Top tips for more effective advocacy

As I whizzed round the Philippines recently, the many conversations about advocacy brought together several past conversations and hobby horses. So here, laid before an indifferent world, (and because everyone loves lists) are my 7 top (and very random) tips for how to sharpen up your advocacy work.

Technical Fixes:

What’s your Home Page?: Everyone in the team should set Google Reader or similar as their home page. When they turn on the computer in the morning, they should spend half an hour reading its contents, before diving into the email backlog. (For non techies, Owen Barder explains how to set it up). Why? Because advocacy is about knowing what’s going on in the world outside, not being on top of your emails. And nothing impresses in the first meeting of the day more than casually asking ‘did you see Krugman’s piece in the New York Times this morning?’

How are you reducing your level of e-navel gazing? Irungu Houghton, who directs Oxfam’s Pan Africa programme uses number of business cards collected by members of his team as a performance indicator. Alternatively, what % of your emails end in @oxfam.org? How do you propose to reduce it? Do you remonstrate with colleagues who clog up your inbox by hitting ‘reply all’ and saying things like ‘yes’? Why? Hours in the day/opportunity costs – advocacy is about engaging with them, not us.

Getting/training the right people

Hire refugees from target organizations: nothing like an ex-City boy, or hydrocarbon girl for knowing how financial/oil & gas companies operate, and having credibility in speaking and lobbying. Ditto those who’ve worked for governments, whether in the North, or in developing countries (one reason why so many ex ODI fellows work for Oxfam).

Secondments: If you can’t hire from them, at least try and ensure your policy people go and spend a week or two working for a target institution (aid agency, government, private sector company). Why?  Because advocacy is about getting inside the heads of your targets, understanding their cultures, language and incentive systems. Can’t do that if you’re living in an echo chamber.

Immersions: You can’t do effective development advocacy if you haven’t spent time with a poor community in years. Why? You lose conviction and passion; you become just another bureaucrat; you start to resemble ‘them’. And what if (shudder) someone actually asks you ‘when was the last time you talked to a poor person’?

Apply your power analysis and theories of change internally: It always surprises me that when sophisticated Oxfam lobbyists, with a subtle grasp of power and the nature of change, want to get stuck into internal battles, they leave all those skills at the door. Windows of opportunity? Killer facts? Iconic stories? Coalitions of interest? Nope, moaning and finger wagging should do it……. Why? Because internal power battles matter – resources, organizational priority etc are crucial. And anyway, there’s nothing boosts team morale more than winning those arcane internal battles.

Finally, when was the last time you stole a good idea from a smaller organization? Why? Because big INGOs don’t know everything, and all the problems of navel-gazing, internal transactions etc mean that small organizations  are often quicker to spot and respond to an emerging issue or develop new ideas – we want to be more Google, less Microsoft, right? When I was at CAFOD, my two main UK targets were HM Treasury (to take up our suggestion) and Oxfam (to steal it). (Don’t get me wrong – you should of course credit the source of the idea).

See also Grey Panthers, harnessing universities, research for impact etc etc. Any other tips?

Is Oxfam finally growing up? Report back from the frontline (sort of)

This may sound unlikely, but I’ve just spent three days at an internal Oxfam meeting and I’m really enthused. The occasion was the first ever gathering of our ‘country directors’ following a big (and painful) internal overhaul, akin to swallowing a giraffe (in the memorable words of one director), which has seen all the different independent affiliates of Oxfam International (17 at the last count) pool their resources in each country in something known as the ‘Single Management Structure’ (SMS).

Most big international NGOs have been through similar restructurings in recent years, often opting for a tight federation that is in practice dominated by the larger members. Oxfam has opted for a looser ‘confederation’ that maintains the voice of smaller affiliates. The closest parallel is probably the EU, (OK not very encouraging right now, but pretty good over the longer term). Still awake?

The reason this matters is that it marks an essential step in improving our work in each country, and the country directors are increasingly being recognized as Oxfam’s key players, running new, expanded teams, doing a lot of high level advocacy with governments as we shift our focus more towards national level change (and relatively less on often-fruitless global summitry), and hopefully being more assertive in telling people in headquarters (like me) what to do.  

And they’re an amazing, diverse and politically sharp group of people (see pic). The week has resembled a marathon of wonky speed dating, with ten minutes of expert insider buzz from Rwanda, Yemen, Tajikistan and Bolivia, and that’s just over dinner. I’ve got guest bloggers and case studies coming out of my ears. Beyond all these individual conversations, the overarching question of the meeting was ‘What do we want to be when we grow up?’ i.e. what comes after SMS? Here are some thoughts.

Once we’ve got the country programmes sorted out, the next phase should include identifying some cross-country initiatives, for example piloting new approaches, or doing comparative research (as we are already doing on the impact of food prices). We’re going to have to construct some kind of clearing house system/dating agency to allow country programmes to rapidly identify common issues and start work.

The country focus puts a premium on finding and keeping staff who are constantly monitoring and responding to their evolving political and social contexts. We need more of these ‘antennae’, and fewer heads-down project administrators grinding through the plan, whatever happens in the world outside.

