Several years ago, a friend of mine< Wade Channell, wrote a paper for the Carengie Endowment entitled, “Lessons Not Learned: Problems with Western Aide for Post Communist Countries.”. The main ideas that I took away from the paper are that development workers are lousy at learning from each other. Although we might be friends and socialize together, the world of international development workers does not foster learning. He cited four problems of learning (my comments follow each):
* Incentives for Knowing, But Not for Learning: We are hired for the experience that we already have. In the 20 years I’ve spent working for different international NGOs, no organization has ever paid for any training for me except language classes. Whereas the private sector and even the Federal Government invests heavily in training its employees; NGOs don’t. Additionally, I don’t know of any professional journals related to international development, except for academic ones.
* High Incentives for Repetition, Low Incentives for Innovation: Donors only want to fund proven successes and NGOs write their proposals to satisfy what the donor wants to hear. This is especially critical when entering a competitive bid. The NGOs seek to divine what the donor wants to hear, rather than to come up with the best approach. The Gates Foundation has made significant waves because they are willing to fund projects that take risky approaches.
* High Incentives for Guarding Information: I was recently project director for one of thirteen projects funded by USAID to strengthen local organizations around the world. Each of the 13 organizations was given a five year contract to do similar work–this should have been an ideal learning environment. Instead, there was very little information sharing. Some organizations even refused to share their annual reports claiming that it would expose their trade secrets! Whereas I emailed my annual report and even my midterm evaluation to all of the other implementing organizations, only one and occasionally a second ever reciprocated.
* Disconnection between Performance and Awards: It is very hard to measure how well a program was implemented and whether its successes and failures are do to implementation or luck–I learned long ago that if you have good relations with your donor, you can explain away any failure.
The funny thing with this problem is that the individual development workers are committed to making a difference. It is the rare development worker that does not work long, hard hours trying to make their project a success.
So what is it that keeps us apart? Why aren’t we a stronger tribe? This past year, I watched in dismay as USAID awarded contract after contract to professional consulting firms rather than NGOs. When I talk with my NGO friends, we all believe that we do a better job. USAID says that they cannot see any difference and it’s easier to work with the private sector. That’s a sad statement.
What would happen if we did begin talking to each other about our failures and problems. What if we shared honest case studies–not the trumped up success stories that we have on our websites. Could we use these blogs, discussion groups, and wiki’s to promote this culture of learning and to reward true successes?
Is it already happening somewhere? Post a comment–let me know.
Comments
2 responses to ““Lessons Not Learned” Why don’t NGO workers collaborate more?”
Great post. Great points. Intuitively it feels to me as if there are two kind of interrelated issues:
1) The whole “professionalize aid work” theme of recent years has lead many to adopt practices and behavior of the for-profit sector, assuming that they were one and the same. (In my opinion, they’re not) Practices and behavior about how we share information with the competition, how we disconnect between what actually happens on the ground vs. what we share in PR materials, etc. It’s hard to think one’s way past the reality that this is an incredibly competitive field.
2) In that incredibly competitive context, there’s very little incentive to share information, admit mistakes. We get another round of funding if our programs rock. We blacklisted in a particular country if programs tank. No obvious ways around that one that I can think of, unless donors want to support programs whose entire point is to share information, do honest evaluations, etc?
Thanks Jeff. We work in a sector with distorted incentives. If it were possible to truly measure the quality of our work, we would be far more focused on improving it. The acid test for the for-profit sector is profits–if people won’t pay for your service, you can’t stay in business. However, our clients (beneficiaries) don’t pay for our services and our donors don’t benefit from them. We have no acid test for quality or efficiency.
Your point that if a program tanks, you can get blacklisted is true, but I wish it wasn’t. If we are never allowed to fail, then we are never allowed to take chances. We don’t want “honest evaluations” because we don’t accept failure. Wouldn’t it be better if we could celebrate failure: “I tried this fantastic new approach, but it failed because of x,y and z. I will try again by changing x for … and see if it works.” Instead we say, “My project was a great success. There were some problems, but they were outside my control.” Where is the incentive to learn in this?