How do we work out the returns to campaigning? Nice example from the Philippines

Like any campaigning organization, Oxfam has limited funds, and so needs to know whether its investment has paid off. The push from everyone and their dog to pursue a ‘results agenda’ and ‘value for money’ has added further momentum to that effort. That’s fine if you’re doing something that’s easy to measure, (say vaccinating kids, or cash transfers), and where attributing an effect to a particular cause is relatively straightforward, even if sometimes technical and expensive to establish. But what about influencing government policy, where there are dozens of voices, numerous events, and establishing any causal chain is both elusive and (inevitably) disputed (did anyone else grind their teeth watching Bono and Bob making poverty history the other night………?)

This matters because Oxfam increasingly sees a big part of its role as working with others to influence government policy, especially in developing countries, through programmes, partnerships and advocacy.

I got involved in a brain-bending conversation about this when trying to help out with a ‘killer fact’ on some smart campaigning by our team in the Philippines. At first glance, the success of the campaign for a ‘People’s Survival Fund’ was ideally suited to the task. Oxfam and partner iCSC (Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities) commissioned research, and then launched a campaign in July 2010 calling on the government to set up a climate change adaptation fund. We did all the usual stuff – backgrounders for policy makers, popular mobilization, media work, celeb endorsements etc and (voila!) a US $25m a year People’s Survival Fund (PSF) was passed by the Philippine Congress in June 2012 after a two-year campaign. Result!

But was it value for money? At first glance it seems pretty easy to calculate the return on the money invested in the campaign – it’s just how much cash reaches poor people over a period of time, compared to the amount Oxfam spent on the campaign, corrected to take into account the fact that Oxfam wasn’t the only organization campaigning on the issue, and so shouldn’t take all the credit.

In mathematical terms, it’s even easier: Return to Campaign (RtC) = (AxBxC/D)

Where

A = The total new expenditure on climate change adaptation resulting from the PSF.

B= the proportion of that money that reaches poor people.

C = plausible % of attribution to the Oxfam campaign

D = Oxfam’s expenditure

We calculate the value for A, B, C and D as follows

A: P$1bn a year, taken over say a five year period, making it P$5bn (about US$125m).

B: If the money is equally distributed among all the people in the areas receiving PSF funds, some 45% would go to poor people (based on the 30-60% poverty rates in the relevant areas). But experience suggests that richer people may be more likely to get their hands on the cash. As we are looking for a conservative estimate here, we therefore assume that only 20% of the money would go to poor people

C: As the main funder, and lead agency in the lobby effort that led to PSF, it seems reasonable to take half the credit for the victory, so D = 0.5

D: Oxfam’s total expenditure over the three years of the campaign comes to P$7.4m

So using $Pm as the unit of calculation

Return to Campaign = (5000 x 0.2 x 0.5)/7.4 = 68

i.e. over a 5 year period, Oxfam’s campaign generated at least 68 times more resources for climate change adaptation than we invested in the campaign/for every $1 we spent we generated $60 for climate change adaptation for poor people.

Enter the nagging self doubt (otherwise known as Claire Hutchings in our monitoring and evaluation team). Every single one of those terms can be challenged:

A: assumes all the budget is disbursed and that none gets eaten up by overheads – any underspend or overhead costs would obviously reduce the amount available to reach poor people.

B: how do we know if that is a reasonable estimate of the proportion of the PSF that will ultimately reach poor people?

D: but what about all the other money Oxfam has spent globally and within the Philippines on raising awareness of climate change, supporting partners etc – didn’t that play a role in the victory?  What about cost of programming we’ve done in the Phillipines and other countries that have contributed to building the Oxfam brand, enabling us to ‘sit at the table’, participate in these conversations, influence etc.

And then we get to C: let’s assume for a moment that we can get an accurate costing of all the resources Oxfam has spent national and globally that have contributed to getting this issue on the agenda in the Philippines, and can reach a credible estimate of the proportion of PSF that will reach poor people.  The question remains how can we credibly attribute a % of any decision to the influence of the campaign?

For example, suppose years of global and national campaigns, by Oxfam and others, had got the issue to a tipping point, where only a small nudge was needed to persuade the government. Should the credit go to the patient slog of a multitude of actors, or the last minute glory-grabbing campaign (back to Bono and Bob)?  A light touch approach might be to ask people – staff, partners, government officials and perhaps most importantly, independent experts – to give us an estimate. But such questions risk being pretty leading (‘please attribute a percentage of attribution to the campaign’ is likely to get an inflated estimate), and open to bias. But doing something more rigorous, to investigate the main factors that contributed to the Parliament’s decision, would be expensive and still may not find the evidence needed to reach credible conclusions.  Now there’s a whole measurement challenge around evaluating campaigns and advocacy efforts, and through our Effectiveness Reviews we’re investing in trialing and refining an impact assessment approach for this work, one that builds from process tracing, to explore what it takes to reach credible conclusions about the contributions of our work to policy change (watch this space).

