Leave No One Behind: Towards the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals in Indonesia

This summer I had the pleasure of working at the Center for Indonesia’s Strategic Development Initiatives (CISDI), an institution serving as the center for national development strategy analysis in Indonesia, which involves studying innovations and strategic initiatives that will help accelerate the implementation and achievement of the 2030 Global Goals on Sustainable Development (SDGs) and the implementation of development interventions specifically in the area of health and youth engagement. As part of their mandate, CISDI facilitates and drives cross-sector collaboration between public, private and civil society organizations that are integrated to achieve development goals that are widespread, equal, and sustainable. 

My fellowship aims to see how CISDI works, as they facilitate multi-stakeholder partnerships on SDGs, as well as the approaches that are taken by the Indonesian government to involve non-state actors, such as youth groups, the private sector, and philanthropic organizations, into the SDGs implementation. I also focus on the strategy to transform these broad global goals into the local development plan, concentrating on public-private partnership and community engagement. 

Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations initiated the SDGs to continue the development efforts after the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ended in 2015. SDGs are a series of 17 ambitious goals to sustain the planet and humanity and aim to integrate and balance the three dimensions of development: economic, social, and environmental. SDGs are a universal set of goals, targets, and indicators that UN member states are expected to utilize in their development agendas and political policies over the next 15 years. Considering the importance of this agenda for the future, an active role and participation of all stakeholders in development are required to ensure effective implementation at a national level. At the same degree of importance, the willingness and strategies needed to translate this new goal into national development agenda. Indonesia has started the process of adopting the SDGs to integrate the targets into their national development planning with initiating the Presidential Decree on SDGs, which hopefully will bridge partnership among stakeholders.

I began my fellowship in Indonesia with a solid start; I was participating in the official government summit on “Collaboration and Action to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals in Indonesia.” This summit was organized by the Ministry of National Development Planning and was supported by the University of Indonesia and Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It has managed to build the foundation and is raising awareness of development stakeholders on the importance of partnership to transform the goals into a national and local development agenda.

In line with building multi-stakeholder partnerships, CISDI as the former Office of President’s Special Envoy on MDGs has been working to facilitate partnerships among stakeholders and building collaborations to ensure Indonesia’s substantial presence and leadership throughout the formulation process of the SDGs. The approach has been taken with developing policy and advocacy, public consultations, information dissemination, monitoring on the plan of action, research, and participating as the key civil society actor on the development of the Presidential Decree.

A major question asked regarding this issue when it comes to the private sector is why are the SDGs relevant to the private sector?

It is relevant, particularly in this rapidly evolving global environment where information is open and free for everyone. Nowadays, the private sector is exposed to greater risks and different social expectations. The private sector is increasingly driven to make use of Corporate Social Responsibility, to make efficient use of the resources, and to work in a sustainable manner that will not harm the environment and surrounding stakeholders. SDGs in this matter can act as guiding principles for the work of private sector and provide a platform for the private sector to implement long-term goals and partnerships that will make a significant contribution towards achieving sustainable development for all. On the other hand, the SDGs have come to represent an important opportunity for the development community to engage strategically with the private sector.

My work with CISDI on SDGs also focused on two forms: strengthening the discussion about SDGs in social media by administrating the official SDGs Indonesia Twitter account, @IndonesiaSDGs, and assisting CISDI in developing one of its initiatives “Partnership Mapping for Development/#PetaKemitraan.”

Social Media Engagement

Indonesia is a vibrant country with an estimated population of 260 million. According to We Are Social, as of 2016, Indonesia has 34 percent Internet penetration with more than 326.3 million mobile phones, which means most Indonesians have one or more phones. Indonesia is also a mobile-first country, where many people are discovering the Internet for the first time from the mobile phone through their Facebook or Twitter account. This is an untapped opportunity to spread positive news and increase engagement. This is the idea behind the @IndonesiaSDGs account. It shares news, information and the ways of engagement on SDGs to Indonesians in social media. Even though most of the posts are in Indonesian, you still can follow this account to see the Indonesia’s perspective on SDGs.

