Stephanie Mann

Location / Country: Jakarta, Indonesia
Organization: Millenium Challenge Corporation

MANN: "This summer I worked for three months as the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) intern with Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in Jakarta, Indonesia. Millennium Challenge Corporation is a U.S. foreign aid agency with a unique approach to foreign assistance. The MCC Board uses independent and rigorous policy indicators to determine a country’s eligibility for a fixed five-year compact. MCC also requires selected countries to identify their own priorities for achieving sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction. The Indonesia Compact entered into force in April 2013 and is currently in its final year. The Government of Indonesia (GoI) established its three development priorities in the fields of procurement modernization (PM), improved community- based health and reduced childhood stunting, as well as environmentally sustainable, low carbon economic growth (GP). As the M&E intern, I worked mostly with the PM project, in addition to some work with the GP project. ”

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PM Project & Mentoring Sub-Activity

“The Procurement Modernization (PM) Project is designed to accelerate the Government’s procurement reform agenda and transform the operation of the public procurement system in Indonesia. The objective of the project is to support the implementation of the procurement function within the GoI by establishing Procurement Service Units (PSUs) resourced with systems, processes, and skilled procurement professionals as per Presidential Regulations No. 54 introduced in 2010. The expected results of building this capacity within the GoI will be cost savings and efficiency improvements on procured goods and services, while assuring their quality satisfies the public need and that the goods and services are delivered to the public as planned. These savings should lead to more efficient provision of goods and services to the economy, potentially enhancing economic growth.”

Impact:

“In order to carry out the implementation fidelity study, I first attended some PwC trainings to make to establish contacts with the mentors that were involved with this activity. After establishing a rapport with the mentors, I set up times to travel with them for their mentoring activities at various PSUs. I traveled with four different mentors to six different PSUs located on three different islands. I conducted 14 standardized, open-ended interviews with sixteen individuals across the six PSUs. The interviews conducted with mentors discussed their general experience with the mentoring program in all their PSUs, with specific experiences from individual PSUs elaborated on occasionally. The other 10 individuals interviewed were various leaders and structural officers from within the PSU. As the intent of this case study was to document how the mentoring was implemented and the impact of mentoring on the organizational development of the PSU, I interviewed the relevant leadership who worked most closely with the mentor.

I compiled my findings from my interviews and mentoring observations in a twenty-five page report that was used for internal review by MCC’s M&E team and the senior technical advisors of PwC.”

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GP Project

“The Green Prosperity (GP) Project promotes environmentally sustainable, low carbon economic growth as set forth in the Government’s medium- to long-term development plans (RPJP and RPJM), the National Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction Action Plan (RAN-GRK), and Regional Spatial Plans (RTRW) (each a “Plan”). The GP Project will provide a combination of technical and financial assistance to support rural economic development that raises real incomes of Indonesians in a manner that reduces reliance on fossil fuels, improves land management practices, protects natural capital, and complements efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and environmental degradation. “

Impact:

“I worked with the “Window 2” umbrella project, which involved community-based natural resources management (CBNRM) intended to fund smaller-scale projects that promote enhances management of watersheds and forests to improve the sustainability of renewable energy and/or agriculture investments and support rural livelihoods and economic development.”

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Conclusion

“Taken together the internship with MCC Indonesia was an enriching one where I had the opportunity to build upon my background in Indonesia and enhance my language skills in addition to learning about a vast array of new sustainable development issues and cultivating field research skills. Furthermore, the internship has led an employment opportunity for this year. I will be staying on with MCC as a government consultant focusing on the GP project and continuing to travel out to Indonesia during holiday breaks to help with project site visits and assessments. Considering the prodigious expenses of an international unpaid internship, I could not have afforded this opportunity if it were not for Jerry Blakeley’s generosity with the Blakeley Fellowship. I very much look forward to discussing the projects I had the opportunity to be involved with over the summer and thanking Mr. Blakely in person.”

Dristy Shrestha

Country: Tanzania
Organization: BRAC Tanzania

DRISTY: "BRAC is the world’s largest non-governmental development organization measured by the number of employees and the number of people it has helped. It is dedicated to empowering people and communities living in poverty, illiteracy, disease and social injustice through its various programs in areas ranging from microfinance, agriculture and food security, education and more. It currently operates in 11 countries across the globe.

BRAC started its work in Tanzania in 2006 with microfinance and livelihood development programs. In just less than a decade with multiple programs in various sectors ranging from agriculture and food security, education, empowerment and livelihood for adolescents, microfinance and small enterprise program, BRAC has become one of the largest financial institutions in the country.

