Jobs for wonks: three new openings at Oxfam

I’m taking time out from blogging today partly because my computer’s on the blink, but also because I promised to plug some new jobs in Oxfam that I thought would particularly interest the kinds of weirdoes intellectuals and deep thinkers who read this blog:

First up, our MEL pin-up Karl Hughes is off to the ADB, so if you fancy becoming our ‘global impact evaluation adviser’ (aka number cruncher in chief), now’s your chance. We need a seriously heavy hitter on this one – Job Description here, or go to the website. Closing date 13^th Feb.

Second, my old chums in the research team are looking for a research officer. Again, top number crunching skills required, working in a great team led by Ricardo Fuentes. Details here. Closing date 7^th February.

Finally, only a two month job, but really interesting, an great way to get a foot in the door/on the ladder and it’s on a topic dear to my heart: how change happens.  ‘A recent graduate/post-graduate and/or someone with research and writing skills and experience in international development, political or social sciences for a two month role, starting early February, to help produce some How Change Happens case studies.’ Be warned though – you may have to work with me on this one. Details here. Contact renglish[at]oxfam.org.uk. Closing date as soon as we find someone.

And if you’re in Leeds with nothing to do this evening, you can come to the University and hear me launch the second edition of FP2P at 5pm. Ditto Warwick University on Saturday.

Should we (and everyone in Davos) worry about extreme wealth? New Oxfam briefing

Good to see Oxfam highlighting inequality in its media briefing ahead of this week’s annual gathering of power & plutocrats in Davos. Because inequality is about the relationship between different social groups, it is inherently more political and more controversial than poverty. As our head of campaigns Ben Phillips, who packs a mean sound bite, said in his Al Jazeera interview, ‘’We sometimes talk about the ‘have-nots’ and the ‘haves’ – well, we’re talking about the ‘have-lots’.’ (I misheard it as ‘have yachts’, which would have been even better….)

An extreme concentration of wealth not only misallocates resources, it undermines political processes, as those who control wealth pay for increased lobbying, which in turn leads to decisions that further skew wealth (Joe Stiglitz has highlighted this kind of destructive feedback loop in relation to the finance industry).

The briefing calls for an end to ‘extreme wealth’. I helped out with our first killer fact of 2013:

‘The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012 – enough to end world poverty four times over.’

I suspect this one could be around for a while, so here are the sources for the calculation:

First, Bloomberg for the increase in income of the richest 100 people:

‘The world’s 100 richest people added $241 billion to their combined wealth in 2012, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The top 100 controlled an aggregate $1.9 trillion as calculated by the prices on world stock markets December 31, for an average of nearly $20 billion apiece.’

Then the Brookings Institution calculated the money required to lift everyone in the world over the $1.25 a day line

‘Providing every person in the world with a minimum income of $1.25/day in 2010 would [cost] just $66 billion.’

Divide Bloomberg by Brookings and you get the figure of (roughly) four.

The more I think about it, the more astonishing this number is. A quarter of the additional wealth accumulated in 2012 by 100 people could end extreme poverty for 1.4 billion people – that’s a ratio of 1 to 14 million. So if each of the world’s top 100 billionaires gave up 25% of their income (we could call it a ‘tax’ or ‘extreme wealth surcharge’…), they could each take 14 million people out of extreme poverty. OK I know it’s not that simple, you can’t just get money directly to poor people (though it’s getting easier with mobile banking etc), but still, the disparity in scale is breathtaking.

Remember when Oxfam took on Winston Churchill, apartheid, the Labour government, Big Pharma and the pesticides industry?

As Oxfam celebrates its 70^th anniversary, head of advocacy Max Lawson discovers its radical roots, and urges it not to lose its edge

January 1942. The second World War was at its height.  The Axis Powers had occupied almost all of Europe. In Greece, people were dying of starvation at a rate of 2000 a day.  Winston Churchill completely opposed any lifting of the naval blockade to allow food in, as he claimed this would prop up the Nazis. In Oxford, a small group of activists came together to form the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, and together with other famine relief committees across the UK campaign for Churchill to lift the blockade.  Under considerable domestic pressure, which won support from Canada and the US, the Churchill government did eventually let some food through, but not until 200,000 people had died of starvation.

Taking on the most powerful people. Saying what has to be said. Campaigning for what is right.

