by Scott MacLennan, veteran NGO leader resident in Nepal
A few weeks ago I was again trekking the Tamang Heritage Trail with a group of medical volunteers. We stopped for the night in the village of Thambuchet which is a short distance from Chilime. There I found a brand new government building that is supposed to be a birthing center. The government has a big push on to stop home births and get the people to use government facilities. So, it’s a really nice building. Problem is that it has never been equipped with anything and has no staff.
Ward 9 in Pokhara, Nepal affords another good lesson. Under UNICEF, the municipal day care center was disgraceful. The barely six-foot high tin roof made the children’s home into a sauna during the monsoons. There were no toys or resources for teaching. There was no toilet and the children defecated on the front lawn. Little in the way of funding ever made it to the center. There were too many bureaucratic mouths to feed further up the management (verification) ladder. The NGO that now helps support this day care center in partnership with local government has transformed it on a shoestring budget.
Much of the part of Nepal where I work has phantom projects. Empty health posts and newly built birthing centers without staff or equipment are not uncommon. These are all development assets on someone’s balance sheet. The government counts them as part of its national health program. The international community has, at the risk of sounding too critical, for the most part been quite willing to allow this to go on. So long as the donors and the government can say they have this, or they have that, regardless of the reality of existence, everyone seems happy. The verification part of this industry thrives on the non-reality of it all.
Only small NGOs it seems are able to actually get out in the field and get their hands dirty making things happen. Past a certain size (what is that size?) the demands for official looking papers, reports, audits and the like overshadow the demand to actually provide aid. Large donors are just too caught up in the appearance of good business and good government. Form without substance.
Doing an inventory of small NGOs working in the various districts, then giving out small amounts of funding ($10,000-$20,000 a year) probably gets the most done. Skip the audits and heavy-duty report writing and verify with a small team equipped with a camera. A picture is worth a thousand words (or reports) it’s there or it isn’t and the camera tells you. NGOs with barely enough budget to survive have little motivation and opportunity to corrupt the process. They are community members themselves and the community can police its own quite effectively. Nearly anyone living in a small community in Nepal can tell you in short order who is working for the good of the community and who is lining their own pockets. Snap photos, ask the locals and you’ll know for sure that your aid dollars did something.
That’s my two cents from the field. I run The Mountain Fund, a very small NGO attempting to keep it real in Nepal. Photographic proof in my newsletters and please, stop and ask the locals about me. Oh, yes, I am taking over the empty birthing clinic and will raise the funds to equip and staff it myself. About $10,000 a year and I will send photos.
Thanks, Scott MacLennan
24 Comments
Thanks for keeping it real Scott. And helping the rest of us do so also.
Your post reminded me of the pioneering work of the medical anthropologist Judith Justice. In her book, Policies, Plans and Peoples: Foreign Aid and Health Development (mostly based on her work in Nepal)- she wrote eloquently of the delusions of planners in the capital (both aid officials and ministry officials) and their determination to remain deluded about what was and wasn’t taking place in the public health clinics in the field.
I read it ages ago, but recall being struck by one particular fact, that public clinic staff with no medical training at all were delivering what little care was being delivered, since they were the only staff who showed up regularly to the clinics(they were supposed to be cleaning it). Though she documented this phenomenon extensively, aid and ministry officials simply refused to acknowledge it. I suppose if they’d acknowledged it, they might have had to do something about it.
I’m sorry, but not surprised, to see things have changed so little.
Here is the link to Prof Justice’s book
http://www.amazon.com/Policies-Plans-People-Development-Comparative/dp/0520067886/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241531092&sr=1-1
Thank you for your kind comments April.
I enthusiastically second April’s recommendation of the Judith Justice book. Reading it was one of my all-time formative experiences in thinking about aid plans.
Very true! Many big NGOs (funded by big foundations and donors) are basically dollar-pots– they get large funding, spend almost 80% on staff and planning, do little real work and in the end publish thick reports with little substance on it.