In June-August 2016, under the supervision of the Program Manager of Microfinance Program, I had the opportunity to work as the Summer Research Intern at BRAC Tanzania. In this role, the main task I was entrusted with was to i) assess the services offered by BRAC Tanzania tailored towards smallholder farmers in the country, and ii) make recommendations to the Country Office based in Dar es Salaam on how to better address the needs and challenges of smallholder farmers in Tanzania."

"Personally, I had an incredibly rewarding summer filled with new challenges, new experiences, and learnings. BRAC is an organization that development practitioners such as myself study a lot about, both inside and outside class. Therefore, the opportunity to experience its activities and inner workings first hand and be a part of its team was a special treat for me. In addition, it was refreshing to explore Tanzania and go beyond my comfort zone into a country, region and continent that I had never been to."

Nashwa Khali

Organization: Vodafone Farmers Club / Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSMA)
Country: Ghana

NASHWA: GSMA1, working with a wide range of mobile network operators and civil society organisations, is launching a series of nutrition-focused m-health and m-agriculture initiatives in South Asia and sub- Saharan Africa, called mNutrition. The objective of mNutrition in mAgri is to create and scale commercially sustainable mobile services enabling smallholder farmers to improve their nutrition, yields and incomes. The product to be delivered and evaluated is the Vodafone Farmers’ Club. The service is a bundled solution offering agricultural information in addition to voice and SMS services. In order to measure the causal impact of the Farmers’ Club product, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) will conduct an external impact evaluation of the mAgri programme in Ghana in November 2016. A randomized encouragement design will be implemented. Specifically, some communities will be randomly assigned to receive additional marketing and promotion of the Farmers’ Club product and some communities will not be assigned to the additional marketing and promotion. The additional marketing and promotion will consist of price discounts, advertisement scripts, and gender targeting.

Rationale for Intervention

The rapid expansion of mobile phone access to populations at the base of the income pyramid presents an unprecedented opportunity to expand coverage of nutrition and agriculture services to this previously overlooked segment of the mobile market. Mobile phones and computer centers are the most targeted channels to provide not only technical and scientific information on crop production and nutrition, but also to support the marketing of products that can help level the playing field between small producers and traders. Agricultural extension services delivered via mobile phones can in theory promote ‘nutrition-sensitive’ interventions by creating competent and efficient farmers who are able to increase productivity by making effective use of knowledge and information which is delivered to them.

Broadly speaking, nutrition-sensitive agriculture is aimed at improving the nutritional status of a population by maximizing the impact of food and of agricultural systems, while minimizing the potential for negative externalities regarding the sector’s economic and production-driven goals. In the last few years there has been a visible trend in agricultural policies and programs to become ‘nutrition-sensitive’ by leveraging agriculture to maximize nutrition impact. Yet there is an identified need to better understand the linkages between agriculture and nutrition, and to decipher the ways in which agriculture can contribute to improved nutrition. Despite the potential of mobile services coupled with agricultural change to improve nutrition and diet quality, very few studies exist that critically assess the application of mobile phone technology for nutrition in resource-poor settings.

Farmers’ Club

Farmers’ Club is a bundled solution offering farmers agricultural and nutrition information in addition to voice and SMS services. The target market Vodafone expects to attract is about 450,000 Farmer Club users by 2016/17 across 8 regions in Ghana: Eastern Region, Western Region, Ashanti Region, Central Region, Northern Region, Volta, Brong-Ahafo, and Greater Accra. Researchers from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) are conducting a rigorous mixed-methods evaluation to estimate the impact of mNutrition and to understand how the context and the components of the mNutrition intervention shape its impact. To estimate the casual impacts of the product on farmer’s behavior, knowledge, nutrition, yields and income, a randomized encouragement design is being implemented where some communities are randomly assigned to receive additional marketing and promotion of the Farmers’ Club product and some are not assigned to the additional marketing and promotion. The additional marketing and promotion will consist of price discounts, advertisement scripts, and gender targeting.

The goal of the impact evaluation is to measure the causal impact of Farmers’ club on behaviors and outcomes linked to nutrition and agriculture. But before a full scale impact evaluation is rolled out; which is resource and time intensive IFPRI decided to do a pilot, which is the leg of the project that I was brought on to do. Essentially the purpose of the pilot was to test the assumptions of the evaluation and related encouragements before they are rolled out for the study and to test willingness to pay for the Farmer club product. As soon as I landed in Ghana I had three priority areas to work on:

1. Build relationships with potential implementing partners and all the involved stakeholders; including Vodafone, The University of Ghana, and ESOKO2

2. Collaborate with Vodafone to do user feedback surveys for existing Farmers’ Club customers. This would help the research team at IFPRI understand the rates of take-up of the service as well as the perceived benefits of subscribing.

