutting through all of the obfuscation to say bluntly "This does not work. We should stop it now and do something else if we really care about helping the poor."

In their valedictory post, Bill and Laura promise that the work of Aid Watch will continue, with longer and more in-depth pieces under the guise of Aid Watch's parent - the Development Research Institute (DRI), at New York University, where Bill is Professor of Economics. I, for one, am very much looking forward to the next chapter of Aid Watch.

Treating Employees as People

2011-05-23T09:23:00.002-04:00

Over the period 1998-2008, the stock of the companies voted "best to work for" appreciated nearly seven times as much as the stock of the average company.
The most admired companies on Fortune Magazine's list had double the market returns of their competitors over a seven year period.
Only 13 percent of unhappy employees recommend their company's products, vs 78 percent of happy employees.

Those are just some of the findings reported in Dave Ulrich and Wendy Ulrich's book The Why of Work. The authors argue that companies that treat people as just another factor of production are increasingly at a competitive disadvantage. Conversely, companies that engage their employees in a meaningful way have higher market returns.

Why? The authors offer the following possible explanations:

"Employees are committed, productive, and likely to stay with the company
Customers pick up on employee attitudes and are more likely to do business with the company
Investors have confidence in the company's future, giving it a higher market value
The company's reputation in the community is enhanced."

There are many approaches to creating a meaningful work environment. One of the simplest (if still rare) is just to treat employees like real people, with valuable insights and instincts for what is best for the business. Another is for the company to engage with the broader communities where it does business, by providing mentoring and volunteering and/or by financially supporting schools, clinics, and other social initiatives. In other words, by treating the broader community members as real people.

What if all businesses treated their employees and customers this way?

Innovation and Parallel Processing

2011-05-16T21:56:00.000-04:00

Tim Harford

This idea of allowing several ideas to develop in parallel runs counter to our instincts: We naturally tend to ask, "What is the best option?" and concentrate on that. But given that life is so unpredictable, what seemed initially like an inferior option may turn out to be exactly what we need. It's sensible in many areas of life to leave room for exploring parallel possibilities—if you want to make friends, join several social clubs, not just the one that appears most promising—but it is particularly true in the area of innovation, where a single good idea or new technology can be so valuable. In an uncertain world, we need more than just Plan A; and that means finding safe havens for Plans B, C, D, and beyond.

That is from an excerpt in Slate from Tim Harford's new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure.

Tim notes how breakthrough ideas often come from outside the mainstream. The famed British Spitfire plane is credited by many with having prevented defeat by Germany in WWII. Yet the plane almost never came to be. Not only was the inventor unconventional, but so was the source of funding at a time when the project was nearly cancelled:

Rescue came from the most unlikely character: Dame Fanny Houston, born in humble circumstances, had become the richest woman in the country after marrying a shipping millionaire and inheriting his fortune. Lady Houston's eclectic philanthropy knew few bounds: She supported oppressed Christians in Russia, coalminers, and the women's rights movement. And in 1931 she wrote a check to Supermarine that covered the entire development costs of the Spitfire's predecessor, the S6. Lady Houston was furious at the government's lack of support: "My blood boiled in indignation, for I know that every true Briton would rather sell his last shirt than admit that England could not afford to defend herself against all-comers." The S6 flew at an astonishing speed of 407.5 mph less than three decades after the Wright Brothers launched the Wright Flyer. England's pride was intact, and so was the Spitfire project. No wonder the historian A.J.P. Taylor later remarked that "the Battle of Britain was won by Chamberlain, or perhaps by Lady Houston."

(Note that given her range of interests, no one would have accused Dame Houston of practicing 'strategic philanthropy!')

Hat tip for this excerpt to Michael Woolcock of the World Bank and Harvard. His own recent blog makes excellent related points concerning aid initiatives. I have been heavily influenced in my own thinking by discussions with Michael over the years.

Fatal Errors vs. Real-Time Feedback

2011-05-02T11:50:00.000-04:00

Fatal error: Unable to open file

That was the response when I clicked on the Email Us link at the US Postal Service website this morning. Earlier, I had stood in a long line at our neighborhood post office while the one postal clerk on duty valiantly tried to process all the customers. While waiting, I looked around and noted once that the run-down facility looks like something from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. (At least in the Soviet Union, there were more clerks on duty, even if they were not always friendly.)

The clerk in our neighborhood station has always been nice to me. She labors under horrendous conditions, but if I smile and am nice to her, she always reciprocates. Though the lines are predictably very long at the station during certain periods, and USPS never provides more clerks to assist, I try never to complain to the lone woman on duty, because I know she has no power to change things.

While standing in line this time, I decided I would give some feedback to the US Postal Service itself. I looked around at the walls in vain for a sign saying "Questions? Comments? Call us at xxx or email us at yyy." Then I realized I have a USPS app on my iPhone. Great! I thought, and fired it up. Alas, the app provided lots of information about zipcodes and rates but no way to give feedback. Darn, but at least they would have a twitter account, I figured, and ran a search on my phone. Someone had in fact claimed the @usps name, but had made no tweets and followed zero people.

So I gave up and was finally waited on by the nice lady, who was relieved my particular parcel was easy to process. Then I went home, and sat down at my computer and thought I would give USPS one last try. Success! There it was on USPS.com - a link saying Questions? Comments? Click here to email us. I mentally apologized to USPS before clicking, and then my screen went blank and said: "Fatal error: Unable to open file."

How many agencies or companies do you know that make it nearly impossible for users to give feedback? They are usually the ones whose leaders say "We hear loud and clear from our customers that..." But the truth is that they don't hear loud and clear at all. They only hear sporadically and indirectly, through surveys and analyzing data.

What if each supervisor at USPS had a dashboard that had real-time feedback from customers from email, twitter, text message, and the USPS website? And what if the supervisor's boss could see that feedback in real time? And what if, maybe even more important, the public could see the same feedback in real time? How would that change incentives and behavior?

What if this were on the desktop of each USPS supervisor,
on the wall of each post office, and viewable by
everyone on the web or smart phone?

My own guess is that my neighborhood post office would be a lot cleaner, there would be plenty of clerks during peak periods, and they would rarely run out of supplies.

(Extra credit: Which company or agency do *you* think would benefit most from such a dashboard?)

More Tales of Two Tails

2011-05-01T21:45:00.000-04:00

The following is cross-posted from AidWatch.

An eloquent 3 year-old would have been better asking "What the dickens are you talking about? Who is defining success? Who says failure is bad, anyway?" - Joe

Earlier I blogged about aid cheerleaders and critics. Each camp argues about the mean outcome of aid rather than the distribution of impact among projects. Both camps agree that some projects have positive results and others negative. So why not try to figure out which projects work and focus our resources on them?

I got some great and insightful comments and a few nice aid distribution graphs from readers. Here are some key themes:

The mean *does* matter if the distribution is random. In other words, if we can't predict in advance what types of projects will succeed, we should only spend more resources if the mean outcome is positive.
Many people believe that on average the biggest positive returns come from investment in health projects.
We should also look at the distribution of impact even within successful projects, because even projects that are successful on average can have negative impacts on poorer or more vulnerable people.
Given the difficulty in predicting ex-ante what will work, a lot of experimentation is necessary. But do we believe that existing evaluation systems provide the feedback loops necessary to shift aid resources toward successful initiatives?
"Joe," the commenter above, argues that in any case traditional evaluators (aid experts) are not in the best position to decide what works and what doesn't.

From reader Daniel Kyba: "Those which do a good job are the ones with defined and observable measures - profit/loss; live/die and so on. These measures provide a form of a feedback mechanism at the project level to which the aid provider can respond. As you move towards the world of fuzzy concepts and measures that is where the ineffectiveness occurs, due to the lack of feedback mechanisms and because there is less definition of success/failure."

From reader Steve White: "Here is my graph based on two stylized facts about aid projects: 1) most projects have very marginal impacts (agricultural tools to villages, microcredit, school construction, textbooks, scholarships, deworming...) and 2) some health projects have HUGE impacts (vaccinations, DDT, bednets)." The two bars represent impacts between -1 and 0, and between 0 and 1"

Petr Jansky sent a paper he is working on with colleagues at Oxford about cocoa farmers in Ghana. The local trade association was upset that they could not get pervasive adoption of a new package of fertilizer and other inputs designed to increase yields. According to their models, the benefits to farmers should be very high. The study found that - on average - that was true, but that the package of inputs has negative returns to farmers with certain types of soil or other constraints. Farmers with zero or negative returns were simply opting out.

At first glance, these findings seem obvious and trivial. But they are profound, in at least two ways. First, retention rates are an implicit and easily observable proxy for net returns to farmers. We don't need expensive outside evaluations to tell us whether the overall project is working or not. And second, permitting farmers to decide acknowledges differential impacts on different people even within a single project.

What other ways could we design aid projects to allow the beneficiaries themselves to evaluate the impact and opt in or out depending on the impact for them personally? And how would it change the life of aid workers if their projects were evaluated not by outside experts and formal analyses but by beneficiaries themselves speaking through the proxy of adoption?

An Expedia for Development?

2011-04-19T14:53:00.001-04:00

Will the successful aid agency of the future look more like Expedia – a platform on which users can make their own choices – and less like the travel agent of yesterday, experts to whom the public was willing to delegate decisions?

That is Owen Barder, writing about the transformative impact that transparency of information - in conjunction with new technology - will have on international aid. No one has better insights into this topic than Owen. Two points bear particular emphasis:

a) Information from beneficiaries and users about project execution and quality is key to motivating real change. Much of the effort to date has focused on releasing information about spending rather than results.

b) Donor agencies are not best placed to decide the format of data reports. The most effective data tools will be created by others using raw data provided by the agencies. In that context, I was pleased this week to attend the ceremony announcing the winners and runners up of the World Bank's Apps for Development contest.

You can read more from Owen on this topic here.

When Users = Funders

2011-04-18T17:50:00.003-04:00

If there’s a bug in EpiSurveyor, our paying users will email us until it’s fixed, sometimes several times. Or more.

A few months ago, I met Joel Selanikio, founder of DataDyne, a non-profit "social business" that creates mobile data and communication tools, primarily for public health. Joel is a practicing pediatrician and former CDC epidemiologist who has seen the power of good data in improving health and saving lives. Yet poor data collection leaves huge gaps in health care, especially in developing countries. Instead of just accepting these gaps as a fact of life, Joel did what entrepreneurs do: he set out to do something about it.

Like many social entrepreneurs, Joel has had his challenges with funding from fickle foundations. Though DataDyne's basic product is free to promote wide dissemination, Joel was forced to introduce fees for higher-end tools to help cover costs. Datadyne has generated some revenue from these premium tools, but maybe even more important has been the customer feedback the company is now getting.

I asked Joel to describe the unexpected outcome of his fees, and here is what he told me:

From Joel Selanikio, CEO of DataDyne

At DataDyne, we create software to support public health and international development. Our mobile data collection product, EpiSurveyor, is the most widely used such software in international development, with users in more than 170 countries.

Making them pay

We got this far with funding from great organizations like the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation, but at a certain point we realized that we needed to diversity our funding in order to make sure we were truly sustainable (it can be pretty precarious depending on one or two grants to survive!). After much thought, about a year ago we decided to start using the “freemium” pay model, where you give away a basic version of the software and charge for a higher-end version.

This approach is controversial in international development: many foundations only fund tech projects if the software is given away for free – even though the mobile phone, the most successful technology of all time in poor countries, is itself sold to the poorest people on earth, not given away. And even though many organizations using our technology have millions of dollars in funding.

Our results are promising: within 2-3 years our sales revenue will be enough to sustain us completely. After that, we’ll be able to provide excellent and affordable mobile data collection software to every single organization in the world that wants it (EpiSurveyor is a web application, so it scales really well). Without more grants.

Who’s the boss?

Revenue and sustainability turn out to be only part of the benefits of the charge-the-user model: since we started charging some of our users, our user feedback has increased tremendously. It turns out that if someone is paying for something, they feel they have the right to criticize (and we agree).

If there’s a bug in EpiSurveyor, our paying users will email us until it’s fixed, sometimes several times. Or more.

If there’s a feature they want, we hear about that, too. And because we get more and more of our revenue from users, rather than foundations, our very survival as an organization is now dependent on responding to the needs of those users. As they say in business: “if you don’t please the customer, someone else will.”

The bad proxy

This is all very different from being supported by grants, because when your money comes from a foundation your survival depends on pleasing the foundation – not necessarily the users. And people at foundations, who are as motivated and well meaning as I like to think I am, are nonetheless a poor proxy for what health workers on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa want or need (for example). The organizations that are now our customers, and that use EpiSurveyor to collect their critical data, are likely to be a better proxy because they’re our users and funders, not just our funders. Not a perfect proxy, but better: they use the software themselves, and they know when it needs improvement.

The educated-consumer model

As our funding model changes, and we take our marching orders directly from users, it’s made me think about how the source of funding can affect the quality of a development project. Foundation grants surely have a role to play: we never would have gotten to the revenue-from-users stage without seed grant money. Long-term, though, I believe it is better for sustainability and quality if at least a subset of the users pay for the services provided.

