Category Archives: NGO

Welcome to the future

Posted on February 18, 2009 by | 3 Comments

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. [↩]

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Posted in Accountability, NGO, Transparency

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Update: Activist Jestina Mukoko in Police custody, show trial to come

Posted on December 24, 2008 by | 4 Comments

Jestina Mukoko and Brodreck Takawira, High Court, Harare 24 December 2008

(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.

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Posted in NGO, Security

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Kill Your Reports

Posted on October 31, 2008 by | 11 Comments

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?

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Posted in Knowledge Management, NGO, Reporting

Cyclone Nargis, you know?

Posted on May 10, 2008 by | 3 Comments

So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on technology. At least it’s relatively non-controversial, except that it isn’t, because Myanmar is one of those places where internet access is a non-starter, where satellite telephones are essentially illegal and where the technology infrastructure (e.g. suppliers and maintenance) is close to zero. What that means is that we’re going to be extremely limited in what we can do on the ground. So what is happening?

I’m nowhere near being deployed for this one (particularly as the government apparently is still refusing entry to foreign aid workers), but all of this makes me feel that we’re headed in the right direction. However until the government lets agencies start doing their jobs with less restrictions on movement and communications, we’re not going to see the benefits – another example of how the technology can be rendered much less useful when the political environment isn’t supportive. I leave you with the words of Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN in his speech last Thursday:

In spite of the technology that we have, in spite of the power that we have, in spite of the network that we have, we still lose lives needlessly… So it is more than just the power of technology, it is more than just the transformation of society through technology, it is certainly a shift in paradigm here in the minds of our people and particularly our leaders. Because if you don’t have that shift, millions and billions of dollars worth of technology cannot deliver effective, timely relief to people when they need it most, because we have reservations about opening up our borders for cooperation, because we have hesitation about cooperating with the outside world, because we have mistrust of the outside world.

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Posted in Blogs, Burma, Cellphone, Co-ordination, Cyclone, Emergency Telecommunications, geospatial, GIS, Humanitarian, Logistics, Media, NGO, Remote Sensing, Sahana, SMS, United Nations, Web

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NetHope Summit 2008 blog

Posted on May 6, 2008 by | Leave a comment

It’s the time of year when NetHope like to get together and stare at hardware until it breaks. That’s right, the NetHope Summit 2008 is on again, this time hosted by Cisco – and once again, David Goodman of IRC is blogging from the conference.

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Posted in Conference, NGO

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Quickbits April 2008

Posted on April 30, 2008 by | Leave a comment

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Posted in Capacity Building, Cellphone, Emergency Telecommunications, Health, Humanitarian, Knowledge Management, NGO, SMS, Statistics

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InSTEDD publishes!

Posted on March 27, 2008 by | 6 Comments

Well, not yet, but they will [pdf]. Janet Ginsburg explains the development of the idea of the Humanitarian Technology Review, while Bruno Giussani covers the recent TED breakfast, where Eric Rasmussen gave an update on InSTEDD.

Initially the idea of a Humanitarian Technology Review sounds like a good idea – if it’s done right. The first two questions – remember the first two questions, everybody! – are: who is the target audience, and what do you want them to do with the information you’re providing? The briefing paper I linked to above says

The Review’s readers, like the Review itself, span many niches: medical researchers, software developers, policy-makers, funders, doctors, veterinarians, communities trying to prepare for or reeling from disasters – even other media.

The one group that is noticeable by its absence is – well, me. People like me, anyway, who seem to fall under the catch-all term “practitioner”. I see doctors and veterinarians in there, but which doctors and veterinarians, exactly? I think it’s likely that I’ve misunderstood – the briefing is explicit that this is about building connections between disciplines, and it’s clearly aiming at a wider audience than the humanitarian community.

If we look at the disciplines that they’re talking about, it’s a wide selection, so it’s probably easier for me to focus on the technology examples given in the review:

  • lightweight fabric + satellite technology = a cheaper portable satellite dish
  • software + cell phones = real-time surveillance for bird flu
  • GIS + interactive mapping = real time tracking of fires and floods
  • solar panels + refrigerator = reliable field transport for vaccines
  • filter + straw = a mobile water purification device
  • open source water tech + microfinance = funding for small water projects
  • genetic sampling + fast data analysis = identifying a pathogen in hours

I’m going to think about those examples over the next few days, but I’m struggling to see how a publication can cover all of these and still appeal to a coherent audience. That’s why communities of practice exist around epidemiology, water and sanitation, and the like – because they’re focused enough to hold peoples’ attention.

The success or failure of the HTR will be in the delivery, and on that front I’m very positive about their proposal to combine different delivery streams. At the very least, InSTEDD’s deep pockets will enable them to experiment and see what works, although I’d warn them not to expect collaboration to magically appear – two years on ECB teaches you that for nothing.

(NOTE: Full disclosure – I thought about a similar idea a few years ago, but gave it up because I didn’t think it was viable. Two attempts have been made to develop this sort of thing previously – ReliefWeb’s HIN and CMI’s PeaceIT [pdf] – but the InSTEDD concept is much wider.)

