Ossification (noun): the natural process of bone formation: the hardening (as of muscular tissue) into a bony substance; a mass or particle of ossified tissue; a tendency toward or state of being molded into a rigid, conventional, sterile, or unimaginative condition.

Remko Berkhout has pointed out that there is an increasing amount of research that tries to envision the future for the NGO sector, to which I would add work by the Humanitarian Futures Programme and the Feinstein Center. Publications such as these, providing a useful focus on the rapidly changing external environment, are necessary but not sufficient for the changes that need to take place if the underlying spirit of the NGO community is to survive.

Paul Polak has described institutions as “radical ideas cast in concrete”, and INGOs are no exception. The concept of the INGO is around 60 years old, more than enough time for their initially lean muscles to harden into rigid institutional bones. That isn’t to say that INGOs have lost the capacity to change, sometimes in radical ways, and to raise issues that would otherwise go without discussion; but we all have the unsettling feeling that INGOs have not delivered on the promises they made to their publics.

A child of their time, INGOs clearly filled a niche in the international system, particularly as a counter to a post-war foreign policy based on military-industrial interests. Yet INGOs were based on assumptions shared by that same establishment, and took on forms that were familiar with that establishment. The fundamental problem for INGOs – as for governments and corporations – is that the world is changing in ways which are increasingly difficult to manage for these old forms.

The worst case scenario for INGOs is that they find themselves filling in where government has failed, providing alternatives that are not alternatives at all but simply poor substitutes for the old system; or find themselves filling gaps where corporations have proved unable or unwilling to extend their reach, creating pseudo-markets which are largely unsustainable. Where these scenarios come to pass, INGOs will twist themselves into new shapes not in order to challenge the systems which lead to these governance and market failures, but to prop them up instead.

Why is it important for INGOs to survive? The short answer is: it isn’t important. NGOs are simply vehicles for realising a range of social and economic outcomes that cannot be realised through other means. The form of the INGO is not important: it’s the function that’s important, and those functions can potentially be delivered through different forms. A focus on whether the form of the INGO will survive runs the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, dismissing the still-important functions in the same breath as the obsolete form.

Mike Edwards writes of INGOs reaching middle age and offers three possible futures: retirement, rejuvenation or replacement. There is a fourth possibility: radical transformation in response to the rapidly changing external environment, transformation which can contain all three of Edwards’ proposed pathways and more besides. Complexity theory gives us some of the tools we need to face that future, but to make use of those tools we need to acknowledge not just that the world has changed, but to reflect that change, rather than attempt to manage it.

We cannot pretend to be agents of change if we are not prepared to change ourselves. The future needs flexibility, not stability; the future lies in collaboration, not competition; the future belongs to the network, not the corporation.

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2. I’m not liveblogging the Global Symposium +5 in Geneva
3. Beware of Geeks bearing Gifts

We didn’t include it in the Report because not everybody agreed on the details, but it’s worth putting out there. In the absence of alternatives and in the face of a humanitarian reform process that largely fails to take capacities and concerns of the NGO community into account, these five elements provide a starting point for NGOs to consider how they can best arrange themselves.

1. A General Meeting that brings together a critical mass from a clearly-defined NGO constituency in a clearly-defined structure for clearly-defined purposes.
2. An elected Executive or Steering Committee composed of senior NGO staff with sufficient resources to invest time in coordination and to support the Chair.
3. An elected Chair with the willingness to commit to ensuring the health of the coordination body and the time to deliver on that commitment.
4. Sub-groups meeting for limited periods on a voluntary and inclusive basis to develop specific outputs that address specific issues of concern to the NGO community (or a subset of it).
5. A Secretariat function that fulfills (at a minimum) basic administrative functions, to free Committee members to play a representative role.