After all, that is exactly what the mobile phone companies are doing – in what may be the most important new technological rollout since the invention of the printing press – and the competition for customers’ money is forcing tremendous innovation and price reductions. Maybe we could use some of that in international development, too.

A Tale of Two Tails

2011-04-12T09:04:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I took my three and a half year old son to Princeton to a colloquium on foreign aid. Speaking were senior people from both the aid industry (including Raj Shah, Administrator of USAID) and academia (including Angus Deaton, one of the best professors I have ever had). There was a spirited discussion of whether aid "works."

Afterwords, my son asked "Dad, doesn't the distribution matter as much as the mean?"

"Yes," I replied. "It does. In fact, the distribution may be more important than the mean. Professor Deaton would be proud of you for pointing that out."

Fig 1: What aid cheerleaders believe

Let's assume that aid impact can be measured on a scale of -4 (horrendously harmful) to +4 (miraculously wonderful). Figure 1 shows the implicit belief of most aid cheerleaders. The average impact is +1, with most of the impact greater than zero. The cheerleaders say "Yes, there is a small part of aid in the shaded area under the curve that has negative effects, but those examples get too much publicity. We really need to do a better job of publicizing and explaining the large area under the curve that represents positive impact."

Fig 2: What aid critics believe

By contrast, the critics feel that Figure 2 is more accurate. They believe that the average impact is -1, with the vast majority of projects (the non-shaded area under the curve) having an impact less than zero. The impact of some projects even approaches the nightmare of -4. Most critics will concede that there are some projects (the shaded area) that have a positive impact, and if pressed they will offer some personal examples. (Professor Deaton offered certain health projects, for example.)

The important question is not whether aid as a whole "works," which has been the subject of a large number of papers in recent years. The real question is what the distribution of impact is.

So, readers, here is your homework assignment: 1) Do you consider yourself a cheerleader or critic? 2) Please download a blank version of the graph here, fill in your own guess at the distribution and email it to me. 3) Describe what types of projects you feel fall into the category of effective. I will post a follow up with selected responses and insights.

Happy is as Happy Does

2011-04-02T10:48:00.002-04:00

Artists create and critics analyze; few artists analyze well and few critics create good art.

That was my reaction to Martin Seligman's new book Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well Being, due in bookstores on April 5. Seligman, the godfather of the positive psychology movement, shows that he is an artist rather than a critic or theoretician.

In his new book, he sets out to expand the concepts outlined in his 2002 book Authentic Happiness. The earlier book described happiness as a combination of positive emotions, "flow," and meaning. In his new book, Seligman adds two more elements he considers critical: accomplishment and personal relationships. Together, these elements add up to well-being. Mix in some some self-esteem, resilience, and optimism, and you get flourishing.

If that sounds a little confusing, that's because it is. Conceptual coherence and theoretical frameworks are not this book's strong points. Seligman describes several exercises that are easy to do and result in a significant and lasting effect on people's self-reported sense of well being. (For example, each night, write down three things that went well that day and why.) Coming up with these exercises is high art - the description of their effect is compelling and left me promising myself to do them.

But instead of arguing his case by demonstrating it, Seligman spends too much of the book looking over his shoulder at his more theoretically inclined psychology colleagues, who are the high priests of that discipline. Seligman openly discusses the inferiority complex that lurks in the psyche of many experimental scientists such as himself, and he sets out to settle some scores with past and current colleagues. While this makes for entertaining reading for those with experience in the academy, most readers will be bored and distracted from the main question: what can people do to flourish by their own standards?

A quick look at his website suggests that the book could have been a great evidence-based how-to manual. And some of his insights could really lead to greater well being for society as a whole over the long term. But Seligman seems to feel that how-to manuals are not academically respectable, even if they are backed up by good evidence. This led him to write a book that is neither fish nor fowl. It is part theoretical, part instructional, part storytelling, part selling, and part personal introspection. Seligman admits that he refused much editorial assistance or feedback on the book, and it shows.

Though the writing and structure of the book are irritating, I wonder whether there is not something to Seligman's approach. There is a whole new genre of writing on science and social science that feels almost formulaic in its style. As much as I love books like Nudge and Freakonomics, there is something predictable about them. The cover design and colors, the tone, the just-so turns. A friend the other day described some of these books as fast-food reading: they taste great and go down easy and give you the illusion of learning. But the next week you actually don't remember much other than you were delighted by reading them. By contrast, readers who persevere will remember many of the points that Seligman made in this book - and will act on at least some of them.

Women Talkers and Black Tires

2011-03-28T09:57:00.000-04:00

The other day, I was having coffee with Steve Lynott, and was discussing my previous post about the near-failure of the company that created Angry Birds, the most popular iPhone app of all time. Steve told me that was a common story, and sent me the following great examples:

by Steve Lynott

Inventors and entrepreneurs unwilling to challenge their basic assumptions face great peril. Basketball and hockey players make moves that seem to defy physics; quarterbacks make changes for 10 other men in seconds on the line. Yet, business people often have a hard time making adjustments to their ideas or preconceptions quickly enough to capture the market. Those who do can win big, those who don’t can lose big.

The phone

At the dawn of the industrial revolution, the telephone was a revolution in business and at home. It was such a huge revolution the company that is now AT&T had to fend off over 700 major attacks on the original patent of the phone – which clearly Alexander Graham Bell got right. However, they completely missed on their early marketing strategies.

In the early adoption of the telephone, AT&T targeted white males (the executive) in big business, in big cities. They ultimately found they missed the market completely. The two most dominant users of phone were women talking to their friends down the street and farmers (35% market share for the first 20 years). AT&T was ultimately able to weather this turmoil due to their patents and first mover position.

Black tires

Crayola, LLC was originally founded by cousins Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith in New York City in 1885. Binney & Smith was known for crayons, silly putty and many other children’s art toys. What many don’t know was how they became a major force in the auto industry.

Auto manufacturers wanted to change the color of the tire from the traditional white to black so the dirt from the road didn’t show up so prominently. So they hired Binney & Smith to come up with a pigment that would work. As it turned out the black pigment not only provided the right (black) color, but it also ended up making the tire more durable, which in part is why we now have all black tires.

Franklin computer

In the 1980’s dozens of computer companies sprouted as “PC clones”: Dell, Compaq, Acer, and many others. However, Apple made it very difficult for anyone to clone the original Apple and Mac products. Franklin computer reverse engineered the Apple DOS and began to manufacture an Apple IIe clone and was quite successful for the first two years. But as the legal and marketing pressure mounted from Apple, Franklin knew it had to reinvent the product or die.

Over the course of the next five years Franklin shifted to providing language translation devices, and then electronic calendars. They ultimately became very successful publishing electronics as well as paper based calendars and notebooks for professionals, finally merging with Covey in the mid 90’s.

The Pointe becomes Groupon

Groupon has pioneered a whole new marketing channel for local business, and recently was valued in the billions of dollars. Many people see this success as yet another overnight internet success. However, as chronicled in the blog ‘The Daily Bones,” it turns out Groupon was almost a huge failure story. The founders had an idea about leveraging groups to get tasks done that could not be accomplished by an individual. After realizing this idea was too unfocused - and running out of time and patience from their board and investors - they went back to the drawing board. Within short order they had come up with the seeds of what is now one of the fastest growing internet businesses in history.

52nd Time's the Charm

2011-03-12T08:04:00.002-05:00

"One afternoon in late March, in their offices in downtown Helsinki, Jaakko Iisalo, a games designer who had been at Rovio since 2006, showed them a screenshot. He had pitched hundreds in the two months before. This one showed a cartoon flock of round birds, trudging along the ground, moving towards a pile of colourful blocks. They looked cross. "People saw this picture and it was just magical," says Niklas [Hed, co-founder of Rovio]. Eight months and thousands of changes later, after nearly abandoning the project, Niklas watched his mother burn a Christmas turkey, distracted by playing the finished game. "She doesn't play any games. I realised: this is it.""

By now, everyone (including me) has heard of Angry Birds, the hugely popular game and bestselling iPhone app of all time. Apparently 75 million people play it and waste an estimated 200 million minutes a day playing it. The Finnish company that created the app, just raised $42 million in new capital to fuel new creations.

The nearly instant success of companies such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter often give us the impression that successful products spring from the first idea - or first few ideas - of an inspired genius. Instead, those are the exceptions.

Some things I like about the Angry Birds story:

The company had developed 51 other games before they became successful with Angry Birds, and it was on the verge of bankruptcy less than two years ago.
No one had any idea during the development process that Angry Birds would be such a hit - they nearly abandoned it several times
The founders did not fire Jaakko Iisalo even though he had previously pitched hundreds of dumb and/or unsuccessful ideas to them. What if they had said "This guy is a loser; let's ignore him"?

Emergency Relief for Japan

2011-03-11T16:20:00.000-05:00

This earthquake was the worst in Japan's history. You can help by giving through GlobalGiving. You can also donate $10 by texting JAPAN to 50555.

Show me the Impact!

2011-02-04T16:56:00.000-05:00

"The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) is an experimental anti-poverty interventionin villages across Africa. In October, we released evidence that the Project’s official publications were overstating its real effects, and we offered suggestions on improving its impact evaluation. On Tuesday the MVP, whose leadership and staff are aware of our work, continued to greatly overstate its impact."

That is from a post by Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes over at Africa Can End Poverty, a blog edited by Shanta Devarajan, Chief Economist for Africa at the World Bank. Michael and Gabriel note in particular the lack of evidence that MVP caused the claimed increase in "ownership of mobile phones...from 4% to 30%" in MVP villages. It turns out that the rate of increase in ownership of cell phones was about the same in surrounding villages that did not have an MVP programs!

Michael, Gabriel and others are far more eloquent than I on the topic of evaluation, including randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Though RCTs are the gold standard, they are neither possible nor affordable in all circumstances, which means that in practice we need a toolkit of different approaches.

In any case, even when interventions do have an impact, the question should be "compared to what, done by whom, and at whose request?" This is asked only in rare cases.

Donors and implementing agencies tend to evaluate their own programs, and as long as there was some positive result they declare victory (albeit often with the obligatory "improvements can be made" and "challenges remain" language).

What if a donor (or group of donors) did something like the following?

Take a total of $20 million and divide it into units of $2 million (the approximate amount of money spent in each MVP village).
Give $2 million to five different implementors (e.g., MVP, Oxfam, Care, BRAC, and GlobalGiving) and assign them randomly to a village.
After X years, evaluate each of them according to two measures: a) measured impact based on predefined objective criteria; and b) satisfaction shown by the villagers.
Since learning is what drives increases in quality and productivity, repeat steps 1-3 to see which implementing organizations improved the most.
Expand the program by a) opening access to more implementors; b) having villagers themselves choose the objective criteria to be used; and c) allowing villages to choose from among the top five or ten implementors.

If someone can round up the money, I am game to help design and oversee an experiment like this. And would anyone like to suggest a name (and acronym) for it?

Urban Landscapes of Evaluation

2011-01-28T13:20:00.002-05:00

"Different sorts of decisions need different sorts of evidence, just as [Jane] Jacobs said different sorts of businesses need different sorts of buildings. In particular, new ideas need cheap tests, just as new businesses need cheap rent. As an idea becomes more plausible, it makes sense to test it in more expensive ways."

That is from a nice post by Seth Roberts. It is highly germane to many endeavors in life, including international aid. Good progress has been made recently on the gold standard of (well-designed) randomized controlled trials (RCTs) testing aid project design.

But RCTs can be expensive and cannot be done in all circumstances. So we need a menu of approaches to determine whether different types of ideas at various stages idea are promising.

I recently had an interesting conversation along these lines with one of the creators of an innovation fund at a major aid agency. I hope soon to be able to post an interview online with him here.

The Primes of High Performing Teams

2011-01-24T14:41:00.002-05:00

If you work in a team, I recommend Chris McGoff's new book The Primes. The associated website and blog are also excellent.

I met Chris in 1997, when he began helping the World Bank's senior management team work better together. He was also critical to the design and implementation of the first Development Marketplace (though his role, along with that of Monika Weber-Fahr, was unfortunately omitted from this otherwise excellent HBR account.)

I can say from experience that the principles Chris describes in his book are effective; I have used them over the past fourteen years. They seem deceptively simple, but I can attest to their power if applied consistently.

Poetry and Development

2011-01-21T18:00:00.001-05:00

A small group of us meet occasionally over dinner, ostensibly to talk about new ideas in international development. Mostly we just have a good time; sometimes we forget to talk about development.

My friend April asked one day "Why don't we read more poetry? What if we started off each dinner with some poetry?" At first I thought this idea was little nutty - like a lot of April's ideas, to be honest (please don't tell her I said that). What does poetry have to do with development, anyway? But then I realized that good poetry makes us happy. And that development is about enabling people to be happier.

So on this cold Friday afternoon, I am going to tip my hat to April and publish the following poem, which makes me very happy. It is by my god-daughter, Evelina Kats, who gave me permission to print the unedited version below. I recommend both the written and audio versions.

