Network collaboration holds big possibilities ... but takes work!

Dear Colleagues

I would like to share this exchange ... there are a lot of people interested in the potential of networking and using the power of the network to facilitate development progress. The first message is from David Barnard of SangoNet.

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:19 AM, David Barnard wrote:

Dear all

This is a critical year for Africa as we head towards the United Nations Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to be held from 20-22 September 2010 in New York. With only 5 years before the MDGs are to be achieved, it is important that all African stakeholders, including citizens, review the progress made in recent years and develop a set of priorities for engagement and advocacy in Africa, and towards building a redefined relationship between Africa and the international community.

Against this background, African Monitor (http://www.africanmonitor.org), a Pan-African organisation monitoring development funding commitments to Africa and facilitating the involvement of African voices in the development agenda, and various partners, including ONE and the Southern Africa Trust, are facilitating consultations around the continent to develop a citizen-driven agenda for Africa in the second decade of the 21st century.

The face-to-face consultations are complemented by an e-consultation process, referred to as #AfricanAgenda2010, to leverage mass input and collaboration. The target is to generate feedback and responses from 10,000 people. The e-consultation will be a useful tool to solicit people’s perspectives on what they think are the key emerging priorities for Africa. This exercise will identify trends and common issues or priorities in a timely manner along with the face-to-face consultations which explore emerging issues in greater depth.

Coordinated by SANGONeT, the #AfricanAgenda2010 e-consultation is open to all African citizens, including in the Diaspora.

Your participation is crucial to the success of the e-consultation process.

• Complete the #AfricanAgenda2010 Survey -
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W835YB5;
• Comment on the issues, challenges and priorities raised during both the face-to-face and e-consultations - africanagenda2010@ngopulse.org;
• Assist us in raising awareness about this process by encouraging your friends, colleagues and people in your networks to also complete the survey.

The final outcome of this consultative process will be a document highlighting key emerging priority issues for Africa for 2010 and beyond. It will be presented to the African Union and shared at other strategic platforms at country, regional and continental levels, with special attention to those that can implement its recommendations by 2015 and contribute to poverty reduction and sustainable development across the continent.

For more information about #AfricanAgenda2010, refer to
http://www.ngopulse.org/group/africanagenda2010.

Thank you for your participation and support.

David Barnard
Executive Director
Southern African NGO Network (SANGONeT)
Tel: (+27) (11) 403-4935
E-mail: dbarnard@sangonet.org.za
URL: http://www.sangonet.org.za / www.ngopulse.org
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sangonet
"Linking civil society through ICTs"

I learned of this because of a message from Tobias Eigen who is the creator of the Kabissa network.

From: Tobias Eigen
Date: Mon, May 3, 2010 at 4:43 AM
Subject: Re: #AfricanAgenda2010 - Have your say about Africa's development priorities
To: "a research list on civil society, ICT and south-south info-politics"
Cc: SANGONeT

Dear David -

This is a terrific initiative - congratulations! I've crossposted your letter to Kabissa (http://www.kabissa.org/node/4334) and distributed it to members of our community blog. Please let me know if you'd like to do this differently and how else Kabissa can support #AfricanAgenda2010. You could add it to our organization database, for example, and we can display the logo on the Kabissa frontpage. I'd also be glad to use Kabissa to promote and raise awareness about the ngopulse.org platform which is a terrific resource.

Warm regards,

Tobias

Tobias Eigen
Founder, Kabissa - Space for Change in Africa
Membership is free. Join at http://kabissa.org
Become a Facebook Fan: http://facebook.com/kabissa
Follow Kabissa on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kabissa

And then I followed up with the following. My aim was to have not only the survey information in the dialog but the broader agenda of better metrics about society bearing in mind the old saying that only what is measured gets managed.

Dear Colleagues

I agree with Tobias, this is a great initiative ... and I will help all I can!

My "agenda" has ... or at least my goals have ... much in common with SANGONeT and Kabissa. Broadly stated I want to see more socio-economic progress ... everywhere!

I read engineering and economics at Cambridge and graduated almost 50 years ago. The expectation at that time was that there would be huge socio-economic progress everywhere around the world largely because of the end of the colonial era ... and the progress with science and technology.

