Over the past two days I have blogged about the contrasting trust relationships we NGOs have with communities and donors, how important they are, and yet how frequently they fall short. Both, however, are wonders of mutual respect and cooperation compared to the relationship we have with government. I think it is hard for anyone [...]
Posts Tagged ‘per diems’
12 Feb
Time to call in the lawyers?
Mike Jennings suggests homeless Haitians should be able to sue international NGOs for leaving them in temporary tented camps for so long, and not providing more permanent housing. You do not have to know anything about Haiti (I don’t!) to see how this would be a spectacularly bad idea. We can start off with a [...]
4 Oct
Big fish swim in bigger ponds
The ever excellent Ben Ramalingam posts on the complexity challenges of scaling up aid projects. He and the paper he reports have many interesting and valid points, and yet the dry analysis glosses over I think one of the biggest challenges of all: increasing political interference. It is relatively easy to run a successful small [...]
22 Jun
Learning by Doing
Kudos to Owen Barder who has no lesser a dignitary on his Development Drums podcast than Tony Blair. Some of his answers are slightly evasive, suggesting to me that you can take the man out of front line politics, but you can’t take the politician out of the man. But he has also got some [...]
21 Apr
Numbering off
Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi lament the tendency to “make up” international development statistics. Though done from the best of intentions the result does rather seem to resemble a counting system that goes: one, two, many … pick a number, any number. Thankfully, I don’t think too much attention is paid to such imaginary numbers [...]
8 Oct
Exit stage left
Apparently Amref are struggling to see through their exit strategy in northern Uganda; ‘volunteer’ health teams are refusing to work without the per diems to which they have become accustomed. Amref have countered with the usual response that the VHTs don’t work for them, but for the government. It would be nice if the Ugandan [...]
12 Jul
Getting Paid to Help Yourself
As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, we regularly pay community representatives small per diems to turn up to meetings about the project. This is not just for meetings for which they may need to leave the comfort of their homes and travel to, but also for meetings actually in the villages where they [...]
9 May
Sustainability
For my first post I want to talk about one of my pet issues, and something which is likely to become a recurring theme in this blog; sustainability. Sustainability lies at the heart of many of the issues dear to the environmental movement; climate change, biodiversity loss, overexploitation of target species. Forestry and fisheries policies [...]
