Building accountability in Tanzania: applying an evolutionary/venture capitalist theory of change

A version of this post appeared yesterday on ‘People, Spaces, Deliberation’, the World Bank’s clunkily-named but interesting governance and accountability blog.

I’ve been catching up on our accountability work in Tanzania recently, and it continues to be really ground-breaking. Rather than churning out the standard logical framework of activities, outputs and predicted outcomes before the project even starts, the programme, known as Chukua Hatua (Swahili for ‘take action’) uses an evolutionary model of change (try out numerous approaches, drop the less successful ones, scale up and develop the winners). It’s more like a venture capitalist backing ten start-up firms knowing that most will fail, but some will win big. This has been possible partly because DFID has been willing to fund such an experimental approach as part of its Accountability in Tanzania (AcT) programme  (props to them).

18 months into the programme, it’s good to see that Chukua Hatua is, errmm, evolving, according to programme coordinator Jane Lonsdale, who I caught up with recently. The first phase piloted six approaches:

1) Election promises tracking – training of ‘trackers’ in 36 communities prior to the 2010 elections. They recorded rally promises on voice recorders, took them back to the communities to agree priorities and are now following up progress against the leaders’ promises.

2) Farmer animators – training more than 200 farmers nominated by their communities, to understand principles of accountability, how to hold those in power to account, and how to share their knowledge and facilitate their groups to take action. (pic right shows some animators getting into the groove at a workshop)

3) Active musicians – training 42 musicians on principles of accountability to act as seeds of change through their music, which is widely listened to by communities.

4) Student Councils (see pic, below) – building the skills of leaders at primary school level; linking students with community ‘champions’ to help them raise issues with teachers and school management committees.

5) Community radio – creating a new space in Ngorongoro district to enable pastoralists to share information and debate.

6) In addition to the pilots, Oxfam also supported local campaigns where communities were already active, most notably in Ngorongoro.

Last September came the difficult bit – killing off the less successful experiments. We got all the partners in a room, plus a couple of other NGOs, the consultants, some Oxfam staff from outside Tanzania and KPMG (which manages the programme for DFID). The group came up with four basic criteria on which to judge the pilots:
- How much were they spreading awareness?
- How successful were they in mobilising people to take action?
- How effective were they at expanding ‘spaces’ in which people can claim their rights – this includes both taking advantage of existing ‘invited spaces’ and creating new ones
- How responsive was the government (either local or national)?

Overall, the farm animators came out best. The musicians were better at awareness raising and mobilisation, but failed to get a good government response. We dropped some pilots and merged others. The student council approach was dropped and spun off to another funder (one unintended consequence of the venture capital approach  – generating other fundable spin-offs).

What didn’t work and why?

Geography: The active musicians were not able to work well in Ngorongoro, because the communities were too widely dispersed to reach.

Government obstruction: The community radio never got off the ground because the government did not issue a licence.

Informal v formal power: The farmer animators’ work was unsuccessful in spreading awareness beyond the groups that the animators belonged to. This might have been due to their lack of a ‘formal’ position in community leadership.

Attitudes to youth: Students were able to make demands within their schools, but were unable to take this approach into the community– there was simply not enough respect for young people’s viewpoints. 

What have we learned for the next phase of the project?

Apart from the shake-out of pilots, a number of other issues have emerged:

• The programme needs to do more to prepare for negative responses, especially from local officials (interestingly, reactions from the state have been most hostile where local opposition parties are strongest, whereas in communities dominated by the ruling CCM, officials are more open to dialogue). These have included threats by village executive officers to community members for being ‘trouble-makers’, arrests for demonstrating for electricity and closing a school for 2 days after students demanded more say in their education. Dealing with these responses will require training in negotiation skills and conflict resolution and linking citizens and partners to national organisations such as the Human Rights Defenders Coalition. The cycle of conflict and cooperation recurs in many change processes, and is always a real headache for both participants and NGOs like Oxfam.

• In Tanzania, building ‘created spaces’ is much harder than helping citizens make better use of existing ‘invited spaces’ for consultation and accountability. In such fora, the main obstacle is often lack of capacity, so the next phase will continue to work with local elected leaders. The benefits of changing the behaviour and increasing the capacity of village leaders and ward councillors are two-fold – they are more likely to support citizens demands’, and they can be a key ally in taking citizens’ issues upwards to central government. 