50 years later science and technology has delivered ... but our socio-economic decision makers have not. After graduating from university, I qualified as a Chartered Accountant and I think it is fair to say that modern technology is a million times more cost effective than the accounting tools I worked with at the start of my career ... so why are the data used for decision making so poor?

This is a question that I worked on in the early days of corporate computerization. People need data that are helpful in improving their personal situation ... their personal performance. They are not helped by data overload and additional complexity. They need data that are clear and relevant. They need timely feedback.

The financial sector debacle of the last few years reflects a fatal flaw in the key metrics of society. Markets do a good job of allocating resources ... but only when the information being used makes sense. In the case of the capital markets the key metrics are corporate profit, stock market prices and GDP growth ... and using these metrics money has successfully been allocated to making more and more immediate profit at the expense of society, the environment and the future.

I argue that the information used for the capital markets should be not only those that relate to money profit, but there should also be metrics about value. Every business on the planet works with profit accounting. Every community on the planet should work with value accounting. These need to be combined as information that guides the allocation of resources and the markets that do this.

Value is important ... but it is subjective and it is not easy to quantify. It can be done ... and in the work we are doing with Community Analytics (CA), value is quantified in a "standard value" framework. Simply put, standard value is to CA what standard costs are in cost accountancy.

In regular accountancy, the organization does the accounting and does the reporting. Observers are able to use these reports to draw conclusions. The impact of the activities of these organizations on community is not part of the reporting. Initiatives for organizations to report double and triple bottom line performance have not been very effective ... for a number of very good reasons.

In the CA framework, the community is the reporting entity. Data about progress of the community shows the progress of the community, and data about the activities of the community help to ascertain the performance in whatever form makes the most sense. Some of the activities of the community are implemented by organizations with profit reporting ... many activities happen in a variety of not for profit settings and in the informal sector ... many activities are the responsibility of public bodies. ALL of these activities end up progressing the community or not.

In money profit accountancy for the organization the balance sheet is an important presentation. The difference between two balance sheets is an indicator of progress for the organization. A balance sheet of a community has the same ability to be a measure of progress for the community. This makes it possible for a relatively small amount of information about the community to give a very powerful metric about socio-economic progress.

I am committed to the idea that if you change the way the game is scored, you will change the way the game is played. Others have observed that you cannot manage what you do not measure. I have used the idea that good management information is "the least amount of data that gets good decisions made reliably".

I have also a high respect for decision making at the lowest level of an organization or a society ... the purpose of data is to guide these decisions so that there are good outcomes. I am always being impressed by ordinary people doing extraordinary things ... and conversely totally depressed by powerful people doing dumb things, and never being held accountable because the data are missing!

My dream ... hope ... plan ... is to combine what I have described with the capabilities of modern technology, and specifically data and the mobile phone, the Internet and the Cloud!

My reality is that I do not know technology well enough to do it well ... but why does this have to be a constraint when there all sorts of good people who can do all of this better than I can!

Is there a way these ideas about metrics fit into you initiatives ... bearing in mind that "What gets measured gets done!".

Sincerely

Peter Burgess

Who is driving?

Dear Colleagues

The investment publication Barrons had a headline this past Saturday "Who's Driving?" with the cartoon image of President Obama and GM President Whitaker struggling for the steering wheel. The article was, of course, about the planned GM IPO that would have repay the Government some or all of their stake in the company.

Who's Driving
by ANDREW BARY
Washington and GM have very different goals. But both are eager for an IPO that could value the car maker at $60 billion.

However, before I read the article, I thought the cover image was about the economy and the election rather than about the specific case of GM. From this perspective the cartoon image of President Obama driving an automobile and the question "Who's Driving?" led to all sorts of thoughts including the image of Obama with a car full of his Democratic family all with their own ideas of where the car should be going ... and few Republic relatives all of whom were quite clear that where the he was taking the car was all wrong. In my version of the story Obama kept on driving with a steady hand in spite of all the noise and hoop-la that was going on.

The image resonates well ... most families have had experiences like this on a holiday trip ... and the driver had better just keep on driving without losing his or her cool.