In addition a Terms of Reference is essential to describe the processes that enable these elements to work together to achieve their objectives, to ensure the clarity and continuity of the body, and to provide a measure of accountability to the wider NGO community and its stakeholders.¹

The structure outlined above a) makes members responsible for electing the right person through an election process, b) spreads the burden of leadership across a wider range of actors (as opposed to the UN model, which concentrates it in a single individual), and c) provides a supportive environment in which the “wrong” individual might receive the support of peers to grow into a particular role.

It’s important to develop these elements as early as possible: poor coordination structures established in the early days of an emergency response, however temporary, rapidly become fixed in place. The NGO community needs to take responsibility for this as part of its contribution to overall humanitarian coordination.

Despite evidence from these case studies that this structure facilitates NGO coordination, I’d be cautious in recommending it without reservation since reports of success or failure remain anecdotal. Given a rapidly-changing operating environment, past performance of this type of structure may not be an indication of future success. In future we need better documentation, transparently monitored and independently evaluated before we can answer the critical question of how successful it actually is.

1. The final element of coordination is individual personalities, but by definition this can’t be planned for.

Related posts:

1. Questions you might want to ask about your NGO Coordination Body
2. The long and short of NGO coordination
3. Brother’s on the slide

First and most important: despite what you may have heard, NGO coordination is extremely common. We found NGO coordination bodies in a range of different contexts, although there were persistent weaknesses common to many of them, the most common of which was that they tend to be reactive. Frankly I think NGO coordination bodies need to push the issues that are important to them more actively, particularly in the face of sluggish humanitarian reform and the militarization of aid.

We also found that NGO coordination bodies deal with similar issues everywhere, which means that there’s huge scope for lessons learned (particularly around practical organisation and policy approaches) to be shared more widely in order to strengthen the entire humanitarian community. One of the biggest problems I see is that NGO coordination is too often focused on International NGOs and not enough on Local NGOs; the most obvious reason for this is that it’s just plain difficult to engage local NGOs.

It also seems that there is a “blueprint” for successful organisation of NGO coordination bodies, which we hope to flesh out more in the next phase of the project (that’s what they call a teaser, but I’ll write something on it soon). However we need to be very aware that “success” in this context is limited in what it can achieve, because NGO coordination by itself won’t resolve critical problems, particularly those involving humanitarian principles.

There’s also a lot of questions outstanding. What do NGOs want to achieve through coordination; for example, given the weaknesses of the cluster system, do we want to get more involved in sectoral coordination? How can we use NGO coordination bodies to promote the changes we want to see in the sector more broadly, e.g. local NGO partnership, humanitarian principles, new challenges? How do international NGO consortia (such as ICVA, or InterAction) want to support these field-based efforts?

So download and read them, send them to your sweetheart for Valentine’s Day, put your money in the tip box, &c &c. The Case Studies cover:

• Afghanistan 1988-2010
• Haiti 2010
• Iraq 2003-2010
• Kosovo 1999-2002
• Myanmar 2008-2010
• Occupied Palestinian Territories 1967-2010
• Pakistan 2002-2010
• Sudan 1999-2010
• South Sudan 1996-2010

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1. Questions you might want to ask about your NGO Coordination Body
2. The Long Last Mile
3. I’m not liveblogging the Global Symposium +5 in Geneva

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.

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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.

Related posts:

1. Update: Activist Jestina Mukoko in Police custody, show trial to come
2. Bail for jailed Zimbabwean activists?
3. Mukoko bail revoked, preposterous show-trial to continue

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.

Related posts:

1. Update: Activist Jestina Mukoko in Police custody, show trial to come
2. Bail for jailed Zimbabwean activists?
3. Prominent Zimbabwean activist Jestina Mukoko abducted by secret police

“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.

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… 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.

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3. Measuring Progress (humanitarian NGO version)

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.

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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.

Related posts:

1. Prominent Zimbabwean activist Jestina Mukoko abducted by secret police
2. Update: Activist Jestina Mukoko in Police custody, show trial to come
3. Jestina Mukoko “near death”