It also means being aware that the constantly changing buzzwords of head office may not permeate to people in the field. If we want to be country-led, we need to stop bamboozling staff with new jargon. With the exception of ‘theories of change’ of course…… Lots of interest in how to do power analysis and improve our grasp of change processes, which bodes well for my next big project (a book on power and change).

In both advocacy and programming, we kept coming back to implementation gaps as the place where an NGO can have the most impact -situations were governments have passed laws, or created institutions, but nothing is happening. That often provides ideal bases for advocacy (after all, the government’s already halfway there) – research the gap, identify the blockers and get stuck in, or set up pilots to show how it can be done. Women’s rights and government decentralization processes provide particularly juicy targets.

Oxfam also wants to build a ‘worldwide influencing network’, but I don’t think we’ve fully incorporated an understanding of of complex systems into our thinking, which seems to be predicated on us knowing what needs to be done and getting out there and advocating for it – cue those shopping lists of recommendations at the end of every NGO report. That was always a bit dubious (are NGOs really best placed to reform global finance or carbon emissions?) but is even less convincing in complex systems where both the future and the impact of any given intervention is shrouded in uncertainty. So how can we do influencing when we don’t know what the response to an issue should be? Examples include highlighting the problems poor people face (going back to a more basic role of bearing witness/helping people communicate what is happening to them) or convening different groups of players to find solutions together, where we act more as a catalyst/match-maker than a policy maker. Any other suggestions?

The conversations were dotted with striking human stories: the Pakistani CD whose home village threw out the Taliban, and has been getting suicide bomb reprisals ever since; the humanitarian/emergency guru who went to the Nairobi slum of Mukuru and couldn’t believe his eyes - ‘worse than any refugee situation I’ve ever seen’, leading him to ask how the word ‘humanitarian’ somehow came to apply only to emergencies, not to alleviating permanent suffering; the engineer in Tajikistan who set up a ground-breaking forum to bring water to thousands of people, but then got made country director. When asked about his promotion, he replied wistfully ‘Honestly? I like water….’.

Don’t get me wrong, there was still plenty of coma-inducing NGO-speak (‘standing for sustainable transformative development will be very contested going forwards’ – a direct quote) but overall, this feels v exciting. Feels great to be talking more about ‘Oxfam’ rather than ‘Oxfam GB, Oxfam America, Oxfam India etc’. And for all those INGO watchers who want a real picture of what we’re up to (rather than academic parodies) here’s an excellent internal warts-and-all analysis of the most recent set of national ‘Joint Country Analysis and Strategy’ documents drawn up by each newly SMS-d country. It’s written for an internal audience, so a bit jargony, but I would argue all the more valuable for not being packaged for public consumption.

What can we learn from a really annoying paper on NGOs and development?

I’ve got a paper I want you to read, particularly if you work for an NGO or other lobbying outfit. Not because it’s good – far from it – but because reading it and (if you work for an NGO) observing your rising tide of irritation will really help you understand how those working in the private sector, government or the multilateral system feel when they read a generalized and ill-informed NGO attack on their work.

The paper in question is from a reputable institution (Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty Institute) and authors (Nicola Banks and David Hulme), and is about ‘the role of NGOs and civil society in development and poverty reduction’.  Here’s the abstract:

‘Since the late 1970s, NGOs have played an increasingly prominent role in the development sector, widely praised for their strengths as innovative and grassroots-driven organisations with the desire and capacity to pursue participatory and people-centred forms of development and to fill gaps left by the failure of states across the developing world in meeting the needs of their poorest citizens. While levels of funding for NGO programmes in service delivery and advocacy work have increased alongside the rising prevalence and prominence of NGOs, concerns regarding their legitimacy have also increased. There are ongoing questions of these comparative advantages, given their growing distance away from low-income people and communities and towards their donors. In addition, given the non-political arena in which they operate, NGOs have had little participation or impact in tackling the more structurally-entrenched causes and manifestations of poverty, such as social and political exclusion, instead effectively depoliticising poverty by treating it as a technical problem that can be ‘solved’. How, therefore, can NGOs ‘return to their roots’ and follow true participatory and experimental paths to empowerment? As this paper explores, increasingly, NGOs are recognised as only one, albeit important, actor in civil society. Success in this sphere will require a shift away from their role as service providers to that of facilitators and supporters of broader civil society organisations through which low-income communities themselves can engage in dialogue and negotiations to enhance their collective assets and capabilities.’

A fairly standard critique, and one with which I have some sympathy (apart from the unforgivably long paragraph). So why is it so annoying? (and I realize I will probably come across as just another thin-skinned NGO prig, but what’s the world coming to if you can’t indulge in cathartic rants on a blog?). Here are some of the irritants that I think we NGO types should note and avoid in our own work:

Sweeping generalizations: there’s a standard couple of paras on ‘hey they’re all different!’, but from then on it’s NGOs are this and NGOs are that, with evidence-free assertions across geography, scale and role. No acknowledgement of differences in approach, of some NGOs being better/worse than others. From NGI (non-governmental individual) to large transnational organizations like Oxfam, NGOs are just one amorphous blob (cf ‘the private sector’ in NGO diatribes). The authors’ defence is that this is just a chapter for a student textbook and so has to be a very general ‘synthesis of syntheses’. Just as long as you don’t expect it to describe reality, I guess.

