So reposting a part of “Spotting Community Ownership” to remind myself as much as anyone.

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The processes of decision-making within local relationships and power dynamics are often the make-or-break factor in development projects. If a local organization or an aid project is genuinely community-based, it has much more to do with its relationship to its constituency than to the locality in which services are delivered. Is there genuine community ownership? Are the people served invested in the outcomes of the program(s)?

And most importantly, how can we know?

As an aid practitioner, working in places in which I have not been able to use a shared language or in which I have not had sufficient contextual knowledge, I know that have made and will continue to make assumptions about various aspects of local dynamics. In some cases, especially early in my career, I did this only to find out later that there was some serious tokenism going on (see related post with explanatory participation ladder) or that the so-called representatives were not sanctioned to speak on behalf of the community.

Over time, I learned to identify and to test my own assumptions about community ownership. I learned that my gut could tell me quite a lot, but that it could also deceive me.

I also learned that the questions I ask myself as an outsider could be useful and important tools to determine if a development initiative is occurring for or with the community, a sometimes subtle but vital distinction. Thus I am sharing here a list of questions I have developed for aid workers, grantmakers, social entrepreneurs and anyone else who has an interest in determining the level of community ownership in a program. What are the things we can look for? What informs our gut reactions, but then can also inform our subsequent thinking?

Questions to Help Spot Community Ownership

1. Who participated in the planning of the project or program? How were/are decisions about priorities made?

2. Do community members recognize themselves as part of the organization’s constituency?

3. Are elements of reciprocity present? To what extent are local resources and/or in-kind contributions being mobilized to support the program?

4. How does the project/program build upon the efforts of groups or relationships that pre-date formal funding opportunities?

5. Before a particular project began, how did the community demonstrate stewardship of shared resources or prior accomplishments?

6. Is the story you are presented about a community’s or population’s “problems” adequately balanced with the story of the community’s strengths and endeavors to change this?

7. Can community members of various ages, gender, position, etc. articulate a project’s goals or effects?

8. Is the local organization (or the on-the-ground implementer in the case of international NGO projects) clear about what how a strategy or activity is or will affect people’s daily lives?

9. What is the quality of interaction between community members? Is mutual respect and care demonstrated? Are more than just a few people engaged?

10. To what extent is the project/program you are working on functioning in collaboration with other neighboring organizations or government officials?

These questions are by no means exhaustive, nor are they meant to be used as a checklist to ensure all aspects of community ownership are present in an aid organization’s work. The questions also obviously contain subjective ideas that are still dependent on one’s definition of community, as well as varying contexts. Some may seem rather obvious, but taken as a whole, I hope they can help us to not only spot, but also uphold and support community ownership as a fundamental building block of informed funding decisions.

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This list will continue to evolve. Reading it again now, I see that when it comes to country ownership, the discussion becomes more focused on who is in control of resources. Let me know what comes to mind for you – feel free to suggest other questions or adaptations in the comments section.

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Already “of” the community

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Don’t change the message. Change the messenger.

What’s missing from the aid effectiveness debate? Overlooking the capacity of local organizations

Grassroots civil society activists from Palestine discuss their experiences with international aid in this Special Mention Award Winner of the Social Impact Media Awards.

Frustration and anger are evident as Palestinians explain how their work is undermined by policies and procedures imposed by international donors and NGOs. Like The Listening Project, this rare insight into the specific impact of international aid policy on local leaders will make donors and tax-paying citizens reconsider what international aid is and what it should be.

Part of an advocacy campaign to reform aid led by Dalia Association, the film was made in the run-up to the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, and eventually begging the question, “Should Palestinians boycott international aid?”

You can other SIMA award winners here and here or on their website.

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When local leaders say, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’

(A re-post)

My foot braked as my eyes beheld the sight. As I drove through a quiet, tree-lined street in Lilongwe’s residential Area 3, fifty to sixty men carried a large, wooden A-frame above their heads, obviously for a large building under construction.

I could see their intended location for the mammoth piece, up ahead to the left. So I eased the car to the side of the road, the perfect vantage to view such a feat of cooperation. The men strained, but chanted, as if the shared rhythm buoyed the heavy, bound logs.

As the carpenters were about to make the arduous turn, a car driven by an impatient white man came from behind me on the street, honking and hooting, oblivious to the complicated and dangerous maneuver underway.

With a few shouts, about half the men dropped their arms from the frame and ran screaming towards the white man’s car, indignant.

He threw the car in reverse and sped backwards past my parked car. Then he whipped an abrupt three-point turn and disappeared down the street.