HOME BY THE FIRE

the fire that has burned all day
lets fly warmth and
a column of silver smoke brings faces, shapes, a battel begins

the warmth clayms the hearth
whilsaling with high pich, shreachsks of terro
as the cold retreadts and warmth ancreases,
we kindel the fire and,
pink, blue, purple and orange flames
dance upon the crackling logs hissing

the hissing continues
but the colors fall back as there
leader the most powerful
emerges yellow, his queen purple, dances with him
his brother claims the embers
keeping them orange

my puppy, pursuaded by the flame
transforms into a pussie before my very eyes
ling down by the fireside
she chews a stick
crunch, munch, hiss,

I am home by the fire
after a long rainy
day at school.

-Evelina Kats (2010)
Reprinted by permission of Evelina Kats and her parents

Listen to this episode

Bridges Made of Paper?

2011-01-14T12:34:00.001-05:00

Michael Woolcock recently wrote a CGD working paper with Lant Pritchett and Matt Andrews arguing that aid agencies have built a lot of bridges out of paper. What do they mean by this? They mean that aid projects have often put in place modern institutional forms, such as court systems or school systems, without much regard for the actual functioning of those institutions.

They call this approach isomorphic mimicry. Mimicry is easier - and more feasible in the time span of a typical aid project. But the authors argue that mimicry can actually retard the development of the desired functionality.

I spoke with Michael about the paper and some related issues, and you can listen here:
Listen to this episode

How Marvelous Collaboration Can Be (Redux)

2011-01-13T09:58:00.000-05:00

"Contrary to the old laws of information theory, it was common for us to find that more information was received than had been sent. I have almost never had that experience with anyone else. If you have not had it, you don't know how marvelous collaboration can be ..."

That is from a post I did sometime back. It is a quote by Daniel Kahneman talking about his work with Amos Tversky. I was reminded of this yesterday when talking to Michael Woolcock about his collaboration with Lant Pritchett - in preparation for an interview about a paper Michael recently wrote with Lant. I will post the interview in the next couple of days, and I think you will like it.

"If You Must Forecast, Forecast Often"

2011-01-11T19:39:00.003-05:00

"Gold is going to $2,800 or higher, mark my words. It is THE ONLY hedge against the coming hyperinflation."

That is what someone told me recently at a conference. I asked him how sure he was, and he reminded me that he works for one of the very few investors who predicted the subprime crisis. "My boss is a genius," my table mate said. I went right home and starting researching the best way to buy gold.

The only problem, according to Joe Keohane in a recent article, is that people who correctly predict an extreme event such as the subprime crisis usually have a terrible overall record. Keohane reports on research by Oxford's Jerker Denrell and NYU's Christina Fang showing that those who correctly forecast an extreme event had "by far" the worst forecasting record among their peers.

This tendency relates partly to the phenomenon Bill Easterly periodically reminds us of - "regression toward the mean." In other words, any person, organization, or even country that performs below average in one period is likely to improve toward the average (mean) in the next period. And those that perform above average in one period are likely to do worse in the next.

It also builds on and extends Philip Tetlock's work showing that, on average, political experts do no better at predicting outcomes than flipping a coin.

I first learned about the regression to the mean phenomenon in 1983. And I read Tetlock's work a couple of years ago. So why was I so willing to listen to the guy at the conference? Keohane says this is because of a cognitive tendency called 'base rate neglect.' Humans rely too much on recent correct predictions and data, while downplaying or ignoring longer term data on success and failure rates.

Base rate neglect is why it pays for experts to forecast as often as possible. And then, as economist Edgar Fielder quips: "If you're ever right, never let 'em forget it."

I haven't yet bought any gold. But my base rate neglect is as bad as anyone else's. So I still may buy an ounce or two.

[Hat tip to my brother Patrick for flagging Keohane's article. Keohane is an excellent writer and Boston.com has some great content.]

TEDx Debut: Helping Outsiders Become Insiders

2011-01-06T11:37:00.000-05:00

Here is a talk I gave at TEDx YSE (Young Social Entrepreneurs) in December 2010. I talk about how I accidentally discovered the pleasure and privilege of helping outsiders become insiders.

Ben Ramalingam on Complexity and Aid

2011-01-05T11:23:00.003-05:00

The whole system disguises rather than navigates complexity, and it does so at various levels – in developing countries and within the aid system. This maintains a series of collective illusions and overly simplistic assumptions about the nature of systems, about the nature of change, and about the nature of human actors.

That is from my interview with Ben Ramalingam. Ben is a consultant and writer who is currently writing a book about complexity and aid to be published by Oxford University Press. I recommend his blog Aid on the Edge of Chaos. My full interview follows:

Why did you decide to write a blog?

Perhaps appropriately for a blog on complexity sciences, I started to write my blog through a combination of chance and random events. I was working on a book on complexity and aid, having led an ODI working paper on the same topic, and at a meeting I helped organize in London in July 2009, someone suggested a blog could be a useful focus point between meetings, and I said I would start one, but didn’t do anything on it.

Then just before the meeting report was published in October, the friend who was working on it called me up and said, ‘so what’s the blog address, Ben, I want to put it in the report!’ And within 60 minutes I had set up the blog, the URL and posted the first piece. So it was very much an unplanned thing, which has started to become more and more important to me as time has gone on and as the readership has grown.

Do you enjoy it?

What I really enjoy about the blog is how refreshing it is for someone like me who has spent almost a decade working at ODI on policy and research issues. But it is also challenging. It is refreshing because you can share ideas as they emerge, see which get traction, get feedback and trigger some debate and discussion, which is invaluable. It is challenging because demands you be transparent about your thinking process from the outset.

What viewpoint do you provide that other blogs do not?

As for my viewpoint, well I don’t think it is unique to my blog necessarily, but I hope to provide a different way of looking at and understanding the challenges faced by international agencies. What might make my blog unique in the aid blogosphere is my attempt to do this by drawing on the latest thinking in complexity sciences and testing its relevance for the problems faced by international agencies. There are aid blogs, there are complexity blogs, but I think mine might be the only one that focuses on the intersection of the two.

Click here to hear more about how Ben got interested in issues of complexity and aid through work on knowledge management and policy processes

Your call your blog Aid on the Edge of Chaos. What do you mean by “chaos”? Why – or how – are we on the edge of it?

The Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is the leading think-tank on complexity sciences, and they have been pushing boundaries in this area since they were formed in the mid-1980s. Stuart Kaufmann, one of the Santa Fe luminaries - he was one of the early recipients of the MacArthur Genius grants – spent a lot of time trying to understand how organisms evolve in an ecosystem. Their work showed that ecosystems can be in three different states – a solid-like state when it is frozen into a rigid set of relationships, a gas-like phase when relationships are fluctuating chaotically, and an intermediary liquid-like state at the interface between the two, when frozen components of an ecosystem are extending and exploring new possibilities. This is a metaphor for where I think the aid system should be trying to locate its efforts.

Another way to look at it is to draw on the blog post you wrote a couple of weeks back, that all of us working in the aid system have to hold our beliefs lightly, know why we hold them, but also be open to change them. Aid on the edge of chaos is a metaphor for an aid system that could do exactly this – hold its beliefs lightly. This principle, writ large, will help aid agencies extend and explore new possibilities. Frozen, outmoded beliefs will not help aid agencies adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Your blog “[explores] complexity sciences in international development and humanitarian aid.” Why is it beneficial to understand complexity sciences?

The most important thing you get from the complexity sciences is different ways of looking at, thinking about and understanding the world. In my view this is the most important thing you can have in development or humanitarian aid or in any form of public policy.

Complexity sciences give us new insights in three broad ways – they help us rethink the nature of systems and how feedback loops sustain or challenge a system; they help us think anew about the nature of change processes as dynamic and unpredictable; and they help us think about the nature of human agency – as adaptive agents reacting to each other and evolving new ways of doing things, and self-organising in often astonishing ways.

So why is this of relevance for aid agencies? My starting point is that international aid has been built on a very particular way of looking at the world, and this continues to dog its efforts. As a senior USAID colleague put it, because of our urgency to end poverty, we act as if development is a construction, a matter of planning and engineering, rather the complex and often opaque set of interactions that we know it to be.

In his forward to the ODI paper I led on, Robert Chambers wrote that a huge amount of development and humanitarian thinking and practice is still trapped in a paradigm of predictable, linear causality – i.e. is still locked into an engineering mindset, which is maintained by mindsets that seek accountability through top-down command and control. In fact, he argued that in recent years there has been a growing emphasis on mechanistic approaches.

The whole system disguises rather than navigates complexity, and it does so at various levels – in developing countries and within the aid system. This maintains a series of collective illusions and overly simplistic assumptions about the nature of systems, about the nature of change, and about the nature of human actors.

So the end result of all of this is that poverty, vulnerability, disease are all treated as if are simple puzzles. Aid, and aid agencies are then presented as the missing pieces to complete the puzzle. This not only gives aid a greater importance than perhaps it is due, but it also misrepresents the nature of the problems we face, and the also presents aid flow as very simple.

Instead of engaging with complexity, it is dismissed, or relegated to an afterthought, and the tools and techniques we employ make it easy for us to do this. We treat complex things as if they were merely complicated. A good definition of this difference was provided by the Millennium Ecosystem project, launched by Kofi Annan in 2000. It involves over 1300 experts worldwide, and it provides a state-of-the-art scientific appraisal of the condition and trends in the world’s ecosystems. And it has distinguished between complicated systems, which can be modeled mathematically, and complex systems, for which there is no mathematical model which can say, if X is the situation then do Y. Sustainability, healthy communities, raising families have all been given as examples of such complex systems and processes. Peacebuilding would be another, women’s empowerment, natural resource management, capacity building initiatives, innovation systems, the list goes on and on. Complexity science pulls back the curtain on these processes and it can force you to think about the world you live in in a different way.

Click here to hear Ben discuss an application of complexity science to agricultural approaches in Bali.

There is much more debate about this collective illusion now – just witness the rise in aid blogs and aid snarks and aid transparency initiatives. We are starting to accept that development is not just about throwing money at a problem - although it seems this has to be re-learned constantly. This was given a new angle very recently – at a meeting this week, Bill Gates said that he had been very naïve about the possibilities of the Gates Foundation solving global health issues when he started their programme 5 years ago. And this was after putting almost half a billion dollars in.

How well do aid organizations operate in complex environments?

One of the most interesting complexity perspectives is the idea that has come out of Rosalind Eyben’s recent work at the Institute of Development Studies. Ros used to run DFID country offices across Latin America and was also the DFID chief of social development, and her argument is that there are a number of people in aid agencies do deal complex, non-linear, realities on a daily basis, but they do it under the radar, below the wire, away from the watchful eyes of head offices. One of the most common responses I got from the ODI paper was ‘thank you, this explains a lot of what I have been experiencing for years’. People instinctively recognize in complexity sciences a set of ideas that is useful for talking about the challenges aid agencies face.

But these same people also have to spend a huge amount of time filtering complexity, making their good work fit the hungry machine, to feed what Andrew Natsios has called the aid counter-bureaucracy, which increasingly demands positive numbers and simple narratives.

People always talk about the challenge of speaking truth to power, the ongoing Wikileaks is just the latest and highest profile manifestation. But in our sector, there may be as much of need to get power to speak truth. Andrew Natsios could only speak out about the complexity of aid, and the idea that measurability was inversely proportional to development relevance – his words, not mine – when he was no longer in USAID. While he ran USAID he couldn’t say that - he perpetuated, perhaps even strengthened - the counter-bureacratic system. Why? There is a real, unspoken, but intensely felt, human cost to living with this level of cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, rant over. Our collective strengths are that we are already know and understand complexity and the limitations it places on us, in the shadow informal world of our organisations. Our collective weakness is that we aren’t honest enough about it, when we need to be.

Do you think other sectors (medicine, architecture, etc.) can teach us how to approach complex problems?

There is some fascinating work in other sectors which have some connections – medicine, healthcare, education, conflict analysis, military planning, economics and so on. There can of course be lessons across these sectors. I am not sure ‘teaching’ is the right way to look at it though - the key to my mind is to approach this as an interdisciplinary learning effort - to bring the best people from those other environments to talk to the development and humanitarian community.

This is partly what a group of us dotted around the aid sector been trying to do over the past few years with a so-called emergent meeting series in various locations around Europe. This has brought people like Ralph Stacey, Dave Snowden and Jean Boulton to run workshops for the development community, providing a range of insights and different ways of engaging with these ideas. I think there is scope for more such engagement, to help re-think some of the critical problems faced in the development sector. Take urbanization, working in fragile states, climate change – any of the real challenges require us to reach outside our usual boundaries. But the starting point has to be to bring different people together.

A good example is the work being led by Bill Frej, former head of USAID Afghanistan, now Development Diplomat-in-Residence at Santa Fe. He has invited a diverse group – of which I feel very lucky to be a part - from around the world to come together in February to establish a collective dialogue on complexity science and how it might help aid strategies in fragile states. I will be spending some time at Santa Fe before and after – and am excited to learn as much as I can about potentially useful ideas for the aid sector.