#PetaKemitraan

The other work that I did with CISDI was assisting this organization for the launch of the Partnership Mapping for Development or known by Indonesians as #PetaKemitraan. This is a consolidated online map showcasing the details of the dynamic development in every province in Indonesia. This map will ensure that the public and relevant stakeholders have access to an integrated reference that is open and readily available to learn about the different national development issues – related to the 17 goals of SDGs. The public can understand key problems and challenges unique to some areas, what has been done to overcome these challenges, and the stakeholders involved in resolving these challenges. This reference is essential in helping each actor involved in designing, planning, and executing their programs for a better Indonesia. The stakeholders in this initiative are divided into public/government, the private sector and philanthropic organizations, youth groups and academia, and civil society organizations.

The Role of 65 Million

The second fold of my fellowship is to see the involvement of young people in Indonesia’s development program on various issues such as education, health, and entrepreneurship. In Indonesia’s context, Law No. 40 of 2009 on Youth categorized young people defined as 16-30 years old. There are 65 million young people in Indonesia, constituting 33 percent of Indonesia’s total population.

Participation is a basic right for young people, but questions arise about its most fundamental phenomena. What is inclusive youth participation, who are the participants, what do they do, and with what outcomes? When we say that youth meaningfully participates, is it about “youth-led activity,” “civic engagement,” or simply when we have young people on the table? I learned during my fellowship that CISDI has answers to these questions through their Open Government Initiatives award-winning program “Pencerah Nusantara.” 

Pencerah Nusantara is a movement initiated by the Office of the President’s Special Envoy of the Republic of Indonesia on MDGs in 2011, with an essential aim of accelerating the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals through strengthening the delivery of primary healthcare. Pencerah Nusantara is represented by a selected group of young people, which comprises general practitioners, nurses, midwives, and health advocates from a spectrum of academics background, voluntarily dedicating their expertise to strengthen primary healthcare centers and build the capacity of communities under the designated area. 

I got an opportunity to visit and work together with one Pencerah Nusantara team in Pototano, West Nusa Tenggara and to see their direct contribution to the local community in this area. I wrote a complete observation (in Indonesian) of my experience for CISDI’s website. With this opportunity, it is evident to me that youth participation is a pre-condition for sustainable development and the youth need to be co-owners of the future. Inclusive participation will not see youth as an object or target, but more in developing a mutual partnership with young people as a subject and partner to development. 

Finally, sustainable development goals cannot be achieved by governments alone. It requires the collaboration of various stakeholders such as the private sector and civil society and includes young people. It is critical to put sustainable and inclusive development as the core, but we have to make sure that this includes investment in individuals whose potential must be realized.

Thank you Blakeley Foundation for this opportunity!

Pathways to Sustainable Food Security in Southern Malawi

It's hard to believe that I am already in the third week of what is proving to be an incredible, challenging, eye-opening, dynamic, and enriching experience with Project Concern International (PCI) in Malawi. This summer I am supporting the mid-size NGO, that hails from San Diego, as a Humanitarian Assistance Fellow. Broadly speaking, my role is focused on helping implement Njira, a large multi-year USAID-funded integrated food security project in Southern Malawi. Given that the country is experiencing the worst drought in nearly two decades, and my area of focus is primarily in Disaster Risk Management, I couldn't have joined the project at a better time.

Now, let's back up a moment. What exactly is an integrated food security project? And what does Njira mean? Well, to start Njira is Chichewa (Malawi's official language) for 'pathways.' Through Njira, PCI seeks to empower its beneficiaries so that they are better equipped to access resources to achieve lasting food security through the use of pathways. These pathways are contextual and adjusted over time given the needs of a particular community.

As an integrated food security program, Njira has three purposes or objectives that link to its overall goal of achieving lasting food security: increased access and availability of vulnerable households to diverse and nutritious foods (Purpose 1); improved health and nutrition of pregnant and lactating women and children under five (Purpose 2); and improved resilience of vulnerable households to shocks and stresses (Purpose 3). As such, the program has been divided into three Purpose teams (with a cross-cutting team that works on issues pertaining to gender, the environment, monitoring and evaluation, and behavioral change).  The theory of change (or causal relationship) that underlies all of this is that specific food insecure and vulnerable populations (defined by characteristics including sex, household wealth rank, and livelihood zone) an achieve sustainable food security if pathways effectively combine "empowerment" and "access" strategies that are tailored to meet a vulnerable group's needs and opportunities. 