Born in a spirit of proud quaker radicalism, Oxfam had arrived.

Seventy years later we brought together figures from Oxfam’s past last week to discuss our radical roots, and it was truly inspiring.

Oxfam campaigning built rapid momentum throughout the sixties. Oxfam, the new kid on the block, a brazen arriviste compared to its far older and more established peers like Save the Children, pioneered many now-familiar methods – harrowing newspaper adverts, celebrity vigils in Trafalgar square (with backing from both the Beatles and the Stones), tens of thousands lobbying their MP.

In 1979 in Cambodia, millions faced starvation following the insane Communist dictatorship of Pol Pot. He had been overthrown by the Vietnamese army who had invaded Cambodia to stop the genocide.  Western governments refused to help the new Vietnamese-supported government, scandalously agreeing that the Khmer Rouge should maintain their seat at the UN despite categorical evidence of mass murder in the killing fields.  Ignoring the opposition of the UK Labour government, Oxfam organised the first shipment of food to Cambodia, turning the tragedy into global front page news, and forcing action by international agencies to support the new government in Phnom Penh.

From the early eighties Oxfam began taking on the excesses of the private sector, whether it was the pharmaceutical giants marketing steroids or nestle pushing baby milk in poor countries. Internally there were huge debates and a fear of risk and litigation.  A report accusing the pesticide industry poisoning farmers was suppressed by management, only to have their decision overturned by the board. Throughout we stayed true to our radical roots, taking those risks, taking on the powerful – and winning.

After a year of detailed planning, Oxfam announced in 1985 that it was going to stop using Barclays Bank because of their support to apartheid South Africa. Oxfam’s break with Barclays was followed by student organisations across Britain and many others, and a year later Barclays pulled out of South Africa – a major victory as they were present on every high street in South Africa and it was a significant market for the company.

This active support of sanctions led to Oxfam being censured by the UK charity commission for being too political.

In the 1990’s we took on the World Bank and IMF, challenging their structural adjustment strictures, handing out packets of pills at their annual meetings saying ‘wrong diagnosis, wrong medicine’.  These should now be dusted off and translated into Greek or Spanish.  We fought hard with many others for debt cancellation. Again we were angrily dismissed by ‘experts’ for being wildly unrealistic and naive.  Ten years later and $100 billion of debt was cancelled.

One of our proudest moments was siding with others such as the Treatment Action Campaign, to face down the pharmaceutical companies on the issue of allowing generic medicines to treat HIV/AIDS- a huge victory which has led directly to 8 million people being alive today on free treatment.  Taking on big pharma was no mean feat.  And we won.

Taking on the powerful. Saying what has to be said. Saying the uncomfortable.  Expecting to be dismissed out of hand. Staying true to our radical roots and moral vision.  A common thread since the beginning.  What does this mean for us today? Huge shoes to fill for a start. Have things changed? Is the world not less black and white?  I don’t think so- it was as complex then as it is now, just different.  The risks were at least as great.  It is true some of those we have targeted have improved their actions.  Many more have improved the way they present themselves. We must beware the wolf in our clothing.  The fights are now as much in developing countries themselves as they are about north and south. These days we should be shaming the 60+ Indian billionaires for accepting that 450 million of their fellow citizens exist on less than a dollar a day as much as we challenge the UK to back a Robin Hood Tax. The issues have changed and evolved but not the fundamental principle. We are entering an age of scarcity, insecurity and grotesque inequalities.  The importance of our responsibility to stay true to the radical heritage of Oxfam, to campaigning against the powerful – is greater than ever.

India’s slums: how change happens and the challenge of urban programming

Got back from a fascinating week visiting Oxfam India last week, so the next few days’ post will be on India, sadly the world leader in poverty (by a long way). One of the areas that Oxfam is keen to develop there is its work on urban poverty, where it already works with migrant labourers, waste pickers, domestic workers, and on issues such as housing and access to identity papers. So I spent a couple of days visiting programmes and talking to partners in the slums of Delhi and Lucknow. (I prepped by reading Behind the Beautiful Forevers – wonderful book)

I know they’re grim to live in, but I have to confess to really enjoying visits to urban ‘informal settlements’, especially at dusk, with that particular sense of intimacy as cooking smells and firesmoke drift through the air and domestic workers, rickshaw pullers and street vendors return at the end of another hardscrabble day to grab an hour or two to socialize and relax.