What can the development sector teach other ones?

I think the main lessons are about values and context. One is a positive lesson, one is negative lesson.

The positive one is on values. Values are the reason we get intelligent, passionate people to stay doing jobs at low rates of pay in difficult conditions - the private sector would love to hear more about that, as would every other sector. Aid agency staff stay put because they believe in the organization, its values and what it does. Our values - at their best - act as minimum rules, knitting together disparate offices with a sense of shared purpose, igniting innovation, motivating people to do more with less.

The negative one is about context, and the importance of understanding it. We have shown time and again, whether it is structural adjustment programmes, or maternal health efforts, or social empowerment, that one size fits all simply doesn’t work. The whole world could do with being reminded of that constantly, I think, especially right now. At the risk of sounding cynical, the development sector has a pretty constant flow of such lessons which sadly is not likely to dry up any time soon.

Thanks for your time, Ben. I look forward to more discussions.

Art at a Distance

2011-01-05T03:17:00.006-05:00

"Several hundred people attend our openings over the web."

That is what Megan Lange at Robert Lange Studios (RLS) in Charleston, SC told me recently. Mari and I stopped by there while attending a conference in that city. The building and its space drew us in; the art kept us there.

I recently went to several studios in Manhattan, but none had the business model - or vibe - of RLS. RLS's approach may point the way being successful in the art world without having to be located in NYC, London, or Paris.

Though headed by Robert and Megan Lange, the studio is a diverse collective of artists mostly under thirty and mostly from the South. Many of these artists keep a blog, where they show early drafts or working models of their next piece. The individual blogs aggregate automatically into the RLS 'Super' Blog, which appears on the main site. That blog in turn feeds into RLS's Facebook page, which has nearly 4,000 members. Prospective buyers are able to watch the works unfold, make comments, and interact with the artists, the gallery, and each other.

As a result of the quality of their art combined with their business plan and execution, the gallery has been able to weather the recent economic crisis - and even grow. When I asked why, Megan told me she believes people still want to buy art, but are unwilling or unable to pay the large sums they previously had paid in New York, Paris, or London. Instead, they want quality at the lower price range RLS is able to offer.

Many clients never visit the gallery in person. The web site photos are good enough to convey quality, and buyers can gauge from the discussions on the blog and Facebook what they might like. Those who come to the openings via webcam are able to appreciate the vibe and reactions of those visiting in person. According to Megan, the gallery even ships several pieces a month overseas.

Impressive. And an example for businesses in other sectors as well.

[Note: this post was amended on 1.10.11 to identify Megan Lange as the woman I spoke with at the gallery.]

Farewell! (But I'm not going far...)

2011-01-03T14:27:00.003-05:00

You will notice a new design on this blog - after nearly 400 postings since mid-2006. This marks a transition in my life and career. Read the note below. It is both scary and exciting. I look forward to new adventures, some of which I will announce here soon. Stay tuned! Thanks for reading.

==========================

December 2010

After ten fabulous years at GlobalGiving, I am fully turning over the reins to my co-founder, Mari Kuraishi, at the end of December 2010. This completes a transition that we began in 2008.

Although the decision to step down was hard, I feel that now is the right time. We have proven the concept, established a world-class online platform, and made a big impact. When we started ten years ago, the idea of an open-access approach to aid and philanthropy seemed radical; it is now becoming the new norm.

To date, we have helped direct over $47 million to 3,000 organizations in 110 countries. This funding has come from nearly 140,000 individual donors as well as from many of the world's most innovative companies, along with their employees and customers. We have been featured in over forty books and countless magazine articles, radio and TV pieces, and online media. Our success has spurred similar initiatives in other sectors and countries, and we now partner with some of these organizations to push the whole sector ahead.

Our accomplishments and momentum are the product of an amazing team here at GlobalGiving. Our people are stellar, but more importantly they all work together like a finely oiled machine. Our project team, donor team, business development team, tech team, finance team, and operations team work seamlessly. They can move new ideas, opportunities, and features from concept to execution and evaluation faster than any organization I have ever worked with. I really am in awe of the people I have had the privilege to work with at GlobalGiving.

In late 2000, Mari and I left the World Bank to pursue a simple idea: that everyone in the world with an idea for improving their world should be able to have their voice heard. We believed that any person, company, or organization should be able to support the ideas directly. Not everyone would succeed, of course, but everyone would have an opportunity. We had spent our previous careers in aid agencies that granted access to ideas and funding to only a select few. We thought the time had come for an open-access market connecting ideas with funding that provided a level playing field for all bona fide participants.

We also felt that with open access should come increased transparency and accountability - and an emphasis on continuous improvement. Our idea was that groups seeking funding should have their proposals displayed publicly, should be willing to answer questions from potential supporters, and should provide frequent updates on the site so that donors could see the impact of their support. We felt that beneficiaries and others should be able to post reviews and comments on the site for everyone to see. We felt that organizations that learn and adapt should be encouraged and rewarded. We felt that donors should be able to talk to each other about which projects and organizations they supported, and why.

Though we have not yet achieved everything we set out to do, the bottom line is this: For the first time in history, any group pursuing good in the world can now have its voice heard. And donors of all sizes are empowered to make a tangible contribution to good in the world by connecting to those groups. I could not be more proud of that.

Even as I turn over all day-to-day responsibility to Mari, I will remain very active in GlobalGiving. I will be out there raising awareness, raising money, and advancing the mission. I believe that over the last ten years we have laid the foundation for our next act, in which GlobalGiving’s impact will be ten times greater. I intend to help make that happen.

In the first half of 2011, I plan to devote more time to writing and speaking on the general concepts behind GlobalGiving, which are applicable in many other sectors and endeavors. During that time I will do some consulting for organizations that are looking to break down barriers so that they can unleash the potential of their own people, constituents, and customers.

Finally, I want to thank you for your encouragement and support over the years. We could not have done it without you, and I am profoundly grateful for what you have done, in ways both big and small.

All the best for the holiday season!

Dennis

The tyranny of ideology

2010-12-21T08:44:00.006-05:00

Berlin

Here is one of the best lectures of all time. It should be required listening for anyone interested in better understanding the world - or trying to change it. I recently listened to it for the second time; it never gets old.

The lecture is by Isaiah Berlin, delivered at Oxford University in 1955. The subject is Alexander Herzen, and more specifically his masterpiece My Past and Thoughts, written in 1868.

Herzen

Once you listen to the lecture, you may want to read the book, too, which is fabulous. There is no more powerful inoculation against our tendency to fall in love with silver bullets and all-encompassing frameworks and ideologies.

Listen to this episode

When aid works: RIP, Rene Le Berre

2010-12-20T13:26:00.000-05:00

"René Le Berre, a French entomologist who helped inspire an international campaign that saved millions of West Africans from the parasitic disease river blindness, died Dec. 6 in L’Aiguillon-sur-Mer on France’s western coast. He was 78.

Onchocerciasis, the formal name for river blindness, had once been a scourge in the fertile river basins of tropical Africa."

That obit is from the NYT.

When I joined the World Bank in 1986, my first memory is of my colleague Bruce Benton yelling in French over the phone across the Atlantic to Dr. Le Berre. I remember wondering what he was yelling about. Bruce did not join many meetings or participate in the various fads and "sexy" initiatives in the Bank. He just steadily and consistently worked with Dr. Le Berre and his program for twenty years, from 1985 to 2005, saving hundreds of thousands of lives, sparing millions of children from affliction, and reclaiming millions of hectares of land for habitation and cultivation. All at a nominal cost, representing a tremendous return on investment.

A very nice brief by the Center for Global Development on the impact of the river blindness control program is here.

Of Wine and Experts

2010-12-19T15:20:00.001-05:00

"I mean, S&P, Moody’s, Fitch, these people all rated securities that apparently completely tanked. So there’s obviously something in the demand for expertise, the imprimatur, which is not really about the fact that they do a good job. By the way, those organizations are not transparent either, just as the Wine Spectator isn’t. So there’s some similarity here that I think probably gives us a little insight into things that are much broader than wine and food."

That is Orley Ashenfelter of Princeton University, quoted by Stephen J. Dubner in a recent Freakonomics column in the NYT. Experts have shown themselves to be no better than regular people in terms of guessing the price (and presumably, quality) of wines in blind taste tests. Professor Ashenfelter argues that the same phenomenon extends into many other arenas.

Karin Christiansen on Transparency

2010-12-18T15:28:00.001-05:00

“Transparency” has (re-)emerged as a buzzword in the development sector and is taking center stage in many development initiatives. Having measured the transparency of 30 major donors, Publish What You Fund (PWYF) released its Aid Transparency Assessment 2010 in October.

I had the opportunity to sit down and to chat with Karin Christiansen, Director of PWYF, during her recent visit to Washington, DC. We talked about (1) the motivations that led to the creation of an organization dedicated to streamlining transparency efforts; (2) what transparency means in development today; (3) examples of how transparency has had real impact; (4) obstacles and opportunities to developing systems that share universally comprehensive, transparent information; and (5) thoughts about future stepping-stones to achieve this goal.

The top performers from the Aid Transparency Assessment scored “fair” marks, yet PWYF and others are leading efforts to ensure that organizations across the sector enhance their transparency systems by providing not only more information but also better information.

Listen to the interview here.

Peter Buffett's Advent Calendar

2010-12-14T10:43:00.001-05:00

Someone sent me a link to Peter Buffett's Advent Calendar. It brought a smile to my face. It's quirky and funny and personal. It has links to some great causes you can give to for the holidays, as well as some very nice holiday music. Each "day" brings something different - some music, a video, a reading. I especially like days 5 and 9 so far (I am only up to day 14, since my mom never let me jump ahead when I was a kid). Peter's recent book was listed as among the best of the year by Matthew Bishop of the Economist.

Expert Blinders

2010-12-13T10:27:00.006-05:00

"The larger lesson is that the brain is a deeply constrained thinking machine, full of cognitive tradeoffs and zero-sum constraints. Those chess professionals and London cabbies can perform seemingly superhuman mental feats, as they chunk their world into memorable patterns. However, those same talents make them bad at seeing beyond their chunks, at making sense of games and places they can’t easily understand."

That is from a piece by Jonah Lehrer in Wired (HT: April Harding). People who have deep expertise in certain areas often have difficulty incorporating new information from outside their narrow expertise. This is why it is important to have a good mix of both experts and crowds in many endeavors, especially social ones. It is not either-or, but both-and. Finding the balance is the key.

Don't Follow the Leader

2010-12-05T09:54:00.001-05:00

"In the final chapter, Seeley suggests five lessons we could learn from bees.

• Compose a decision-making group of individuals with shared interests. Here bees have a higher stake than us: all members of a colony are related (sisters) and nobody can survive without the group.

• Minimise the leader's influence on the group. Here we humans have much to learn.

• Seek diverse solutions to the problem. Humans realised only recently that diversity is good for a group.

• Update the group's knowledge through debate. Here again, bees are superior to us, as each scout's "dances" become less effective with time, no matter how good a new site is, while stubbornness can lead humans to argue forever.

• Use quorums to gain cohesion, accuracy and speed. Impressively, bees came up with this concept long before the Greeks."

That is Tyler Cowen, discussing Thomas Seeley's new book Honeybee Democracy. These points resonate with my own experience.

Holding Beliefs Lightly

2010-11-29T18:06:00.000-05:00

"But I’m trying to hold my beliefs lightly, in the long view that almost all of them, I’m sure, will one day be seen as very naive or even completely misguided.

The purpose of holding them lightly is not to drop them completely, but just make it more difficult to beat other people over the head with them, more difficult to hold on to them when they’re clearly not being helpful, and easier to swap for other ideas, when those new ideas appear promising."

That is from a very nice post about "smart aid" by David Week. Any serious aid worker is constantly trying to infer principles about what works and what doesn't, and then to have those principles guide his/her actions. Naturally, many of us want to tell others what we have discovered about what is effective and what is a waste of time and resources. But we should realize, says Week, that we will often be wrong, and that should be very humbling.

Free the aid bloggers!

2010-11-22T08:06:00.018-05:00

"In general I fully support transparency, but these people could lose their jobs."

That is what Saundra Schimmelpfennig told me when I asked her why some of the best aid bloggers out there were anonymous. She is right, of course. But it is also a shame. If there is a common thread running through our understanding of effective aid, it is the need to experiment, learn, and adapt. This means admitting to - rather than hiding - things that don't work, so that we can learn from them. The anonymous bloggers I was referring to talk about the reality of aid work, warts and all. They have a following because their readers know that they are speaking the truth. But their employers could not tolerate the truth, so these bloggers have to remain in the closet.

One day, aid agencies will brag about the bloggers they have on staff. This will happen when they realize the best aid agencies are platforms for conversations and learning rather than infallible oracles of aid wisdom. Until then, many bloggers will have to remain anonymous.

To shed some light on this topic, I was fortunate enough to catch up by email with J, the author of Tales From The Hood. J offered to answer a few questions about himself and his blogging.