Teaching grandmother to suck eggs (yes, for non English readers, that is one of our weirder sayings): nothing more irritating than having an academic, in ringing tones, telling you the blindingly obvious like ‘while NGOs comprise part of civil society, they are far from synonymous with civil society’ – NSS (no shit, Sherlock). The authors pull the student textbook defence again on this one – it makes me rather worry what our students are being fed (but at least explains why several have come up to me after talks to say how confused they are because they like what I’ve said, yet have been previously taught that all NGOs are evil/incompetent pawns of imperialism).

Argument by assertion, rather than evidence: if you repeat often enough that ‘concerns of financial sustainability and organizational

survival drive the erosion of an NGO’s original values and mission’, maybe the reader will eventually swallow it, despite the lack of nuance or evidence. The authors’ defence is that the paper summarizes ‘the best elements of an enormous academic literature’. The trouble with that is that, like an NGO writing a paper based exclusively on other NGO reports, the process acts as a huge echo chamber, magnifying normative assumptions and prejudices, and bidding farewell to any dwindling link to reality.

Dodgy stats: Citing secondary sources from 2000 and 2006, ‘NGOs depend on donor funds for around 85-90% of their income’. What, all NGOs? (certainly isn’t true of Oxfam). To be fair, the authors promise to sort this one out (but what if I hadn’t bothered to write this? Those poor students again.)

Assuming all NGOs are either venal (endlessly pursuing their own expansion and ‘professionalization’ – which apparently is a Really Bad Thing) or stupid (not realizing that they can’t succeed): Nothing alienates more than a truly condescending tone based on very little actual knowledge. Over the years, I’ve seen some spectacular NGO finger wagging alienate potentially sympathetic politicians – this is right up there.

No sign of them actually interviewing anyone who’s worked for an NGO in the last 5 years. The authors’ response was that both authors had worked with NGOs over the years, and they’d drawn on writings by ex-NGO ‘practitioner-scholars’. So if you’ve worked with government/private sector, no need to check your analysis with them before slagging them off? Interesting. Get ready for my paper on ‘academics’…….. The authors pull the standard ‘it’s just a working paper and can be fixed’ defence. Sorry, but if you’re serious about feedback you have to actively go out and ask for it.

No case studies of NGOs doing the things they are being accused of. Not one. I asked them about this too. Response? Weirdly, the authors argue that eschewing case studies (in favour of slagging off all NGOs indiscriminately) is somehow an act of kindness. Not sure I follow that one.

I could go on – ubiquitous aunt sallies, lazy use of the passive tense (‘it is argued that….’) – but you get the picture. As far as I can tell, they have not solicited, or read, any internal or published NGO work on these issues (and boy, there’s plenty of it – we agonize constantly about effectiveness, accountability etc). Nor have they sent the draft to any NGO people to review (unlike this blogpost, which both authors have commented on).

Gosh I feel better for that…….. But back to my main point. If you work for an NGO and want to influence, rather than irritate, read this paper and monitor your reactions.

I think I may be hearing from the authors……

When does accountability work have an impact? The importance of Implementation Gaps

I’ve been reading the set of papers Oxfam recently published on local governance and community action (see previous blog) and was struck by how central the issue of ‘implementation gaps’ is in our work.

An implementation gap arises when a set of institutions (often via decentralization), policies or budgets (or all three) exists on paper that should benefit poor people and communities, but is having almost no impact on the ground.

Such a situation provides a particularly good entry point for an INGO like Oxfam because it reduces the political risks of being accused of being a politically interfering foreigner (you are supporting the implementation of what the state has already agreed). What’s more early wins are likely to be easier to achieve and can have a galvanizing effect – plucking a few low-hanging fruit is great for morale and motivation. In terms of power analysis, this is about making the most of ‘invited spaces’ rather than creating new ones.

If the state is particularly effective, then a lot can be achieved through evidence and reason, perhaps facilitating dialogue with excluded minorities, as we did in Vietnam. Or through helping poor people gain access to their legal rights, for example through legal aid – I’m often struck how much of this kind of work we do, and yet it features fairly low down in our wider communications.

If the state is more chaotic, then a greater level of activism and confrontation may be required to get official attention, as in our campaign on access to medicines in Malawi. In South Africa, I have seen our partners organizing ‘toyi toyis’ – a very loud and musical form of war dance – outside the courtroom to pressure the judges to act.

In either case, as Jo Rowlands points out in her overview paper on the country cases studies, there is a need to balance both the supply and demand side of the accountability equation, supporting officials to respond to growing citizens demands, and working to prevent conflicts and breakdowns breaking out between the two sides. Always recognizing, that many activists cross the border between supply and demand, moving from jobs in the state to activism in their communities.

The time horizon for such work is relatively short – this is about lots of mini-victories through which poor people and their communities begin to make the most of their invited spaces and legal rights. It’s not about maximalist demands for total revolution that, to be honest, hardly ever prosper.