All of that is certainly a tall order for PCI and when I first read through the technical narrative while traveling to Malawi, I felt a bit overwhelmed. Questions such as, where do I fit in? How is PCI working to achieve all this? Where is the project in its implementation phase? And most importantly, what have been the biggest challenges of the program? 

Since arriving, my time in Zomba, Malawi has been a whirlwind of an experience hence the late timing of my first blog post. Immediately upon meeting my supervisor when I arrived three weeks ago, I was told I'd be in the "field" for my first week. As someone who has never worked overseas and selected this opportunity with PCI partly because of that gap, I was shocked and excited to be diving right in to things so quickly. Furthermore, I quickly learned that I would also be accompanying my supervisor in conducting brief assessments of the communities we were visiting. While my supervisor would monitor and assess progress on the implementation of a series of activities, I'd be doing the same for another set of activities-which means I'd be directly engaging with Njira's targeted communities. Having taken multiple courses and studied issues around participation in development programs, I was amazed to finally have the opportunity to get a glimpse of this process. 

Nonetheless, diving right into the thick of the project has meant that I've had to do a lot of prep work and constantly ask a lot of questions to determine my role and purpose in supporting PCI with implementing Njira. While my day-to-day work seems to change almost daily, I think I finally have a strong grasp on my role. Having outlined the scope and structure of Njira above, my priority is to help my supervisor Burnnet Khulumbo, the Disaster Risk Management (DRM) Advisor in implementing and overseeing all work that falls under Purpose 3:  Improved resilience of vulnerable households to shocks and stresses. Improved resiliency to shocks and stresses in southern Malawi is crucial, particularly over the past year. Given the devastating impacts of El Nino on a country, who's main livelihood is still agriculture, many people are extremely vulnerable to a loss of livelihood as a result of drought and other El Nino-impacts. 

Thus, the work under Purpose 3 is working to ensure that Njira's targeted communities are better equipped and capable in utilizing disaster risk reduction and management tools and mechanisms. This can include the use of disaster risk management plans or contingency plans (e.g. if a flood strikes, how will the community respond?) and the use of improved practices that prevent further degradation of the environment (which in effect increases a community's vulnerability to environmental shocks and stresses) such as the use of drought resistant crops or no longer using river banks for irrigation systems.

In helping to oversee implementation of activities to align to these areas, I am also assessing how PCI is managing its DRM work. So far this has included assessing the DRM Plan templates being distributed to 'beneficiaries'  of the program, developing a meeting minutes template to ensure that the communities are keeping consistent information on DRM work when they meet, and briefing all office staff including our Chief of Party on achievements and gaps in meeting Purpose 3's objectives in Fiscal Year 2016 and opportunities for Fiscal Year 2017. Over the coming weeks, I will continue to travel to 'the field,' or really the Traditional Authorities in Balaka and Machinga Districts (for context, Malawi has 28 districts, which are comprised of about 250 TAs) to conduct rapid food security assessments, which are reported to USAID,  but will also feed into an overall assessment of how PCI is working to reduce vulnerability of Malawians through its Njira project. I am also documenting best practices and lessons learned based on how PCI's staff, through the use of a 'Dynamic Team' approach in implementation of DRM activities. The final product will be a report as well.

