humanitarian.info

Obviously, this blog is dormant but we don’t often have good news to share; so, here we go…

The  baseless and preposterous charges of banditry against humanitarian.info’s friend, Zimbabwe Peace Project National Director Jestina Mukoko were yesterday bounced out by Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court. Zimbabwean Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, quoted in  the BBC, said:

“The state, through its agents, violated the applicant’s constitutional rights… entitling the applicant a permanent stay of criminal prosecution.”

I do not have a copy of the judgement, so it’s unclear to me whether this is a ruling on the procedural conduct of the authorities in failing to bring Jestina to court, or their complicity in her (and others’) abduction and torture. I hope  that this ruling opens the prison door for those who are still missing,  likely imprisoned in off-the-map places of detention , before the bitter fight to bring to book their abductors begins and closes it again.

Uh-oh … events overtake blogging. After writing the previous post about how Jestina Mukoko’s bail had been revoked, the following happened:

Zimbabwean rights activist Jestina Mukoko and 14 other people were ordered freed on bail Wednesday after the president and the prime minister forced a judge to reverse the previous day’s decision that had sparked outrage.

I guess this sort of rapid turnaround is what the otherwise wholly wretched Twitter was invented to report. Anyhow, this is far far better news, although the political intervention clearly shows the Zimbabwe legal process for the sham it is.

As feared, the Zimbabwean state continues to press its shonky case against my colleague Jestina Mukoko, National Director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, and 14 other Zimbabwean political and civil society activists. From Violet Gonda at SW Radio Africa:

The courthouse was packed Tuesday with journalists, members of civil society and the diplomatic community, who were left shocked after the Magistrate remanded the accused persons in custody. Eyewitnesses said Mukoko looked pale and dejected when she heard the news. The accused persons were all abducted and tortured between the months of October and December last year.

It’s  going to be little comfort to Jestina as she is taken back to prison, but the authorities have only managed to delay, not stop the work of ZPP and others in monitoring what is going on in Zimbabwe’s hinterland. Just in is the meaty February report from ZPP:

Since January 2009, a total record of 2410 cases of politically motivated human rights abuse have been recorded: 1125 in January and 1285 in February showing  an upsurge by 160 cases. Although there were no reported cases of murder since 2009, cases of harassments, assaults, looting, displacement and unlawful detentions continue to maintain a stubborn presence.

It’s pretty clear to me that Zimbabwe’s resilient communities are making for resilient organisations too. This numerical analysis doesn’t really mean anything, but the datatrail and the paper beneath it – combined with the quiet work of many others in country writing down and photographing what is going on – is there for an eventual reckoning.

IRIN reports on how the financial crisis is affecting the NGO community while Michael rounds up the details (and will be keeping a running tally, no doubt):

“Clearly the impact of the financial downturn on charities is widening and deepening,” said Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the Charity Commission, the independent regulator for charitable activity in England and Wales. “Some charities still face that double whammy of a drop in income as well as an increased demand for services.”

When I was last in the UK, those I spoke to in the NGO sector all had the same story to tell – budgets predicted to fall and programmes scaling back. It’s likely that the programs that will be affected are long-term development rather than emergency response, since money tends to come through for the disasters no matter what, and it’s going to be core staff that disappear while consultants take up the slack.¹ My main recommendation for the NGO community would be this: if you’re going to be receiving less money, and you’re going to be doing more work, then you need to work smarter, not harder.

The NGO community is quite smart at the tactical level – in the field, where resources are constrained, as we discussed in the series on humanitarian innovation. It’s not so smart at the strategic level – at headquarters, global or regional, where those resources are allocated and where the big picture thinking usually gets done. It’s not because there aren’t smart people thinking about key issues in the NGO community – you only need to read Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog to realise that there’s a very high level of analytical capacity out there. However much of that thought is directed towards the issues that the NGOs deal with, rather than the effective functioning of the NGOs themselves.