The road map available to President Obama is not reliable ... and the metrics are not very helpful. They are not particularly encouraging in confirming he is on the best path to success ... but not really very informative anyway. I have always said that the purpose of data is to help to make good decisions ... but these data do not exist. All we have are rather unreliable statistics that show the ex-post facto results of a whole portfolio of actions that have taken place in the past ... both distant past and recent past. Actually getting cause and effect from any of the statistics is just plain impossible ... and the correlation that people try to draw from the statistics are really laughable except that the unreliability factor of the data are rarely talked about!

An anecdote or two maybe a way forward in the political realm ... but decision making needs a lot more than this. The way forward can be about anecdotes, but organized into a system of dataflows that enables analysis of what specifics worked where and when and especially why and how they worked in each and every particular case.

I am troubled because the prevailing metrics are most likely to encourage decision makers to make bad decisions ... missing the good decisions that would make the USA perform much better much sooner. I have traveled a lot both in the USA and around the world ... and people could be a lot happier that they are with quite modest changes. But the changes have to be quite specific to the needs of the group ... and not the typical Washington model of "one size fits all" which really translates into "nothing fits anyone"!

A good driver watches the road ... collects the data and drives accordingly. In terms of data, there are not much worth having for President Obama to drive in the best possible direction. This should be changed sooner rather than later. We use social networks to connect people ... why don't we use social networks to connect the data ... to connect the dots, and to replicate things that work well.

And while we are about, why not use the data to discontinue what does not work at all. So called "pork" sometimes has huge value for the community ... sometimes the pork produces pure boondoggle ... and there should be data to show the difference. The system of accounting and accountability is broken ... perhaps better said is missing. The budget is passed as a result of market forces otherwise known as "horse trading" and once passed the moneys are spent ... but with proper accounting and accountability the value from the spending would get put on the record and the decision makers can be accountable for their waste. This is not complicated but it does take commitment ... and up to now there is none.

I for one do not like to see the driver without a map and essentially blind because the metrics about our society are so out-of-touch with modernity and reality. The USA can and should do better and do it soon.

Peter Burgess

World Bank and UN procurement practices

Dear Colleagues

When I first had reason to study World Bank and UN procurement practices in the 1970s it was clear that there were issues in need of attention ... and equally clear that the work in improving procurement practices was totally inadequate to the problem at hand.

Over time the problems have grown ... and the procurement practices become more and more complex, but not really very much better. In fact, I would argue that the procurement practices are worse now than they were decades ago.

I have always been bothered by the World Bank's use of improved procurement procedures to address issues like corruption. This has the perverse effect that small efficient low cost suppliers can really never get anywhere near a World Bank procurement contract. The paperwork essentially limits bidding to those that really know the complicated procedures and everyone else is out of contention. As a result contract prices are way higher than they need to be ... and the public pays a big price.

This would be less of a problem if there was good cost accounting and systems to report the actual costs of work done under World Bank and UN funding. Such data are difficult ... perhaps impossible is a better word ... to obtain. The over-invoicing of World Bank and UN contracts is a huge problem ... but completely off the radar. Prices agreed are not easy to access ... and for good reason (that is for bad reasons!).

The very low status of the accounting function in the World Bank and the UN is part of the culture ... and critical to its inability to either be accountable internally, or to the greater public. I have been aware of the problem based on personal observation for a very long time ... but it was refreshing to read a book from 2008 called "Backstabbing for Beginners" by Michael Soussan that tells some of the story of accountability ineptness in the UN within the infamous UN Oil-for-Food Program for Iraq.

Once in a while the World Bank and UN does something remarkable ... and there is the ongoing hope that this could become the norm ... but change is going to be very difficult in large part because many of the key decision makers are well aware of the sort of embarrassment that good metrics would make visible.

I want to see good metrics deployed so that these organizations are made to account ... but while I work in one direction, the World Bank and the UN are marketing their practices into the educational sector so that the World Bank and UN practices are considered "best practice" when in fact they are nothing of the sort!

Metrics are powerful ... but nobody really wants to see what good metrics will show!

Peter Burgess

NGO accountability ... World Vision and its stories!

Dear Colleagues

I started to write this post in May ... almost three months ago. The delay changes little. My views are as valid today as they were months ago ... and in fact years ago.