Q: J, can you tell me a little about your background?

I got my first aid job in 1991 as a junior communications officer, based in Bangkok with an INGO. My first involvement with relief response was in early 1992, following a large influx of Karen refugees into northwestern Thailand. Except for a couple of short breaks for continuing education along the way, I’ve been doing aid work continuously since then. In various roles I’ve been involved in responses to Hurricane Mitch, Sudan, Kosovo, Angola, and the whole can of worms that was “The Former Soviet Union” in the late 1990s (mostly Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia). I spent a few years in Vietnam as a country director. More recently I’m a veteran of The Tsunami response (Indonesia, Sri Lanka), and of course the Haiti Earthquake response.

Q: When did you start blogging, and why?

I started in 2005, mostly as a way to keep in touch with friends around the world. It was most personal updates – “where I am this week” kinds of things. My blogging has been through a few different iterations, names and formats. When I started Tales From the Hood in March 2008, it was mainly for personal cathartic value: a space to admit the things I might not otherwise admit, say the things that would never be said in interagency working groups or in-house meetings.

Q: Did you consider blogging under your real name? If not, why not?

Not really. Even when it was mainly about staying in touch with friends, there was still the sense of saying the things we’d never say in the workplace for fear of reprisal. NGOs are funny and sometimes a bit schizophrenic: for as much rhetoric (and maybe even actual practice) around valuing diverse input, free market place of ideas, and so on *in the context of communities where we work*, in my experience they are (typically) incredibly *in*tolerant of diverse opinion internally. If you don’t toe the party line of your employing NGO’s paradigm on… whatever, or if you simply express an opinion contrary to the happy in-house propaganda, you can be in for a world of hurt.

Q: You have blogged on a wide assortment of topics. If you look back, which two or three posts would you highlight as ones that you most want people to read?

That’s a great question. While I sometime rant and preach on Tales From the Hood, more than anything else it’s about my own inner struggle to balance being a full-on unapologetic professional aid worker while also staying eyes-open to the inconsistency and paradox that very clearly exist in the sector/industry. I think these three posts get at that:

“Kompong Thom” - The first post, ever, on Tales From the Hood

“Closer I am to fine”

“Between Arrogance & Defeat” – a bit of a sequel to “Kompong Thom”

Q: Looking back, which posts do you think would have been least well received by your employer?

There are many. I think, though, it would be mostly those posts which deal with the extent to which NGOs typically fall down on the side of educating their donor constituents about what aid is. A few examples:

“I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“You Can’t Handle the Truth”

Q: Since you started blogging, do you think your employer's attitude has changed about blogging from inside the organization?

Incrementally.

There seems to be a growing awareness of the power of blogs and social media overall. I have not talked to very many people with the power to make actual decisions around this on behalf of large INGOs who were able to envision anything very far beyond the sort of marketing and flag-waving possibilities.

Q: How many people inside your organization would you say agree with most of your posts? Is it the people or the organizational culture/hierarchy that keeps you from coming out of the closet?

To the first, I can tell you that I have a large and growing following within my employing organization. Some of those people know who I am, but many do not. To a large extent I’m saying things on Tales From the Hood that we all talk about at Starbuck’s (during lunch break, of course) or during happy hours. And so in that sense I don’t think I’d have much to fear from my professional colleagues. My fear in “coming out” would be more around the organizational culture, which (like every NGO that I’m specifically aware of) has a very low level of tolerance for opinions not strictly in alignment with the “party line.”

Q: What do you think the repercussions would be if your identity would be discovered?

It would depend quite a lot on the circumstances which led to that discovery. Most probably I’d be instructed to “be careful” about what I wrote. The worst-case scenario would probably involve me being forced to choose between taking down Tales From the Hood and ending my employment.

Q: How do you think your situation compares with some of the other bloggers out there?

I think my situation is quite comparable. Not to over-romanticize it, but there is something of an informal “underground” alliance of anonymous aid bloggers. We know who each other are in real-life and in some cases interact professionally as ourselves. We all face similar constraints in our respective workplaces.

Q: Recently I met in person someone I knew only on Twitter. The quality of our interaction was much richer, and I found that the personal connection helped create a level of understanding and conversation impossible in the online world. Do you feel hampered by your inability to reveal your identity in face-to-face conversations?

Yes and no. To the extent that I’m known personally by a small group from among those who read my blog and follow me on twitter, our professional and personal interactions are very rich. In some cases I very definitely get the feeling that some readers/twitter followers truly are friends that I just haven’t met yet.

On the other hand, I do have to self-censor to some extent both on Tales From the Hood and in twitter conversations. There are some issues or questions that I cannot respond to fully because to do so would compromise my anonymity.

Q: Thank you, J.

Good aid projects come from good conversations

2010-11-15T11:44:00.001-05:00

If we could directly observe the results of aid projects, we could avoid a lot of the heavy bureaucratic processes and reporting that makes life miserable for so many aid workers and that often impedes and obscures quality work. Like Owen Barder, I believe the time is coming when new approaches and technologies will help us clear away a lot of this bureaucratic brush so we can focus on results.

In the meantime, a blogger called Tales from the Hood has a nice post on practices considered correlated with "good aid" - i.e., aid that has the desired impact. I particularly like his/her first point:

1) Starts and ends with the needs of those affected by poverty, disaster, and conflict (a.k.a. “the poor”, “aid recipients”, “program participants”, “beneficiaries”…). ...[I]f we’re to do it right, if we’re to plan and implement good aid, our starting point needs to be those whom we seek to serve. If that starting point is anything else (for example, the needs of a particular donor, surplus of something…) then a recipe for bad aid has already been started.

This requires listening to what communities themselves want. And then listening to how they feel that projects are being implemented. And then listening afterwards to what they learned.

Listening is not easy. Communities are full of diverse interests and unequal distributions of political power and voice, and it is usually tough to sort out these various influences. Many aid workers and organizations still lack the capacity to listen systematically in such contexts. But dealing with ambiguity and conflict by not listening is usually a poor strategy.

And listening should not be one way. The best aid projects I have seen have been born from a conversation between community members and aid workers. All involved in the conversation bring unique information, perspectives, and desires. A constructive outcome - leading to a good aid aid project - requires give and take on both sides. I love this piece by David Gaus where he describes how he learned to listen - and be heard - while working on health care in Ecuador.

How much can we rely on medical experts?

2010-11-11T16:13:00.001-05:00

"He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed."

That is from a recent article by David H. Freedman in the Atlantic Monthly sent to me by my friend April Harding. The "he" is Professor John Ioannidis, who has done as much research on this topic as anyone in the world. Here are some other key quotes from the article:

... he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings.

“I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals."

... 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials...

“You can question some of the details of John’s calculations, but it’s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren’t absolutely correct,” says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine.

If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. That article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Sometimes people contact me to say they think I should emphasize more the importance of experts in development. I often respond by saying that the issue is in development is finding what works rather than relying on people who have credentials based on their degree or who they work for (see Saundra Schimmelpfennig's excellent post on this). By contrast ( I used to say) relying on credentials made sense in certain fields where there was a clear link between credentials, knowledge, and outcomes such as structural engineering and medicine.

This article makes me think that I should re-think my reference to medicine - a field that needs to re-examine its own standards of proof and good practice. It does not mean that I will stop going to the doctor when I need to. It does mean that I will ask a lot of questions (something fortunately encouraged by my current doctor).

Does this have anything to do with philanthropy and development? I am not sure, but I did like this quote from another researcher, Athina Tatsioni:

“Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.”

Professional is not a Title

2010-11-08T08:38:00.001-05:00

"Professionalism may have less to do with your job title/organization and whether you are paid staff or a volunteer, and more to do with how you approach aid/development."

That is from Saundra Schimmelpfennig's excellent post over at Good Intentions are Not Enough. There has been a lot of commentary on Nick Kristof's recent NYT Magazine article about "DIY" foreign aid. The heat:light ratio of that commentary has been high. Saundra's common sense in summarizing the apparently diverging views on this topic is most welcome, because it shows that there is more consensus than might be apparent. Here is more:

"There is a need for fresh perspectives and a variety of ideas and approaches. However this must be tempered with knowledge of the factors that led to success and failures in the past so the same mistakes are not constantly repeated."

I recommend the whole post.

Transparency: How to Get from Consensus to Impact?

2010-11-02T15:39:00.000-04:00

Here is a nice paper from Homi Kharas of Brookings on how transparency can transform accountability in the official aid sector. The paper goes beyond treating transparency as a slogan and instead asks "what is it good for?"

Here are some thoughts that came to mind as I read the paper:

Key questions: a) Who is doing what (b) to whom (c) with whom (d) why, and (e) how is it going?
An emphasis on beneficiary voice is key. Kharas says "In many ways, the call for aid transparency is a hand maiden of the call for greater ownership by recipients."
Transparency should be mostly about learning rather than punishment or blame - see this.
This will only work if we get the incentives right - incentives for donors to put out data, and incentives for people to provide feedback and input. Top-down mandates will not work; my own experience is they will sink under their own weight. As a corollary, simpler may be better than complex. Witness Yelp and TripAdvisor. Both have flaws, but they are sustained and influence behavior in ways more complex and heavy systems do not.
For these initiatives to work, they require a combination of factors - the right information, gathered from the right sources, displayed through the right user interface, to the right people, at the right time.
Lant Pritchett has a very nice article about the disincentives that donors face for honest evaluation. Bottom line is that there is all downside, and little upside.
Devesh Kapur and I predict that allowing each donor to run its own transparency system will lead to obfuscation and lack of network effects. The biggest effect would come from a single, independent system that donors can't massage.

What's the Bottom Line?

2010-11-02T15:05:00.001-04:00

Aid is made less effective by the incentives which aid agencies face, which they in turn transmit to their staff. In large part, these unhelpful incentives are a consequence of lack of information about results. If we can measure results better, and if we can use this to simplify the management of aid (and not simply bolt additional reporting on to existing bureaucratic processes), this will enable more decentralised decision-making, respect country ownership, make the jobs of aid workers and government officials more rewarding, improve the effectiveness of aid, and so reduce poverty faster.

That is from Owen Barder's post Incentives, Results, and Bureaucracy in Foreign Aid. If you have never worked in a large aid organization, this piece will help you understand the pressures that even the best aid workers face. And if you have worked in one of these organizations, you will find that Owen offers a ray of hope that might (just might) allow you to stop spending so much time on internal process and start spending more time on what we all care about: results.

Africa = US + China + India...

2010-10-28T13:29:00.009-04:00

This graphic by Kai Krause is not only clever. More importantly it affects the way I see the world. (Click for larger view.)

(Hat tip to Scott McCloud, whose fabulous book Understanding Comics is recommended even for those who don't read the comics. Image is via Information Is Beautiful.)

Development as Evolution, not Intelligent Design

2010-10-27T08:30:00.000-04:00

Having worked in Russia for five years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I can attest to the quality of goods and services produced in a planned economy. There was little variety and terrible quality. Consumers had little ability to complain - they were either met with a shrug of the shoulders or just told to be happy they got anything at all.

In this great narrated presentation, Owen Barder argues that that the functioning of market economies is more akin to evolution than to design from above.

The key factors are variation and selection. He extends the analogy to international development, and makes several key points. First, we do have a profusion of development actors and initiatives, but not enough real variation; the strong pressure for aid coordination reduces experimentation. Second, we don't have good mechanisms for selection - failed or mediocre organizations and projects seem to plod along. And third, a critical factor for selection is the ability to get feedback directly from the intended beneficiaries.

I highly recommend setting aside a few minutes to watch this compelling and well illustrated video.

CGD as Social Capital

2010-10-22T17:39:00.000-04:00

Last Wednesday I went to the Center for Global Development for the launch of my friend Devesh Kapur's new book Diaspora, Development, and Democracy. Book launches in Washington, especially about public policy, can be either mind-numbingly boring or maddeningly partisan, and I generally avoid them. But the minute I walked in the door over at CGD, I was happy to be there.

Why? Because CGD is one of the rare places where smart people with often sharply different perspectives and positions come to listen to - rather than talk at - each other. When you are there, you have a real sense that people have come to learn from one another to understand the world better. Unlike so many other places in Washington, in the blogs, and on TV, people don't come to CGD only to score points or to win intellectual arguments. Instead, they come to present their arguments and listen to others and then go away and refine their own thinking.

I sat there on Wednesday wondering how CGD came to be this way. Part of it is due to Nancy Birdsall, the co-founder, who cares less about winning arguments and more about the truth than almost anyone I know. Ed Scott, the other co-founder and core funder, has a similar personality. He is gruff and opinionated, but in the end he cares about what works, not about ideology. Together, they have recruited exceptional fellows and staff, all of whom have their policy disagreements and petty disputes but who feel (to the outsider, at least) like a family. Many of those of us who attend CGD events feel like part of an extended family.

CGD has become the leading think tank on development because of the social capital that it has built over the last ten years. Other academic institutions and think tanks have impressive rosters of scholars, but the whole is often less than the sum of the parts. (Don't even get me started on talk radio and TV talk shows.) CGD is the opposite - the whole is far more than the sum of its parts because the parts respect and listen to each other.