There’s been a big push in recent years towards redressing the balance – the ECB Project being the most notable example – but there are certain institutional constraints built in. One of them is that we’ve had it drummed into us for decades that spending money on the organisation is a Bad Thing. You must spend as little money as possible on the organisation, the reasoning goes, because then you’ll be spending more on the communities that you work with. The basis for this is public perception as much as anything – imagine what the average private donor would feel if they knew you were spending 50 cents in the Euro on your running costs. Those running costs have to be paid for somehow, though, which has lead to all sort of budgetary trickery to hide the fact that – gasp! – we actually pay staff. I’d argue that this is a communications failure, that it’s an inevitable byproduct of the way that we treat private donors in general², but that’s (yet again) a discussion for another time.

Since this is supposed to be a blog primarily about humanitarian information management (although that feels increasingly tangential these days…), I suppose I should point out that investing in technology can offer ways of leveraging scarce resources. Although I tend to agree that the productivity revolution promised by technology hasn’t actually arrived yet, there are a range of smaller impacts that are blindingly obvious. For example: if you haven’t moved most of your main office communication  to VOIP now, then why not go into the carpark with a big pile of dollar bills and set fire to them? The NGO community shouldn’t be exempt from the evolutionary algorithms that drive organisational developments. There’s a good chance that some organisations will collapse if funding streams dry up to the extent that some people fear they will – but there’s also a  good chance that some organisations will find this is the opportunity to radically change the way they do business, and they’ll come  out of that process working smarter  than they did before.

That’s the theory, anyway.

1. I could be particularly provocative and say that I’m looking forward to seeing whether the withdrawal of NGO support makes a significant difference to the lives of affected communities, but I’ll save that for later. [↩]
2. Briefly: as idiots. [↩]

Let’s take a break from the more negative posts of the past few days to congratulate the members of NetHope who recently won Intel’s INSPIRE•EMPOWER Challenge.¹ Catholic Relief Services’ Great Lakes Cassava Initiative (GLCI):

… a pilot project using laptops to help cassava farmers increase food availability and incomes. Millions of families in East and Central Africa rely on cassava as a primary food source, but two virulent diseases are wiping out fields across the region. GLCI aims to educate 1.15 million farmers in six countries about these diseases and provide them with disease-resistant cassava plants. The laptops will facilitate information exchange among farmers, field agents and project managers; support remote distribution of training modules; and improve disease monitoring through automatic data transfers.

and WinRock International’s² Rural Livelihood Enhancement:

… to deliver information and communication technology (ICT) services to rural communities in Nepal. To address the lack of grid electricity, the project will utilize renewable power from micro-hydro stations and solar photovoltaic panels. The goal of the project is to bring about economic development and improve access to energy, education, employment and information in remote areas. The ICT service centers will serve as computer labs for students and will be open to the public during off-school hours to provide services to the community.

Both of these projects take the right approach – looking at an existing problem from the perspective of the affected communities and applying technology to solve that problem, rather than taking a technology and trying to find a problem to apply it to. Congratulations to both organisations, and good luck with the projects!

1. Not strictly humanitarian, but NetHope gets a free ride on this blog. [↩]
2. Another interesting article about WinRock’s work at Ken’s blog – by Gary Garriot, a legend in the development tech sector. [↩]

Ken Banks has almost written a manifesto for himself in Time to eat our own dog food? I think there’s a lot of potential in his project FrontlineSMS – mainly because it’s a platform. Like any good platform, it’s up to the end user (in this case, grassroots NGOs) to work out how they want to use it, and how they want to incorporate it into their organisation and activities. I need to work out why I feel more positively towards FrontlineSMS than I do towards Ushahidi, particularly since the two projects have a good working relationship, but right now I want to focus on something that Ken says in his blog post:

If we draw parallels between the concerns of Easterly and Schumacher and apply them to the application of mobile phones as a tool for social and economic development, there’s a danger that the development community may end up repeating the same mistakes of the past.

I don’t think I’ll put myself in any danger by predicting that the development community will absolutely repeat the mistakes of the past, since that’s one of the things that the development community is good at. Ken rightly feels that we need to avoid developing an “NGO digital divide”, but once again I don’t think there’s much danger in stating that there’s already an NGO digital divide. It’s been quite clearly identified, at two levels.