In most cases, the right place for an INGO is behind the scenes, supporting local civil society with funding, capacity building, access to information etc. Where civil society is particularly weak, INGOs may have to be more of an actor (as in the Vietnam case).
I guess this is an example of what I meant when I wrote recently about the potential progressive interpretation of the political economists’ insistence on ‘going with the grain’ of local contexts, rather than seeking to impose outside blueprints.

But the programmes go well beyond merely ensuring that governments implement their laws and policies – the trick seems to be to combine working on the implementation gap with something more (to use the fuzzword du jour) ‘transformational’, i.e. helping to unleash the agency and organization of hitherto excluded groups (on the basis of gender, caste or ethnicity) as part of the project. That seems to combine the benefits of lasting change, with the morale-boosting effect of quick (or fairly quick) wins.

As a reminder, the five case studies are:

‘Nothing is impossible’: Women’s rights in Nepal

‘Missing medicines in Malawi’: campaigning against ‘stock-outs’ of essential drugs

‘Where does the money go?’: citizen participation in Turkana, northern Kenya

‘No longer sitting quietly’: building community participation in Vietnam

‘Citizens Wake Up’: The Chukua Hatua programme in Tanzania

This post also appeared on the World Bank’s People, Spaces, Deliberation blog

How to write Killer Facts and Graphics – what are your best examples?

Time for a spot of crowd sourcing. We’ve had research guidelines on our intranet for ages, covering everything from survey design to writing for impact. Now we’re updating them and, more importantly, making some of them public on Oxfam’s Policy and Practice website. I’ve been lumbered with revising the ‘Killer Fact’ two pager, so naturally thought I would try and use the blog to get other people to do the work for me. Here’s the draft - all comments welcome, but particularly, give me your best killer facts under each heading (or suggest new headings) – with links please. Honourable mentions to the best suggestions.

‘Killer Facts’, are those punchy, memorable, headline-grabbing statistics that cut through the technicalities to fire people up about changing the world. They are picked up and repeated endlessly by the media and politicians. They are known as ‘killer’ facts because if they are really effective, they ‘kill off’ the opposition’s arguments. The right killer fact or graphic can have more impact than the whole of a well-researched report.

Suggestions for how to do it

There are various kinds of killer facts. Most involve some kind of comparison:

Type of killer fact	Example (please click on the link for sources)
Big Number: the single statistic showing the size of the problem	Armed conflict costs Africa $18 billion a year A Eurozone breakup could cost the poorest countries $30 billion in lost trade and foreign investment Remittances from overseas workers to developing countries are worth $372 billion a year, 3 times the global aid budget
Juxtaposition to highlight injustice and double standards	It would cost $66 billion to get everyone on the planet out of extreme poverty – 4% of global military spending [From Poverty to Power second edition, forthcoming] A woman’s risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes ranges from 1 in18 in Nigeria to 1 in 8,700 in Canada.
And absurdity can make a juxtaposition much more memorable	It is easier to trade in guns than bananas… bananas are subject to more regulations under EC rules than sales of AK47s Every EU cow receives over $2 per day in support and subsidies, more than the income of half the world’s people
Surprising Stats	More people die of road traffic accidents in developing countries than die of malaria Mexico is the second most obese country after the US
Humanizing abstract issues	12 million more children will go hungry by 2050 because of climate change
Human scale. Statistics can be so big that we can’t comprehend what they mean. Re-scale them to a size we can relate to.	A child dies every four seconds from preventable causes. UK aid spending per person per day is less than the price of a cup of coffee. There are two bullets for every person on the planet

Killer Graphics

Graphs can speak louder than words, as can infographics [example below]. They can illustrate the contrasts of killer facts but in addition

• Show sudden changes in long term trends, e.g. food prices
• Show projections into the future

 

Do’s and Don’ts

DO:

• Be totally certain of the data you use to create your killer fact. The sources must be reliable and respected, and as up to date as possible. You should reference them in your report.
• Be ready to provide sources to media or politicians – if the killer fact succeeds, they will be on the phone very quickly and you need your sources ready!
• Make sure that the fact can’t be misinterpreted, i.e. that the language is not too convoluted. Otherwise journalists will attempt to re-write it in plain terms and accidentally twist your meaning. The same applies to killer graphics: make sure they can be readily understood and not given alternative interpretations.
• Make sure the best killer facts are included in the executive summary and the press release – ask someone other than the author, e.g. a media officer, to read through the paper and pick out the best ones.
• Plan ahead: early on when working on your report, decide on the kind of killer facts you would really like to have. Does the data already exist to fill it out? If not, is it possible to generate that data?
• Working out killer facts can take a long time – it often involves adding statistics up in a way that they are not usually added up. So make the time, or get a research assistant to help you with all the calculations.

DON’T:

• Cut corners on killer facts. They are crucial to a report’s impact. If you are exhausted and have run out of inspiration (a common problem late on in the writing process!) ask a media officer or campaigner to help with ideas.
• Use too many killer facts in one paper: focus on the most powerful. Otherwise they overwhelm the reader.
• Rely on killer facts that have been overused in the past: keep it contemporary, relevant, and interesting.
• Use a killer fact that is not credibly sourced, even if it fits your message. It is not worth damaging your credibility for quick hit.

And remember – if in doubt, leave it out!

Over to you…….