The NGOs are great story tellers ... and World Vision is one of the best. The stories help to raise a lot of money which then gets used in a variety of relief and development settings around the world. The text of the story below and is accessible at this URL:
http://www.worldvision.org/news.nsf/news/clean-water-niger-201005-enews?Open&et_cid=15365458&et_rid=&campaign=1059388&cmp=EMC-1059388&wvport=sp&wvsrc=enews

Villages in Niger that no longer need to wish for clean water wells
May 2010

A wish for clean water comes true for villages where dirty water and disease were once the norm. Now, with deep wells and water pumps installed by World Vision, good health is common.

In the village of Mekaka, Niger, women and girls are gathered around the village well. Their lively conversations match their fast-paced arms pulling up heavy water containers from a 130-foot deep well.

Drawing water in Mekaka takes an average of four hours each day. Hadiza Moussa, now 50, started to draw water from the village well when she was 8 years old.

Hadiza says girls come to the well and work beside their mothers once they are strong enough to help. For girls, drawing water is a higher priority than attending school; therefore, they often miss class to help at the well.

However, in Mekaka, drawing water will not always be this difficult. The village is part of a World Vision sponsorship project area, and two water pumps will soon be drilled here.

“We’ve seen the change in people’s lives, in other villages where there is already a water pump,” explains Hadiza. “Women spend less time fetching water, and it is less tiring, so they have more time and energy for their families.”

A change in the community

Drawing water from traditional wells in Zakara Hanou, another village in Niger, once took over three hours of intense labor. However, since the construction of the boreholes by World Vision, that same task now takes 30 minutes to accomplish.

Hassana, a 14-year-old girl, remembers how hard it was. “I had to lean over the deep, dark well, and when the bucket hit the water, my heart was beating so fast and the rope burned my hands,” she recalls. “I got dizzy looking down into the well, but had to keep steady to finish the work.”

Prior to the boreholes, women needed to pull the rough plaited ropes, 130 to 200 feet in length, which would often cut their hands. However, the installation of the water pumps made it easier. Women now have more time to spend with their families, girls are able to attend school, and Chief Saidou Abdou even says the boreholes brought peace to the village.

Before, disputes would break out in line at the well, and villagers would quarrel over the water. But now, they no longer have this problem.

If you could see this village as it was five years ago, you’d realize how much our community has changed,” says Chief Abdou. “No other [non-governmental organization] came to our village, so World Vision was a God-sent presence to us, as they came here to help.”

‘Drink to quench our thirst’

The health and well-being of the Zakara Hanou villagers has improved significantly since they got access to clean, safe water.

“The well water was smelly and unclear,” says Chief Saidou Abdou. “When we used to drink it, we were always sick, and our children had stomach problems.”

And how have things changed? “The water that we pump out today is crystal clear, it tastes good, and you don’t even have to put it through a sieve to take out insects and dirt. Now we can drink to quench our thirst,” he says.

“Many children in our village were sick with [trachoma],” adds Harouna, Chief Abdou’s wife, “but now that water is clean, we don’t have problems anymore.”

Three ways you can help

>> Thank God for how the well in Zakara Hanou village has already changed the lives and improved the health of the children and families there, and pray that the village of Mekaka will soon enjoy the same benefits. Pray that someday soon, every child would have access to clean, safe water.

>> Donate now to World Vision’s Water and Sanitation Fund. Your gift will help us dig deep wells for safe water access, provide purification equipment, distribute water storage containers, develop sanitation systems, and more.

>> Sponsor a child in Niger. Your love and support for a boy or girl in need will help provide essentials like clean water, a building block for a healthy, hopeful, and productive future.

There is no question that some of the work done by World Vision is very good ... but there is a very big question about the relationship between the amount of money raised and the amount of good work that gets done. As far as I can tell there is solid "accounting" at World Vision, but everyone knows that good accounting tells very little about performance unless there are people in management and associated with the accounting unit that are interested and experienced with cost accounting and performance metrics. World Vision has not shown me up to now that they are skilled in these matters ... yet the money flows that World Visions handles are huge.

I cannot prove this ... I do not have access to any of their internal accounting ... but the easily accessible published material shows the multi-million scale of their operations ... how much raised and how much spent ... but does little to inform about the amount of value that these moneys were actually able to deliver. Even if millions of dollars were to be mis-used, the publicly accessible accounting would never show the problem ... there is no accounting whatsoever for the value of the work an organization like World Vision does.