After the discussion, I went out for drinks with a couple of former classmates, including Devesh. We joked about the paper he and I recently published on aid accountability. Devesh and I see the world very differently, to say the least, and from the outset I questioned my sanity at having agreed to write a paper with him. At times, we both felt like strangling the other over one point or another. Yet despite (and maybe because of) these differences, we persevered and wrote a paper that, hopefully, sheds a little new light on the topic. And that reminds me of the initial question I had for Devesh when he asked me to do it:

"Why on earth do you think we should write a paper together?" I asked.

"Maybe so we will learn something," he replied.

And he turned out to be right.

Can USAID Reach Escape Velocity?

2010-10-18T16:32:00.007-04:00

Can USAID be saved? The aid agency has been on the ropes for the last few years. First it was folded firmly into the State Department, reducing its independence. Then its problems were dissected in great and depressing detail by a former Administrator, Andrew Natsios. In an excellent paper, Natsios shows how a culture of compliance and caution has overwhelmed the agency, making it almost impossible for even the best staff to deliver results.

Few would argue that USAID is on the ropes. But there are some bright spots that offer hope. One of these is LAUNCH, a global initiative formed by NASA, Nike, USAID and the U.S. Department of State to identify and to support innovations that meet the world’s urgent challenges. LAUNCH will announce the winners of its Health Forum on October 30.

The aid field has been dominated by solutions that are top-down and incremental. Instead of trying to simply “procure” the cheapest or the best available solutions from the usual suspects, LAUNCH challenges nearly anyone to come up with breakthrough ideas. Bottom-up solutions alone won’t save USAID anymore than purely top-down ones will. But if the agency can achieve a critical mass of bottom-up initiatives, it just might escape the gravitational pull that threatens to have the agency crash and burn.

Fortunately, LAUNCH is not the only such initiative at USAID. Others, such as Development Innovation Ventures and Global Development Commons, are also pointing in the right direction.

But there is one more thing. USAID and other agencies need to make sure they are addressing the right problems. That, too, will require new approaches since aid workers and experts are not always in touch with what beneficiaries actually care about or need.

Transparency for learning, not punishment.

2010-10-12T09:59:00.000-04:00

"Today, transparency is not used enough as a tool for helping organizations to learn, improve, and adapt—to hold themselves accountable to themselves first! Far more frequently, it’s used to find fault and even punish . . . But don’t we have to dig for the truth and ferret out the facts as to what is (and, equally important, is not) working so we know how to improve?"

That is Mario Morino, in his latest column. He goes on to say:

"Transparency is about our value set and how we act on it—not about checking a set of boxes or posting a set of documents on a website. It is about the honesty, openness, and integrity we live by in governing and running our organizations and doing our jobs."

Transparency: The first step to democracy

2010-10-12T09:02:00.000-04:00

I had the pleasure of meeting (and running with) Owen Barder last week at a meeting of the International Transparency Initiative. I have to admit that "transparency" is one of those terms that does not inspire me. It seems so static. Yet in this interview with Lawrence McDonald of the Center for Global Development, Owen brings alive the dynamics that aid transparency can bring. I call it The Democratization of Development, and Owen's work, along with that of the IATI makes me more and more hopeful.

Legalize Gay

2010-10-11T13:48:00.002-04:00

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

One of my colleagues told me this morning that it is National Coming Out day. So I am going to come out - for equal rights for gays and lesbians and for marriage rights for all men and women, regardless of sexual orientation.

One day we will look back and be ashamed at the way that we forced a large segment of our population to hide a central part of who they are. We will be ashamed that we tormented them in school, denied them benefits at work, and forbade them from entering into legally sanctioned relationships.

One day we will look back and be ashamed - in the same way we are ashamed of how we treated African Americans and even women, to whom we denied the vote and many other rights for decades.

Alan Turing, the father of the computer, who was also instrumental in cracking the Nazi code in WWII, was both persecuted and prosecuted in Great Britain after the war for being gay. He was forced to take female hormones to "cure" him of his illness. Turing buckled under the abuse and killed himself with cyanide in 1952. Of this, and of many other crimes against many other homosexuals in the free world, we should be ashamed.

This blog is titled "Pulling for the Underdog." And despite all the progress we have made in the last decade, there are still many voices of hate speaking out against gay people and against the unalienable rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is time for the rest of us to stand up and speak out - and to come out for equal rights for all. One day we will look back and be proud that we did.

Which Donors are Meeting their QuODA?

2010-10-07T05:28:00.005-04:00

Birdsall

"Which donors give aid well and which need to improve? These (and many more specific) questions are addressed in a new report issued by the Center for Global Development and the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development Program. The report is authored by Nancy Birdsall and Homi Kharas and is designed to be updated and published annually. For data nerds there is plenty to get excited about. For starters they use information from the AidData database in order to construct many of their aid quality indicators! "

Kharas

That is from a post by Mike Tierney over at AidData. Hats off to Nancy Birdsall and Homi Kharas for leading this effort called Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) over at CGD. You can hear them interviewed by Lawrence MacDonald here.

Show Me The Money!

2010-10-06T07:53:00.003-04:00

Sometimes we reach our desired destination by taking an indirect route. That is the key theme of John Kay's new book Obliquity. And it was on my mind over the last two days at a meeting of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), a consortium of donors promoting greater transparency in international aid funding.

IATI has made much more progress than I imagined possible, and I left the conference encouraged by the possibilities and by the people working on it.

One of the presentations was particularly striking, because it demonstrated John Kay's point. A representative from UNDP showed the system they had designed to track trust fund budget flows. They created the system because UN country offices were complaining that the trust funds they had been allocated were not being disbursed to them in a timely way. As a result, programs were delayed. Under the old system, it was hard to tell if the problem was in the implementation or in budget availability. And if the problem was the budget, was it because the donors had not paid up, or was it because of some delay at headquarters? So they set out to make the flow of funds in the system available in near real-time to relevant UNDP staff.

After they designed this beautiful system, they then realized it would be useful to a larger group of people within the UN system. At this point, they started thinking about who should have access and who should not. The answer to this was no obvious, and in any case the complexity of creating and managing an restricted access system was substantial. So the UNDP team asked itself "Is there any reason not to just make it open access? That would sure make our lives easier."

And it turns out there was no good reason not to do this. The result is that anyone in the world - beneficiaries, recipient governments, aid workers, donors, and taxpayers can all see where billions of dollars of UN trust fund money is coming from, and where it is going, what it is for, and when it arrives.

So this was an example of an initiative that created unprecedented transparency at the UN. But it didn't start out that way. It started out as an initiative to solve a problem within the agency itself, and because it solves that problem you can be sure it will be properly maintained and sustained. I left the IATI meeting wondering how such an indirect approach can be pursued in other dimensions of the information we need to make transparent.

Pritchett: Experts impede innovation

2010-10-04T04:35:00.001-04:00

The same skepticism about “one size fits all” that made “Washington Consensus” two dirty words should be taken to the range of “expert” advice in sectors from education to health to public sector governance to “institution building.” All of which is mostly just repeating the conventional wisdom and closing off, rather than opening up, space for novelty and innovation.

That is from a very nice piece by Lant Pritchett over at AidWatch about President Obama's recent speech about US development policy, which he applauds.

A New Kitchen Gadget or a LifeSaver?

2010-09-24T15:09:00.000-04:00

It needs to get as much input as possible from the people who will actually use the stoves. The stoves will need to be as much like existing stoves as possible, to minimize the change in cooking style required to use them. In particular, women need to be able to cook traditional foods that are appealing to their families. Listening to the women who’ll cook on them is the best way to do that.

That is from a nice guest post by Alanna Shaikh, commenting on Hilary Clinton's recent speech at the UN promoting improved cookstoves. Many people are unaware that breathing poorly ventilated cookstove fumes kills an estimated two million people a year.

Improved stoves can reduce the fumes problem while also reducing fuel costs. But as any of us who have bought a fancy new gadget for our cooking spouses can attest, "great" ideas aren't always appreciated - much less used - if they don't meet the needs of the user.

Alanna points out the needs for careful consumer research - and even broad consumer marketing, which is rare in the aid and development field. Even with both of those, it is no guarantee the cookstove initiative will succeed. In fact as I have written before, it takes an average of 58 ideas for each initiative that succeeds. But while improved cookstoves are not a silver bullet, they are well worth promoting.

Read the whole post here; it is very good.

Whatever Donor Wants?

2010-09-24T09:27:00.003-04:00

But before we rush to the toolkit and assume that better data is all that donors want and need, it’s important to take a step back and remember that while metrics are critical and have their place, they’re only one piece of the puzzle. As studies indicate, there are other equally-important things to consider, among them, personal relationships, family dynamics, social networks, values, and commitment to particular causes or issues.

That is from a nice article by Cynthia Gibson in the Non-Profit Quarterly. As someone who studied economics and cost-benefits analysis in grad school, I probably appreciate and rely on data more than most. But at the same time, I also realize that data is not what determines most decisions - even at so-called expert aid agencies and foundations.

For many years, I was annoyed by this and felt that harder arguments and more facts would sway people. But changing human nature, as desirable as that may be, is something rarely achieved. So perhaps, as I noted earlier, the best approach is to try to work with - rather than reform - human nature to improve decisions about philanthropy and aid.

For marketplaces like GlobalGiving, this does not mean giving up emphasis on data and impact. To the contrary. One of the key functions of a good marketplace is to use metrics in the background to drive the average quality of projects higher and higher over time - and to do this while enabling donors to find good projects that resonate with their personal relationships, family dynamics, social networks, values, and favorite causes.

Developing Communities - Not Countries

2010-09-23T10:10:00.007-04:00

Guest post by Felipe Cabezas.

"There is no such thing as the Western world and the developing world." – Hans Rosling

The speakers at Monday’s TEDxChange stressed countries’ progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Even though countries have not universally met them, they have made impressive strides in a relatively short period of time – so much so that classical divisions between the “developed” and “developing” worlds are now muddied.

Yet we still refer to developed/developing countries, North/South and First/Third Worlds in our discourse.

But data implies that development functions on a smaller scale rather than on a larger one. When Hans Rosling dissects country bubbles in his visualizations, he illustrates that average information hides vast differences between regions’ development achievements. He argues that, because “there’s such a lot of difference within countries, it’s not relevant to have [average data] on a regional level. We must be much more detailed.” Bill Easterly takes that extra step and, by zooming into New York City, reveals that significant socioeconomic differences exist even in neighborhoods consisting merely of city blocks.

We already know this. So why do we still refer to developed and developing countries?

This linguistic habit blurs details and positions communities in need to disappear from view. Take Bennett County, South Dakota. Life expectancy in the United States is 78.11 years but in Bennett County is 66.6 years – on par with Azerbaijan, considered a developing country in the 2009 Human Development Report. But by using a developing-country framework, funders will invest in health initiatives in Azerbaijan – not in the United States. What about Bennett County? Doesn’t it warrant assistance, too?

This is not to say that organizations do not assist communities. They do. So then let’s reflect that in the way we speak!

Let’s refer to developing communities instead of developing countries.

This may seem like an insignificant change, but it alters the underlying cognitive framework that serves as the basis from which aid organizations operate. Incorporating developing communities into our lexicon portrays the world as a patchwork of variably developed communities that does not conform to national boundaries – a framework that more accurately reflects the reality of development.

Urban Agriculture Challenge: Communities Helping Themselves (With Delicious Results!)

2010-09-22T15:22:00.004-04:00

GlobalGiving nurtures bottom-up, community-based solutions to pressing social problems. We believe in the power of small over large, local over centrally planned and grassroots over top-down. This is why we jumped at the chance to partner with Bonterra Vineyards and Growing Power to support urban agriculture.

Urban farms help low-income communities access fresh food, generate employment, enhance food security, and improve quality of life. Rather than relying on fast food chains or large supermarkets, urban residents with access to a local farm can eat fresh fruits and vegetables grown right in their communities.

I grew up in Kentucky. It’s a great state. But parts of Louisville have been labeled “food deserts” due to the lack of accessibility to fresh food. Through its urban farms, Breaking New Grounds not only brings fresh produce to these underserved neighborhoods, but also provides agricultural training to local residents, and creates new, environmentally-friendly jobs.

In Denver, while fresh food is available in summer, winter months often mean relying on food grown and processed thousands of miles away. Feed Denver catalyzes urban farms that can be operated year-round, giving urban dwellers access to high-quality food from January through December.

Until October 7, these urban agriculture programs – and several others - are participating in an online fundraising challenge on GlobalGiving, with the chance to win up to $20,000 in contributions provided by Bonterra Vineyards.

To further highlight the power of communities working towards a common goal, the Bonterra-Growing Power-GlobalGiving challenge features a collective group incentive. If each participant raises at least $2,000 from 25 or more unique donors, all will receive a $1,100 bonus from Bonterra Vineyards. As on a community farm, each participant’s individual effort will contribute to the larger good. I like the taste of that!

Does the Truth Set Us Free?