Additionally, to help ensure that TAs are adequately prepared to prevent, manage, and/or respond to disasters, I am leading PCI staff in the development of a contingency planning exercise, which we will pilot on two TAs later this summer. And finally, another major deliverable will be developing a framework for PCI staff t that combines scientific knowledge of DRM and technology with indigenous or local knowledge of DRM. This is crucial as it promotes a framework for DRM that is not solely based on outsider knowledge, but rather is inclusive of mechanisms and processes the TAs have been using for several years. In the meantime, I will continue to work on small tasks and responsibilities that come up. As a student studying gender analysis at Fletcher, I am also seeking opportunities to work with PCI's gender advisor and particularly focus on how DRM activities are considering gender dynamics (e.g. thinking of how men and women participate in DRM and how men and women are affected differently by disasters). While this is a lot to accomplish in less than three months, I am excited to be in such a large, interesting, complex, and challenging project. The work Njira hopes to accomplish is critical to Malawi's food security; despite the challenges to implementation, the experience will be enriching from a learning perspective. I hope that at the very least, that my insights from the classroom and prior work experience can contribute positively to Njira.

While this was certainly a long overdue post, I will do my best (internet pending) to keep everyone apprised of Njira's work. Stay tuned for more!

Entrepreneurship in Central America

Hello Blakeley Blog,

I just finished my first two weeks with TechnoServe in Managua, Nicaragua. TechnoServe is an International NGO that works to improve the lives of business owners and farmers. Their motto is, "Business Solutions to Poverty." TechnoServe works throughout Latin America, Africa, and India. 

I am working closely with a project called Impulsa Tu Empresa - in English "Boost Your Business." Impulsa Tu Empresa is a business accelerator program to help grow small and growing businesses. Entrepreneurs entering the program do between $20,000-$2,000,000 USD in sales per year and on average have 14 employees.

Broadly, the program works like this: Entrepreneurs first work with TechnoServe "technicians" to develop a growth strategy. This lasts about three months. Then, these technicians work with the individual businesses on implementation. This is called "aftercare." The program is one year long. Most of the 2015-2016 cohort is just finishing up. In this region, the program is running in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. 

Officially, I am part of the TechonServe Volunteer Consultant Program. TechnoServe calls these people "VolCons." My consulting assignment is to work with their Central American offices on their entrepreneurship strategy for the region. Over the next two months I will be traveling around the region talking to entrepreneurs about their experience starting and growing their business in order to recommend the best intervention strategies.

This past week, however, I got the chance to join another project team to see the work TechnoServe is doing with smallholder dairy farmers. This project is called GANE and is in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Many of the farms we visited were located around the city of Wappy. We talked with farmers about GANE and challenges facing smallholder famers in the region. TechnoServe works throughout the supply chain. This meant that we also met with microfinance institutions, cooperatives, a mayor of a small city, and cheese and yogurt producers. I am not a dairy expert, so it was interesting to learn about things like incentivizing "trazabilidad" ("traceability" - tracking cattle with ear tags), and strategies for optimizing pasture quality.

Overall, being in the field was a great experience. I met some of the people TechnoServe works with got a better feel for the operations of the organization.

La Fundacion para la Innovacion Agraria

This summer I will be working with La Fundacion para la Innovacion Agraria (FIA), or in English, The Foundation for the Innovation of Agriculture. This is an organization that provides Chilean farmers with climate-smart agriculture technology to mitigate climate change and stimulate development in rural communities.  My role over the course of eight weeks will be to propose a new line of tools for potential development in Chile.

Specifically, this work includes understanding the current instruments and tools used in Chile financed by FIA and other organisations, such as the Chilean Ministry of Environment and Agriculture. Of particular emphasis is finding tools that will work specifically for Chilean farmers and the Chilean cultural context. This, in combination with understanding what tools are being used elsewhere, will serve as a foundation for this new proposal.

Currently, I am in St. George’s, Grenada at the Blue Growth Conference, hosted by the Government of Grenada and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This conference serves to give me a better understanding of what kinds of tools are being used in the realm of climate smart technology and systems, for the comparative part of my work for FIA. This is a great opportunity to kick off my internship with FIA, meeting with and learning from the leaders in this space. Of particular interest have been the GIS and debt-for-nature conversion tools, which are relatively newer and something I will explore further over the summer.  

Experiencing María la Baja: Empowerment and Local Associations as Engines of Development in Colombia’s Montes de María

A couple of weeks after my internship with Ayuda en Acción (AeA) began, I traveled with the AeA team to the community of María la Baja in Montes de María. The purpose of the visit was to evaluate the performance of the local NGO "Corporación de Desarrollo Solidario" (CDS) in pushing forward the objectives outlined in their Triennial Intervention Plan (PIT).