• Although there have been some notable successes, gender bias in Tanzania is very entrenched and work with women needs to be strengthened, especially looking at women’s leadership, men’s attitudes to women and women’s participation in public spaces. 

Perhaps most interesting for me is the wider impact on how Oxfam is working in Tanzania. The team is getting much more expert in understanding who has power at local level, and in the next phase will involve key local players such as faith leaders, traditional birth attendants and healers. Over to Jane for the last word:

‘I can’t differentiate programming from power analysis – they go hand in hand. We’re doing something different now, not just rolling out a load of community scorecards, or public expenditure tracking – the usual kind of governance work. We’re pushing ourselves to really think through how change happens in Tanzania and try out different things. The whole team and partners are now talking in terms of power analysis. We’ve got the same language to describe what change looks like. Everyone is picking up trends and patterns – it’s a lot better than conventional indicators.’

And here’s a nice 14m video covering the first phase of the project. In the words of the commentary, ‘they all deserve a big-up’.

What use are models of change? An experiment in Tanzania

I spent last week in Tanzania, but had to wait til I returned to internet-land before blogging on it. So this is Tanzania week on the blog.
 
First up, models of change (MoC). As you may have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about these recently. That usually involves exhausting intellectual gymnastics in seminars or dozing off over impenetrable academic papers, but now I got to apply them to Oxfam’s work in Tanzania. Fascinating (at least for me). The task was to use MoC to develop a programme called Chukua Hatua (‘take action’ in Swahili), part of an innovative and ambitious DFID programme managed by KPMG called AcT (Accountability in Tanzania).

Here’s a blurb from the programme coordinator, the redoubtable Jane Lonsdale (left, apologies for the Oxfamese – she wrote it at the end of a long, it was a hard trip):

‘Chukua Hatua (Take Action) does what it says on the tin. The programme is testing different approaches through a series of pilots to learn which can best act as a catalyst for Tanzanians to claim their rights. These include training a network of ‘farmer animators’ at village level, student councils, and an ‘active musicians’ scheme. Each pilot uses several of the following approaches in the design: 1) using visual and digital communication on issues such as monitoring election promises and land rights; 2) building the capacity of citizens to understand the concepts of rights, entitlements, transparency and accountability, and to seek information, organise and take action; 3) supporting citizen networking and the establishment/ strengthening of spaces for engagement and collective action; 4) researching issues that are a priority for the communities and providing simplified information along with disseminating relevant budgets, policies and laws and providing appropriate monitoring tools; 5) promoting women’s voices and rights, including in decision-making; 6) supporting communities’ initiatives to plan, organise and take action.  Following a year of piloting along with close monitoring of changes in communities and their leaders, the programme will be scaling up the most successful approaches through a combination of promoting natural replication across communities and groups, increasing programme coverage, and advocating for adoption and/ or replication.  The programme is delivered across the Shinyanga region and in Ngorongoro district, and is integrated with Oxfam’s agriculture, pastoralist and education programmes.’

The first step was two days ‘in the field’ (literally and figuratively). More on some of the encounters there in subsequent posts. In what was essentially a two day rolling seminar, we identified three MoC already exemplified by the programme, and a further three that could add new elements to the work. Ready?

First the MoCs that best describe the current programme:

Evolution: Take Action is a nice example of evolutionary acceleration, built on evolution’s core process of variation-selection-amplification. In the first phase, the programme sets lots of different hares running, from ‘farm animators’ to ‘active musicians’ to primary school student councils. It then selects (or allows natural selection, as projects multiply or die of their own accord). The final phase will be amplification: creating an enabling environment for them, promoting synergies between different initiatives, but otherwise staying out of the way so that new ideas and approaches bubble up from the grassroots.