After more than two decades of ADB’s involvement in Nepal, we are yet to see a single successful project funded by them (I mean they can lay a claim that it was their work). Everyone is going after the common denominator- poverty reduction- and all of them lay claim if there is success. How is one able to distinguish who did what and what is each donor’s contribution? The ADB has been funding a large water project in Nepal for more than a decade, but still the capital city is reeling under sever water shortage. Where did millions of $$ disappear, leaving the country in perpetual debt?
off topic, but further proof that for Sachs, “development” is about personal advancement, and hobnobbing with celebrities.
http://www.thecreativecoalition.org/about/boardofdirectors.htm
F
It’s certainly tempting to want to disparage large INGOs and large, donor-funded programs for their too-often untenably high cost relative to impact. They’re easy targets, no question.
But I don’t agree that large size/budget necessarily equals poor quality/low impact (not said directly, but implied in this post). You have to look case-by-case. Some large INGOs do it well, others not. Moreover, as anyone who has worked for a large INGO knows, there is often tremendous variation around the network: one country program runs a stellar show, while the another founders.
Moreover, small NGOs and small projects are by no means a formula for success. Thinking back over those programs/projects that I have had direct personal knowlege of in the past 15 years, the ratio of lame large programs to lame small programs is about 1:1.
Either can work. Either can fail. There are simply different sets of challenges and benefits associated with each.
Thank you Jeff for your comments.
I agree either can work and either can fail. That said, looking back on my experiences I would like to note two things; large projects seem to take many years to bring relief to those who most need it while my personal experience is that small teams can mobilize quickly and take those simple and often cheap actions that bring some immediate relief. I could not, for example, undertake to overhaul the entire healthcare program of this country (Nepal) nor the policies that shape the program. That may indeed take a very large organization working with policy makers over the course of decades. Of course here in Nepal where the policy makers seem to change as frequently as the seasons, I can imagine progress is further hampered by the need to begin again with each change in administration. Even in a stable country, like the US, changes in administration often result in an abrupt change of direction for programs. It’s conjecture on my part to say such starts and stops must take place on a fairly regular basis leaving those in need waiting decades, or longer, for any aid efforts to begin; secondly, I don’t take issue with your pont that both small and large can work.
Certainly both have failed in your experiences and my own. However, when $10,000 is lost on a local project that fails the donors as well as the local community can often quickly recover, learn lessons and go back for another try. The resources lost in that process, while tragic of course, are not a significant obstacle to further attempts at solving problems and improving conditions. Small. local organizations have the advantage of quickly adapting to changing conditions.
When a multi-million dollar project fails this is a significant loss of resources and it may take years to evaluate what happened and adopt new techniques and technologies. Donors may become reluctant to take such risks in the future and local communities may likewise be less willing to commit their own time and resources to future plans.
In short, if we accept that your 1:1 ratio is indeed correct, we must also consider that when small projects fail, they fail in a small way and when big projects fail, they fail in a big way. If the chances for failure face the same odds, why would one bet the farm on the big project which should fail at the same rate as the small, just with bigger consequences. A bit like the Titanic I suppose. If you are going to sink, might as well sink large. As I recall, the lifeboats floated though.
Scott
Owen Barder has just written a blog related to this discussion (http://www.owen.org/blog/2283).
What do we want to do? Provide social welfare for those falling out of the bottom of the system, or help develop sustainable systems?
For sure, the second of these is more likely to fail big, but if it succeeds big then it’s worth 1,000s of micro-projects.
Presumably we need to do a bit of both?
great work on reporting this. to often we let NGO act under a halo, because they have good intentions. To really offer help is to point the critical eye at their work. This will help everyone. Perhaps an NGO’s gone wild wiki? easy to set up at pbwiki.com for free and would catalog abuses of donor funds.
Adam you are right, we need both, with some distinctions perhaps.
Large social change and small local projects do not have to be an either/or discussion. Break the development goals into small, manageable projects with teams small enough to act quickly and independent enough to “get it done.”
The “big picture” can be accomplished best, in my admittedly skewed opinion, by the small local groups. They no the issues, the personalities and the customs. They can be acting as a part of a whole. There is no need to suffer one large failed project with this approach. If a large goal is executed as a thousand small, local projects you’d spread your risk of failure across a broader canvas. Some of the “parts” (read small projects) may fail but many will not and the march toward that magical “sustainable society” will go on. Not that I think for one minute anyone knows how to create a sustainable society, certainly, we in the west should be very cautious to say we do. I haven’t seen the Wall Street Journal or Mother Jones for a few months but last time I did we did not appear to have found the secret to sustainable society either.
