Tonight was a reminder for me that our vocabulary reflects our biases. OK, so maybe I am too sensitive about development vocabulary (say “villagers” around me, and I turn green!), but saying you are helping people with “no skills” really irks me. Have you told these people that you are “helping” that you think they have “no skills”?

And, if I can picture these skill-less people you speak of as you stand there in your suit, I imagine they can grow food we only know how to pick off of a shelf, perhaps build their own home, and fix the limited electronic items they have – ones we would throw away because we wouldn’t even know where to start in opening them up!

It reminds me of the lady in Colombia last month who asked me where I was from. When I said “America”, she said “Me too!”, and I thought she was joking with me, as she was clearly from Colombia. It took me a while to realize my biased view of the world and correct myself. “I’m from the United States of America”, it turns out, as she was indeed from America too. My myopic world view biases exposed – touche.

The people who made the “no skills” comments at Oxford’s heated “Bottom of the Pyramid Debate” tonight equally had not intended to offend, and certainly were passionate about the work they were involved in, but it still struck me: if we see the people we are working with in this type of work as having “no skills” we’re clearly taking a myopic view of what skills are important to survive in this world.  Drop me in a developing country, in a community without electricity, with no job, and many kids to feed, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have the skills to survive. I bet the “villagers” (yep, I feel sick!) in that community would indeed describe me as having “no skills” at all… and in their world, they’d be right.

And since these BoP initiatives ARE in “their world”, maybe it is our skill-less-ness that we need to be making more note of!

(Thanks for permitting me this rant. OK, I’ve dismounted from my higher-than-it-should-be horse. Off to bed!)

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Addition (2 days later): Today I was reading “Next Generation Business Strategies For the Base of the Pyramid” by London & Hart and this paragraph struck me as more eloquently reflecting my thoughts from above:

Unfortunately, too many managers and development professionals fail to recognize and calibrate for their existing biases about the BoP [Base of the Pyramid]. One good test of this is to ask them to articulate the first references that come to mind when they think about the “BoP”. Some are surprisingly disrespectful of the members of the BoP community, saying something along the lines of “The poor are lazy, lack intelligence, or are helpless; if they were not, they would not be poor.” Other descriptions focus less on individual shortcomings and more on structural disadvantages. Here you might hear terms such as “uneducated”, “limited resources,” or “isolated from opportunities.” While more charitable, this latter view still fails to recognize the poor as having the capacity to productively participate in the venture-development process as thoughtful colleagues and resourceful experts. People who are characterized as uneducated, limited, or isolated are unlikely to be viewed as strong potential partners in a design process.

This Aid Band-Aid was designed by Daniela Kon and her team at Deeda Productions for our beta website of “Investing Time in People“.  Check it out:

The website’s function right now is to just hold the space for lessons and stories from people who have experienced the impact of development work with a focus on human capacity building and “investing time in people” (as opposed to giving things away). All of us involved in this project feel that we have made mistakes in the way that we have given our time and money and, by sharing what we have learned, hope to influence positive changes in how others approach social sector work. We’re not sure if we’ll take this further, turn it into an ad campaign, or partner with other organizations, but for the time being, this site is holding the space for all of those possibilities. If you are interested in this work in any way, be in touch! In the meantime, feel free to pass on this band-aid image to anyone who you think might need to be reminded to think differently about aid!

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” says Simon Sinek in his very popular TEDx talk. And he’s right. People buy thy WHY. The thing is… this is a big problem in development work! People buy the WHY – which means they are fueling good intentions, not necessarily good impacts. Here are some thoughts about this that our team at PEPY  & PEPY Tours put together via video (thanks for the animations, Wei!):

Selling the WHY works for companies selling products or services, like in Simon’s example, Apple. If Apple sells their WHY – like “Being Different” – people can get on board with that. They buy into the WHY and then they buy the product. But if the WHAT fails (ie: if the product breaks, isn’t really all that “different” or just doesn’t fit the person’s need), then the person wont buy from that company again, and in today’s world, they’d use social media to let all of their friends know not to buy it either.