This problem is not limited to World Vision ... every NGO is in the same situation. They do very basic reporting to the IRS and that is about all. It is not good enough and NGO performance is not going to change for the better until there is some substantial reform in the progress and performance metrics that get used!

As I write I realize that the good news reported in the World Vision story of May was overtaken some weeks later by tragic drought stories in the same country ... the disconnect between the depiction of fact about good works on the one hand and the depiction of fact about tragedy a little later should not be possible. Again it is reliable independent and useful metrics about socio-economic situations and organizational impact that is missing.

Peter Burgess

////////////////////////////////

The text associated with pictures in the World Vision article not copied here:

Mariama, 6, smiles as she pumps clean water into a container in her village of Zakara Hanou. The girl used to suffer from trachoma, an eye disease, because of unclean water. But such illness is no longer a concern for her.
Photo ©2009 Dana Palade/World Vision“

Sponsor a child in Niger. Your love and support for a boy or girl in need will help provide essentials like fresh, clean water — the foundation of health and hope.

Story and photos by Dana Palade, World Vision Niger. Edited by Gabrielle Kim, World Vision U.S.

Thanks to World Vision water projects in Niger and elsewhere, children like this boy no longer need to worry about the absence of a resource as critical as clean, safe, fresh water.
Photo ©2009 Dana Palade/World Vision

Market metrics ... livestock prices down 50% in Madagascar

Dear Colleagues

I started a response some weeks back ... the news in the IRIN article is no longer "new news" but the issue remains the same. According to the IRIN article, livestock prices in Madagascar were down 50%. The article almost explains why ... but stops short of connecting all the critical dots! In fact the article merely provides one datapoint!

This is the URL of the article. The text of the article is copied at the end of this post. http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=89330

I have done considerable work with the private sector in Madagascar. The country ought to be a wealthy ... but it is not. Politics and government are mainly to blame ... they have been dysfunctional for decades.

Though my work in Madagascar was in a different sector and different part of the country ... I have done work with livestock and pastoral communities in other parts of the world, notably in the Horn of Africa. The price of livestock tells you a lot about the state of the economy and the state of the weather. As the IRIN article observes, livestock are not only a component of the agricultural economy, they also represent a store of wealth.

MADAGASCAR: A financial crisis on the hoof ... Zebu prices are plummeting

AMBOHITSAHATAZA, 1 June 2010 (IRIN) - Far from the world's financial centres, isolated from sub-prime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations and collapsing investment banks, Madagascar is going through a financial crisis of its own, and stock prices are plummeting.

As in most of rural Africa, wealth is measured in livestock. Joseph Rabemamamtsoa, leader of Ambohitsahataza village in Amphany district in the southwest of the island, told IRIN that the value of his zebu - sturdy cattle with long horns and a fatty hump on their shoulders - had halved. "Normally, we could get up to 300,000 ariary [US$140] for a good animal; now we are lucky to get 150,000."

Not only has the value of individual animals dropped in the past few years, the average size of herds has also dwindled. "In a good period one rich family will have between 20 and 40 animals, now they have only 10," Rabemamamtsoa said. Poorer families - most of the roughly 1,700 villagers - now had none.

The Malagasy government's Early Warning System (SAP) noted that the average price of a zebu in southern Madagascar had dropped from A221,000 ($103) in March 2008 to A110,000 ($51) in March 2010, which was in line with the 50 percent devaluation experienced in Rabemamamtsoa's community.

Breaking the bank

In local terms this is a financial meltdown: people in the south of Madagascar depend on their zebu for more than just meat, milk and draught power to pull carts and plough the fields; their herd of zebu are their life's savings, insurance, their standing in the community. "It is what we value most," Rabemamamtsoa said.

Lundi Perole, a civil engineer and head of Hiara Hampandroso (Develop Together), a local NGO that helps communities build resilience in the harsh dry conditions of the region, said a large herd of zebu meant social prestige and importance.

They prefer not having water to drink for themselves than having their zebu without water. He has helped build water harvesters with the help of UN World Food Programme (WFP) Food-for-Work projects, in which a community works on projects geared to restoring self-sufficiency in exchange for food aid.