But today, we’re encroaching on that precious leisure time, chatting to an animated group of slum leaders, mainly women, on the edge of Lucknow (see pic). Here, an Oxfam partner, the Vigyan Foundation, is promoting community organization to demand identity papers, water and sanitation, and access to health and education.

Vigyan moved from rural to urban work in 2005, after running a slum mapping exercise by Oxfam in Lucknow & Allahabad. The work highlighted the importance of identity and visibility in Indian politics. Simply by showing the location and population of Lucknow’s many informal settlements, (the previous census had simply denied their existence), they were able to win numerous victories on access to state funding and services.

Beyond the specifics of the slum dwellers’ demands, Vigyan is working on slum dwellers’ sense of ‘power within’, when it comes to their rights and identity itself. Organizers describe it as moving from ‘we are on government land, we shouldn’t be here’ to ‘we are building the city, we have rights, we are not ‘encroaching’’.

The foundation also wants to counter anti-slum prejudice among Lucknow’s better-off residents by highlighting the extent to which the slum actually subsidises the city (eg by supplying cut-price domestics and street vendors, paying sales taxes, rubbish recycling). Anybody know of research on this in India or elsewhere?

Talking to local activists, as well as Vigyan’s staff, I am struck by how little we/they work with the many sources of social capital in informal settlements. They seem to think there is no savings activity taking place other than formal microfinance schemes (Portfolios of the Poor suggests there are numerous more indigenous ways of saving among poor urban people); anxious to maintain their secular impartiality, they largely avoid religious groups and leaders, despite their enormous presence and importance in the slums; they don’t seem very curious about networks based on place of origin (eg waste pickers from Assam), or moneylenders or the role of local teachers. Yet all these are part of an ecosystem of power and relationships that plays a huge role in how people in slums interact. If well-intentioned activists go into a slum and start organizing as if on a blank canvass, they are at best going to miss opportunities. At worst, they are more likely to fail.

We talked about how the slum interacts with the external world of state officials and elected officials. Government-recognized ‘notified slums’ are ‘politically empowered’, so the first hurdle as slum dwellers start to organize is to get their slum notified, so it appears on the political and fiscal map.

Their least worst allies in this are the lowest tier of elected officials, the ‘corporators’ (what a great word). After notification, they distribute voting cards and see the slum as a ‘vote bank’, but at least that means the residents have a degree of leverage. Political parties have been visiting for years – lots of slum dwellers get voter cards long before they get formal i/d papers.

Seen from the bottom up, the corporators are the most engaged, but the least powerful links to the political world. Above them, few members of the higher tier state assembly (MLAs) are interested. Officials largely ignore city politicians anyway, as they answer to the state government. ‘The officials are worse, especially the low level ones – they ignore us or demand bribes. At least corporators listen, even if they don’t do anything.’

I ask the women why they get organized in this way: “Because we’ve got confidence, the people at the top listen to us now. When we had a water crisis, we approached the water department and got hand pumps. We used to work alone in our employers’ houses, but now we know how to talk. We want our children to assert themselves, not be like us.

Why vote? “We’re positive if our candidate wins, they will provide basic services. When it doesn’t happen, we’re disappointed, we wait five years and vote for someone else – what else can we do?

Why do so many women become leaders?: “The men are away earning money, so women have more time. And anyway, we suffer more: when there is no water, women are hit hardest. Women care about the kids, whereas our husbands just drink. If I have a problem (eg domestic violence) the other women help – that’s what an organization means. We’re illiterate (the attendance sheet has as many thumbprints as signatures), and we’d never gone outside before, so meeting and interacting like this feels good.”

The women and Vigyan organizers are inspiring, the sense of energy and personal and political progress palpable. In contrast,

conversations in villages often seem more static, with a few organizers, usually men, hogging the airtime. But if the urban world is so much more promising (and its population rising so much faster than in rural areas), why is it proving so hard for international NGOs to overcome their rural bias and develop a greater level of urban work? Is it the greater difficulty of establishing attribution in the chaos of the slums, in our logframe-dominated world? Or do we prefer the ceremonies of rural work (the songs, garlands and, yes, ribbon cutting – see pic) to the gritty urban reality of minding where you step and dealing with drunks?