1. Between the richer UN agencies and the (usually) Western NGOs who do most of their contracting, and their poorer cousins (particularly national NGOs in the developing world). As the two groups diverge further (which I admit will be a slow process) communications between them will become increasingly problematic. When one organisation has a 24/7 broadband connection and the other needs to go to the local internet cafe twice a day, you’re going to feel it.
2. Slightly less alarming but potentially more damaging is the digital divide within organisations. In most organisations, the further out into the field you go – both geographically and organisationally distant from headquarters – the poorer the ICT capacity is. Considering that field offices are our eyes and ears on the ground – the source of nearly all the baseline information our organisations need to do their work – this is something which needs to be fixed.

Ken’s proposal for how we can avoid this:

To do this we need to think about low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, affordable, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. This is something I regularly write about, and it’s a challenge I’m more than happy to throw down to the developer community.

It’s a challenge that we all need to deal with, and one of the critical things that Sahana has (and continues to) wrestle with. I think that this approach – exemplified by projects like FrontlineSMS – is the right way to deal with the first point I discussed above, because the most likely common denominator between organisations is the mobile phone. However while mobile phones can play a role in improving communications within organisations, there are deeper political and cultural questions that need to be addressed regarding priorities within the structure.

Read Ken’s full post and leave him a comment – this is a discussion which needs to be continued and expanded.

BBC and Alertnet are echoing the wires that the bail applications of ZPP’s Jestina Mukoko and Brodrek Takawira, and others have been granted.

The Police have routinely ignored previous court orders, so I hope that this is true. The lawyers seem to think so though. I await some confirmation from colleagues and if so, it’s terrific news.

The perpetrators of this event have caused deep and profound personal damage to a lot of decent people. If I were somehow involved in the abduction and torture of a fantastically eloquent, popular and relentless globally-known campaigner, who then became one of the world’s most prominent prisoners of conscience, and she were released, knowing my identity, with the world’s media baying for information, I’d consider the following:

a) Packing my bags (of money, that is),

b) Booking a ticket to  Hong Kong,

c) Trying to get that dirty amnesty agreement sorted out double-quick time.

Update 3 March 2009:

Seems to be true. From hospital, though looking unwell, Jestina is reporting as saying:

I am free now and I must concentrate on my health … The time will come for me to comment to the media. I am still being attended to by the doctors and I might be in here for some weeks to come.

A while ago, I predicted that – absent significant reform, particularly around accountability – the humanitarian community would be overtaken by events and rendered increasingly irrelevant. One area where this seemed inevitable was fundraising with the general public – if we continue to treat people like clueless chumps in our fundraising, then as their access to information increases and they realise the gap between what we tell them and what actually happens, their resentment will increase and their donations will dwindle.

There are exceptions, of course – faith-based charities will probably be able to rely on continued inputs from people for whom charity is a requirement of their religion – yet even those purses are squeezed by the wider economic environment. That’s what we’re seeing now, as yesterday’s article in Third Sector outlines:

The weak pound is forcing international aid agencies to make redundancies and reductions to overseas programmes… spokeswoman for ActionAid said it had reduced funding to some of its overseas programmes by between 20 and 30 per cent…Martin Birch, finance director at Christian Aid, said the charity was not making cuts to programmes but was expecting to take £2m from its reserves over the coming year to tackle the problem. The fall in the value of the pound has cost Oxfam £7.8m in the past year, the charity said. It is axing about 40 jobs because of the downturn.

At the same time, access to information is also starting to change beneficiary expectations. We’ve heard a lot about how mobile phones level out the market in developing countries, enabling farmers to make price comparisons when it comes to selling their crops, or fishermen a clearer picture of weather forecasts, and so on and so forth. From the economic perspective of somebody affected by disaster, aid organisations are a market like any other, and we can expect to see more disruption to our operations caused by mobile phones in particular – swarming patterns around aid distributions, for example – but also in a rise in problems around e.g. security of beneficiary information on databases.

The third area where technology is having an impact is in linking donors and beneficiaries on a personal level. Organisations like Kiva aren’t presenting a radically new model per se – it’s a combination of the sponsorship programmes that a lot of charities used to run¹ with micro-finance. For the record I really like Kiva, but there’s no doubt that in a disaster it would struggle to survive. We might see more resilient, disaster-oriented versions in the future, but I doubt it.