On his desk there is a huge pile of envelopes with requests from communities. "Most are for water catchment basins for cattle," he said. "The decision of what to build is taken by the community. We are in the south, [where] water is the big problem. They prefer not having water to drink for themselves than having their zebu without water."

The importance that Malagasy attach to their zebu cannot be underestimated: "It is their life and their death," Perole commented. Cultural practice dictates that a deceased person's zebu be slaughtered and the skulls set to decorate the tomb - the more skulls on a tomb, the greater the wealth and status - although outsiders often consider the practice destructive.

A buyers market

Drought lay at the heart of this local recession, and the consecutive years of scant rain had pushed families beyond their ability to cope, Perole said.

By the end of April 2010 the government projected that a record 65 communes in the south would face hunger in the coming months - surpassing the 45 of the previous year – and some 866,000 Malagasy would probably need assistance by June 2010.

"Food prices are increasing beyond the purchasing power of the population, reducing their access to food," said Krystyna Bednarska, head of the WFP in Madagascar.

Official figures indicate a rising cost of living in southern Madagascar: the price of one kapoaka (a small tin can) of maize, the staple food, rose from A130 ($0.06) in July 2009 to A230 ($0.11) by February 2010 in some areas.

Alexandre Huynh, Emergency and Rehabilitation Coordinator at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said poor harvests meant families were forced to sell off assets - like their prized zebu - to make ends meet.

"Zebu provide a solution to purchase food during lean seasons and food shortages, but ... as the sale becomes critical to the family, and as numerous households sell their animals at the same time, prices [fall] extremely low," he said.

"When the crisis has passed, [people] try to repurchase animals, but at the normal, and higher, market price, which directly contributes to their increasing destitution and current heavy de-capitalization."

The loss of local wealth is keenly felt. Rabemamamtsoa said the zebu were being bought and trucked to cities, like Tulear on the southwest coast, "But even up to Antananarivo [the capital, in the north]."

One of the perennial questions is why there has been little or no significant investment in the essential infrastructure of the country in decades ... what has been done to invest in water supply so that drought is less of a problem. The problem of water has been an issues for a very long time ... since the 19th century but there was a time when "development" included making big investments in water infrastructure and doing it well. For the past fifty years hardly any water infrastructure has been done to benefit local people, though some major projects have gone forward where rich elites have been major beneficiaries ... the Lesotho Highlands Water Project in Southern Africa and the Three Gorges Project in China come to mind and there are others.

With good development leadership Madagascar could be a reasonably wealthy country ... but this leadership is not coming either from the government nor from the international experts in the multilateral organizations. Madagascar is a big place with all sorts of potential! What a waste!

Peter Burgess

Malaria ... reinventing the wheel

Dear Colleagues

I was copied on this message because the value dimension of our work is included in the Integrated Malaria Management (IMM) initiative of Dr. Novak.

"Low-Cost Cell Phone-Based Applications for Priority Global Health Diseases"
On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Robert John Novak wrote:

Kate, the recent Gates call for a "Low-Cost Cell Phone-Based Applications for Priority Global Health Diseases" was a operational part of the LOI that we submitted to you. We already have a operational system. Why are you re-inventing the wheel! I guess the next thing that will be solicited is a applied GIS based surveillance system to manage malaria control operations.
Regards, Bob
Robert J. Novak, Ph.D.
Professor of Medicine
Division of Infectious Diseases
William C. Gorgas Center for Geographic Medicine
University Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine
220 Bevill Biomedical Research Bldg.
845 19th Street South
Birmingham, AL 35294-2170
205-975-7614 FAX 205-934-5600

I think my response is self explanatory:

Dear Dr. Bob

I would like to add my "two cents" to your message.

As you know I have been active in the international relied and development industry since the 1970s ... and before that was the CFO of a company operating in 26 countries around the world. I think I know something of how good information can make a huge difference in operational performance ... and I would argue that good information improves performance in almost any environment by a factor of 10 or maybe 100. It is no wonder to me that government execution of almost any works is high cost and low impact, simply because the management information dimension of the work is usually missing ... whether it is the Government of the USA, or the UK or France or Russia or Nigeria!

I have been attracted to Integrated Malaria Management that you have initiated because it is an initiative that is based on the best possible use of data for planning, operational execution and performance assessment.