Your thoughts, as ever, appreciated.

Getting evaluation right: a five point plan

Final (for now) evaluationtastic installment on Oxfam’s attempts to do public warts-and-all evaluations of randomly selected projects. This commentary comes from Dr Jyotsna Puri, Deputy Executive Director and Head of Evaluation of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie)

Oxfam’s emphasis on quality evaluations is a step in the right direction. Implementing agencies rarely make an impassioned plea for evidence and rigor in their evidence collection, and worse, they hardly ever publish negative evaluations.  The internal wrangling and pressure to not publish these must have been so high:

• ‘What will our donors say? How will we justify poor results to our funders and contributors?’
• ‘It’s suicidal. Our competitors will flaunt these results and donors will flee.’
• ‘Why must we put these online and why ‘traffic light’ them? Why not just publish the reports, let people wade through them and take away their own messages?’
• ‘Our field managers will get upset, angry and discouraged when they read these.’
• ‘These field managers on the ground are our colleagues. We can’t criticize them publicly… where’s the team spirit?’
• ‘There are so many nuances on the ground. Detractors will mis-use these scores and ignore these ground realities.’

The zeitgeist may indeed be transparency, but few organizations are actually doing it.

So while Oxfam’s results are interesting, more importantly the transparent process must be applauded. But as I read these documents, it was deja vu… In the initiatives that used quasi-experimental methods I was struck by Oxfam’s acknowledgement that they didn’t know the ‘why’ of some of the results. For the ones that used qualitative methods (the humanitarian portfolio, citizen’s voice and policy influencing), I kept asking myself, how much did they do better by? It seemed like a zero-sum game: One method meant the absence of the other.

This was one source of familiar dissatisfaction…

As they say, once a ship has sunk, all the mice know how it could have been saved.

So here’s the mouse in me. What can an organization do to answer questions I (and it) have and not wring its (collective) hands regretfully later? Here’s my five point list for what all NGOs should think about before setting up an M&E system (or even after setting it up). It’s operational (I have put one into place), it’s not easy, but it has the potential to quieten most detractors (and people like me):

Point 1: Have a good theory of change/causal pathway/impact pathway or whatever you want to call it. The name doesn’t matter (it’s a rose!)

Theories of change are good for understanding the program, for schematics and great communication tools too. Additionally anevidence-based theory of change can help you decide where you need most investigation, where a process evaluation is sufficient, where a counterfactual analysis of outcomes is required and where a simple tracking of indicators is useful.

Do: Set one up and ensure everyone who needs to, knows the theory of change along with risks and assumptions.

Point 2: Put in place monitoring and information systems. Track process and process/output and some outcome indicators across program areas. There should be a list of performance monitoring indicators that speak to different sectors (four in the case of Oxfam).

Do: Put together a set of standard operating procedures for collecting information on process indicators. This should contain information on frequency of collection, identify data sources (clinics, households, schools), specify respondents (teachers, nurses, women, children…) and clearly elucidate methods for calculating indicators (even for simple indicators such as enrollment rates).

Do: Write and revise and revise a standard operating procedure manual till you have it pat.

Do: Have a management information system that also includes algorithms for quality checks and have a full time person doing data review.

Do: Train your data collectors and your data base managers;

Point 3: Think about measuring attributable change. Can you for instance:

-          Assign the intervention randomly from the beginning without losing sight of your final goal?

-          Identify counterfactual sites and start collecting data there? Pros: great reporting to donors; rigorous information; Cons: more expensive than just monitoring data, does require high level of scrutiny in comparison sites especially if you use ex post techniques.

-          Use other methods to establish causality? (Which ones?)

For all methods:

Do: Use protocols and register them (3ie will soon start to register them.)

Do: Use rigorous surveys in implementation sites and in control sites (and get someone who knows how to do them. Don’t do them yourself).

Do: Have standard operating procedures for site level data entry and cleaning;

Do: Use anthropometric measures and bio-physical indicators to the extent possible;

Do: Use and write a field operations manual, write standard operating procedure manuals for data managers that contain range and logic checks for data, and, encourage double data entry.