So the world is a complex system – what should aid agencies do differently?

Had a fascinating chat with Jean Boulton (right) this week. Jean is a physicist-by-training (a real one, unlike me – I jumped ship after my first degree). These days she is a management consultant and social scientist who has been working to bring ideas of complexity theory into organisations for many years. More recently she has become interested in international development – hence the chat.

Jean argues that facing up to complexity is not an option. Behaving as if the world is stable and predictable when it is not does not make it so. Such mechanical thinking can lead to blindness to change and difficulty in adapting to shocks and fast changes. So a shift in mindset is needed. Don’t assume the world is a smoothly functioning machine: review progress often, pick up on unintended consequences, look for the unexpected, scan for signs of change.

But there is still a dilemma here. Some people use these ideas to suggest that a) The world is complex, so there’s no point trying to understand it – just do what you feel, or b) The world is complex, so we should give up trying to influence change in any particular direction and just pick civil society/other partners and accompany them through thick and thin. In fact, complexity theory has a much richer set of implications for development policy and practice, but they can be hard to nail.

So in addition to Jean’s more general points, here are some more specific candidates:

Firebreaks: forests and forest fires are classic complex systems, in that you can’t predict where the fire will take place, or how it will spread. But you can still introduce ‘circuit breakers’ into the system by clearing firebreaks in the forest that will slow down the spread of fire. In the development world, the closest parallel is perhaps with financial systems – e.g. suspending share trading once a certain level of volatility has been reached. What other examples are there?

No regrets policies: back to the financial system – we can’t be certain what kinds of speculation, if any, increase food prices, but could we take steps that would be effective if speculation is indeed the guilty party, while not harming the useful operations of financial markets if it isn’t?

Decentralization:  bringing decision makers closer to the ground makes sense in complex systems where they are required to spot trends and react to them, rather than develop the master plan and implement it.

Enabling environment: rather than ‘picking winners’ – e.g. backing a particular social actor, technology etc, in complex systems where such winners could come from anywhere, it might make more sense to focus on creating a broader enabling environment to support would-be change agents. Things like data transparency, literacy, health and education, communications infrastructure (see internet pic), or even trying to influence the underlying norms and values that guide human behaviour.

Regulation: If the previous point sounds a bit like the Washington Consensus, that’s because complexity theory sometimes risks veering towards blind faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of markets. Jean’s counter-argument is that the self-organising invisible hand does not necessarily lead to ‘the good’. It depends on the values and intentions of the actors. The work of complexity economist Brian Arthur emphasises that free markets tend to lead to the big getting bigger and the powerful more powerful. The voice of the powerless and the voice of the future are soon lost. Governance, social movements, even good old-fashioned regulation, can be crucial in countering this ‘pull to power’.

Run multiple experiments: If you can’t pick winners, why not pick 20 runners and see which ends up being the fastest, then pick that one? This is essentially what we are doing with the Chukua Hatua project in Tanzania, and it seems like a really sensible way to intervene in complex systems.

Real-time data: functioning effectively in complex systems means spotting new (and inherently unpredictable) trends as soon as possible and reacting to them. Better real-time data on everything from nutrition to levels of popular discontent is important, but so is creating the right set of incentives and mindsets to ensure that organizations actually respond to the data and see the patterns within it.

Monitoring and Evaluation: in complex systems, trying to attribute an outcome to a particular activity is often a fool’s errand. But that doesn’t mean you give up on measurement altogether. One method focuses on the use of journals, diaries and looking for patterns in what Jean calls ‘narrative fragments’ which can all help detect impact in complex systems, even if they don’t provide the illusory certainty of ‘intervention A is 36% more effective than intervention B’.

Judging the context: Jean is keen on this one. Not all situations are endlessly uncertain and fluid. We need to make some judgements – what parts of our work and context are relatively stable – and the task is to do well what we are doing; what parts are very unstable and the focus is on agility and adaptation; where do we experience rigidity and ‘lock-in’ and the task is to challenge and disrupt?

This week Jean is in Northern Kenya, exploring what her ideas can bring to our work with pastoralists there – should be a fascinating example of theory meets practice.

By the way, regular readers will know that I am a big fan of Eric Beinhocker and was blown away by his book arguing that evolutionary theory was a much better model for the economy than the 19th century physics of equilibrium. Turns out that Thorstein Veblen got there a bit earlier: in 1898 he wrote a paper ‘Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science’. Sorry Eric.

NGOs and blogging on development: Why do we find it so hard?

I went to a fascinating ‘bloggers breakfast’ in Washington last week, hosted by Lawrence MacDonald of CGD and Oxfam’s Paul O’Brien. A bunch of development bloggers from the Center for Global Development, Oxfam America and a few others chewed over a mixture of blogging dilemmas and CGD’s muffins and fruit. V pleasant way to start the day (actually I had started it an hour earlier reading endless Thomas the Tank Engine books (see right) to a delightful three year old by the name of Lawrence – great way to start the day). What emerged?