But if the WHAT fails in development work (ie: people really weren’t “saved” from XYZ disease, kids didn’t show up to the school, the well as broken, the micro-loans caused more debt than gains in wealth, etc), the donor who was so moved to fund the project because she believed in the WHY sometimes never finds out. And when the annual collection information touting the WHY of the organization ends up in her inbox again, she might send another check, again, and again, and again….

So we need to stop buying WHYs and start buying HOWs. And if donors start buying good HOWs, then NGOs will start selling their HOWs, and we can use our fundraising for more education, rather than emotions fueling good intentions.

Pass this on if too want to be part of a HOW and IMPACT focused movement.

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Pssst – we have some beta info up on www.investingtimeinpeople.org – a loose collection of people (like you?!) who share similar ideas about development work. We are looking to apply for a grant that is coming up in a few months with regards to creating an ad campaign around the HOWs of high impact development work. Want to be involved? Drop a note!

My goodness… I have never gotten more emails, Facebook messages, and general questions about a social sector issue than this week with #KONY2012. “What do I think?”, you ask?

In case you have really not heard anything about this, which if you are reading this blog I find shocking, then just google #STOPKONY or #KONY2012, and you should be well on your way to learning more.

I think this campaign and subsequent backlash, is bringing a few important issues to light:

1) Most people do not really understand the system their money is going into when they donate.

Our friends asks us to give, and we do.
We hope it’s going to a good cause. (90% of us)
Only some gather ANY information at all before donating. (69%)
Few self describe as doing any “research” at all before donating. (33%)
And almost no one compares non-profits. (6%)
(Hope Consulting)

And it doesn’t even really matter if we do compare, as most of us don’t understand what questions are important to consider and how to evaluate “impact” on any given issue.

2) A lot of NGO money is wasted because few are asking good questions. And “program costs” does NOT mean what you think it means.

I sometimes want to create a TV ad campaign, like the “Rock the vote” ones, that says “I ASK QUESTIONS” reminding people to ask questions before they donate money. But then I realize, it might make matters worse, because we’re asking the WRONG ones.

People still focus on one question when it comes to donating: “How much of my money is going to the cause?” They problem is, many of us are making incorrect assumptions about the answers we get. I do commend Invisible Children for breaking their $9 million annual fundraising down further than most in their reaction post where they address the campaign’s negative feedback but even then, some might not understand that just looking at the Management & General spending numbers is not the whole story. Many think “programs” means programs in “a poor country” and don’t realize that programs can mean TV ads, and the salaries for the producers, and the office in the western city they work out of, and the annual holiday party etc…. which is usually all legally reported above board, it’s just that people don’t understand it and it is not in the interest of most organizations to try to explain it. To learn more, read about why looking at administration costs is meaningless via this example from Good Intents, or buy her paper on the subject of why non-profit overhead doesn’t mean what you think it means, which I might just do myself. Additionally, an organization that legitimately spent 0% on overhead but did not achieve their mission is not better than one that only spent 1% of their money on their programs, but did. Hence, we’re asking the wrong questions.

Here are two slideshares we made for Investing Time in People last year which get further into this:

3) Even the NGO directors themselves are often asking the wrong questions…. especially when they are far away from their “cause”.

Some of the backlash about the KONY2012 video’s facts being wrong or issues being poorly framed are not things I have any clarity on as I don’t know much about the  issue, but it does resonate with my belief that the further away you are from an issue, the less likely you are to get the facts, needs, strategy etc right…. distance makes the decisions grow wronger, perhaps? (Forgive my “heart grow fonder” joke attempt, it’s late here.) In our work in Cambodia, the office where I worked out of was in the major town, which was only 65km from our main working area, but even then, I made a lot of the wrong decisions because of that distance and even more because of cultural and language differences. Many mistakes though were easily righted once I spent time in the community we were working with and I listened more, but if I was far away, I would never have noticed. There are so many NGOs running out of major North American and European cities managing projects on the other side of the world, and this distance inevitably means there will be more misunderstandings, delays in making changes once ineffective policies are made, and incorrect assumptions than if those same people were located next to their “cause”. Even better would be if the people from the “cause” were managing the solutions themselves! Being on the board of PEPY now, I am again caught in this struggle knowing I’m probably giving wrong advice from a distance and if an organizations management is nearly ALL away from the cause, then that can be even more likely.