Perhaps an approach worth taking is as a villager friend of mine is fond of saying, “simple living, big thinking.” That would require the BIG to stop thinking BIG and think in terms of many SMALL that make a big. I don’t know if that distinction is coming across clearly or not. It’s simple yet sublime.
For an example of how a small NGO (~$100k/year) can set a good model of transparency, you should check out Nyaya Health. In particular, go to their wiki, and look under the “data and monitoring” tab on the right.
To pick a random large NGO to contrast, CARE international has 1-2 paragraph on each of their million-dollar projects, listed on this page.
Perhaps prospective donors care only about the total amount of information available, which for a large organization can be substantial without ever getting into details.
Right on, Scott:
http://denniswhittle.blogspot.com/2009/05/substance-over-form.html
Dennis Whittle, GlobalGiving
Scott,
Thanks for speaking up for quality work out of the limelight. The world needs more people like you, making a real difference.
Congratulations on adapting a receipe for ‘lemon-aid’ into a receipe for success!
Scott–
I take issue with your statement that “the international community has allowed this to go on”. You sound a bit like Jeff Sachs there. It is not the responsibility of the international community to fix Nepal and it has no mandate to allow or disallow poorly performing projects. It is the government’s responsibility and if they do not perform that function there is little that international organizations with institutional mandates to support the government can do. This leads to the NGO impulse just to get out there and fix things, but this approach is short term and unsustainable.
I think it depends much more on the competence of the NGO, and the reporting requirements of its donors, than the size. Paperwork doesn’t overwhelm you unless your donors ask for overwhelming amounts of it. A large donor can often handle administrative requirements more easily, because the proportion of work time to reporting time is better with more staff. On the other hand, a small NGO funded entirely by small unrestricted donations might have no donor reporting to do beyond tax documentation, which would certainly free up people for more field visits.
I agree with Jeff. I have also seen something like a 1:1 ration of big to small projects that fail.
Scott MacLennan says:
“Skip the audits and heavy-duty report writing and verify with a small team equipped with a camera. A picture is worth a thousand words (or reports) it’s there or it isn’t and the camera tells you.”
At Akvo.org, this is largely our approach. As part of our project fund raising and reporting system we emphasise light-weight reporting.
Now, we don’t work with funding birthing clinics at the moment, as our focus is water and sanitation, but I am sure that each birthing clinic needs those facilities too.
You can read more about Akvo.org here: http://www.akvo.org/web/
And you can read about how to become a field partner in the Akvo system, and be able to raise funds and do photo and simple reporting from the project here:
http://www.akvo.org/web/become_a_project_partner
Thomas, co-founder, Akvo.org
OK, I was off for 3 days in the field. I have some comments for all of you but so much thank you (even you who disagree, or perhaps especially you) for you kind and thoughtful comments. One of the great things I think Bill has done here is give us a forum for talk, for sharing, to disagree, agree and find the path that unites us. All of us have a passion and interest in solving problems. That’s a really good thing. I am learning much from your comments and that’s what it’s all about. Thanks friends. Back to you soon.
Scott
OK, I was off for 3 days in the field. I have some comments for all of you but so much thank you (even you who disagree, or perhaps especially you) for you kind and thoughtful comments. One of the great things I think Bill has done here is give us a forum for talk, for sharing, to disagree, agree and find the path that unites us. All of us have a passion and interest in solving problems. That’s a really good thing. I am learning much from your comments and that’s what it’s all about. Thanks friends. Back to you soon.
Scott
sorry for posting twice.
I did not mean to imply that the international community has an obligation to do, or not do, anything in Nepal. However, the international community is here and seem happy enough in some (not all) cases to allow business as usual. The international community acting as donor(s) to Nepal I think 100% does have a responsibility to see to it funds are well used. If the government cannot properly furnish aid to its own, and it cannot, then the international donors should seek ways to find and fund directly those in-country NGO’s who can do the job. To take the position that the international community should give funds to the government and let the government take care of things is chapter and verse from Sachs. That’s old school and time and time again it has not worked. Large international donors feeding money to the government has not and will not work. It presumes a number of things which are on their face flawed.