Cheers rang out from the incensed carpenters as they filed past me and returned to once again lighten the load of their fellow workers. They then completed the turn and carried on building.

(A true story.)

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For me this story speaks directly to us in the international development sector. How many times had I been that other driver? Just wanting to get through to the next stage to achieve those ever-elusive results? Demonstrating my own ignorance and intolerance? Wreaking havoc on what was already underway and unleashing anger as a result?

It occurs to me that sometimes, the most productive thing we can do to help bring about change, is pull over to the side of the road and show our respect.

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Barefoot in Church

“Inputting evil” I learned is a negotiator’s bias that assumes the worst of the person sitting across the table from you. In other words, if this person disagrees with you or is your opponent, they must be unreasonable and sleazy.

This particular bias is what Bill Gates exhibited this week towards Dambisa Moyo. While at a talk at the University of New South Wales, Gates was asked what he thought about Moyo’s book, Dead Aid. He responded that the book damaged the “generosity of rich countries.” But what everyone will remember about his comment is his conclusion that the book was “promoting evil.”

“I am disappointed that Mr. Gates would choose the route of personal attacks rather than a logical counter argument about the role of aid in modern Africa,” Moyo responded on her blog yesterday. Regardless of your opinions about Moyo’s thesis, Dead Aid no doubt sparked (and obviously is still sparking) an important conversation.

Not unexpectedly, any statements perceived as inflammatory will bring both parties some attention. (Just ask Bill Easterly and Jeff Sachs.) However, when it comes to aid and aid reform, rarely are we operating in a zero-sum game (as in most negotiations we learned yesterday).

Aid flows from richer to poorer countries have created massive systems, delivering $3.2 trillion of aid to poor countries between 1960 and 2008 (World Bank, 2011) and employing an estimated 595,000 aid workers (ALNAP, 2010). To fundamentally change this structure, we need people who represent and advocate from the polarities, and who operate at different spots along that financial pipeline to engage constructively with each other. Since when did provoking so-called evil-doers bring them to the table?

Invective remarks never bring us closer to understanding how better, more equitable and responsive partnerships are built and where the common ground exists. Let’s hope this attention results in Gates and Moyo sitting down together, trying to find it. Let them debate: can aid have a role if it supports citizens’ efforts to determine and lead their own development?

I’m left wondering after my negotiations training yesterday…if aid were approached like negotiations for a business deal, would power dynamics shift? Perhaps Moyo makes people so uncomfortable because she showed that people on the receiving end of aid are much closer to their walk-away point than anyone would care to admit.

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And I know some of you will breath a sigh of relief that you won’t need math or gun slinging in the future!

We have conditioned tendencies that are a result of education, our training, or organizational processes, that make “I don’t know” an unacceptable answer to a question these days. Yet “I don’t know” is found in imprecise information, in unseen or undetectable outcomes. It’s found in our trust in people, in their innate capacities and energy.

I’ve worked extensively in building the M&E capacity of grassroots organizations in Africa. What I have found is that abstract metrics and “big data” often don’t often help people understand their relationship to improving the well-being of those around them. Rather local leaders, as members of a community, read real-time trends via observation of what’s happening on the ground. This, in turn, drives intuition, much like entrepreneurialism. They seem to know what we have forgotten—that this ephemeral life is governed by a multitude of forces.

Most important to me is that our ability as “thinkers” to gather and use data and high-mindedly question everything about “what works” can insulate us and can greatly remove us from the realities of those we’re serving. In practice, this can mean imposing risk-averse procedures on people who are in the process of organizing at grassroots levels.

Undoubtedly, soundly-gathered and -interpreted data can provide important new perspectives for us all to consider. But now more than ever, having more information at our disposal than ever before in our history means that we will need to employ a rigorous humility to increase our tolerance for the risk of “not knowing.” I could not agree more with Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger in “The Rise of Big Data” in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, that:

“There will be a special need to carve out a place for the human: to reserve space for intuition, common sense, and serendipity.”

Consider the Arab Spring – could big data have predicted that? From where we sit, there remains quite a lot we cannot know about how social change occurs.

And I, for one, am okay with that.

…“more measurement” bandwagon. There’s a lot of value in big data, and it may be tempting to place local leaders’ expertise within the big-data paradigm. However, we need to be cognizant that our obsession with results is the product of an educated, Western, male-centric tradition, and it can be dangerously reductive. It’s a big, big world out there, full of people who relate to “data” very differently (and, in many case, much less desperately) than we do.