4) Social media is changing the power dynamics of the world.

If Invisible Children wanted people to know about Kony, well then the negative backlash has only aided their cause. As the BBC points out, social media now quickly gives us two sides to a story and “people are becoming more critical about what they read online, especially when it comes to charitable causes.” But the problem is, now that we have more and more information being thrown at us, we can get a lot of 140 character news feeds, but not a lot of depth, unless we seek it out. Even journalists rarely have, or take, the time to dig deeper into these issues, as was clear with the Greg Mortenson scandal.

That said, more than 50 million people have viewed this video. As Robert Wright pointed out in The Atlantic, “Invisible Children has accomplished what may be the most potent demonstration to date of the ability of new technologies to stir citizen activism. If it has done so irresponsibly, and/or in an ultimately ineffectual way, it still will have been part of a dialectic that yields something worthwhile, and maybe very worthwhile, down the road.”

This debate brings up other issues, Whites in Shining Armour ones, the need for media to display the realities of development, and much more… but for me, I’ve had enough #KONY2012 to keep my brain busy for one night!

(Pssst! Share your thoughts below or good links you think we all should read on the issues this debate brings to light which are important to YOU, please )

This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project about the impact one NGO has had, and lessons that can be drawn .
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In 2008, acid attacks in Cambodia arrived at a tipping point, with daily news coverage, new cases, and gory photos dominating the public discourse. What caused the increase? Beginning in May 2008, one high profile case dominated the national news and captivated the country. Chea Ratha, a Military Police Brigadier General, allegedly paid 5 of her bodyguards a ‘bonus’ to throw acid on the auntie of her lesbian lover, radio personality Sok Lyda. Many believe that Ratha ordered the attack after Lyda called off their sexual relationship.

Ya Soknim was left with severe scaring on her face and torso, and ultimately passed away last year.

The coverage started a cascade of similar attacks and by the end of 2009, there were approximately 40 new cases reported. An NGO Pari now works with was created to support the victims of these attacks: Cambodia Acid Survivors Charity (CASC).

Founded in 2006 by the team from Children’s Surgical Center, CASC was intended to provide rehabilitative and social support to the small number of acid burn patients the hospital treated in its burn unit.

Research compiled by LICADHO in 2003 reported 44 acid attacks in a 3-year period, beginning in 2000. By 2010, CASC was recording 40 new cases per year, with approximately 20 attacks. In some instances, children were not only innocent bystanders, but collateral.

From the start, CASC was in a unique position to respond to these cases. After being treated at a Burn Unit at CSC, victims were taken to recover at CASC. There, they had access to physiotherapy plus therapeutic support.

By late 2009, a movement had begun to stop the impunity of high-ranking perpetrators. Never serving time and currently wanted by Interpol, Ratha’s victims are left to appeal for refugee status, afraid for their safety at the hands of her bodyguards. CASC, via its Program Manager Ziad Samman, was soon called upon to create systemic change.

CASC teamed up with LICADHO and CCHR, and began to gently lobby the appropriate government representatives. They started with the Ministry of Women’s Affairs believing that if they weren’t going to care, then who would? Leveraging existing contacts to get key meetings, the management team soon had the ears of many government officials’ wives.

Today the law is nearly ratified, having been approved by the King. CASC continues to provide ongoing support to relevant government officials, at times providing advice and counsel to ministers’ dealing with the rubber industry lobby, or the acid wholesalers and distributors.

On its own, the story of a small grassroots NGO advocating for an issue would not be remarkable. Yet CASC is a tremendous case study: without any budget for lobbying, advocacy, awareness, marketing or development, CASC is working to dramatically change national policy, has helped create a function within the legal system to prosecute perpetrators, and thus provided the deterrent we all hope is needed to prevent a continued increase of these attacks in Cambodia.