Given these three technology-driven trends, what can aid agencies do? Obviously they need to be smarter in how they use technology (becauseheythat’swhatthisblogisaboutright?) but really they just need to be smarter. There needs to be a radical restructuring of the entire sector, not just in the face of growing criticisms of aid at the macro level² but at the roots of the entire humanitarian effort. It should be clear to us by now – after years of poor evaluations and failed projects – that serving the beneficiaries and educating the public require a different approach to the one we have now, one that starts with openness:

A public entity (a non-governmental organisation) using public funds (either via a government institutin or from the general public) to carry out public service (providing relief to communities) should make all its data publicly available, with the only possible exceptions made for privacy or security issues.

The recent ICVA annual conference took as its starting point the depressing premise that, despite the four previous conferences discussing reform, little actual reform seems to have taken place. Our resistance to reform has developed partly from our lack of transparency and accountability, but that era is coming to an end. Change or die, folks.

1. Before they realised those sponsorship programmes were basically a lie with marginal impact, but that’s another story. [↩]
2. Stand up, Dambisa Moyo with Dead Aid and  Jonathan Glennie – the latter on a Development Drums podcast here. [↩]

(ZPP Director Jestina Mukoko, in red, and ZPP Provincial Coordinator Brodreck Takawira, in white shirt, entering court in Harare, 24 December 2008 [Source: BBC])

Earlier this month I wrote about my friend Jestina Mukoko, Director of Zimbabwe Peace Project, who on 3 December 2008 was abducted from her home near Harare.

Since then, despite a very loud international outcry from goverments and civil society, no information about her wherabouts was provided by the authorities. The Commissioner of the Zimbabwean Police denied they had her in any premises under their jurisdiction, and then ignored a High Court order to cooperate with her lawyers in finding her. One journalist reported that the Police were very polite to concerned citizens telephoning them to ask what was going on: “We will trace your call you sellouts, we will make you sh*** in your pants”. Nice.

Well, it now turns out the Police have had her all along! From Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, today:

Lawyers responded with a comprehensive but non-exhaustive search of a number of police stations, including Mabelreign, Marlborough, Avondale, Borrowdale, Mbare, Stodart, Matapi, Harare Central, Braeside, Rhodesville and Highlands police stations. By speaking to various police officials, examining Detention Books and requesting cell head counts, it was established that at least fourteen (14) individuals of the total number subjected to enforced disappearances, twelve (12) of whom appeared on the list of confirmed abductees, were being detained in custody at Mabelreign, Marlborough, Mbare, Stodart, Matapi, Braeside, Rhodesville and Highlands police stations. These individuals include Jestina Mukoko and her two (2) colleagues from the Zimbabwe Peace Project, who are being held at different police stations.

I’m relieved that Jestina is alive, and her family must be totally overwhelmed. But it’s not going to be an easy road to getting her back home and back to work. There are reports citing The Zimbabwean Pravda saying that Jestina will today face trial for recruiting people to undergo military training for the purpose of otherthrowing the goverment. Because it’s so jaw-droppingly craven, I’ll clip a portion of The Herald’s story here, but read the rest yourself:

A statement from the Zimbabwe Republic Police yesterday said some time in April this year, Manuel allegedly recruited Ricardo Hwasheni, a police constable based at Waterfalls in Harare, to undergo military training in Botswana with a view to forcibly deposing the Government and replace it with one led by Morgan Tsvangirai. Manuel allegedly tasked Hwasheni to recruit four other policemen, promising them US$2 000 each. Later, the statement said, Manuel and Kaseke, who is Hwasheni’s cousin, went to MDC-T’s headquarters at Harvest House, where a man identified only as Josen interviewed Hwasheni.After the interview, Josen allegedly told Hwasheni that he would hear from him within two weeks or that Mukoko would contact him.

In June, the statement says, Hwasheni met Mukoko at her offices in Milton Park in Harare where she further interviewed him before handing him over to Takawira, who told him that he would be contacted within two weeks. The statement further alleged that a man who had been sent by Mukoko met Hwasheni at Girls’ High School in Harare and gave him 200 pula and some Zimbabwean dollars for transport to Botswana where he was to meet a man known as Special. Hwasheni crossed into Botswana in July through the Plumtree border post and met Special at Ramokgwebana Border Post. Special took Hwasheni to a military camp in Botswana where he underwent training in the use of FN and AK rifles, military tactics as well as political lessons together with five other MDC-T recruits. There were, according to the statement, 50 other recruits undergoing military training in the same camp. Hwasheni returned to Zimbabwe with specific instructions to study the mood of junior police officers inasfar as loyalty was concerned and the mood of the public towards Government.