Point 4: Undertaking cost and cost effectiveness studies. What are the priced and non-priced inputs in the project? Think about whether you want to use these projects in other places? Scale them up? (And no it’s not going to be calculated from your budget statements alone. )

Do: Put together a standardized template with cost categories and measurement methods. (E.g. how will you measure the cost of usinggood seeds for the farmer? It’s not just the cost of procurement or transportation but also the cost of additional manure, the cost of storage for seed and post-harvest produce.)

Do: Ensure that everyone in the delivery chain understands and sees this template the same way. (Train, train, train…train!).

Point 5: Focus on implementation research. Systematically documenting implementation factors, and putting together a protocol which contains questions that are relevant to informing all stages of the evaluation. This is where participatory methods, focus groups, observational scrutiny, process research should come in, and also inform your theory of change.

Do: set out a protocol at the beginning that lays out i) the questions you want answered ii) what you’ll ask in your interviews to answer them; iii) a plan for analyzing your qualitative information.

There are many more things one can do. But I believe if you have these covered, you are on your way.

A few more things to bridge that elusive evidence-policy gap:

• Evidence is required for policy making but most policy makers are looking to affirm (and not inform) their opinions (as a recent article in Time says. See here for an excellent QJPS article also cited there).
• Be circumspect about what evidence you advocate for. Not everything is worth fighting for (and often leads to evidence-fatigue.) When I have taught policy analysis, I have often used a rule of thumb long known to academic political scientists: if a policy change leads to less than a 10% change in outcome, it’s a flashing red (stop and think before translating that evidence into policy); if it’s a 10-25% change (it’s a lime, go for it but think about transition costs); if it’s more than 25% change, it’s a deep, loud green: Adopt the policy. The costs of transition will be surpassed by the benefits of policy change.
• Change the institutional incentives: Oxfam is on its way, but will program managers on the ground really adopt this culture change or will it continue to be top down? (See here for an excellent blog by Mead Over and Martin Ravallion.)

What do DFID wonks think of Oxfam’s attempt to measure its effectiveness?

More DFIDistas on the blog: this time Nick York, DFID’s top evaluator and Caroline Hoy, who covers NGO evaluation, comment on Oxfam’s publication of a set of 26 warts-and-all programme effectiveness reviews.

Having seen Karl Hughes’s 3ie working paper on process tracing and talked to the team in Oxfam about evaluation approaches, Caroline Hoy (our lead on evaluation for NGOs) and I have been reading with considerable interest the set of papers that Jennie Richmond has shared with us on ‘Tackling the evaluation challenge – how do we know we are effective?’.

From DFID’s perspective, and now 2 years into the challenges of ‘embedding evaluation’ in a serious way into our own work, we know how difficult it often is to find reliable methods to identify what works and measure impact for complex development interventions.  Although it is relatively well understood how to apply standard techniques in some areas – such as health, social protection, water and sanitation and microfinance – there are whole swathes of development where we need to be quite innovative and creative in finding approaches to evaluation that can deal with the complexity of the issues and the nature of the programmes.  Many of these areas are where NGOs such as Oxfam do their best work.

So we would really like to welcome and applaud Oxfam’s new Effectiveness Reviews, which adopt a clear and practical framework for assessing what difference it is making, through its partners, in the development process. It is a big step forward for them – and it would be great if it also inspires other organisations to develop new and interesting approaches to measuring results and undertake rigorous analysis of what works.  Clearly this needs to be done in a way which each organisation can afford and resource – things need to be done in a proportionate way – but the Oxfam initiative shows some of what is possible.

They have chosen quite a practical strategy – picking out a random sample and then probing more deeply and using different techniques to measure impact or use well-tried monitoring of performance indicators.

Of course there is one potential drawback – random sampling may mean there are gaps in what you can say, if key areas don’t happen to have been sampled this time.  Oxfam also notes that the reviews do not necessarily enable full understanding of why a programme is successful (e.g. in Pakistan) and that they now need to go back and undertake some more work.   One way round this is more purposive sampling – we don’t know if this was considered –  or identifying priority themes up front based on what the organisational objectives are, and focusing on them in some depth.  The key challenge is finding a strategy for using the limited resources for evaluation and data collection in a targeted way that gives a nice balance between extensive coverage and intensive analysis.

Another challenge is maintaining the independence and integrity of those carrying out the evaluations.   Finding impartial observers – given that many people and experts have worked for years in these areas and know each other well – can be difficult.

