Excluding the missionary types most conservation and development workers I’ve met are about as far, politically speaking, as you can get from the neoconservative agenda of Bush junior. However, they all do start out with a substantial minimum quotient of compassion that differentiates them from the average denizen of Wall Street. What I think few [...]
Archive for the ‘Development Workers’ Category
26 Oct
Rome wasn’t built in three years
This is a follow-up post to my previous one over the lack of adequate diagnosis by Engineers Without Borders in determining the cause of failures they have admitted. Here I turn my attention away from the admitting failure process to address the substance of EWB’s failure. It is also specifically a response to Erin Antcliffe’s [...]
17 Jul
Good for personal development, bad for economic development
Ranil Dissanayake has written a perceptive elegy to his time in East and Southern Africa. “I will miss the constant obstacles, challenges, fights, compromises, small victories and major changes that come when working in a developing country Government here. There is no such thing as a simple task in Government: a photocopy could take an [...]
9 Feb
Jack of all trades, master of one
Calling all generalists! Do you know a bit of economics? Know some social science / cultural anthropology? Do you have any experience in project management? What about marketing (proposal writing)? If you can answer yes to all of the above, have a love for adventure (albeit adventures that mainly happen in an office somewhere) and [...]
7 Feb
Good strategies need good implementation
We’ve just submitted another funding application. As is usual in such cases I took on the lion’s share of the writing. Indeed this is one of the most important roles played by me and my peers in other small NGOs about the developing world. We’re the rain-makers for three reasons. Firstly our command of English [...]
17 Jan
The Aid Effectiveness Officer
During my Xmas break I was able at last to put flesh to what, for me, was a mythical creature: the Aid Effectiveness Officer. The lead character in John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener is an Aid Effectiveness Officer, but I’d never previously encountered one. I had thought / hoped that they might only exist [...]
8 Dec
SNAFU redux
When I first conceived of my previous post it had a rather different character than it ended up: a testament to the immediacy of blogging, and how one’s thoughts can take one in unexpected directions. Lindsay’s original post, which is far better than any of my analysis, had a powerful tinge of sadness about it. [...]
1 Dec
SNAFU
Lindsay Morgan also dispatched her personal thoughts from her trip Southern Sudan. The post had all the usual ingredients, grizzled veterans, impossible projects, crazy donor expectations, poverty that won’t go away and that might get worse when you leave, constant travel to uncertain ends. One word summed it up for me: SNAFU. It was coined [...]
