Recently the acting CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, Rodney Bent, invited a group of development bloggers for a congenial chat over breakfast pastries about their new monitoring and evaluation website and “results” portal.
This is in contrast, mind you, with another aid organization which shall remain nameless but which has the initials U and N, which told us a couple weeks ago that they “didn’t have a communication policy for blogs” and weren’t sure whether they could give us the document we were requesting (to their credit, they eventually did.) To say nothing of another agency that emailed us: “Hello. I have received your emails and phone call. However, WHO does not participate in blog discussions. Thank you.” And let’s not even mention the other US aid agency, USAID, who responds to requests for information by demanding that we talk only to the USAID press rep whose full-time job is not responding to requests for information.
So the bar here is low. And the MCC isn’t perfect. But hey, it’s nice to be given a cup of coffee every once in a while and treated like you exist.
The personable Bent started the meeting with a little story: he recently visited a university classroom and completely disarmed the students—who were eager to rip apart any self-serving propaganda he served up—by being the first to enumerate the MCC’s own failings and weaknesses. The original MCC design team was too tactless about implying that USAID had been a failure, he said, “too optimistic,” too “eager to sign things.” Not to mention the problems MCC has run into in Armenia, Nicaragua, Honduras and Madagascar…to name a few.
This little anecdote seems to represent the MCC’s current savvy outreach strategy: be honest about your failings before others can beat you to it! Hence, the chat and the coffee.
The MCC says many of the right things. Publishing economic rates of return for their projects, providing M&E data for each MCC country in two formats, adding in data visualization and more collaborative feedback tools (all currently available or in the works over the next few months) is MUCH more than many other aid agencies are willing or able to do at the moment.
You can visit the new site here, and use the feedback form to get in touch with Shiro Gnanaselvam, the MCC’s senior director for monitoring and evaluation.
Still the most interesting question to me is, why is the MCC so proactively courting bloggers when other aid agencies tell us to drop dead?
Maybe it is because the MCC—a Bush administration initiative that has never been fully funded—has been predicted to face extinction if it can’t get broad support from the public and from some key power brokers in the new administration.
Could this be a tiny piece of evidence in favor of the theory that effective accountability sometimes requires a threat to your very existence (as with private firms or with the political careers of elected officials)?
The organization with the least vested interests supporting it may be the one that will perform the best. At least, they actually invite their critics to breakfast.
11 Comments
MCC has always been extremely slick and professional in their outreach and informational materials, even when they were new and everyone’s darling. It’s just their organizational culture.
I am just curious: what other blogs were invited to this?
Nothing concentrates the mind (or the PR efforts) like the threat of extinction. It is all too rare for agencies that were created for a specific purpose to go out of business once that purpose has been achieved or they have failed miserably at it. UNAIDS is my candidate for closure. MCC deserves credit for sticking to its original mission and trying to do better at it rather than finding new things to do. That said, something has to be done about the plethora of USG entities doing development work (State, DOD, USAID, CDC, MCC, PEPFAR, PMI, etc.)
I second Andrew’s question – who else was invited?
Indeed – what other “aid bloggers” were invited?
Also, just curious: did MCC share or indicate over coffee that it does/did in fact have a communication policy for blogs?
Hello all,
Other orgs represented at the breakfast were CGD, ONE, Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), Global Integrity and the IBM Center for the Business of Government. It was a small group, and MCC communications staffers there said they hoped to hold other, similar events in the future, perhaps based around specific topics (technology, M&E, etc) if there was interest from the blogging community. Neneh Diallo, assoc. director for communications (diallodn@mcc.gov) was one of the event organizers so I’m guessing you could get in touch with her to convey your interest.
They didn’t articulate a specific policy about blogs but certainly seem to realize the value of shaping/participating in online conversations about development effectiveness.
The World Bank also publishes estimated economic rates of return for their investment and TA projects in appraisal documents, and with luck, actual rates in implementation completion reports. But not yet the M&E data.
MCC is alway proactive in making it’s case, probably due to it being under continuous assault from the more established agencies and it’s early dissmissal of those agencies as inneffective.
Personally, I like the principal of tying investment to real changes in government policy and actions, but I have not been too impressed by it’s implementation. Thou that’s not a direct knock aginst MCC – development is a messy business, we often confuse investment with aid, and the last administration was too keen to tie it to short term political agendas.
Laura: who is CDG? Global Integrity?
A CRITIC RALLIES TO THE CAUSE!
Though often a critic of what passes for argument on this blog, appropriately so I might add, and of the activities of the aid agencies, more than appropriately, I do applaud the challenge the MCC presents to traditional ways of dispensing aid and the challenge Dr. Easterly consistently presents to the foreign aid establishment. Though not personally familiar with the MCC, I am familiar with the traditional aid agencies. One of their biggest problems, among many, is that they continue to insist on how wonderful foreign aid has been while it is clearly been a monumental failure if not disaster.
Though I believe in solidarity with the poor, sharing the world’s resources, a truly level playing field and foreign aid in principal, I certainly do not agree with the type of neo- colonial exploitation that has the name of foreign aid today.
I too, therefore, am intrigued by what the MCC is doing and applaud Dr. Easterly for calling attention to it.
SS
Wayan,
CGD is the Center for Global Development. They have a blog devoted to tracking the MCC, here.
The Global Integrity Commons blog is here.
MCC’s blog/comment policy is available to the public at: http://www.mcc.gov/blog/ceo/commentpolicy/ (and on front-page of the public website). We welcome the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the community that cares deeply about the issue of foreign assistance, aid reform and how to foster country ownership in poverty reduction. Social media and public outreach are important tools for listening as much as they are good vehicles for telling our story. We welcome your feedback at http://www.mcc.gov and will be hosting similar roundtables in the future. Please contact MCC (via our website — “contact MCC”) if you are interested in participating. Thanks for your comments and this very useful exchange…