The Four Powers: One model of change holds that disempowered, marginalised people must first feel a sense of ‘power within’ – the lightbulb moment when people realize they have rights, and that those they elect should serve them, rather than vice versa. Then they move to ‘power with’ – coming together around common issues -  before achieving ‘power to’ – asserting their rights, campaigning, mobilizing. Finally comes ‘power over’ officials or companies. Chukua Hatua concentrates on the upstream part – power within and power with, especially among women. What happens next is up to them.

Transitions to Accountability: This is based on the work of Jonathan Fox in Mexico (an elected one party state for most of the 20th Century, so some similarities with Tanzania, which has been under one party rule since independence). Fox found that local breakthroughs in accountability arise through the interaction of ‘the thickening of civil society’ and successful reformism by parts of the state e.g. particular ministries, or local officials. These often involve cycles of conflict and resolution.

OK, so far that’s just a fancy theory(ies) to describe what is already happening (or at least planned), but three other MoCs we identified actually suggest changes in the programme design.

Drivers of Change and importance of alliances: one of the findings of DFID’s ‘drivers of change’ work was that successful change often comes about through alliances of dissimilar actors, e.g. social movements, churches, sympathetic officials and private sector champions. What works best is if they come together around a simple, winnable aim – nothing like an early victory to galvanize people and overcome fear (a real issue in Tanzania). That suggests the relative purism of the programme in seeking to build ‘active citizenship’ needs to move much quicker to exploring alliances – e.g. when we asked them, five out of 40 farm animators turned out to be church leaders (protestant and Moslem), yet the programme had never explored alliances with faith based organizations. The lesson? Start building alliances from the outset – don’t wait til you’ve got a nice big citizens’ movement (and emerging leaders do it anyway – they don’t wait for your permission!)

Granularity/local political economy analysis: This is linked to the previous point. Social movements are seldom homogenous masses. On closer inspection they are made up of building blocks of more permanent, stable organizations – churches and mosques, savings groups, village militia, faith healers, cultural groups etc. You need to explore and understand this local granularity both to identify potential allies, and to understand the political economy of change (and resistance to change) at local level.

Positive Deviance: the evolutionary process doesn’t fit into distinct periods of variation, selection and amplification. It is constant. So even as you support successful experiments, you need to be constantly watching for new innovations. One way to do that is via positive deviance – studying outliers in terms of project performance or otherwise looking for what was ‘not in the plan’.

Conclusion: In order to use MoCs to understand reality (rather than the other way around), you need as big a range of them as possible. Looking for a single grand theory may close down avenues and stop you spotting opportunities (I even found myself urging our staff not to get too hung up on active citizenship….). Instead, you need a toolkit of ideas, which each contribute to understanding what is happening and how to improve things. But overall, I am reassured that I haven’t been wasting my time in the ivory tower – this looks like an approach worth developing. Feel free to agree or disagree below……

Positive deviance: spotting the hidden innovations in development work

I just learned some new jargon – always a heady sensation. Positive deviance. Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? And it describes something really interesting and, I suspect, quite important.

A colleague at Oxfam America, Roanne Edwards, filled me in – she has been to Mali to look at OA’s massive Saving for Change (SfC) project, which reaches 300,000 women and has spread to several other countries. Here’s how it works:

‘In partnership with Plan Mali, the Strømme Foundation and 12 local NGO implementing partners, SfC animators work in villages to organize women into savings groups of 20-25 members. These women meet weekly and regularly save an amount – the equivalent of 20 cents, for example – that is determined collectively. Once this money has formed a large enough pool, the women lend it to each other to expand or start businesses, or to pay for food, a medical emergency, schooling or other needs. The loans are repaid with interest, which increases the size of the fund. At the end of the year, the fund is divided and each woman gets her savings back with the accumulated interest.’

All good stuff, and as you would expect with such a large project, lots of monitoring and evaluation has been undertaken. The interesting addition is what Roanne was asked to do – identify the extreme aspects, both positive and negative. Why? ‘Atypically successful groups can provide insight into what could be possible for typical groups with additional guidance.’ So as well as worrying about averages, look at the outliers.