My over-riding impression was just how much of a struggle blogging is for NGO types: many (not all) NGO bloggers just don’t enjoy the experience. They find it hard to keep to length or strike a suitably conversational tone. But much more problematic is how they feel about the exercise – overwhelmingly anxious. Constrained by feeling they face a conflict between finding their personal blogger’s voice and having to write to what one Oxfamista called ‘the editorial voice’ (I didn’t even know we had one…..). People talked of ‘writing what I think is appropriate from Oxfam’s point of view, and not in my own voice’. ‘I’m just so nervous and afraid of having my true voice out there, so I get really conservative.’ Ouch. Not surprising, then, that so many great bloggers inside Oxfam choose to set up their own personal blogs instead, but I think that’s a shame too, if it means fewer people get to read them.

These difficulties show in the numbers – a lot of NGO blogs really don’t do very well on traffic or on reputation (the ABBAs were dominated by academic blogs – NGOs barely got a mention). So what can we do about this? First distinguish between the different purposes of blogs and manage them differently. Some categories (please add your own refinements) include:

1. Discursive, trying to set or change agendas (Gramsci would have made a great blogger), raise new issues, but feeling free to express doubts (yep we all have them), and not hammer home specific policy demands (what Owen Barder caricatures as ‘flogging not blogging’). I would put FP2P into the (very) discursive category. For these you need to give the blogger license and avoid heavy sign-off processes. If you’re worried, then monitor authors over a probationary period and if they don’t screw up, progressively loosen the reins.

2. Issue specific-policy blogs – Oxfam’s new Global Health Check is doing rather well in this category, getting decent numbers and lots of positive feedback from health officials and other target audiences. In this case the writers should know the no-go areas better than anyone – so set the bloggers free. In this category, doubt and diversity may not work – if you’re trying to persuade health officials, it’s no good having one post saying user fees are terrible, then another saying ‘well, on the other hand….’

3. Witness bearing: one of NGOs’ niches ought to be blogging ‘from the field’ in a way that communicates the reality of life in developing country communities to people who live elsewhere (mainly in rich countries). If these are really crude ‘thank you Oxfam for giving me a new goat’ type blogs, they probably won’t reach many people – nuance and ambiguity is a good thing when trying to describe real life. But some of them can be extraordinarily powerful, like the blogs from Oxfam staffer Mohamed Ali during the Gaza blockade in 2009. Sign-off here should be limited to avoiding risk to staff or partners in country.

There are some inevitable and pretty fundamental tensions. Campaigners are always itching to use blogging in a rather instrumental way, e.g. get everyone blogging on the same issue or directed at the same target, but on some level, that really goes against the nature of blogs. ‘Authenticity is key’ asked one participant, ‘but how do you coopt authenticity?’ No blogger (or indeed sentient human being) agrees with their organization’s ‘line’ all the time.

And there is more to life (and social media) than blogging. Owen Barder usefully described blogs as ‘part of a set of conversations’, including twitter, facebook etc. He sees the particular niche of blogs as setting out arguments, rather than having conversations – twitter is better suited to that. I came back from the US finally accepting that I am going to have to start using twitter for more than the current ‘robo-tweet’ alerts of blogposts.

Overall, I would say that NGOs need to think about the bloggers not the blog. Blogs need human faces and personality, which seems to go against an instinctive corporate urge to suppress ego, promote the Oxfam brand and speak anonymously in ‘the Oxfam voice’. According to in-house blogging guru Eddy Lambert, this doesn’t work: ‘‘We have no evidence that people want to develop relationships with ‘brands’. It’s people, problems and ideas every time. However much we may wish otherwise, we struggle (as do others) when we place our brand at the centre and obsess over style/tone of voice etc.’ 

If you have multiple bloggers on a site , at least follow Global Dashboard’s model of giving prominence to them as individuals, and letting subscribers pick and choose who they want to hear from.

Finally, this has to be fun, not a chore (or it shows). Don’t force people to blog if they hate it. Would-be bloggers need encouragement, mentoring (especially on the first few posts) and, yes, empowerment. NGOs have to shift from ‘permission to forgiveness’ – a big but essential organizational shift (practice makes perfect – I’m getting quite good at asking for forgiveness….). Unless we can make these kinds of changes, I fear NGOs are going to continue to struggle in the blogosphere.

Your thoughts?

Wrapping up the great Nairobi guesthouse pool debate

Wow. Hit a nerve there. I’m both gratified and slightly appalled by the level of interest generated by Wednesday’s post on the development-critical issue of whether Oxfam should keep the pool at its Nairobi guesthouse shut. For those people without the time or inclination to trawl through over 60 comments, here’s a summary.

First the voting – deeply unscientific, self selecting, but at least the software doesn’t let you vote more than once from the same machine. Of the 654 votes cast to date:

• ‘Open the pool, provided it operates at zero cost to Oxfam’ gets 59%

• ‘Open the pool right away’ gets 26%

• ‘What are you wasting space on the blog on such a trivial issue?’ gets 8%

• ‘Keep it shut’ gets 7%

Now for the comments: I read through everything up to number 60, and got the following approximate breakdown:

• Open the pool: 20

• Open the pool + lateral thinking (open it to the public, charge other NGOs, privatize it etc): 11

• Humorous (at least in intent): 9

• Completely random and hard to categorize: 9

• Keep it shut: 6

• Other stuff Oxfam does is much worse: 3

• Why not just go to a pool somewhere else? 2

The lateral suggestions are interesting and creative, but they are only worth considering if they fulfil one overriding criterion – Oxfam is in the middle of a major emergency, helping some 3 million people get through the drought in the Horn of Africa and Nairobi is the headquarters of that effort. So if anything distracts one iota of management attention from that effort, forget it, at least until the drought is over.

