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Making up your mind. Prioritizing and making it happen

This is very much in line with the SALT approach, hope you enjoy this...

Making up your mind. Prioritizing and making it happen

 

* As DrMartin Luther King Jr. said, "every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative...".

 

Source: https://shanemcdonnell45.wordpress.com/tag/darkness-into-light/

* Our President, Barack Obama said in his farewell speech, "change only happens when ordinary people get involved and they get engaged, and they come together to demand it".

* OXFAM International demanded changing shocking inequity: "just eight billionaires own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion peop...".

* Caroline Heider of the World Bank's IEG asked we examine how we evaluate long-term impacts: "current considerations of efficiency, cost savings, or cost-benefit...".

 

What do you want to prioritize and demand of international development? In these times of shifting priorities in powerful nations, where politicians are questioning the needs of those whom many of us have been serving, what do you want to demand? What issue do you prioritize, and want to move forward?

 

I choose to prioritize sustained impact driven by country-nationals. Why? I grew up in large cities, and when I first worked in Africa’s Sahel desert 25 years ago, the herders and farmers making a living from the arid pastures and sandy soil, with wells 100 feet deep astonished me.

 

Without them, I’d last 3 days out there. They were the experts.

 

I always assumed we measured ‘sustainable’ development in work with such herders and farmers, but in 2013 I founded Valuing Voices after I began to see how rarely w6e return to evaluate what remained after our foreign aid projects stopped.  

 

Reviewing  thousands of “ex-post” or “post-project” documents in 30 organizations’ public databases, Valuing Voices has found the vast majority of documents only suggested a post-project be done, a small proportion were desk studies and fewer than 1% were original fieldwork post-project evaluations of sustainability. In these 370 post-project (ex-post) evaluations, development workers asked partners and participants what was still standing, showed what succeeded or failed and what unexpected successes participants created themselves from what we left behind. 

 

Returning to learn, consulting our participant-experts seems so common sense as they are the ones that can tell us what we should replicate, adapt or abandon.  In 2015 research we found only three World Bank IEG evaluations that asked participants their... in a methodologically clear way (out of 33 post-project PPAR evaluations), and only one was perceived as successful.  On the other hand, in 2014, IRIN highlighted Rwanda’s very successful community based nutrition solu..., replete with participant voices.  We have found 23 ‘catalytic’ (mostly NGO) organizations having done one or more (... and each of them is filled with excellent lessons for doing ‘development’ well now and after closeout. Yet what are any of these organizations doing differently and why are so few doing more? That is what drives me.

 

A seminal book, Time to Listen asked 6,000 such participant-experts in 20 countries what they wanted foreign aid to look like. “Very few people call for more aid; virtually everyone says they want “smarter” aid…. A majority criticize the “waste” of money and other resources through programs they perceive as misguided or through the failure of aid providers to be sufficiently engaged… [it is] a supply-driven approach that squeezes out the views of the recipients, and a focus on spending – both volume and speed, which undermines aid’s ability to listen, learn and adapt to local contexts.”  Sobering stuff. 

 

While Valuing Voices is not profitable (yet?) and growth is slow, I continue to evaluate and advocate, believing that designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating for sustained impact by our true clients is key to successful work life well spent.

 

We need a sustained impact mindset.

 

OXFAM and Save the Children recently wrote “The Power of Ownership: Transforming US Foreign Assistance” (2016). They ask: “country ownership is at the core of effective development… as the United States transitions to a new President and new leadership for development cooperation, how will the next administration build on current successes and chart a path forward?“  I fear the answer, as it takes trust and interest in countries’ capacity to chart their own way forward.  USAID is ready to help. It has some done some exciting work through USAID Forward’s local partners (e.g. Afghanistan has done this in depth) and it has looked at Local SystemsFood For Peace’s strategy includes sustainability.

 

What will be a priority in 2017 onward? What each of us creates will remain.

 

The powerful Sidekick Manifesto beautifully proposes this new core belief which we can each espouse, that “Local leaders with local solutions to local problems” will end poverty. We will not.” We can, however, “always be listening, learning and seeking a deeper understanding…” I am delighted to be a sidekick in projects that prioritize participant and partner views, for that is how they end poverty.

 

What do you want to prioritize and create? What is so vital for you that you must work on it?  What has been neglected?  What difference do you want to make?  GO!

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