Her report on the exercise ‘is a qualitative study of 30 SfC groups, either atypically successful or unsuccessful. The former are engaged in collective social projects that benefit their village, large-scale collective investments and entrepreneurial activities that, in certain cases, take the SfC model to a new level. This study also evaluates groups that have experienced unusual and sometimes extreme challenges, which have resulted in the loss of members, the failure of projects or the shutting down of their groups, temporarily or permanently. The final section focuses on completely uncharted territory: the newly discovered children’s groups and their possible role in the larger SfC context.’

Here are some of her findings:

‘13 groups have pursued collective activities as part of their participation in SfC…. one group successfully advocated for the building of a maternity clinic with a major donor to a local NGO. Subsequently, the nine village SfC groups organized themselves into teams to pump and transport water to the construction site each day. As the president of one group remarked, belonging to SfC “made it very easy to constitute the work groups because we were used to working together in SfC.”’

‘The village midwife in the village of Dogobala has used her SfC loans to build a successful medicines and medical supplies business and has empowered her group to advocate with local government representatives for beds and a baby weighing scale for the village maternity. Members’ views on girls’ education are very progressive and family planning is already a part of the group’s curriculum.’

Success or failure turned out to depend to quite a large extent on the support or hostility of husbands and village chiefs.

But for me the most interesting findings came when Roanne started to look for what people had kept hidden from the project, because it ‘wasn’t in the Plan’. She found out, quite by chance, that one community had established a children’s group, so she started to ask around:

‘Following the discovery of a children’s group, the author inquired at each subsequent interview with an adult SfC group whether or not the village had a children’s group. The five groups in this study were either replicated by SfC members or created spontaneously by children of SfC members. Two of the groups are structured like the adult groups, with weekly meetings, contributions and late and unjustified absence fines. While some of the older girls are taking loans for their own commercial activities, the majority of girls are taking loans for their mothers or, in some cases, their fathers or grandmothers, who provide their weekly contribution money…… once the first children’s groups were discovered and the technical agents reassured that the groups’ existence was worthy of research, technical agents in nearly all the districts visited admitted that they had seen children’s groups.’

The children’s groups may be good (creating new generations of leaders, scaling up the savings effort) or bad (undermining girls education), but the point is that they were previously hidden from evaluators and bosses, and were only uncovered by building trust, and doing some respectful digging. I suspect that many of the innovative aspects of development projects take place under the radar in this way, and so great opportunities for learning and innovation are lost. Stepping back, it acknowledges that evolutionary processes are at work all around us – random mutation, selection and then amplification of successful mutations. Positive deviance spots those positive mutations early, and helps them flourish.

Roanne’s paper has not yet been published, but you can get an advance copy here. For more on the idea of positive deviance approaches, see here.

And here’s a youtube on the SfC scheme, (but why do NGO voiceovers so often sound like they’ve had a combo lobotomy/sense of humour bypass?)

Can we improve aid through evolution rather than planning?

Finally got round to reading ‘Beyond Planning’ Owen Barder’s CGD paper on aid reform. Owen’s a former DFID bigwig turned Ethiopia-based consultant and blogger. Here he writes like a true economist, which can be pretty heavy going, but the paper is worth persevering with. He can also write like a human being, for example in this thoughtful and human defence of aid on Open Democracy.

Owen sees a lot wrong with the current aid system, but he’s an aid reformer rather than simply an aid sceptic. He identifies a series of system failures as the underlying reason why attempts to improve the quality of aid often fail: ‘The political economy of aid agencies is driven by incomplete information and multiple competing objectives and confounded by principal-agent and collective-action problems…. A particular challenge for aid is that there is a broken “feedback loop” connecting the intended beneficiaries and decision-makers.’

He reckons that aid reform has to start by changing its rules and incentives, or else the systemic problems of the aid system will block any progress on aid practice: ‘we are reaching the limit of how much progress can be made by international statements of intent and coordination meetings. ….These constraints cannot be overcome by wishing that they did not exist. Progress does not require “thinking outside the box”: rather we have to understand the box and take steps to reshape it.’