Despite having analyzed María la Baja’s PIT the previous week, it was shocking to feel that I knew nothing about the place, about the processes that were taking place. Yes, I had read about the region’s needs. Yes, I knew what projects were being implemented. Yes, I was briefed on CDS’s accomplishments in previous years. However, when I arrived to María la Baja, I felt that I had missed something huge: the essence of María la Baja and its people. The paramount difference between reading a document and actually experiencing that specific reality was astounding. 

Experiencing what “empowerment”, “advocacy” and “associativity” actually look like simply blew me away. As one of the regions of Colombia that were more severely struck by armed conflict, María la Baja endured decades of displacement, disappearances, mass murders, paramilitarism, poverty and complete state abandonment. Despite of, or maybe in response to, this devastating past, advocacy and local associations have become the core of all the processes that take place in the community. It was as if years of devastation led them to believe that it was up to them, and up to them alone, to make things better. Peasant leaders, youth, teachers, and women associations entirely empowered of their processes: working together, brainstorming, drafting plans to be passed to municipal authorities.

In addition to the tenacity and determination of the people of María la Baja, CDS has, without a doubt, had a central role in helping community members see themselves as the holders of rights and agents of their development. CDS is a truly base organization that has worked for decades in the region having horizontality, empowerment, work with youth and local associations as its pillars. To give a sense of the air that is breathed in the community, during my days in María la Baja many men and women came up to me, introduced themselves and asked me who I was and why I was there. It was interesting because it wasn’t the unfortunate, but common, vertical relationship between aid agencies and communities. It was a one to one conversation. They had questions, they had priorities, they envisioned themselves in certain ways and were working persistently to materialize these projections.  

Riding at the back seat of a motorcycle in a dusty road, at 95°F, surrounded by mosquitoes, and not knowing what we would have as our next meal, I felt complete, fulfilled, inspired. It was such a blessing to be able to experience a facet of my country that I had never experienced, to listen to these people’s stories, to learn about how they live and the obstacles they face. I left Montes de María with so many new questions and so many new ideas. Eager to return to Colombia’s burning suns and contribute to improving the wellbeing of communities such as María la Baja. 

Geospatial Data for Development in Peru

As an AidData Summer Fellow hosted by USAID/Peru, I quickly realized the auspicious timing of my fellowship. I was working with USAID to collect and analyze subnational development data in a country where geospatial data had recently become a national priority. Just a few weeks into my fellowship, I attended an event launching the Spatial Data Infrastructure of Peru, known by its spanish acronym, IDEP. I learned that work done by the regional governments to catalogue and publish their datasets for public consumption had been integrated with national data in a single comprehensive platform.

The IDEP initiative is representative of two paradigm shifts in the government of Peru: (1) Applying spatial data analysis to key policy areas like economic growth and domestic security; and (2) Adopting open data norms of access and accessibility. USAID/Peru seeks a similar change in its work with Peruvian NGOs, civil society organizations, and government agencies. Specifically, the Mission aims to develop competencies in geospatial data and analysis in order to improve the design, monitoring, and evaluation of its programming in Peru. This is related to USAID's agency-wide push for a geographic approach to development. As a Blakeley Fellow, I was thrilled to play a small part in helping to advance this long-term goal and to see how one of the world's largest aid agencies was collaborating with Peruvian organizations to advance development.

With over 50 years experience in the country, USAID/Peru has worked closely with the Peruvian government and NGO community on initiatives in the fields of environment, democracy & governance, health, education, and alternative development. However, the Mission has long struggled to effectively answer the question of where they work, which is key to both strategic planning and reporting. Internally, this lack of location information may hinder cooperation between technical offices working in the same geographic areas on interdependent programs. Externally, the organization is not adequately equipped to report subnational activity data and impact to relevant partners or beneficiaries.