Up next? Ziad says public perception needs to shift away from the victims, and the inherent presumption it was their fault. He wants Cambodians to understand 48% of all victims are actually male, and not everyone is burned because they were on the wrong side of a love triangle.

To achieve this goal, he’s still focused on advocacy at the grassroots level: CASC victims going into district health centers and meeting with village leaders to tell their stories. He’s also aiming to train the next generation of Cambodian journalists to report the issue from a different lens in hopes of reshaping attitudes.

I think more is needed. I think Cambodia is ready for a visually confronting mass media campaign that presents the reality of acid burns, and makes the consequences known. I think Cambodian society is ready for a campaign that challenges victim culpability, and explores deeper issues related to education and empathy.

What is the lesson that Ziad taught me? That the people I met are not victims, they are survivors. Today they stand as evidence of the changes Cambodian society must undergo – the value it must start to place on all its citizens – before it can advance in its freedoms. At the same time, the adoption of the acid law is evidence of the progress it is already making, and its good intentions. For the future of this issue, only time will tell. In the meantime, Cambodia is lucky to have Ziad and CASC on its side.

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This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Parivartan Project. Pari is a social enterprise that provides marketing and organizational development services to grassroots development organizations that ‘believe in better’. To learn more: www.thepariproject.com

“But that wouldn’t really happen in real life,” said one of the students in my economics class as our professor was reviewing game theory and the economics of auctions. “People wouldn’t act in that way, and it wouldn’t work like that.”

Our professor turned around and smiled and looked at us all like he’d just realized that we had come to the theatre to see Jaws and brought our bathing suits thinking we’d get to swim. “Don’t try this at home, people,” he said. “This is E-CON-OMICS. It’s not real life! Did you think I was going to tell you how to make day-to-day business decisions? You do have strategy class, right?” and he went back to eagerly scribbling away his mathematical proof about what might happen if there was perfect information, if all people were rational, and if we were interested in the average collective behavior of a bunch of unaverage people.*

That night, after memorizing a bit more about Nash equilibrium theories, I decided to try to go see Jeffrey Sachs speak as he was giving a “sold out” lecture at Oxford. I figured it would give me fuel for my economics fire and give me a further look into an economic perspective I have been turning over for the last few years.

It would be the third time I had seen him speak. The first was at Notre Dame a few years ago, just after I had started PEPY. I was on campus as part of a guest session on “alternative careers” and Sachs was speaking at the university’s biggest annual lecture series. I rushed out of my little workshop to see Sachs’ presentation and I didn’t understand the professor’s confusion about my excitement to see “the rockstar economist” speak.  “I’m not sure you agree with him,” the professor said, looking at me with that same confused expression.  “What, was this guy mad? Of course I agreed with him!” I thought.  “Sachs was calling for more people to work towards livelihood improvements in ‘developing’ countries. How could I not agree with him?”

It wasn’t until the second time I saw Sachs speak, at Conde Nast’s “World Saver Awards” ceremony in NYC, that I realized that the ND professor’s look was likely due to my level of ignorance about development economics. By that time, I had fortunately spent a little more time to educate myself and had read more of Sach’s work and those of “competing” economic thinkers. I had also come to some of my own conclusions about what might “work”, or not, in the development sector based on my own failures and experiences. That time, (along with being a bit shocked that Disney Cruise Lines was up for a “World Saver” award for having painted their cruise ships with a more environmentally friendly sealant?!), I noticed that his prescription for how we should move forward didn’t fully jive with my own.

So I went to the lecture at Oxford reminding myself on the whole bike ride there to be open to listening to his perspective and to seek to understand where he was coming from. I was so conscious of WHO was speaking that I hadn’t bothered to read WHAT it was he was speaking about. I arrived expecting a millennium development goals debate and was presented with a diagnosis of the American political and economic decline that I couldn’t help but agree with. Sachs’ talk focused on his new book, The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity with nearly the entirety of the talk, and the larger part of the book, focusing on defining the problem and its causes. To my surprise, here I was listening to Jeffrey Sachs and I was agreeing with so much of what he was saying. But then, at the very end, he touched on the “How to fix it” ideas which the second par of his book focuses on.