Nepal in the 12th poorest country in the world and has been propped up for decades by aid. To presume that a very poor country can, given enough dollars, solve its problems is the position that the large donors have taken over and over again and Bill’s books and blog well document the results. Once aid started pouring into Nepal the government swelled at an alarming rate and while I don’t have the data at my fingertips, my memory of it is that government workers grew from something like 10,000 to 50,000 persons. I’ll have to go digging now through all my bookmarks to find this. Point is that international donors continued to pour money into the government while nearly anyone walking the streets of Kathmandu could see that very little could be found that helped the country from all of it, save for a lot of new government jobs. That’s what poor, undeveloped countries do. They don’t have effective government, if they did they probably would not be in the mess they are in.
To continue to pour dollars into the same old buckets (leaky ones at that) is akin to the business model of losing a little bit on each sale but making it up in volume.
Having tracked all aid coming into Thailand after the tsunami I’ve seen the best and worst of aid. I’ve come to the conclusion that the quality of the work they do and the usefulness of the money spent is not related to the size of the aid organization (although with every level of administration or contracting/sub-contracting money is lost). I’ve seen local aid agencies and start ups do a great job and I’ve seen them make the problem worse while patting themselves on the back. I’ve seen INGO’s do the same.
Part of my work was talking with donors seeking the best aid agencies to fund. Through explaining what was happening on the ground I came to realize that the best aid agencies are those that follow best practices, whether or not they realize they’re doing it.
Is the idea coming from the bottom up, not top down? Do the aid recipients have real decision making power? Is there transparency in how the money is spent to both the aid recipients and donors? Do they evaluate the process rather than just count numbers? Does the aid agency take into account the effect of the project on a broad scale rather than just focusing on their aid recipients?
We have got to become more professional in how we approach aid. Best practices exist, we need to start making them part of our organizational culture. Good intentions are not enough.
informationincontext.typepad.com
Nice post Saundra and I enjoyed your blog. You clearly understand some of the issues and how to avoid such things as “sexy” projects or hamburgers for Hindus.
Bottom up, recipient participation (ownership) and looking at the big picture to avoid the law of unintended consequences are great practice. Full disclosure to recipients can be a useful tool as well. It’s a balancing act at times but if recipients are clear about what you have capacity to do and not do that goes a long way toward building trust. I wouldn’t, for example, dream of hiding information from a major donor (or minor one for that matter) so why not treat the recipient with the same respect and courtesy. After all, you need both donors and recipients to work in this field and one is not more important than the other.
I have to stick by my preference for small is beautiful though if for no other reason than Newton’s first law. Objects in motion, in my experience, require a lot more force to act upon them the bigger they get. As with your boat story, once inertia sets in its hard to put the brakes on, even when the evidence all around you suggests stopping might be the thing to do. My personal experience (and thus not a universal truth) is a smaller group on the ground can quickly adjust to changing circumstance (look at all these boats!) and rethink and redeploy. Sometimes there has been so much planning, thought and preparation go into a BIG project that putting the brakes on becomes nearly impossible. We then begin to force the darn thing to work and won’t take no for an answer.
This does not preclude big players with big projects from having huge impact. If, as you suggest, best practices are followed and if, perhaps the big goals are broken down into small, local teams who can get the recipient input, react to that and change plans as needed a good balance can be found.
This has been great for me. Thanks to all for the insight and advice. I have to get back to doing what I do now. There’s an empty birthing center in Thambuchet that the Nepal government just handed over to me so I am going out shopping for equipment and staff. I have to get back to the US in a week or so and start begging up some money again. If I am lucky enough to say anything in the future that Bill thinks is worth repeating, perhaps I will see you again.
Scott
PS to Chandan. I was just in Melamchi and it’s still just a large hole in the ground where donors throw money. I’ll let you know if the water ever arrives here. Scott