The very interesting study of policy influencing by Oxfam’s partner in Bolivia, Fundacion Jubileo, is worth looking at in some detail.   It made a good case that the grantee was really having an impact on some key aspects of social change in Bolivia The evaluators clearly applied the process tracing technique skilfully and identified the most significant changes – but it must have been difficult to stay objective when doing the interviews, working with the grantee and identifying who was really influencing whom.  Howard White and Daniel Phillips’s paper on ‘small n’ techniques talks a lot about the biases that one needs to avoid in using these techniques.  The appendix to the study provides an excellent and useful set of reflections on the use of the process tracing methodology and what the evaluators learned.

One key assumption is that by doing more work and collecting more data (e.g. from comparison sites in Zambia and the Philippines), they will be able to understand and demonstrate impact.   Actually, based on discussions we have had with Michael Woolcock recently in DFID, we have started to ask a different sort of question.    In some types of programmes, more data and more work may not be the solution - more innovative methods and approaches to understanding impact can be required and if the programme itself develops as you implement it then the goal posts are continually shifting too.

Looking ahead, and thinking about the next stages of this agenda….first, we would encourage others to share their approaches and experiences in the way that Oxfam has done.   Second, it would be great to see Oxfam and other NGOs sharing resources to develop better methods across the sector, given their common challenge of demonstrating results and the limited resources.   The results agenda is particularly challenging for smaller organisations, whose inputs are increasingly recognised – so can we ask if Oxfam sees itself as in a position to demonstrate leadership in linking with such organisation to jointly share and explore results?

Nick York is DFID’s Chief Professional Officer – Evaluation and Caroline Hoy, its Results and Evaluation Specialist, Civil Society Department.

Can you help promote ‘From Poverty to Power’? This won’t take long…..

OK, out of consideration for your sensitivities, I’m going to try and condense all the humiliating, grovelling self promotional authorial thing into a single post (OK, I’m lying, but the other promo will be less blatant). The second edition of From Poverty to Power is published on the 23^rd October, and as you doubtless know, there is nothing so craven as a writer desperate to promote their book. So let’s get it over with:

Presentations and lectures: Have Powerpoint, will travel. If you’re in the UK, I’m happy to add your organization to the launch roadshow, provided you can guarantee a reasonable turnout. Please contact chingley[at]Oxfam.org.uk to discuss dates etc. If you’re outside the UK, I’m still interested, but it may be more complicated (and expensive) – but please get in touch. The current list of launch events is here.

You can also follow event news on facebook and twitter

Buying it: You can order individual copies, or if you want to get a bunch of them, contact andrea.palmer[at]practicalaction.org.uk to discuss bulk discounts.

Reviewing it: Andrea is also the go-to woman for review copies

Translations: We’re keen to see translations, either of the whole thing, or in an abridged version. The first edition is already in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Korean, so you can cut translation costs in those languages (we can provide track changes versions). Contact rcornford[at]Oxfam.org.uk.

Blogs: I am generally keen to repost stuff as a guest on other blogs. My ideal model is the World Bank’s People, Deliberation, Spaces site, which regularly reposts, and is really easy to work with (no demand to post before/at same time as me etc). Anyone else out there interested? You don’t have to ask permission to repost, but if you let me know, I can alert you when suitable subject matter is on the way.

Free access: If you want a taster of the new edition we’ve opened up the ‘Food and Financial Crises‘ chapter ahead of publication to clelebrate World Food Day and Oxfam’s GROW week – Look inside now

Finally, here’s a promotional video, featuring me reading an autocue for the first time, which induces a strange zombie-like party political broadcast tone. Felt like having a lobotomy.

Phew, glad that’s done.

