humanitarian.info

If I don’t think that a bottom-up approach is going to work in the humanitarian community, I must think that a top-down approach is the best bet, right? Wrong. And here’s why:

Worst of all, though, the [additional and novel layers] mainly exist because the Government wanted to have the job done by the Big Consultancies – Accenture, EDS, and friends – that it was used to dealing with. Assuming that they wouldn’t be interested in small contracts, the Government invented a completely new organisational level in order to sweeten the deal. They further insisted on the contracts being covered by intense secrecy, which cut off any possibility of talking to the users. And the Big Consultants proceeded to move the actual development to the US and India to save money, thus avoiding any institutional knowledge that might somehow have seeped in.

Top-down approaches to data management don’t work in the public sector, full stop. This is because organisational politics usually over-determines a process that fails to include the users¹, and that’ll always defeat your technology no matter how shweet you think it is. So what do I think works? The Yorkshire Ranter actually provides that as well:

Part of the original plan involved using a common data exchange standard for the whole NHS; if this exists, there’s no need for much of the rest, especially not the regions and possibly not the Spine. We could define some goals and a set of data formats, then break out the cash to the individual hospitals, trusts etc to use themselves. … I think a cross-government requirement for common data standards, as much open source as possible, and perhaps even building everything with a sensible API for further development would do nothing but good.

That’s the starting point. Establish a minimum data standard using an agile process, use existing practice based on the experience of participating users, make the process as open (and open-ended) as possible, get the sign-off from the participants at the highest possible level, and then let go. Then it’s out there and organisations can use it – or not, but if they don’t, they no longer have the excuse that such standards don’t exist and can be held accountable against that. It also allows entry into the market for organisations and individuals that are new to the sector or weren’t involved in the original process – and then they might become part of the next iteration of development.

The key thing to remember is that the development needs to take place in the heart of the user community, and anything else is unlikely to yield useful results. The humanitarian community needs exactly this, and I’ve been saying exactly the same this for ten years, and as far as I can tell we’re still nowhere near even getting such a process off the ground in most of clusters / sectors. If anybody knows anything different, please feel free to let me know and make my week brighter. And if anybody thinks this process wouldn’t work, I’d be interested to hear why – especially in light of the persistent failure of IT projects in the public sector.

1. Note: the actual users, not the people who manage the actual users. [↩]

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. [↩]