Let’s assume (for the moment) that such evaluations would allow us to credibly attribute our influence.  The fact is that these evaluations take time and resources.  Do we really need to commission an evaluation any time we want to talk about the resources that are being leveraged through our campaign work?  Or can we identify a rule of thumb, with all the necessary caveats and qualifications, that’s ‘good enough’, at least for cases that seem pretty clear cut.

What would be good enough in this case? Your thoughts please

Meetings with Remarkable Women: Lan Mercado’s journey from megaphone to microphone

A while back, I wrote about some amazing Oxfam women I met in East Africa. Here’s another, this time from the Philippines.

Lan (real name Lilian, but Filipinos never use real names) is one of those quiet but effective (and very determined, and maybe not so quiet….) women that abound in development work. She

Lan, the megaphone years, circa 1985

was formerly our country director in the Philippines, but has now moved to head up a project on ASEAN (more on that below). She is also yet another Oxfam woman with a remarkable story. In 1988, as a 28 year old Communist Party activist in the Philippines civil war, her own Party denounced and arrested her on trumped-up charges of being involved in an intra-Party assassination. They held her for 6 months in the mountains, blindfolded and handcuffed in a cage. She and the other prisoners were tortured physically, mentally and emotionally. At least she avoided the fate of prisoners in other camps, who were forced to play ‘eeny meeny miny mo’, with the loser taken out, killed, and their blood smeared over the remaining prisoners.

Lan says she stayed sane by thinking about food, shopping malls, ‘normal life’. After her release, she felt compelled to try and understand how Party cadres became torturers, the various pressures that transformed what were otherwise good people. ‘Had I not done this, I would have turned into an angry and bitter woman, consumed by vengeance. It helped because it prevented me from thinking that all those years of being a CP member were a waste, and I was able to resume working for the same issues of justice and democracy, albeit outside of CP organs.’ She also sought out and interviewed 15 known torturers from the military.

The Party killed over 2,000 people in an orgy of purges and paranoia, before sanity returned as its leaders realized it was ‘eating its own tail’. Even after her release, Lan could not risk going home for two years, because the military would ‘seize me and show me as exhibit A, a ‘victim of the Communists’.’ Other people now working for Oxfam suffered similarly, one even wrote a book about it. A younger staffer’s father was a ‘military asset’ – a university lecturer who informed on leftwing students who were then disappeared by the military.

25 years on, Lan chairs the Peace Advocates for Truth, Healing and Justice (PATH), a group of survivors and the families and friends of those who perished. She is also seeking a way to erect memorials and establish ‘sites of conscience’ at the mass graves of those who died. ‘The search for truth and justice goes beyond impugning individuals, casting blame or sowing hatred. It is about reflecting on the dark moments of the Philippine Left’s history, and promoting healing and closure anchored on restorative justice rather than vindictiveness.’

Lan seems remarkably matter of fact about it all – ‘sure you can write about it, it’s on my Facebook page!’ she tells me, sipping beer in a bar where a guitarist covers ‘Wake up Little Suzy’, Tracy Chapman and Bob Marley. Another Oxfamista is appalled to hear that her hero in the movement was one of Lan’s torturers. It all feels quintessentially Filipino.

These days, Lan has come a long way from cages and guerrilla war, pursuing her activist agenda in the very heart of the Asian establishment – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The region is prone to typhoons and earthquakes, accounting for 14% of the world total number of disasters, against just 9% of its people. Poignantly, ASEAN signed the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) just 3 weeks before the deadly Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, but then, as so often, it languished in bureaucratic in-trays, wending its way through ratification by ASEAN’s ten member governments and eventually coming into force on the 5th anniversary of the tsunami.

But Lan and other civil society activists saw the potential: ‘That was the opportunity. They had the text and no implementation strategy’.

and now, with microphone

A coalition of CSOs lobbied the ASEAN secretariat and member nation ambassadors and got them to accept their support, in the form of the APG (AADMER Partnership Group), which Lan now works for on secondment from Oxfam: ‘The deal was we would help write the strategies for the implementation of AADMER provided there was a good country-level consultation process on how to make AADMER pro-people.’

Working as an advisor to the ASEAN secretariat, she now speaks the language of committees, acronyms and procedures ‘We’re now embedded. Our contributions have been recognised by the ASEAN Committee on Disaster Management and our programme to facilitate partnerships between ASEAN and CSOs was accepted by the Conference of Parties.’

Some of the main achievements of the APG to date:

• The formation of the APG and the secondment of Oxfam advisors demonstrated to the ASEAN that there is a non-threatening way of engaging with CSOs; and showed CSOs that there is another way for civil society to engage with the ASEAN apart from lobbying and mass actions. The ASEAN Committee on Disaster Management has agreed to develop a framework for partnership with CSOs, with the APG facilitating the process.

• APG activities at the country and regional levels increased public and civil society awareness of AADMER, which was previously known only to specialised agencies of government. AADMER had been used by country actors in Myanmar, for example, to engage with the national government on humanitarian concerns.

• APG advisors drafted a range of AADMER implementation strategies (training, knowledge management and so on) and is currently co-organising the ASEAN Day on Disaster Management, which highlights the role of women in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR).