Development Theory v Practice: Visiting Oxfam’s work in Mindanao

For me, one of the most fruitful aspects of ‘field trips’ such as last week’s visit to see Oxfam’s work in the Philippines is the exchange it sets up in my head between the academic literature and debates I’ve been ploughing through in the UK, and the reality of our work on the ground. A good trip confirms, improves or adds to your thinking, and occasionally shows you that you have got it all wrong. This was particularly true on this occasion as our staff and partners in the Philippines are both real thinkers (one guy passed a long car ride by listening to a lecture on Hegel on his laptop ‘for fun’) and activists (more on that tomorrow). The quality of discussions in a Manila seminar on active citizenship and food justice was truly impressive – nuanced and open minded, with no sign of the dogmatic, fissiparous Left I saw on my last visit in 1998 (when I had to give the same lecture twice because different fractions refused to sit in the same room). First some (relatively minor) new insights from all these interactions:

What role for INGOs in peripheral regions? This is a frequent situation – we work in remote areas, where a substantial part of the problem is neglect by central government and others. Per capita public spending in Mindanao is significantly less than in Luzon, home to the capital, Manila, as is aid spending. The same pattern is repeated in pastoralist areas in Africa, and indigenous areas everywhere. One thing we’ve never really got involved with much (as far as I know) is trying to shift national attitudes and beliefs (‘pastoralists are lazy – there’s no point in helping them’; ‘indigenous groups are backwards and need to be assimilated’). We do some work in the capital, typically raising specific issues like human rights or conflict, but what about applying our skills at framing, brand-building etc, and all those offers of pro bono work from ad companies, to shifting attitudes in capital (‘Marvellous Mindanao’)?

But local advocacy may well be more useful than national: Complaints about the state of the roads are universal (and well justified, if ourexperience is representative). They are an obvious advocacy target – do something about the illegal loggers (right) that are destroying the roads, spend more on fixing them, and get the local community to chip in some free labour if necessary. Another potential candidate is finance – the rubber farmers get into debt to the buyers, and then can’t negotiate better prices, (‘if we can break out of debt, maybe we can try new things’) partly because state banks won’t lend to long-gestating crops like rubber. So why not do some advocacy on local bank lending? More generally, who gets elected mayor at the municipal level is hugely influential on the level of priority the local government gives to small farmers – yet up to now we haven’t seen working around elections as a relevant ‘critical juncture’ for our model of change. Often, we seem a bit trapped in a combo of national advocacy + local programming, maybe because of the friend v critic tension (see next point).

We struggle to be partner and critic of the same institution: eg we work with local government on agricultural production, and that somehow prevents us challenging it on dismal road maintenance. Ditto the private sector – it takes a relatively sophisticated approach from both sides to both work with private companies and simultaneously to criticise them in public. One option is to get better at differentiating within institutions – we work with the agriculture ministry, but give public works a hard time on roads. Ditto leaders and laggard companies within industries. But often, we find this tension quite disabling – more for emotional reasons than practical ones, I suspect – it’s very hard to criticise someone in public and then have a meeting with them where you want to establish a rapport.

And some familiar issues and quandaries

Our secular blindspot: The Philippines is a very Catholic country (opening prayers before meetings etc); in addition there are the citadels of the homegrown variant ‘Iglesia ni Cristo’ (estimated 3m congregation) and the mushrooming churches of evangelical sects. Yet staff laughingly concede that we only engage with Islam (on women’s rights in Mindanao). They say it’s because of the Church’s opposition to the Reproductive Health bill currently before Congress, but that doesn’t really convince (the Imams aren’t exactly pro-reproductive health either).

Working with local government: The role of local government units (LGUs) has been central ever since the decentralization process began some 20 years ago. LGUs are authorised to lend money, hire extension workers, take out infrastructure loans and supply inputs (often subsidised). Yet many fail to raise local income and are heavily dependent on revenues from central govt. The level of underspend in Mindanao is currently running at around 25% (another target for local advocacy). What’s more important, supporting local government with finance and capacity building, or lobbying it to do a better job?

Is climate change adaptation just good development? Not entirely, but a high degree of overlap. New elements include climate-based weather insurance, getting farmers to use weather forecasting rather than traditional predictions, developing drought-resistant strains and new cropping techniques on things like water retention, and prior site suitability assessment. But it also includes more traditional good practices like income diversification and producer organization.

How well do we, or our partners, understand the local economy? I was struck by our partners’ insistence that farmers don’t save anything. This is in flat contradiction to the rich savings ecosystem discovered by Portfolios of the Poor. I suspect a more rigorous study would find both local savings systems, and a much higher level of income diversification, especially through non farm income, than we currently recognize.

