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

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

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.

Scott

Scott

“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

I agree with Jeff. I have also seen something like a 1:1 ration of big to small projects that fail.

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.