As for going elsewhere – in Nairobi  anywhere further than walking distance seems to require an hour in a taxi stuck in traffic.

And here are three of my favourite comments:

Calvin: ‘Use the pool but don’t enjoy it’

Ros: ‘How we all agonize that we are not Gandhi’

But by popular acclaim, the prize for best comment goes to Matt for this gem:

A) Form a swimming pool collective with a rotating chair, with use of the pool to be voted on every week. Pool to be funded by bake sale at the local international school.

B) Divide the pool surface area into 100 square use rights – sell rights to the staff and/or guests, who are only allowed to swim within their allotted area, unless allowed to by other freeholders. Let residents buy and sell these rights to each other and let the market reach an efficient outcome

C) Let NGO workers use the pool, but constantly make them feel guilty about it: surround the pool with posters of photos from recent/ongoing drought. Actually, this could be a win win situation – if you run into anyone who seriously objects to the idea of Oxfam using a pool, let *them* stand on the side and heckle the swimmers.

D) Randomly allocate 50% of your guests with passes to the pool. Use pre and post survey data on stress levels, health, etc to evaluate the actual impact of pool usage. If you’re concerned about financial viability, charge a high price and then randomly distribute vouchers of varying levels to the treated group to tease out the demand curve for pool usage.

So what happens next? Errrmm nothing, necessarily. I’m just a humble head of research and for some reason the big cheeses tend not to manage Oxfam via online referenda, but I think this exercise will eventually have an influence. Right now, those in charge undoubtedly have better things to do, but I know they read the blog (far more often than they ever read my emails….) and this exchange has definitely made a few waves. I’ll keep you posted.

And by the way, yes, this was an interesting exchange on a genuine dilemma facing an INGO, but if you want to read about a rather more pressing dilemma, try why everyone (including us) was late in responding to the drought and what we can do about it.

Right, now I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks (and yes, there will be pools involved). I’ve set up a bunch of roboposts to keep wasting your time while I’m away and Richard King will manage the blog. Anything goes wrong, it’s his fault.

The great Nairobi guesthouse swimming pool dilemma – cast your vote now……

Nairobi is a major NGO hub, currently the epicentre of the drought relief effort, and Oxfam’s regional office realized some years ago that we could save a pile of money if we ran our own guesthouse, rather than park the numerous visitors in over-priced hotels. It’s nothing fancy, definitely wouldn’t get many stars, but it’s much more relaxed than a hotel and a brilliant place to meet the kind of people I profiled recently. It’s really rather unique.

But there’s a problem. As a large converted house in a nice part of town, and like most such houses in Nairobi, it has a swimming pool. But the swimming pool is covered over and closed, even though it would be cheap to keep it open. Why? Reputational risk – back in the UK, where swimming pools are luxury items, Oxfam’s big cheeses saw a tabloid scandal in the making and closed it (see right, the blue of the pool is a protective tarpaulin, not water). It didn’t help when some bright spark decided to advertise for a swimming pool attendant on the Oxfam website……

On my recent stay at the guesthouse, I asked everyone I met there and whether African or mzungu, they all said  it makes sense to open the pool. Exhausted aid workers arrive hot and dusty from remote areas of East Africa for some R&R, but there’s no chance of a refreshing swim. I need my exercise so had to go running instead – the combination of altitude, hills and choking traffic fumes nearly killed me.

On the other hand there’s no denying that most of our supporters back in the UK, let alone the people we are working to help, are not likely to have access to a pool in their back yard, so why should aid workers get special treatment? (And I have to confess, when I interviewed the members of a sex workers’ collective in Rio de Janeiro a few years ago as they relaxed by their aid-funded organization’s pool, I was rather shocked myself.)

So what do you think? Should Oxfam open the pool and take any bad publicity on the chin, or should we stop whining? It would probably cost about $200-300 a month to keep the pool open – if we could find a way to do it without creating an accounting nightmare, we could probably raise that from contributions from guests, and even have money to spare to plough back into Oxfam programmes. Vote now (see right).

Vote choices: Open the pool; Open the pool but only on if it at least covers its own costs; Keep the pool closed; Don’t waste my time – use the blog for something more high-minded please (and you can choose more than one option).

Update: check out the comments – some hilarious suggestions and yes, I am a bit depressed that this is already the most popular poll ever on this blog………

Thick problems, thin solutions and the future of NGOs

Normally I avoid discussions about the future of NGOs like the plague – they either involve a bunch of academics with only the vaguest idea of what we actually do all day, or a lot of senior managers emitting sonorous pronouncements on how we need to be more agile in a multi-polar world and use twitter a lot. But every six months or so, I dip in to see what’s new, so this week I joined a discussion at Hivos, an interesting Dutch NGO that is doing some big picture thinking and producing some extremely funky materials on ‘digital natives’, among other things.