Are we thinking widely enough? Apart from Imelda’s shoes and a national karaoke obsession, Filipinos are famous for two things – text messaging and migration. Yet we don’t work on either in any systematic way (eg partnering with Diaspora Filipinos, or building in mobile comms to our livelihoods work). Maybe that’s because what looks distinctive from outside doesn’t feel so important from the inside, but if we want to make the most of our global spread, shouldn’t our programming partly reflect such national specificities?

What about the youth? The Philippines is a young society – median age 23. How do we connect with it, if young people don’t relate to formal politics or NGOs and social media only deliver shallow links? Answers on a postcard please.

But this doesn’t really do justice to the warm bath of intelligent debate in which I was immersed – Filipino staff, feel free to put me straight! And if you want to read more about their work, take a look at their blog.

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.

Meetings with Remarkable Women

I’m in Kenya for a week, (posts to follow), and as always on such trips, find myself chatting to a range of Oxfam staff with mind-blowing stories – here’s a selection.

Shukri Gesod is an elegant and supremely confident young Somali (from Puntland) who moved to Oxfam from DFID a year ago. She originally wanted to be a barrister in the UK (where she partly grew up after moving from Somali to Tanzania as a baby), but got into development while studying at East Anglia (law) and SOAS (a globalization, governance and development Masters). Now she’s our governance adviser in Somaliland. She’s an arch networker, highly connected with the youth wing of the Somali Diaspora and for several years has focussed on getting their voice into the room in the endless international discussions on the fate of her country. She describes her identity is ‘fluid – when I’m in the UK I say I’m Somali; in Nairobi, I am Tanzanian; everywhere else I am British’. When the drought hit, she started working her Diaspora connections, setting up Global Somali Response and raising $400,000, as well as organizing aspiring Somali filmmakers to get the story out. Newly started at Oxfam, she took a week’s leave, managed to transfer the money she had raised, and organized truckloads of food and distribution networks to feed 85,000 people for 3 months (what did you do on your last week off?…..)

Xin (pronounced Shin – she asked me not to use her second (ex-husband’s) name) is an infectiously good-humoured Chinese woman who laughingly describes herself as ‘Oxfam’s Red Guard’. As a minister under Mao Tse-Tung, her father oversaw the development of China’s nuclear industry, including its bomb, and met Mao regularly. Xin was in the UK studying management when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place in 1989, after which all Chinese students were granted leave to remain. She got a job at Oxfam, where her financial skills are still in big demand. As an accountant and finance manager, she has worked in Eastern Europe, Latin America, the UK and Rwanda. She’s currently in drought-hit Wajir in Kenya for six months, but right now she’s been evacuated to Nairobi after attacks on aid workers around the Dadaab refugee camp. She bubbles with excitement about the recovery in Wajir, ‘the grass is growing green, animals are stronger – new life is returning after the recent rains, the best for years. People are coming home.’ Now she is planning to go back to China and do volunteer work on the environment. After a couple of marriages, she is free to go (although she admits she’ll miss her granddaughter): ‘Now my life is so free, burden free, I can do what I want, go where I want. The freedom is like enlightenment in Buddhism.’

Patricia Parsitau runs Oxfam’s urban work in Nairobi and is a dynamic former teacher. Now her dream is to stop ‘grumbling’ about the state of Kenyan politics and start doing – she’s standing for MP in the December elections in her home constituency of Narok (population 2/3 Maasai, as is she). She is working her connections, and hopes to capitalise on the new constitution’s requirement that a third of all elected positions should be women. But she’s up against some tough and well-connected female competition – the daughter of the current MP (who runs her father’s constituency fund and the local arts and sports committee) and a councillor who leads a prestigious NGO. Still, she gives herself a 50% chance of victory, reckoning that in personality-obsessed Kenya, people will warm to her ‘policies not personalities’ approach. But it’s hard being an MP in a patronage- based system – she keeps her phone off during work hours because every day brings dozens of calls from ‘my people’ – ‘how are you, why haven’t you called, can you help us with this fund raising drive or visit us for such an event, my daughter is sick can you help with the hospital fees?’ She reckons the notorious 1 million shillings (roughly £10,000 a month) paid to Kenya’s MPs won’t go far in the face of this onslaught. Of her work in the NGO sector, she says ‘the best thing is when you go back to a community five years later and they don’t say ‘you built this school’ but ‘you empowered us. People ask us to speak now, and they listen because we know our rights.’