3. Set up the IRB3 protocol, as well as pilot evaluation that would allow us to answer the following research questions:

   •   How effective is the Farmer Club at increasing the knowledge and changing the behavior of farmers?

   •   What are the impacts and cost-effectiveness of the Farmer Club product on household’s dietary diversity, agricultural income, and production?

   •   Does targeting women increase impacts over and beyond the impacts of a non-targeted Farmer Club product?

  What is farmer’s willingness to pay for Farmer’s club?

The preliminary data gathered while I was in Ghana evidenced that Farmers’ Club positively enhanced the livelihoods and quality of life of smallholder farmers by improving access to information, financial services and supply chain solutions, delivered via mobile phone. Furthermore the mNutrition component of the intervention promoted behaviour change around key farming decisions and practices via mobile nutrition content.

Lauren Jencik

Country: Malawi
Organization: Project Concern International

LAUREN: "I accepted an offer as a Humanitarian Assistance Fellow with Project Concern International (PCI) in Zomba, Malawi this past summer. Prior to Fletcher, I had lived and worked in the Washington, DC area for years. I studied international affairs in college, held a nearly two-year internship with the State Department, and worked for both a development and then management consulting firm. In other words, my life revolved around the workings of the Beltway both in an academic and practical sense. Part of my why I came to Fletcher was to fully immerse myself in my studies, particularly given the breadth of human security courses. More importantly, I knew that as a full-time student, rather than a part-time student in Washington, DC, my summer would offer the perfect opportunity to finally work overseas. Having worked in the public and private sectors in DC, I was especially interested in working with a non-profit organization that dealt with a complex array of issues around development and disasters; PCI offered the perfect opportunity.

PCI is a mid-size non-profit organization, founded in 1961 by a doctor from San Diego (where the organization is still headquartered today). Per the organization's website, PCI's mission is "to empower people to enhance health, end hunger and overcome hardship." The organization has expanded over the years and covers an array of issues in the increasingly integrated fields of development and humanitarian assistance. One area in which PCI has expertise in humanitarian assistance is Disaster Risk Management (DRM). DRM is led by the notion that communities can be empowered to reduce vulnerability to future shocks and stresses created by disasters. Disasters may include earthquakes or floods or prolonged events including droughts—they can also be the result of conflict or political turmoil. In the case of Malawi, many communities are vulnerable to environmental shocks and stresses due to a combination of factors some of which include economic status, health and well-being, gender, and livelihood. This has been particularly the case more recently as the country has been experiencing a severe drought, brought on by El Nino, and was previously experiencing severe flooding."

"While three months is not enough time to have a major impact within any organization, but especially in a development and humanitarian assistance one, I left PCI at the end of August confident that my work was well-received among my supervisor, fellowship coordinator, and project leadership. During my last week at the office, I was asked by the Chief of Party to provide a debrief to him and the Country Director because both valued my feedback on my experience and wanted to understand the extent of my work for the purposes of ensuring continuity within Njira. Furthermore, as referenced above, I am awaiting a follow up email from my fellowship coordinator, who just wrapped up a visit to Zomba to begin start up of a newly awarded emergency response project. I am optimistic that the conversations that will take place will include discussion of further developing the food security assessment tool and best practices and lessons learned document, as well as ideas for how I can remain engaged on Njira throughout the coming year."

Paroma Husain

Country: Uganda
Organization: BRAC Uganda

PAROMA: "During the last summer I spent almost three months working with the Microfinance programme of BRAC in Uganda. BRAC is an NGO that started as a small post-war rehabilitation operation in the newly born Bangladesh in 1972, and grew to be one of the largest NGOs in the world. BRAC now operates in 12 different countries across Asia and Africa; taking its years of experience from Bangladesh in implementing successful models in various development programs such as health, education, microfinance, and community empowerment into other developing countries.

Uganda is BRAC’s largest and fastest growing operation in Africa. In the last decade, Uganda has grown consistently, at an average rate of 6.4 per cent. It has made significant progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals and is now focusing on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. But approximately 20 per cent of Ugandans still live below the poverty line and they are mostly concentrated in rural areas. While there are a number of financial institutions providing financial services to marginalised groups, they have limited operations in rural areas. With 147 branches all over Uganda and more than 180,000 borrowers served, BRAC Uganda’s microfinance program is one of the biggest in the country and it reaches out to the poorest in both urban and rural areas.1 Besides microfinance, BRAC currently operates programs in small enterprise, agriculture, poultry and livestock, health, education, youth empowerment, adolescent livelihood, and the Karamoja Initiative in Uganda. To date the programs have served 4.4 million people, which is almost 12% of Uganda’s population.2 Before Fletcher, I have been working in BRAC’s microfinance program in Bangladesh. This summer I had the wonderful opportunity to work with and learn from my colleagues in Uganda."