The practice of listening to beneficiaries is tremendously valuable, and it will lead to better outcomes—not because it yields more or better data, but because it is the right thing to do.

Luckily, I gave up the search for “it” a while ago. I have a different orientation to my role in the development space and it frees me from much of the swirl of thoughts that can de-motivate and confound us, especially after we’ve been working for a few years, and change still seems elusive and organizational life at times ridiculous.

“So why should we continue?” she asked me.

“Because of people like Don Popo.”

And then I showed her this short film, Familia Ayara, the winner of the Impact Jury Prize at the Social Impact Media Awards. (And my first pick – I was honored to be one of the judges.)

Familia Ayara from documon on Vimeo.

Congratulations to all the SIMA 2013 winners and nominees! I look forward to sharing the rest of my picks in the coming weeks!

1. Aid workers are privileged, removed from reality, and wasting their time. (Some are, yes.)
2. Haitians are stuck in a cycle of dependency (not a characterization with which I agree) and aid is not helping. (A lot of it is definitely not. I do agree.)

Such frank reflections about the difficulty of “doing good” are still too much of a rarity in the aid industry and in the popular media. As @pj_blue pointed out on Twitter yesterday:

“@intldogooder @pandpvolunteer I think the point being made is that it is easy to be a do-gooder. It’s the actual doing good that is tricky.”

So good for Nora for sharing the realities of her experience and for getting out of the system once she realized it was not for her. The tension between the root causes what aid is trying to solve (poverty, inequality) and aid actors’ own contributions to those dynamics is certainly a difficult one to navigate, especially as a person begins this work. Though as @monasf shared via Twitter:

“@morealtitude @intldogooder @dawnsdigest This is nothing new & lacks the nuance and insight that might come later in a career.”

I must confess I myself was riding around in a white vehicle last week. Of course, I was doing so to talk with Haitians about how they are able push back on the aid system and on systematic injustices in general.

Everywhere I go these days, I’m interacting with a growing cadre of skilled professionals that openly, bravely, and constructively question “business as usual” in the aid industry. If I had written a personal narrative essay for the New York Times this week, I guess it would have read a little more optimistic and it would have included more about assuming our personal responsibilities in supporting those who are bringing about progress and development in Haiti and elsewhere.

I would have wanted to tell the world–change is upon us and here’s how we can all start bringing it about.

A superior continues to make passes at you. You find out you’re paid less than someone doing your exact same job. Someone takes undue credit for work you did.

The rules don’t work for us? Guess we have to stand up for ourselves and change those rules. This will not happen by letting power go unchecked or unchallenged, on a personal or a sectoral level.

Telling a donor or a boss to go fly a kite is an intimidating experience, but there is a point when we have to speak up, no matter how uncomfortable we may be or how much power someone else has.

From my experience, here are seven things that can make these encounters a little less frightening.

1)   Use of the powerful’s own language and tactics. Like it or not, sometime we’ll have to “play the game” in order to get the access to change the rules. I tend to favor infiltration and influence. But the words of a friend and fellow writer often also ring in my ear, “Sometimes, you also have to also scream and yell to get a seat at the table.”

2)   Consideration of the counter-argument. Anticipate how people may object to what you are saying. If you can, by acknowledging their perspective, you may “head them off at the pass” and defuse their opposition.

3)   Your peeps. I tend the tribe as a source of my power. Allies ground me, validate me, are friendly adversaries, help lick my wounds, and share their own tales of speaking truth to power. Invaluable.

4)   An ever-thickening, yet still permeable skin. When speaking truth to power, you will receive criticism yourself. Some of it will need to bounce right off your exterior. Some of it will be necessary to reflect upon and move you to the next level.

5)   A new definition of vulnerability. Powerlessness is only a perception. But I find that if I can acknowledge my own vulnerability, I can find a more secure place from which to advocate. In fact, my vulnerability emboldens me in a way, knowing that push-backs are necessary.

6)   A back-up plan. Whistleblowers often have to start anew. It’s the price they pay for speaking truth to power. But personal risk is often over-estimated. Bureaucracies and organizations benefit from our fear of losing our jobs. But we are not our organizations and it is foolish to equate income with security.

7)   Non-attachment to outcomes. You win some. You lose some. Real change is due to many factors outside of your control. So keep the long arc of justice in mind and let it rip anyway.

Why is it important for people to speak their truths within their organizations and within global development circles?

Because if you haven’t noticed, it is all about power.

So let her rip.

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A version of this post first appeared on the Women Working in Aid and Development blog.