And then I heard it in my head: Sachs, this is E-CON-OMICS. Don’t try this at home!

I recognize that people would be very upset if they were presented with a book that analyzed the problems of the economy or the development sector and were not then presented with solutions for how to go about talking these problems, but my economics professor was right. This is economics, not strategy!

We can learn a lot from economic theory and, when looking at averages and analyzing trends, it is an essential tool. But when looking at exactly what to then do in a certain instance, especially instances that involve real human beings who are not all rational, who certainly don’t all have perfect information, and who don’t always act in alignment with their own best interests, simply applying economic theories of averages of what is supposed to happen when A and B meet can be more like hiring a professional conductor to generate beautiful music out of singing seals. It’s gonna take a lot more work than just giving them sheet music.

From this point in the lecture, my typical Sach-ian reactions kicked in. I didn’t agree with the global solution theories he touched on and see problems with taking any “proven” solution here and plopping it down there and there and there and scaling it as if one could mass produce solutions as easily as Band-aids. Sach’s model examples of economic role models were the northern European countries (notably, some of them oil-rich, like Norway), and when a few audience members from or referring to those countries noted that they too were having economic problems, Sachs practically put his fingers in his ears.

It was the most disappointing part of a very interesting discussion when Sachs responded to a student who was questioning why we should model an economic improvement plan on situation’s like Iceland’s with a response that started with “Don’t tell me bad things about the economies of Northern Europe. I don’t want to hear that.” He might have been joking a little bit, but he didn’t really respond to the question nor did he seem interested in discussing an issue that might challenge some of his assumptions. Kenyan economist Bernadette Wanjala recently published what was deemed the first independent audit of the Millennium Villages Project, a project trying out Sach’s theories in African communities as a partnership between Columbia University and the UN. If Sachs and all those of us who have “theories” about how to improve the world aren’t seeking out and harnessing contradictions to these ideas, we’re not going to find viable remedies to the problems we continue to face. Instead, we’ll counter our cognitive dissonance by seeking out “proof” to fuel our egos rather than our world. I believe that we need to be asking people TO tell us where we are wrong and then seeking out ways to work with them to find solutions which are more viable through constantly iterating our ideas based on new information.

Sachs’ speech was followed by a panel of Oxonians who had been asked to provide comments and critiques of Sach’s talk and his book. Side note: I love panels like this one, which unfortunately are very rare, as they each dug right in and were not afraid to speak their minds about where they disagreed or had more questions. There was none of the usual chest puffing that comes with panelists each trying to put their business resume on the table by spending the majority of their allotted time talking themselves up – they got straight to the debate and academic questioning– gotta love the Brits! The American on the panel, Peter Turfano, Dean of Oxford’s Said Business School, also highlighted the areas he had questioned about the book touching on a need for more strategic thought in the “what” to do after the thorough economic analysis of the “why”. His comments made me realize that we should leave the economics to the economists and then use their findings to fuel strategy designed by those who are experts in implementing projects involving real human beings.

Another question worth noting was from an audience member who asked if Sachs had shared these ideas with the US government. “They wouldn’t take my calls,” jokes Sachs on two occasions. Funny, the US government doesn’t let Sachs or any one of with a good idea us experiment with the US economy and people’s lives. (Well, to fit in with what Sachs and I both think is wrong with the US, they MIGHT have let him try out his theories, if he had enough money to make it worth their time to listen to him.) Yet, when it comes to international development, the barriers to entry are much lower. Sachs, and many of us (myself included), are guilty of thinking it’s ok to experiment by taking the lives and economies of others in our own hands. We think we can all play strategist, politician, and hero. The US government wouldn’t take his calls, yet communities in Africa are living out his theories. Unfortunately for the world, there is no checks and balances systems set up in global development, no bi-partisan senate debates forcing Sachs to stop, change, or improve. It seems the system is so lacking that even when others take time to do monitoring and evaluation of our projects for us, we can write it off and ignore it. Hmm…. maybe it’s not so different than the current US government after all… but back to the lecture.

