humanitarian.info

Chris Blattman’s partner Jeannie is the new research director at IRC, and they’re thinking about “how to assist learning in the field — both IRC’s expat aid workers and national staff”. So here we are, ready for another go-round. What do we know about aid workers and “learning”?

1. Most aid workers learn by doing rather than by reflecting; that’s what lead them into aid work in the first place.
2. Different professions have different approaches to learning. Compare water engineers to child protection officers.
3. National staff have different approaches to learning depending on their social and economic backgrounds.
4. Different organisations have different cultures which affect how their staff will learn. Compare MSF with WHO.

One concern is when Chris says that if aid workers were learning more, “Presumably the quality of aid would benefit too”. I have yet to see any research connecting aid worker learning to improvements in the quality of aid, and I’m not even sure what that research would look like, to be honest – two extremely hard to measure metrics with a very tenuous causal link. Good luck! More worryingly, it overlooks the structural deficiencies that prevent aid workers from improving the quality of aid – but that’s a bigger argument.

Chris believes that “while most research is horrific to read… enough well-written stuff is out there to keep us all busy for a fair while.” This is not true. The quality of writing is irrelevant, it’s the style of wring that’s problematic. My apologies for being blunt, but academic research is plain boring and functionally useless for most aid workers. Your best bet is to hire a professional writer who understands the sector to rewrite academic research in styles that will be more widely appealling (and tailored to the medium of delivery, of course).

One danger of technology-focused solutions: a lot of aid workers spend a lot of time sitting at computers. Yeah, I know he says that “not everyone sits behind a computer”, but not everyone has an MP3 player either and he still think podcasts are a good idea. The last thing I want to do with my spare time is to keep sitting behind my computer. Aid workers who aren’t sitting behind computers are generally the sort of people who don’t like sitting behind computers, so they don’t want to keep sitting behind their computer either. So we have to be careful.

The two ideas that they have so far are: podcasts for Landcruiser journeys, and reading clubs for aid workers.

• Podcasts, sure, I do think they’re a good idea. I like podcasts, but I listen to podcasts that have nothing to do with my job, because podcasts are entertainment. If you’re chugging 6 hours through the forest on bad roads, do you really want to listen to a detailed discussion about a book on nutrition? I’m not sure, but worth a go.
• Reading clubs – myself, I hate book clubs, but I’m probably not the target audience. If you emphasise the social element, then people will go for it, but I’m just not sure how it’s possible to create a top-down learning structure like that. And when I say I’m not sure how it’s possible, I mean I don’t think it’s possible.

I just came back from a workshop in an unnamed Latin American country for an unnamed organisation. (Ha!) This is not the first workshop I’ve done, nor will it be the last (hopefully); my experience with technology in the aid world is not inconsiderable; my commitment to improving the capacity of aid workers (particularly national staff) is fairly obvious, blah blah blah. So I’ll go out on a limb, and say that this approach will work in this sector as the starting point for better learning:

1. Holding workshops in the field that bring people together across a) different organisations, b) different countries and/or c) different disciplines, focus on core transferable skills, emphasising practical skills that reflect policy. Old school!
2. Creating structures that enable the professional links developed in those workshops to be maintained more effectively over time. Call it social networking if you must, but stop looking at Facebook. This is where the technology comes in – new school!
3. Then (and this is the really, really difficult bit) let these groups define the direction of future learning. Regularly poll staff to see what they want to learn, how they want to learn and when they want to learn, and shape your approach accordingly.

There needs to be some imagination around these two approaches, a willingness for organisations to give up control of the learning process, and a long-term investment that will definitely see mixed results. Unfortunately these are three things that aid agencies are really, really bad at – however I am available for consultation should funding be in place cough cough cough.