What are the narrative elements here? So far, we have:

1. A single statement from a junior Zimbabwean Police Officer; from,
2. The same law enforcement agency that has openly lied on paper, participated in and failed to investigate a wave of abductions, and directly ignored the the courts; involving,
3. A mystery protagonist known only as “Special”, marshalling a cast of people from an organisation that squarely beat Zimbabwe’s dicatator at the ballot box; and,
4. Staff from organisation that has evidenced tens of thousands of incidences of politically-motivated violence and human rights abuses being kept incommunicado in secret detention facilities by known torturers; and,
5. The alleged support of the only government sharing a border with Zimbabwe that has sustained open and trenchant criticism of the regime’s behaviour.

Sounds like a trustworthy, watertight case to me, and I’m sure that the Harare courts will scrub the bias from it, and test the evidence with their customary rigour. After all, Mugabe was right about the Wonga Coup, wasn’t he? Saracasm aside, a few days after Jestina’s abduction, one sharp commentator and Zimbabwean political insider argued that this would be the likely outcome of the this wave of abductions:

I now believe strongly that the next time we see Gandi Mudzingwa, Jestina Mukoko and the two staff members from the ZPP will be in the company of the eleven or 15 MDC activists who were also abducted as I explained above and as widely reported elsewhere. They will be appearing together as either “co-conspirators or architects of the insurgency” in the evidence to be put forward [to SADC] by Mugabe.

And there’s more, before today’s news:

…[the Attorney General's office] is being readied to carry out the mass prosecutions of MDC “terrorists” (I am taking bets on how long it will be before we start hearing this word, reading it in the Herald). From the silence of SADC on the matter, it would appear that there is nothing much anybody can do about it, except maybe shout a bit now and again.

I disagree. This conspiracy is convoluted even by the desperate standards of Mugabe’s regime, and will fall as flat in the courts as it will in the public’s eye. The question is whether this will matter, and how we can make it matter.

Alanna:

Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.

Owen:

It seems to me that we must de-escalate the amount of paperwork involved in international development. There has to be some record-keeping to enable us to account to the people whose money we are spending.  But the bureaucracy involved in designing and getting funding for projects, for hiring people, and for monitoring and reporting, has become an industry in itself.

All true. The ECB research showed clearly that while nearly every expat staff member – and many of the senior national staff – in an international organisation is required to contribute to situation reporting, donor reporting, co-ordination reporting and so forth, precisely none of them believed that the reporting process added value to their work.

Agreed that reporting has become an industry in itself, as Owen says – but why? Cui bono? The beneficiary of these reporting processes is headquarters (sometimes regional offices) – the senior management and support staff in the organisation. Now this wouldn’t be an issue if we could demonstrate that their receipt of reports had a positive impact on the organisation’s work in the field.

Yet time and again, it seems there is no such impact. Country offices receive little or no feedback on their reports, and individual staff receive none. It’s also hard to identify any link between the reports that are generated in-country and any strategic decision-making, although it’s clear that there is some benefit there. This is a tremendous problem – a waste of money and time in situations (especially emergencies) where those resources are at an absolute premium.

There’s no single solution to this problem, but there are a few strategies you can adopt.

1. Cut reporting to the bare minimum, in terms of both frequency and length.
2. Revise reporting processes so that they add value to the staff tasked with doing that reporting.
3. Develop multiple reports from single processes, rather than having multiple (and redundant) processes.
4. Make use of new technology to cut down on traditional narrative reporting in favour of (for example) SMS flash reporting.

I’ve been advocating these approaches for years now, with almost no impact – organisations are wedded to the idea that reporting is an intrinsic part of their work, rather than a tool that can be optimised. If there’s one critical step every organisation should take, though, it’s that individual reports must be linked clearly with specific decisions that need to be made within the organisation. If the information in a report is not going to be used to make a decision, then why are we asking staff for that information?