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?

Related posts:

1. Beware of Geeks bearing Gifts
2. Sudan takeaways
3. NetHope Disaster Relief White Paper