2010-09-21T13:48:00.000-04:00

Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

That is from an article by Joe Keohane summarizing a number of recent studies about human nature.

I spent the first half of my career working at aid agencies gathering facts to inform policy analysis and recommendations to governments. This describes the mental model I followed most of those years:

If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

Alas, that does not seem to be the case:

Rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs.

When someone does not agree with us, we are often tempted to redouble our arguments to convince them we are right. Aid agencies often offer carrots and sticks as well. The research points to why that often does not work either:

The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

Is it time for us to let go of the idea that facts and good analysis can convince people? I hope not. But on the other hand, the Buddha realized that he could only be enlightened if he faced reality rather than ignoring it. The question is how best to combine human nature with facts and analysis to help society progress.

"They even told me so, but I ignored it at first"

2010-09-20T17:03:00.006-04:00

I have learned that the community had the answer. They even told me so, though I ignored it at first. But they left it up to me to figure out the 'how.'

That is from a nice paper that Jim Hennigan sent me by David Gaus, titled The Rural Hospital in Ecuador. It's about how a highly trained doctor and public health expert came to Ecuador with his own well developed sense of what should be done.

The quote above hints at a successful combination of bottom up and top down: too often experts come in thinking they know what to do as well as how to do it. But communities generally know what they want; they just don't know how best to get it. And that is where expertise brought in from the outside can make a real difference.

Innovation Challenges - surprising sources, surprising approaches

2010-09-16T07:57:00.000-04:00

Teams from Virginia, North Carolina and Winterthur, Switzerland, with roots in the world of auto racing have won the first Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, the $10 million competition aimed at advancing the technology for more fuel-efficient vehicles.

That is from today's New York Times. One of the benefits of challenges like the X Prize is that anyone can participate, and often the winners come from non-traditional places. In this case, who would have thought that the winners would come from the auto racing industry, which is known for sacrificing fuel consumption in favor of speed. And while the second and third place winners used electric engines, the first-place team relied on a not-so-new approach called internal combustion.

The timing of this is appropriate, since I am speaking today at the NCOC's Civic Innovator's Forum, co-sponsored by the Case Foundation, which has done what may be the leading analysis of promoting innovation through challenges and competitions. Check it out - and while you are at it, check out GlobalGiving's own Global Open Challenge, which is now underway.

"Don't be seduced by visualization..."

2010-09-13T13:32:00.000-04:00

"Don't be seduced by visualization. It can be cool for data wonks. But you need to focus on real users who are trying to solve a problem."

That was Tim O'Reilly at the World Bank last week, speaking at the opening of a session discussing the Apps for Development competition.

Tim told me he had never been to the World Bank before. But many of his words of wisdom apply more broadly to aid initiatives. Try replacing "apps" with "projects" in the following quotes:

"It may be the case that you invent apps that no one uses."
"Look at other apps to see if you can become part of their ecosystem."
"It may well be that you don't have the right data for your cool new app."
"Think of your app as a component rather than a platform."
"Don't assume your app will be used in isolation."

The purpose of the session I attended was to prime the ideas pump for apps. Someone at my table suggested an app that allows users to tell developers what kind of app users would find useful. In light of this previous post, you can imagine that I seconded that person's suggestion.

Listening and Learning

2010-09-13T10:56:00.000-04:00

A recent post "If you can flip a coin, can you be an expert?" got a mostly favorable response, but I want to elucidate and emphasize a few things in this post and the next.

First, listening to communities should be the foundation of any aid initiative. What community members want for their lives should be the starting point. Though aid agencies may not be equipped to address a problem such as security, the fact that security is of great concern to the community should inform what projects get funded and how they are designed. For example, if security for women is a big issue, then the design and placement of wells or standpipes is critical. Or if social tensions are high between certain groups, then great care needs to be taken to design projects that don't exacerbate these tensions.

Second, though there are some outstanding exceptions, as a rule we don't yet do enough listening. A recent study by Alex Jacobs and Robyn Wilford concluded that "most NGOs do not manage 'participation' or 'downward accountability' in a systematic way." It noted that a "number of pioneering innovations are emerging...[but] most are still in the experimental stage..." It cites the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership's 2007 Standard as offering a constructive approach, along with pilots being conducted by the NGO Keystone. GreatNonProfits is also piloting an approach that listens to a broader set of stakeholders. NGOs are not alone in not listening enough. I can speak from long years of experience that listening is an even greater challenge for official aid agencies such as the World Bank, ADB, and USAID.

Third, most aid workers are trying to do the right thing, but they usually have to spend a lot of time and energy managing upwards within their own bureaucracies. The Jacobs and Wilford study cited above discusses these dynamics, which will be familiar to staff of NGOs and official agencies alike. In short, the incentives for listening to communities are attenuated at best.

Fourth, listening is hard. Power dynamics sometimes mean that community members don't say exactly what is on their mind. In response to a question, they may say what they think the donor or implementing agency (or local official) wants to hear. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, we are working with Cognitive Edge on an indirect approach that relies more on storytelling to infer what people really think. More details on that will follow. Though this approach is by no means the whole answer, the initial results are encouraging.

Fifth, listening is messy. There is no single "community." Community members usually differ on what is most important to them, and the question arises about how to decide to whom you should listen. Should initiatives be decided on majority vote? In addition, sometimes donors or implementers with a lot of experience feel strongly that a certain approach desired by community members won't work, and that there is a better way. Should the donor or implementer over-ride the wishes of the community, or should they err on the side of accepting the community's wishes so that learning can take place if the project does not work? Again, there is no easy answer to this - there needs to be a balance. On this topic, I recommend David Ellerman's Helping People Help Themselves.

I suspect that the ability to listen is one of the most important factors determining whether aid workers can have a positive - and lasting - impact on a community. That is why we are trying to help the project organizations on GlobalGiving listen better to the communities they serve. As always, I welcome comments on this topic.

Why Peer Review Works in Science, and Why We Need It for Aid

2010-09-03T11:54:00.001-04:00

Guest post by Marc Maxson.

"Calls for aid reform assert that better evidence will lead to better policy."

What if this isn’t true?

What if policymakers don’t really care about whether their policies align best with the evidence? Are we screwed?

No. Good systems can still achieve progress and coordination in spite of the people within that system. The example I know best is scientific peer review.

You might think that the peer review process is a system to weed out garbage and improve publications – but that’s a pleasant side effect. The actual “system” is built around these three components:

1) One “cannon” – Scientists within a field implicitly agree that there will be one shared body of knowledge, to which everyone will contribute. This knowledge can be spread across hundreds of journals because (a) all use the same peer review mechanism and (b) specialized search engines (PubMed, Web of Knowledge, and Scopus) index virtually everything – reducing the odds that an important paper will go unnoticed. Grantmakers also consult the one cannon before allocating.

2) Forced confrontations – Scientists must face their critics and respond to them. Most neuroscience papers are submitted at least 3 times, meaning you get to read about your professional inadequacies a hundred times over a typical career. Peer review also alerts your most successful competitors ahead of others, further pressuring you to address the weaknesses in your paper and resubmit. Dialogue results.

3) A reputation system for scientists (see the H-index) – This system fairly reflects your breadth and depth, ignores non-peer-reviewed work, and requires that your work not only pass peer review but also be valuable to others (frequently cited).

Science is simpler than international development. Knowledge is the only measurable output, and the system outlined above reinforces quality. Moreover, the relationship between scientists and grantmakers is driven by the quality of that knowledge, which is determined by one's peers - not the grantmakers. The NIH program officer doesn't need the knowledge he is funding; he wants to know how many people cited it and what the author's cumulative impact (H-index).

What happens when people try to game the system?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that scientists are only concerned with their own reputations. Scientific facts become a means to an end: prestige.

A scientist could try to publish a bunch of “facts” to vault his career, but only peer reviewed “facts” affect his prestige. Four or more quasi publications equal a peer-reviewed one; that's a lot of wasted effort.

A scientist who promotes his “facts” outside of journals won’t get cited and could get “scooped” by a competitor. These non-canonical publications win the media and public but lose in grant competition. The “herd” protects itself because the H-index never lies.

Groups of scientists colluding to publish each others’ papers and move their reputations forward also fail, for a number of reasons I explain in my longer post.

Dialogue

The best part of the system is that scientists are forced to confront the other viewpoint in order to publish and be heard by the larger community. This is something that is badly needed in aid, because it is currently an afterthought, and disorganized. Some discussion questions:

Q: What incentive do aid practitioners have to discuss work with their peers?

Q: How can grantmakers in international development work from a common set of knowledge, as science grantmakers do?

Q: What compels people to consider different viewpoints before acting?

Q: What is the basis of personal reputation in international development?

Q: What happens when we replace "experts" in the peer review model with "crowds" of beneficiaries?

Q: Could a system that guides grantmakers in this way work in international development?

If you can flip a coin, can you be an expert?

2010-09-02T16:53:00.008-04:00

With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, we recently ran an experiment at GlobalGiving that had shocking results. We asked people in four communities in Kenya to tell stories* about the development issues most important to them. This was their answer:

In parallel, we asked experts (both local and foreign) with experience in those communities to predict what they thought the story would be about. Here is the shocker: Only 1 of the 65 experts and implementers correctly predicted the most common theme.

Personally, I found it surprising that 42% of the stories were about social relations, but on the other hand, I don't work in those communities so how should I know? But I would expect the experts to know, wouldn't you? Alas, the experts predicted only three of the top six concerns of the community. In other words, they did about as well as flipping a coin.**

The old style of aid is for experts to study the situation and decide what people need. It is tempting to say that we should simply reverse this and let the people decide. Exciting new technologies will enable beneficiaries to have a far greater voice in the coming years, and that is long overdue. But the best system will likely provide a balance of the two. It will create an ongoing, iterative conversation between beneficiaries and experts about what is needed, what works and what doesn't, and what that implies about priorities and initiatives in subsequent rounds.

* The story telling part of this experiment was done with the help of Cognitive Edge and Irene Gujit. They were introduced to us by the Rockefeller Foundation, which is leading some of the most innovative work in the field I have seen in years.

** There were a total of twelve themes to choose from.

Air-Traffic Controllers' Lesson for Development

2010-08-30T10:08:00.001-04:00

Guest post by Felipe Cabezas.

Thinking about the recent buzz about aid transparency on my flight from Milwaukee to Washington, DC, I wonder if we will use more information to improve programs’ effectiveness or to conduct business as usual. Of course, a large part of that depends on how we gather – and display – information.

Perhaps we should turn to air-traffic controllers for guidance.

Air-traffic controllers oversee specific airplanes within a specific flight zone – not the entire air space. When trying to land an airplane, they communicate directly with the pilot and elicit pertinent information. They already know some things (for example, current weather conditions) but rely entirely on the pilot for airplane-specific information (for example, mechanical issues). When assessing information from multiple airplanes, air-traffic controllers discuss among themselves and develop a plan to land all of the airplanes within their flight zone. But this plan continually evolves. At any moment, an unexpected problem could occur which would cause the air-traffic controllers to adjust their initial plan. And because air-traffic controllers are not flying the airplanes, they need to constantly share their updated plans with each pilot to ensure that no airplane lands unsuccessfully – or worse, collides with another. All of this occurs from the moment an airplane enters a flight zone until it reaches its terminal gate.

So, what do air-traffic controllers teach us about aid? Just as Dennis wrote earlier, actionable, transformative information comes from the right sources and is provided to the right people at the right time.

From the Right Sources: We must communicate directly with beneficiaries as well as other stakeholders who have been the primary source of information in the past. Beneficiaries have critical information that experts do not have. But experts also have information – including lessons from experiences elsewhere – that beneficiaries do not have.

To the Right People: Aid agencies and stakeholders must collaborate not only ex-ante but also during implementation. Aid agencies devise programs that are intended to help beneficiaries. Due to unexpected problems, no aid program works perfectly as designed. Stakeholders (especially beneficiaries) must provide feedback, and aid agencies must listen and readjust their programs accordingly.

At the Right Time: A donor-stakeholder feedback loop must exist in real time. Beneficiary feedback is key. An unexpected problem must be identified and corrected immediately to ensure that a program remains on course. If not, then the program may not serve – and may even harm – the beneficiaries.

Air-traffic controllers want their airplanes to land successfully and rely on a robust, real-time feedback loop to prevent a pile-up of airplanes on the tarmac. Errors have catastrophic – and visible – consequences, which is why good feedback systems have been invented.

The costs of failed aid programs are less visible but no less tragic. The good news is that the right kind of transparency can lead to feedback loops that improve program impact significantly. A recent study in a small area of Uganda showed that improving transparency around the performance of health clinics reduced infant mortality by 33 percent, thereby saving an estimated 550 lives – the same number of people that a Boeing 747 holds.

Who did this?