"My three years of experience with BRAC Bangladesh had made me curious to find out how well BRAC can apply its learnings and program models from Bangladesh in a starkly different country context. Working with BRAC Uganda gave me an opportunity to assess the success and failure of BRAC’s international scaling efforts. My overall conclusion is that while there are some things BRAC is doing quite well in its country offices, it can do a much better job in many other aspects. For instance, there is a clear cultural divide between Bangladeshi expats, who generally occupy higher management posts, and the local staff. While the highly standardised operational models were so crucial in BRAC’s amazing success story of scaling in Bangladesh, strict compliance of these standards can overlook the contextual operational needs in a different country. There is also a resource constrain in the mostly donor-depended programs of BRAC International that BRAC Bangladesh does not have to face. As a result,

many effective client oriented programs and monitoring tools that have proven to be effective in Bangladesh cannot be implemented in other BRAC countries. Based on several of these observations, I can make the following recommendations: (The suggestions made in this section are mostly based on interviews with clients and staff members and observations from field visits – which are often anecdotal and not grounded in rigorous studies.)"

Mari Kenton Wright

Country: Malawi
Organization: Population Services International (PSI)

Mari Kenton Wright worked in an M&E manager capacity with responsibility in the Reproductive Health Department for the launch of a family planning social franchise network, SafePlan. She also worked with the Malaria/Child Health team to develop policy and program documents. During her fellowship, she conducted baseline assessments at 30 health clinics, participated in high level policy meetings, and presented policy work to members of Malawi’s parliament.

Mari: “My fellowship experience at PSI greatly re-inforced many of my career goals while helping to refine others. The fellowship allowed me to strengthen my skills in program design, monitoring, and evaluation.”

Elena Fiekowsky

Country: Vietnam

Elana Fiekowsky worked as an impact evaluation specialist at VinaCapital Foundation the summer of 2011. VinaCapital Foundation (VCF) is the corporate foundation for VinaCapital, the largest Vietnamese investment firm. VCF focuses on providing heart surgery to children who would not be able to afford them otherwise, HeartBeat Vietnam, and improving the cardiac healthcare system in Vietnam. VCF also provides a seven year scholarship to ethnic minority girls to ensure that these girls can go finish high school and college, and go on to become role models within their communities’, Brighter Path program.

As an impact evaluation specialist, Elana designed, implemented and analyzed evaluations for their HeartBeat Vietnam and Brighter Path project. To do this work, Elana worked with the program teams to learn what indicators to measure and helped train the team to run and then understand the findings after the evaluations were done. Additionally, Elana helped design program changes in order to increase the rigor and information gathering for these projects.

Michelle

Country: Uganda

Michelle worked with two Kiva microfinance partners, BRAC Uganda and Pearl Microfinance Limited. Her goal as a Fellow was to ensure that each institution accurately represented Kiva and was utilizing Kiva funds efficiently. She saw how Kiva’s mission came together in the field and had significant involvement with top management at both MFIs.

The Fellowship reiterated my previously held belief that microfinance alone cannot solve problems in development, and that access to health systems, education, and good governance among other things, is needed for change to be sustainable.

Evelyn

Country: India

Evelyn conducted field research with World Health Partners in rural India, in support of the social franchise’s efforts to improve access to healthcare using local market forces and cutting-edge technology. Her work in Bihar focused on understanding the organic network of Bihari health providers before the WHP network was to be started. She conducted a baseline survey of existing providers to find out how they were connected to one another, including doctors, pathological labs, pharmaceutical distributors and supply chain components. The goal was to see what gaps, bottlenecks or roadblocks existed. Data included referral practices, impact on patient in terms of cost and patient travel time, cost to patient for four priority diseases so that WHP’s franchise could be as efficient and effective as possible.

Elisabeth

Country: Tanzania

Elisabeth worked for MicroEnsure, a subsidiary of Opportunity International, on a health microinsurance project for poor, small shareholder coffee farmers in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. She assisted the NGO with marketing and communications.

Jaime

Country: Brazil

Jaime worked with Mobile Metrix to define high impact health issues to focus on, validated results of government, NGO, academia and community programs and made recommendations relating to the coordination and cooperation of private and government health organizations.