Reshaping the box means starting with Bill Easterly’s critique of planners and exploring two alternatives to planning as a means to coordinate multiple players – markets and networks (hence the graphic at the top of this post – Owen says these are the only 3 options – can anyone suggest others?). He pulls aspects of all three together in a proposal for what he calls ‘collaborative markets’, ‘governed by collective regulatory agreements and complemented by symmetric and accessible information. Specific measures to move towards a collaborative market could include unbundling funding from design and implementation of aid programmes, to create explicit markets for aid delivery; improving international competition in the supply of development services; new standards for aid transparency; mechanisms to allow aid beneficiaries to provide feedback about the services they receive; penalties for negative spillovers (such as entry fees to discourage proliferation) and subsidies for positive spill-overs (such as independent and rigorous evaluation); and the establishment of a more effective regulatory mechanism, backed if necessary by treaty.’

He sees salvation in harnessing the forces of evolution (mutation, selection and amplification – see previous blog) to improve the quality of aid: ‘reforms should build incentives to innovate and improve, and to screen out unsuccessful institutions and approaches.’ To achieve this, ‘Reform should focus not on a grand new design of the aid system, but a set of technical and apparently innocuous reforms which, over time, create stronger political pressures for evolutionary improvements in the aid system.’

What difference might it make in practice? Owen sets out a ‘menu of measures to provoke discussion’ that includes:

Network-like measures as part of a collaborative market such as an international decentralized mechanism for sharing aid information and independent evaluations, or feedback mechanisms for beneficiaries (communities or governments)

Market-like measures such as untying all aid, signing explicit contracts for aid delivery and ‘unbundling’ funding from delivery (likely to become just back-door privatisation, I imagine), an ebay style market for technical assistance and a focus on results e.g. cash on delivery and vouchers.

I think the interesting aspects are his central challenge – how do we create an aid system that allows evolution (of policies, institutions etc) in a world of imperfect knowledge – and his insistence that unless we change the political economy of aid, there’s no point in aid agencies promising to do better in future – the structure of the aid system creates a political equilibrium which determines how aid works. The only option is to change the structure, and so the equilibrium. Otherwise donors will just bang on about how much they support developing country ownership, but the system will drag them back to a ‘donor knows best’ practice.

Introducing evolutionary forces takes him down the path to vouchers, cash on delivery and market mechanisms, about which I have some concerns (see previous blog), but not completely – he sees roles for planning and networks too.

I guess it comes down (as usual) to what constitutes development. Is it primarily about empowerment, institution building or service delivery? And should aid focus on all three or mainly concentrate on one? Owen seems implicitly to think aid is best suited to service delivery, and has a rather technocratic/new labour enthusiasm for using market mechanisms to deliver it. That may be a suitably modest aim for aid, but a) such mechanisms have a pretty chequered history where they’ve been tried in countries like the UK and b) service delivery is only one aspect of development.

Final word to Chris Roche, an aid wonk at Oxfam Australia: ‘I think Owen is spot on re a) the need for feedback from ‘primary stakeholders’ or rights holders – they are not beneficiaries! – and b) the need for evolutionary, emergent and non-linear approaches to change rather than the linear grand design approach (though we can see grand design element such as the MDGs as ‘stabilising points’ around which emergent change can coalesce). 
 
Where I think he is wrong is a largely market based philosophy for creating incentives based on New Public Management theories of expanding choice more than voice. There is some evidence to suggest that reputational threat is one of the major incentives that aid agencies – and particularly NGOs – actually respond to. If this is the case then more effort needs to be put into providing primary stakeholders with the ability to create that reputational threat and thus really strengthen their ability to sanction poor performance (much of the discussion about transparency etc may increase ‘answerability’ and is a necessary step but is does not create the ability to sanction). This in turn requires some quite fundamental organisational change with in aid agencies, as well as establishing more citizen to citizen links possibly using new social media.’

Update: detailed response from Owen to this post on his blog

Complexity Economics, Evolution and How Change Happens

Eric Beinhocker’s book, ‘The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics’ (for review see previous post) challenges our understanding of how change happens and the role of would-be ‘change agents’ like Oxfam. Read More …

Complexity Economics and Evolution – a Truly Big Idea

I spent much of the Christmas break sneaking off to read chapters of Eric Beinhocker’s path-breaking 2006 book ‘The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics’. There’s probably too much to cover in one post, so I’ll follow up this overview with some more specific reflections in the days to come. Read More …