I got to meet Sachs afterwards and asked him a few questions related to how his books are written and with regards to the split between economic analysis and improvement strategies. He noted that the majority of his time and expertise is spent in the problem analysis and that I’d see when I read his new book that the “solutions” parts were incomplete and intended more as suggestions/shoves in the right direction. I forgot to ask if he felt the same way about his solution suggestions from the “End of Poverty”, but when standing in front of rockstars or rockstar economists, the right questions sometimes fail to formulate. (Sachs? You reading? Want to share some insights?)

I walked out of the lecture realizing that I had thought I didn’t agree with Sachs, but it turns out I do. I agree that there are big problems in how development work is being administered and how the impacts are not what they could/should be. I also agree that the political, economic, and corporate sector of the US is out of balance and that we are on a high-speed downward path. I just don’t want Sachs or any economist conducting our choir of seals.

The value I see is that Sachs has spent time detailing the WHAT, but we need to do a better job of figuring out the HOW. Sachs, and all those with theories of HOW should hopeful marry themselves to the goals rather than the solutions so that we can all freely debate and improve these imperfect solutions. Because they are ALL imperfect. That was my biking mantra on my way home to my economics studies where I had to go back to channeling the mind of an economist, pretending the world was full of rational ego-less creatures who care more about improving their lives and the world than their reputation. And now, economics makes a little more sense. Just don’ try it at home (or in Africa for that matter).

* Note: Those are not direct quotes, but my general summary. Also note that I LOVE our economics professor and his love for all things econ. It’s fabulous to be around people who are passionate about their subject and he often jumped with excitement when talking about economic theories he thought we should know, even if they were outside the scope of the course, which was either the most interesting part of the lecture, of the part where he totally lost me! I also loved that he was honest with us that this was NOT a representation of how things “would” work, but measures of averages and possibilities based within constraints. That recognition, that theory and reality are not directly interchangeable and require reworking of ideas to fit into the specifics of each new scenario should be a hallmark of formal education – from international development frameworks to MBA business planning. If it’s not, we’ll head out into the world and think we can apply these cookie cutter ideas to real human beings. And that would be just as silly as wearing a snorkel to Jaws.

I was just reminded about a friend, with whom I used to work, who wakes up every morning* and turns to whomever first crosses his path and says:

“Good morning! It’s a great day to be alive!”

And, if you wake up near him at a campsite for a few days in a row you soon realize that, indeed, it always is.

When people ask me why I chose to work in Cambodia, I almost always say “Why not?”  And when they give me a look that implies that they really do want to hear a longer reason, I usually ramble on a bit about change, and how it is palpable in Cambodia: forward, backward, and side-ward, but always some-ward. For a stagnant-a-phobe, Cambodia is a great place to be. It’s in motion and being in a place in motion means you can feed off of and into the momentum around you. I imagine working on the Thai/Burma border, with adults who have spent their ENTIRE lives in refugee camps, or in the consistent undulation of the Gaza disputes could be harder. In Cambodia, progress might sometimes seem slow or misdirected, but at least it does always feel like it is moving.

If you ask me on a verbose day (which is probably about a good 360 of the year), I might also tell you about a quote someone said to me on my first visit to Cambodia in 2002. “It’s a great time to be alive in Cambodia,” was part of her answer about why she loved her job. Alive… and time. Post 1979, after the Khmer Rouge had attempted to turn back time and when nearly a quarter of the population had died or were about to from starvation or ongoing fighting, Cambodia today seems like heaven. How does corruption effect you? “Well, it’s better than before,” she says. So indeed, it IS a great time to be alive in Cambodia, and it shows.

So perhaps that is part of why I chose to stay in Cambodia. And perhaps that is something I got out of living there, and out of Tim’s daily mantra. Today IS a great day to be alive. Now let’s go prove it