I am amazed at how little information based work is being done by the global health community which has adopted more than anything else what I refer to as the UN model for management. In this model a lot of work is done assessing what is going to work based on academic papers and historical studies, and then virtually nothing is done to check that the work done conforms to the suppositions made at the outset. When assessments are done they are usually done by "friendly" independent organizations who know the rule that you only get the next assignment if this current assignment produces the results that are wanted! With this structure not very much can be trusted!

As a fully independent observer of the international relief and development sector ... and with considerable practical experience in the sector ... I am appalled at the waste of money both within the official development assistance (ODA) organizations and the increasingly important private philanthropy organizations. The sad reality is that the money is not actually wasted but diverted to "special interests" of all sorts. As an old accountant I learned to "follow the money" as an audit clerk ... and I am not impressed by the "leakiness" of almost all the financial control systems in place that allow funds to flow to self-serving interests at the expense of beneficiaries.

I cannot for the life of me understand why a world where information technology is now a million times more powerful than when I started my career and the accounting is many times worse. There is a systemic dysfunction here that should be cause for great alarm.

From what I know of the global malaria sub-sector, things are not encouraging and I would suggest that the money will run out a long time before the malaria problem is controlled unless there are some serious rethinks of the approach to allocating resources into this sector.

While I am incredibly disappointed at the progress that has been made with the IMM initiatives and the deployment of meaningful metrics for planning and assessing malaria control interventions ... I am confident that those of us who are committed to a world with better metrics are going to prevail. It is human nature to want to win ... but scorekeeping has never been trusted to the players alone ... scorekeeping has an independent dimension that is essential for trust.

Peter Burgess

Relief and development sector performance ... starting with Save the Children UK

Dear Colleagues

I am, I think, starting to sound like a broken record. I just posted this comment on a blog written by Rica Garde, an Economic Policy Officer with the Development Policy Team at Save the Children UK about their recent report "Addressing the Inequalities in Child Survival". The text of the blog is at the end of this post and may be found at URL:
http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/blogs/2010/08/addressing-the-inequalities-in-child-survival/. This is my comment:

Dear Colleagues

I am always surprised at the rather "obvious" conclusions drawn in well publicized papers from well known organizations like, for example, this paper on child survival from Save the Children (UK). There is something wrong with the whole of the global relief and development industry ... and I am not really sure what it is!

When I first did work in this field in the 1970s I was immediately struck by the poor management processes in use compared to the corporate sector where I had been involved in Management Information System development and had been a Chief Financial Officer of a complex international company. In my corporate career I had been actively engaged in helping to improve performance and profitability ... but the same level of attention to progress and performance in the relief and development sector was totally absent. The situation has not improved very much of the subsequent 30 plus years.

Spend a couple of days in any country in the world and it is pretty clear that national averages are totally useless in managing anything ... yet they are almost the only data points being widely discussed. The national average reflects neither the good that should be replicated or the bad that should be eliminated ... and I would argue using advanced common sense that what one does to replicate good is rather different from what one does to eliminate bad.

The availability of "reports" is pretty impressive ... but they overwhelm as much as they inform. Somehow the management process is not working because while there are good things to write about, the scale of bad things remains ridiculously large. I argue that it leadership was doing its job and the systems were working there would not be multiple billions of people poor, hungry and in ill-health.

I can go on ... but will not, except to observe that until we get the metrics and measurements right, there will be little or no progress in relief and development and in the socio-economic status of most people on the planet. The incentives to do nothing by make profit for corporate organizations and to make a profitable career for "me" are just too powerful at the moment, and they ignore absolutely everything associated with value that contributes to quality of life and a stable planet!

Peter Burgess

The number of reports published by Save the Children and other relief and development organization is impressive. The URL to download the report referred to in this blog is: http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/en/54_12286.htm
and and lot more reports about development progress are located at:
http://www.countdown2015mnch.org/reports-publications/2010-report/2010-report-downloads

The problem is that all of these reports do not add up to a system of accounting and accountability for progress ... they are good if you have the time to study them, but most decision makers are busy and these reports are overtaken by all sorts of other matters, many of which should not be in play. More on that subject later!

This is the text of the blog.