Hivos had commissioned a paper by Mike Edwards (development thinker and NGO watcher) to get the ball rolling. Mike’s core argument was that we face a disjunction between ‘thick problems and thin solutions’. Thick problems are ‘complex, politicised and unpredictable’, while ‘thin solutions’ are the preferred operating system of the aid industry, desperately seeking linear causation so it can ‘prove’ its impact (and justify its existence) with lots of monitoring, evaluation etc.

“The world of international development is excited by the power of markets and technology, but not by the slow arc of building better institutions or changing values and relationships; by the efficiency of Results-Based Management but not by the task of democratizing foreign aid; by the ability of Randomized Control Trials to forecast interventions that deliver the best returns, but not by debates about what this means for the deeper dimensions of wellbeing; by “value-for-money” among NGOs as sub-contractors, but not by the need to establish financial independence for groups that are rooted in the South.”

He adds some nice explanations for this trend, and argues that these solutions are ‘not going to get us anywhere near a sustainable human future’, and that the role for NGOs is to ‘act as bridges between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’, reintroducing ideas of transformation (of power, structures etc) back into development.

I buy some, but not all, of this. Real life (as opposed to the uncluttered conceptual landscape of the aid industry) has always been ‘thick’ – multiple factors, messy and unpredictable change, leaving leaders, citizens and social movements to navigate through the fog of history using a blend of values, instinct, opportunism and analysis. To my mind, Mike also gives too much importance to civil society organizations per se – his paper barely mentions the role of the state, democratic institutions, faith groups etc.

He’s too dismissive of the results agenda (he doesn’t think we can beat them, i.e. start measuring what counts, not just what can be counted – ‘quantiphilia is not a contest NGOs can win’ – and argues we shouldn’t join them in the first place.) And although I would personally love to heed his call to give up on international institutions and close our offices in Geneva, New York etc, I think he’s wrong to portray these institutions as on the way out. There are too many global problems that will (eventually) require global solutions/institutions, and we need to be engaged in that thankless task. Ditto his argument for leaving humanitarian response to ‘consulting firms and other specialists’, although we probably agree on the need to shift towards building national capacity to reduce risk and respond to disasters.

So much for the paper, what about the discussion? It was pretty ‘wide-ranging’, as they say, so I’ll just add a few observations on the subtexts to the conversation.

Firstly gloom – the Dutch NGOs feel under political and economic siege right now from government, right wingers and the media, attacking everything from senior salaries to aid effectiveness.

Secondly, we kept skirting around one of the underlying questions in the evolution of the aid industry – what replaces market forces as a driver of change? Speakers contrasted the development scene with the Fortune 500, where big companies rise and fall from year to year. Not so the UN, aid agencies or NGOs. Does the lack of destruction also stifle creation, blocking the appearance of development Googles and Microsofts to break in, crush the existing powers and transform how we work or think? And does the absence of market forces to drive product differentiation explain why we all do the same stuff, herding after the latest development fads (value chains, microfinance, RCTs, whatever)?

In response some, like Owen Barder, think we need to find ways to introduce or mimic market forces in aid. But I think it’s also worth thinking about how other non-market institutions (governments, religious organizations, universities) improve their record on innovation, accountability and competition. In the world of INGOs, decentralization is happening fast, both internally and through the appearance of new start-up affiliates in the emerging economies (Oxfam India and the like) who will surely challenge for power within the NGO network. Maybe large NGOs should also get better at spotting, supporting and adopting innovation from its most likely source – new or smaller NGOs?

Thirdly, the discussion didn’t distinguish clearly enough between complicated and complex processes (and I’m not sure which of these constitute Mike Edwards’ ‘thick’ category). Complicated problems can be solved by thinking and studying harder. Complex ones are inherently insoluble – there is just no way of predicting that one man’s self-immolation will trigger a revolution. Complicated problems require NGOs to become cleverer; complex ones require them to think differently – to get better at spotting incipient big changes as early as possible, at finding ways to respond (promoting good change, preventing bad change), at learning how to take risks in a fog of rapidly moving events where we can never know enough to be absolutely sure.

There are also things we could do differently (or better) in response to complex processes. One is bearing witness – how is the latest shock hitting poor people, women in the informal sector etc? There is a huge gap in gathering rapid, realtime data on this that academics are not currently filling. We did it a bit on the financial crisis and food price spike and plan to do more of it in the future.

Finally, what is our role in a really big downturn and/or prolonged period of stagnation and austerity in INGOs’ traditional power bases – Europe and North America? One option is to hunker down, defend the gains (such as aid budgets) and seize the odd opportunity (like the Robin Hood Tax). Another is to say ‘there’s not much we can win here, and we have huge challenges coming down the track – let’s step back from the trench warfare of advocacy in Europe and America. Instead we should shift resources to the emerging powers (growing and changing fast, and so more open to influence) and/or long-term prophetic visioning on things like the future of economic growth, even if it damages our access to those in power today (second cartoon). As one person summed it up – do we want to be right or relevant? (And yes, in true NGO fashion, the answer is of course ‘both’).

This post also appears in an online forum hosted by The Broker. Feel free to join in the navel-gazing…….