It all sounds very bureaucratic and unheroic, but Lan sees her work on ASEAN as just another step (from megaphone to microphone?) in a life devoted to social justice. People working in NGOs are often like icebergs, with a below-the-waterline history that can be quite astounding. Discovering such histories (usually by accident, often over a beer) is just another perk of the job.

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.

In the Philippines: does Oxfam’s livelihoods work go beyond trad income generation?

Last week I visited Oxfam’s Philippines programme. Such trips follow a pretty standard format – our national staff and relevant partners

with the moringa farmers

whisk me through a series of site visits and conversations with farmers, civil society organizations, local government officials and anyone else who’ll talk to you. For a few days, I’m engrossed, wrestling on multiple levels, first to understand the intricacies of the projects, and then to try and get at the meta-questions: what are the strengths and weaknesses in our work? What could we be doing better? Is there a clear power analysis and theory of change? Discussions continue in vehicles to and from the visits, over dinner and (sometimes) in the bar, as everyone grapples with the incredibly difficult business of ‘doing development’. It’s intense and definitely the best bit of the job.

I went to Mindanao, one of the poorest and most conflict-ridden islands in the Philippines archipelago, and home to 23m of its 94m population. The focus was our livelihoods work (I hate the term, but can’t think of anything better to describe the complex ways poor people find to put food on the family table). Such work forms the backbone of many of Oxfam’s programmes. In Mindanao, we’re working with women farmers to introduce new crops or upgrade existing ones:

Crop 1: Moringa – a magical tree whose fruit is x7 more rich in Vitamin C than oranges, has x4 more calcium than milk, and x3 more vitamin E than Spinach. The leaves can be made into a herbal coffee or poultry feed. The plant has medicinal properties – arthritis, blood pressure etc. It’s also a good crop for women farmers – easy to plant and harvest (those I talked to had an average of over 4 kids each). The problem for local partner AADC is linking up moringa producers in the idyllic forested mountains of northern Mindanao with the market chains that can deliver reliable customers and improved prices. Possibilities include a herbal remedy exporter to the US and a Philippines health food producer, but for the moment, the main customer is a poultry feed company.

Crop 2: Rubber. Not a new crop, but one which was previously produced on a plantation model, and then replaced by oil palm. Now small farmers are picking it up, but with low grade seeds and poor quality control, and at the mercy of buyers who advance them credit and then force them to accept rock bottom prices. Our partners there are developing a big seedling nursery and bringing in new ideas on climate change adaptation (a real issue here – for example, the project encourages farmers to plant ground cover crops like legumes to retain moisture, as climate change is producing months without rain where previously the two settings for the weather were ‘wet’ and ‘very wet’.)

Crop 3: Abaca: a traditional crop, and relative of the banana. The fibrous bark is stripped and woven into a hard wearing rope. It’s also used in paper manufacture (hence the ‘manila envelope’ – 85% of world production comes from the Philippines). The issue here is how to add value, find better markets and develop women’s participation – Oxfam identified Abaca through a feasibility study as one of the crops with best potential for women farmers in this area (Agusan del Sur).

I could write a post on each one of these, but I want to highlight the common challenges. In particular, how do these projects differ from

rubber farmer, credit: Felipe Ramiro

traditional income generation? For decades, NGOs have been showing up in communities and persuading people to raise chickens or rabbits, open tailors, or plant the latest new wonder crop. The record is decidedly mixed. What’s different about this latest round? I think Oxfam is trying to pull off a really difficult trick here, known in the execrable jargon of the business as ‘leverage’ or ‘scaling up’ – how can a limited intervention trigger a much wider and long-lasting process of change that benefits poor producers? The key differences with the old give-em-a-chicken-coop school include:

-          Involve local government and private sector from the outset – they are the only long term guarantors of ‘sustainability’. Similarly, the NGOs’ exit strategy, whether as funder and implementer (often a local NGO) has to be built in from the outset.

-          Scale – it’s no use just running a pilot and then crossing your fingers. From the outset, you have to think how your intervention needs to be designed to benefit 100,000s of people , rather than 100s

-          It’s about value chains, not just production. Often the real barrier is not growing or making stuff, but finding the credit you need to keep you going between planting and harvest, getting the product to market (the roads here are terrible, gulleyed by rain and gouged by illegal logging trucks), or finding a reliable buyer who pays decent prices.  Multiple actors need to be involved – it’s no use just funding a local NGO to hand out seedlings. Systems analysis is essential, which in Oxfam’s case includes analysing the gender aspects of the value chain.

-          Advocacy: a systems approach resembles a micro version of Dani Rodrik’s bottlenecks to growth. Resolving one bottleneck (eg supplies of decent seeds), allows the effort to move on until it hits the next one (roads, access to finance, quantity and quality). Some of these can be incorporated into the programme, but many require local level advocacy (eg lobbying the public works department to do something about the roads, or the state bank to start lending to long gestating crops like rubber).

This new dispensation often seems ridiculously ambitious/quixotic – with relatively limited spending we presume to ‘transform’ (another favourite buzzword) whole systems. Unsurprisingly, staff can get frustrated and ‘just want to get on with the project’, but I think we have to aim high, and every now and then something really comes off and it’s worth it.