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Posted in Blogs, Capacity Building, Emergency Telecommunications, GIS, Humanitarian, Logistics, Media, NGO, Private Sector, Software, United Nations, Web

NGOs under fire (no bullets involved)

Posted on March 22, 2008 by | 1 Comment

No sooner had I written yesterday’s post about digital security than the New York Times has a piece by Nicholas Kristol on how the Save Darfur campaign website has been under attack recently – from Chinese IP addresses.

As the coalition’s China advocacy campaign has intensified, officials have noticed increasingly sophisticated and subversive attempts to intercept emails and infect computers with malicious programs.

Kristol relies mainly on innuendo to suggest that the Chinese government might be behind the attacks, with very little evidence to support the accusation. From a technology point of view, though, it’s irrelevant who’s responsible – this is a cautionary tale for NGOs and other organisations. We can enjoy the benefits that technology brings – but we also need to guard against the dangers. The price of liberty, and all that…

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Posted in Human Rights, Media, NGO, Security, Software, Sudan, Web

Ed Granger-Happ’s new role: NonProfit Tech Guru

Posted on February 28, 2008 by | Leave a comment

Ed Granger-Happ is taking a sabbatical from his job as CIO of Save the Children US, and spending the next few months as an executive fellow and the CIO-in-Residence at the Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. This is great news for Ed, and for the Center as well, since Ed has a track record of innovation that will hopefully encourage some of the Tuck staff and students to get more engaged in our sector. Even better, he’s started blogging as he begins the residency (I have no idea who managed to persuade him to commit to that…) and I hope that he’ll keep posting on a regular basis at his Dartmouth Fellowship blog.

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Posted in Academic, NGO, Private Sector

Emerging markets for NGO technology choices

Posted on January 25, 2008 by | 3 Comments

Tom asked me to elaborate on a point about NGO technology choices and (despite the fact that he’s failed to deliver the blog posts he promised, ahem) I think it’s worth putting something out there. I haven’t seen anything written about the issue of NGO technology markets anywhere else, but it seems to be a key issue given the recent development of some key applications and platforms. Basically the problem is this: the humanitarian community (but particularly NGOs) seems to make quite poor choices in terms of software. We then have to live with legacy software and all sorts of compatibility issues, while we lag behind developments such as Web2.0 and tend to deploy the sort of technology that only increases the gap between ourselves and our beneficiaries.

To some extent this pitiful state of affairs is the result of four linked factors. First, we’re public organisations, and although we’re perennially strapped for cash our decision-making is (ironically) not lead by concerns of efficiency. Second, it’s only recently that some of the larger NGOs have put in place good IT governance and management – based on a strategic vision of how technology supports their work – so that most NGOs still make decisions about technology without adequate decision-making processes. Third, we are (in general) not particularly well-informed about technology, and slow to adopt new technology which might lead to serious improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. Fourth, and as a result of the above three factors, we have not historically formed a coherent market that would lead private companies to develop software that targets our needs.

What this means in practice is that we get really excited any time that anybody proposes a new software that appears to meet our needs. The key word is “appears” – it seems to me that much of our excitement is based on the look of the software (ooh, maps!) rather than a sober assessment of the capacities and costs of the software. As a result, we’ve seen a lot of genuine attempts to develop software founder, particularly when the specific needs of the end user aren’t taken into account until very late in the development game. So what’s the solution? There seem to be two possible paths to take:

  1. The “Follow the Leader” model, where a single key actor or consortium leads the development process of a single well-targeted application for end users.
  2. The “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” model, where a range of organisations develop a range of alternatives, and others choose which one suits them.

Now personally, I think option 2 is better, on the basis that diversity is better than a single solution, no matter how perfect that solution is (I’m definitely willing to be challenged on that one, though). The problem is that option 2 hasn’t worked very well – there just isn’t a big enough market (apparently), it’s difficult to mobilise support to those projects and the cost of failure is ridiculous (in some cases, literally life or death). In addition, our sector doesn’t pay close enough attention to technology developments that we actually track software that might be useful for them – so even if something is developed, getting it in front of people is hugely difficult.

That leaves us with option 1. Clearly this has potential, particularly when there are budget constraints (and when aren’t there?) – by allowing organisations with more funding to take a lead (preferably together), development costs are borne by those who can afford it the most, and by working together we can leverage economies of scale. The problem is that this doesn’t work very well either: the needs of the larger organisations are not often identical the needs of smaller organisations (they’re at different stages of development), there’s no guarantees that a) the developers will release it to other end users (or at least not without trying for costs recovery) or that b) the end users will accept it without at least some customisation – for which there’s no cash available.

Having said that, option 1 has been the favoured one so far, and will probably continue to be so. Part of the inclination of Sahana – and more so with the humanitarian-ICT community – was to encourage people to explore option 2. So far, progress on that front has been slow indeed, but perhaps that’s because we’re only really starting to develop a mature market for software.

(Note: Slightly related is a fantastic blog post at Humanized last year, Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software, where Jono DiCarlo lays out the ways in which he thinks we can get to better (read: more useable) Open Source solutions. A number of the things he discusses are germane to this discussion in terms of managing the development process itself – but none of them address the problem that I outline above.)

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Posted in NGO, Open Source, Private Sector, Software