Addressing the inequalities in child survival
Tuesday 17 August 2010

Every year figures on child deaths are released to track how countries are progressing towards Millennium Development Goal 4 — to reduce the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015.

Reductions in under-five mortality are usually reported as national averages however, masking the unequal progress across different groups within a country.

A new Save the Children paper entitled “Inequalities in child survival: looking at wealth and other socio-economic disparities in developing countries” outlines a number of important issues surrounding children’s unequal survival prospects.

Across the developing world, countries with lower levels of under-five mortality tend to have more inequality in child mortality between the richest and poorest households.

Child deaths are more concentrated in poor households in developing countries that have reduced under-five mortality the fastest. This suggests that these countries made progress at the expense of poor households.

A few, like Egypt, however have managed to improve child survival and narrow disparities in under-five mortality between the rich and poor at the same time. Cases like these prove that inequalities in child survival can be avoided.

Unequal survival chances between rich and poor children are driven by a host of factors. Poor households often lack clean water and sanitation, cannot afford to buy nutritious food and have no access to medical care making their children more vulnerable to diseases.

These deprivations are both driven by and contribute to poverty, joblessness, low female education, weak health systems and poor governance. Wealth is an important but not the only determinant of inequalities in child survival. Unequal survival outcomes are present across gender, ethnicity, caste and tribe.

India perfectly mirrors the child survival story in the developing world. While under-five mortality has fallen in India, high and sustained growth rates in recent years have not been enough to put the country on-track for the MDG 4 target.

Child survival varies in different parts of the country. Southern states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu have brought down under-five mortality way below the national average, while northern states are lagging behind.

For example, the under-five mortality rate in Rajasthan is more than twice that of Tamil Nadu. The poorest children in India are three times more likely to die than those from the richest households.

Girls are less likely to survive to their fifth birthday than boys, and so are children from scheduled castes compared to the average under-five population.

There is some good news however. A of number of poor countries have shown that it is possible to make a dent on child deaths with limited resources. Bangladesh, which is on-track to meet MDG 4, has significantly improved child survival with only modest economic growth.

It has done so by rolling-out effective but inexpensive interventions widely, ensuring that the poor is not left behind. For example, coverage for immunisation against measles—one of the most common causes of child deaths—went up from 62% in 1996-97 to 80% in 2007 among the poorest households.

Coverage gaps in measles vaccination between boys and girls have effectively disappeared in the past decade according to the Countdown to 2015 Decade Report. Other socioeconomic disparities in under-five mortality still need to be addressed in Bangladesh however, such as unequal survival chances in urban and rural areas.

World leaders will meet in a UN Summit in September to accelerate progress towards the MDGs. With only five more years to go before the deadline, it is just right to put pressure on national governments and donors to agree on an action agenda.

We should not forget to press them for a more equitable achievement of the goals. In the case of child survival, meeting MDG 4 at the national average but leaving poor children behind makes it a shallow achievement.

To better understand these issues, read our paper and engage in the debates in the run up the Summit.

While I am a strong critic of the metrics used for corporate performance with a total focus on profit performance without much reference to anything else ... but at least there are widely followed metrics about the profit performance of each independent organization.

In the relief and development sector, there are not even the metrics to compare the performance of different entities in the sector. Of course money profit is not a meaningful metric in relief and development ... but after so long I would have expected some metric to have been development that would be both useful and universal. My solution to this is a "value" based standard for impact which can be related to a money cost for the organization as well as a "value" based consumption of resources that would, for example, handle the value of volunteer efforts.

When there is a humanitarian disaster there is a media focus on the plight of the affected people and organizations raise money to address the disaster ... but it is also arguable that the poor half of the world's population live a permanent disaster. This being so, then the question is what should be done to have metrics that focus clearly on the reasons for the poverty and those who have the possibility to do something about it ... those that are responsible.

This may be complex and it is difficult to use national average data as a way to identify responsible parties, if not impossible ... but similar data at a community level is way more easy to understand. The private sector and the public sector are possible culprits ... the for profits and the non-profits ... the available resources, organization and the systems of governance. But the culprits are also the solutions ... and, in our view, it is meaningful metrics that are going to change the that get made and the behavior of people and organizations so that the outcomes reflect positive socio-economic progress and efficient and effective performance.

More on all of this another time.

Peter Burgess