2010-08-26T14:21:00.002-04:00

We shall find too that such current notions as that society ‘acts’ or that it ‘treats’, ‘rewards’, or ‘remunerates’ persons, or that it ‘values’ or ‘owns’ or ‘controls’ objects or services, or is ‘responsible for’ or ‘guilty of’ something, or that it has a ‘will’ or ‘purpose’, can be ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, or that the economy ‘distributes’ or ‘allocates’ resources, all suggest a false intentionalist or constructivist interpretation of words which might have been used without such connotation, but which almost invariably lead the user to illegitimate conclusions. We shall see that such confusions are at the root of the basic conceptions of highly influential schools of thought which have wholly succumbed to the belief that all rules or laws must have been invented or explicitly agreed upon by somebody.

That is from Friedrich Hayak's Law, Legislation, and Liberty via Cafe Hayek (HT to Bill Easterly). The full post is worth reading for a quick summary of some of Hayek's key insights. Among them is this: that rules, laws, regulations, institutions, etc were generally not invented by specific people or by a society for specific purposes. Hayek's point is that in most cases they actually evolved organically.

A corollary is as follows: Being able to describe (a) how a system currently does function and then (b) how it should function generally does not (c) lead to the system getting changed.

Learning from Mistakes - Medical Edition.

2010-08-19T16:33:00.000-04:00

“When you break that paradigm of litigation and give patients the chance to understand the human element of the other side — of the doctor and what they are struggling with — you find that people are far more forgiving and understanding than has been typically assumed,” said Richard C. Boothman, one of the study’s authors and the medical center’s chief risk officer, who devised and carried out the disclosure program. “We have given patients no alternative but to sue, and then we use the fact that they sue to show how opportunistic and awful they are.”

That is from an article in the NYT about a new approach being taken by the Univ. of Michigan Health System. Instead of circling the wagons and taking refuge behind the lawyers when a mistake is made, the hospital staff admit the mistake to their patients and talk about what they have learned and what they are going to do to avoid the same mistake in the future. Sometimes they compensate the patient or family, but that is worked out directly rather than via a lawsuit.

You really have to hand it to the University of Michigan for trying to break with normal practice, which is that doctors are discouraged from admitting or talking about mistakes, preventing others from learning from them. The article notes:

"That openness has in turn created an environment where patient safety and patient care, not avoidance of litigation, have become the priority."

Amen.

Don't Make the Same Mistake I Did

2010-08-17T15:22:00.002-04:00

“We dump hardware down and hope magic will happen,” said Michael Trucano, senior information and education specialist at the World Bank, whose offering to FailFaire was a list of the 10 worst practices he had encountered in his job.

Trucano won the award for best failure at a recent Failfare gathering at the World Bank that was co-hosted by MobileActive. Earlier I blogged about the product pileup of things the aid industry invents that people don't want. Events like this at the World Bank are encouraging, because talking about failure is the first step toward not making the same mistakes again and again.

The full story, by Stephanie Strom in the NYTimes, is here. Trucano's own account, with many insights, is here. A very nice post by the World Bank's Aleem Walji is at the Development Marketplace blog.

Solving the Wrong Problems

2010-08-16T11:51:00.000-04:00

"It turned out we were solving the wrong problem."

That is Saul Griffith, a wunderkind inventor who created a new way to make eyeglasses on an inexpensive device in developing countries. For that invention and others, Griffith won a MacArthur genius award. The eyeglass machine was a great invention; unfortunately, the real constraint turns out to be testing eyes and writing accurate prescriptions rather than making the lenses.

Griffiths' story is highly relevant to the aid business, especially these days as new foundations and people with experience in technology are trying to help address challenges faced by the world's poorest. A lot of smart people are trying to help, and since their expertise is in software or technology, they (naturally) try to use those tools first.

But as Griffith says in the article, "The speed with which software-based activities and web innovations catch on - text messaging, eBay, Twitter - has encouraged public perception that transformative technological change takes place almost instantaneously." Unfortunately, this is not the case with most development challenges, as in the case of the new eyeglass machine.

A more fundamental problem is that the inventors don't have a good way to assess demand. So they invent all sorts of things that *seem* to make sense, but turn out not to be used or adopted by the intended beneficiaries. Over at the CGD blog, April Harding has written about the "product pileup" in the health sector, where new agencies and foundations have created products such as Malaria Rapid Diagnostic Kits and bednets. She cites a book by Laura Frost and Michael Reich that discusses why these innovations are not being adopted, and what can be done to reduce this mismatch between supply and demand in the health sector.

With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, GlobalGiving and Innocentive have teamed up on a pilot to reverse the sequence of innovation. First, we ask the communities what they need. And then we advertise that need to Innocentive's virtual teams of inventors. This pilot is described here.

Illustration source: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/small-business-financing-is-missing-the-target.html

When Supply Meets Demand for Innovation

2010-08-16T11:47:00.004-04:00

Guest post by Britt Lake

With support from the Rockefeller Foundation and in partnership with InnoCentive, we at GlobalGiving have been piloting a way to enable communities to tell the world what problems they need help solving. We've then been crowdsourcing solutions to these problems to bring clean water and electricity to communities in India, Uganda, Peru, and around the world.

First, we reached out to hundreds of local organizations around the world to determine their communities' biggest challenges. The responses came pouring in: How can we build a rainwater harvesting storage tank that is appropriate for our region? How can we design an indicator that would show us when water has enough exposure to UV light to make it safe to drink? How can we create river turbines with local materials that would provide electrical power to villages in the Peruvian jungle?

We then posted five of these challenges on the InnoCentive website, which in turn broadcast them to potential inventors around the world. The initial results are promising. Four of the five challenges have already found potential solutions.

Take the EDGE Project. EDGE is an organization that researches, designs and implements sustainable development projects on the Ugandan island of Lingira in Lake Victoria. Since they were founded, they’ve been trying to find a way to make water from Lake Victoria safe to drink for the Lingira community. They have tried boiling the water, using biosand filters, chemical water treatments, and an electrochemical system, but none of these have provided sustainable solutions for the local environment. These existing methods make the water taste bad, require expensive replacement parts that are not found in the community, or don’t get the water completely clean. In the two months after the challenge was posted, the EDGE project received 85 potential solutions! The EDGE team reviewed all the submissions and selected one promising new approach - a new type of ceramic pot filter that both cleans the water and stores and protects it from re-contamination.

Through this process we’ve been able to figure out what people need, and we’ve identified potential solutions to these challenges. Our final step is getting these solutions funded and tested. We’re working with our partners now to find out what it will take to get these solutions working on the ground, then we’ll use crowdfunding to actually get these solutions tested.

When Top-Down is Needed: World Bank Reform

2010-08-12T19:23:00.001-04:00

Reforming the World Bank, by David Phillips, is the most constructive book on the topic I have read. Phillips, a long-time World Bank staff member, spent his career advising developing country institutions how to make the changes needed to carry out their functions effectively. Upon retirement, Phillips decided to turn his formidable analytical skills toward his own previous employer. He has produced a refreshingly different book about reforming the largest international aid institution.

Phillips describes not only the changes that need to be made but also offers insights into how to get them done. New aid donors and new social technologies threaten to make the Bank and other aid agencies irrelevant if these agencies do not change with the times. The leaders of those traditional agencies would thus do well to heed the lessons of this book.

In the fourteen years I worked at the Bank and in the ten years since I left, I have read many critiques of the institution from a variety of sources - academicians, NGOs, government commissions, and journalists. Most are arguments for the Bank to do more or less of something (engagement with civil society, environmental projects, gender projects, infrastructure projects, policy lending, trade adjustment loans, government transparency and corruption initiatives, etc). Others argue that the Bank should change the way it works at the margin, by making more grants and fewer loans, for example.

But few critiques show much understanding (or even interest) in how to effect the changes prescribed. That is the great strength of Phillips' book. He has thought carefully about the forces that have led to changes in the Bank over time, and how they might be brought to bear today. More importantly, he describes with great clarity the incentives at work at all levels in the institution. He knows what individual staff and management are held accountable for in reality (vs the rhetoric). And like Moises Naim, former board director of the Bank (and most recently editor of Foreign Policy Magazine), Phillips is able to elucidate the incentives facing the board of directors as well.

The crux of this book (and something not duplicated by Naim or others) is Phillips's insights into the tensions between management and the board. Those tensions are a binding constraint to real reform and change at the Bank. They are all the more intense because the Bank has a resident board of directors that typically meets twice a week(!). Phillips describes the sophisticated (and rational) efforts by management to keep the board from micro-managing by flooding the board with too much information to digest. The board, in return, distrusts management, and repeatedly tries to rein in management initiatives. This vicious cycle eats up a huge amount of staff and management time. The brainpower, relationships, and energy of board members are also sapped by the struggle with management instead of applied to development problems.

The result is an inward-looking institution whose whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts, and whose ability to change and innovate is sharply limited. Before I left the Bank in 2000, I asked many of my colleagues, whom I admired greatly, what percentage of their skills, energy, and time got applied directly to development challenges facing their client countries. The response I got from most of them was "twenty-five to thirty percent." The rest of their potential was dissipated on internal processes and compliance with regulations. Given the tremendous assets of the Bank in terms of people, money, and relationships, this squandering of potential is a real tragedy - especially for the world's poor.

On the eve of my departure from the Bank, one of the managing directors asked me for advice on his ongoing reform effort. "What do you think are the most important things?" he asked. I told him that in my view real change would not happen unless the Bank deliberately subjected itself to outside competition that threatened some of the Bank's own resources. Only if the Bank had something concrete to compete against could its real progress be assessed objectively, and only then would the board and management feel compelled to develop a more productive way of working together in order to survive.

The managing director was aghast at this idea, since he felt it would threaten the very institution he was charged with protecting. But this is short-term thinking. In the end, it will be up to the board and the Bank's shareholders, including the US government and others, to show the courageous leadership needed to bring the Bank into the 21st century. Without such leadership, the Bank will remain insulated from competitive forces and will continue using the majority of its resources on internal processes rather than on promoting prosperity for the world's poorest. But if the will to lead is there, Phillips' book can help guide the way.

Mapping the World Bank's Footprint

2010-08-12T14:55:00.001-04:00

The World Bank, in collaboration with AidData and the Development Gateway, have just announced the release of a service that allows you to use Google Earth to see exactly where Bank projects are being implemented around the world. In seven weeks, the team (which included members from Brigham Young University, William and Mary, and Georgetown) geocoded over 12,000 project locations. As they explain, this information was often available, but it was buried deep in hundreds of different reports. In practice, this meant that it was unusable for the vast majority of people.

This is a big step forward. As I have noted before, information availability per se is not enough. The information must be available in a format that is easily usable, and on this front, the team working on this seems to have made much progress. What encourages me about this effort is also the inter-sectoral nature of the collaboration. It included not only World Bank experts, but also academicians and an NGO. It had seasoned aid veterans (Jean-Louis Sarbib used to be a VP at the World Bank) working together professors and students. Each of them brings to bear perspectives and expertise that the others don't have. That is the wave of the future for the development field as a whole.

I was also encouraged by the talk of empowering communities themselves to take action. Information and transparency initiatives only succeed if they enable or require people to act or change their behaviors in a way that will make a real difference. A number of other aid transparency initiatives are underway, and as I watched the video at the link, several important drivers of success came to mind. Initiatives that make a difference will:

1) Be as real-time as possible. The usefulness of the data falls off sharply as a function of age.

2) Allow and even encourage two-way flows of information. Users have to be able to comment on the information in a way that everyone can see (and act on - see point 4).

3) Have strong incentives for updating. As I have confessed before, I have run or been involved in a couple of massive data exercises that collapsed because after the initial push there was no ongoing incentive for people to refresh the data. This aspect is very hard, but critical.

4) Have a clear theory of how the information will affect behavior, and that theory needs to be reflected in what data is collected and how it is presented (for an obvious but compelling example, see here.)

5) Be as simple as possible. Present only the information needed to elicit behavior change. There is always the temptation to have more bells and whistles, but if there is one thing I have learned at GlobalGiving it is that complexity and clutter kill. Simplify, then check to see if people are using the data, and if not, then change the data or the presentation.

Aid and Aviation

2010-08-10T15:20:00.007-04:00

This guest post is by Felipe Cabezas.

When flying, do you want to know this information?

Before I board a plane and while I’m in the air, I don’t care about aviation statistics. They fly (get it?!) out the window. I could not care less about how many planes landed safely worldwide in the past year.

Or this information?

Instead, I worry about my flight. How are the weather conditions? Are there any mechanical issues? Did the pilot have a good night’s rest? These are the factors that will determine if my plane lands safely at Reagan National Airport. Flight so-and-so that landed safely in LaGuardia a week earlier does not factor into the equation – by a long shot.

Now, that’s not to say that aviation statistics aren’t important. They’re good to know when booking a flight and assuring myself that traveling by plane is safer than by car. But the only times when I seriously consider them are before and after my flight . . . when I’m on the ground . . . safe and sound . . .

When I read articles, documents and position papers about international aid and look at accompanying graphs and charts, I wonder if we focus too much on aviation statistics. (Child mortality worldwide has decreased by X percent over the past decade.) That’s good to know, but we’re not on the ground. We’re in the air. Perhaps we should start gathering more information about specific flights and assessing it more closely to gauge how likely we are to land safely.