Specificity killed the cat

The Climate & Development Knowledge Network innovation fund has opened to a second round of applications (with an African focus). In order to apply you need to meet the following criteria:

• Are an applicant group that includes at least two (2) partners; Lead Applicants must be African (and not international institutions based in Africa), with additional partners also being African.
• Are an applicant group which includes government institutions; if not, you must demonstrate significant government buy-in.
• Are proposing activities that support an existing network/community of practice to ensure buy-in and sustainability.
• Have game-changing project ideas/concepts focused on Africa that require development and shaping through an innovation process; provide a forum in which active (cross-sector and cross-regional) engagement, consultation and collaboration can directly take place and catalyse the direction, design and structure of a future project or initiative.
• Are aligned with the evaluation criteria.
• Can set up a sustainable uptake pathway for the results of the innovation process, for which a relevant target audience is clearly articulated.

I have two observations. Firstly, this is jargon overkill à la EU for what I imagine should be a wide-ranging call for proposals accessible to as many people as possible. What is an “innovation process” when it’s at home? Opaque language like this tends to restrict applications to the usual suspects who can navigate the linguistic contortions, the very opposite of what innovation is supposed to be about.

Secondly, these are very specific criteria. Why does it have to be 2+ partners, 100% African? Why demand government buy-in when civil society can be a more powerful agent of change? Why should applicants be working through a network and have to provide a forum for engagement etc? The problem with very specific funding criteria is that you encourage applicants to dream up projects specifically to meet your preconceived notions rather than to meet their own priorities.

This gets a thumbs down from me.

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Social entrepreneurs and M&E

Bill Easterly apparently wants to see faster determination of successful and failing aid projects than is provided by traditional monitoring and evaluation. That is according to Tom Murphy’s report on the DRI annual conference from back in March.* Tom commented:

“… strong and open monitoring and evaluation practices can ensure to the trial and error of the Easterly ‘searcher.’” (sic)

I also seem to recall – but cannot now find the right quote or link – the suggestion that aid practitioners could seek inspiration from how success and failure business is determined in the business world. (The DRI debates considered whether an RCT would be a suitable evaluation mechanism for the IPhone game Angry Birds – not the best example imho!) (Update 27/06/12: found that link, it was Ian Thorpe blogging here.)

As someone who played a major role in setting up a local NGO and then leading it for several years, I guess I can be classed as something of a social entrepreneur. Thus I have a few thoughts on how this can or cannot work in practice.

Like too many organisations in the development and conservation sectors I wouldn’t put down M&E as one of our strong points. We’re not terrible at it, and we’re getting better, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to poke plenty of holes in what we’ve done so far.

As ever with M&E, getting the budget balance right is tricky. If we had as much money as the MVP we could do some amazing M&E. (Hopefully a lot better than the MVP has achieved in practice!) But we do not have anything like that amount. Plus we have a problem that many of the impact indicators we are targeting take a long time to move in a positive direction (e.g. biodiversity). So we have to wait quite a while just to see whether our monitoring programmes are capable of detecting the kind of change we are seeking to achieve.

These challenges are universal. More particularly, taking an entrepreneurial approach involves a lot of flexibility and adaptation to changing circumstances. Most people seem to agree this kind of approach is a good thing. Which is all fine and dandy, but it does make it hard to set up your M&E baselines, because we’re continually adapting how the project will work, and thus what impacts it will have. As the project matures it settles down better, but for our earliest pilot sites the opportunity to establish a firm M&E baseline has long gone.

So how do we track our own progress? Mostly I would say through a number of milestones, which may or may not be well set out on paper. Conceptually we started with a pretty good idea of what we wanted to achieve. As things progressed we developed a number of internal targets (usually with very flexible timelines if they are specified at all) against which we could measure ourselves.

The analogy with modern business is perhaps something like Facebook. At first it was just an idea – something cool to do – then it became an enterprise, but one not particularly focused on bottom-line impact (profit) as on other metrics and milestones (e.g. market share and time spent on site by users). Only latterly has the focus at Facebook shifted increasingly to monetising their substantial achievements. (If recent share performance is anything to go by, this is proving tricky.)

Similarly our own project is being subjected to increasingly robust M&E assessment, as indeed it should do. But, in my mind, most M&E approaches and entrepreneurial innovation apply to quite different stages of project development. This is also why starting small is so important; it allows time for KISI. Alas too many people in conservation and development are often in such a rush that they want to spend $100 million first, and ask questions later.

* Yes I’m finally back blogging again. I have a number of posts queued up in my head responding to the news over the last couple of months. Hopefully it won’t all seem too much like yesterday’s left-overs.

All we need are brains

Hand Relief International is a very amusing blog, but presumably not widely read outside development circles. So it’s nice to see some satire on development reaching more mainstream sites, see here. And it’s got some bite, attacking one of the classic fallacies of development thinking: that all we need are some really bright people, and we can solve the problem of poverty in Africa and elsewhere. Clever people and new ideas can always help, of course, and too much development work is done like painting by numbers, but clever ideas need to fit with the real needs and context of poor people. And even then, outsiders’ brains can only help; ultimately development has to come from within individuals and communities, otherwise it will never be sustainable.