Thus, the top priority for the Program Office at USAID/Peru was to develop an online map of all their activities in Peru, at a subnational level. This first involved gathering location information and geocoding activities across four technical offices. To ensure the sustainability of the project, we simultaneously sought to improve data collection and management of all project-related information from budget to geographic location. The design of a new internal activities database was critical in achieving this. Additionally, it was important to train Mission staff in ArcGIS Online, as this software is supported by the USAID GeoCenter in DC.

When I shared the new Activities Database and Map with USAID/Peru staff, I was encouraged by their enthusiasm. Simply seeing where other technical offices were working sparked dialogue. During and after trainings attended by key staff members from each office, we held conversations around spatial questions and how they may inform the Mission's development objectives in Peru.

But what does all this mean for local organizations who implement these projects? On one hand, USAID relies on its partners in Peru to report accurate location information so they may utilize GIS to inform investment decisions. More importantly, however, USAID now has the capacity to help its many partners monitor their progress, communicate their impact, and plan for future projects. Given the national focus on sharing geospatial data in Peru, I hope USAID/Peru and its implementing partners will continue to develop their capacity and ultimately reach more Peruvians with development solutions.

Assisting Brazil on its path to become the country of the future

"Brazil is the country of the future – and always will be.” So goes a saying recognizing that despite Brazil’s great potential, the country is stuck in structural problems.

Five years ago, Brazil was on the rise, looking into a bright future fueled by economic growth and the prospects of becoming a major oil exporter. This mindset has changed given that the economy is shrinking by up to 1.5% in 2015; the Real has lost over half of its US Dollar value during the past four years; inflation is scratching double digits; corruption lingers in the highest levels of the political elite; human rights abuses in the favelas and towards minorities remain the rule; and the challenges of the next mega-event, the 2016 Olympics, are around the corner.

Up until today, Brazil has failed to translate its potential, ranging from its young population of 200 million, to massive natural resources and enormous soft power, into sustainable economic and  social policies. Curiously, the largest food exporter in the world is not able to feed its own population. The country of roughly the size of the EU is troubled with distributing its abundant territory. Brazil's sweet water reserves are enormous, but major cities remain without water. These problems, together with social disparity, inefficient public institutions, and shocking security problems animated young Brazilians to take to the streets in 2013 to protest investments in soccer stadiums instead of education and public transportation. 

It is a crucial moment to make Brazil more competitive through wise investment policies, as well as advanced transparency, education and public infrastructure. This is why I decided to intern for the Brazil Office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS), a German NGO dedicated to political freedom and economic development. Operating out of Rio de Janeiro and funded by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, KAS has a track record training social entrepreneurs, as well as supporting transparency and socioeconomic development.

During my time at KAS, I was able to experience the full scope of work of the foundation abroad. I was impressed with the expertise of the analysts ranging from security to economic development. KAS is uniquely positioned, offering access to both communities and policymakers. By bringing stakeholders together, KAS aims to empower small businesses to be engines of growth by helping them to shape mechanisms to finance infrastructure projects, by streamlining local requirements to encourage investment, and by considering community needs. Hereby, the foundation is focusing on a number of innovative projects. Let me present you some of them: 

- "Virtual Democracy" -  The Internet and social media is gaining increasing importance and is leading to many social dynamics. KAS wants to understand and promote the impact of social media and innovative governance tools on policymaking and institutional effectiveness on all levels of the government. Hereby, KAS is initiating dialogue with various experts across the country to discuss how governments, businesses and entrepreneurs are reacting and adapting to these technological and social changes.

- "CB 27" - Brazil has become a front runner in fighting climate change and reducing carbon emissions. However, the country faces major differences in coping with its proclaimed goals. While states in the south of Brazil have proven very successful to implement environmentally friendly policies, such as recycling initiatives, the northern parts of the country (especially in the Amazon) do not have the capabilities to match the success of the south. In order to share best practices among the local stakeholders KAS brings together all of the 27 state governments, along with experts of the private and NGO sector on a regular basis.

- “PSDB Mulher” - The aim is to enable politically engaged women - and those who are keen to become so - to fight for their interests on the political agenda with confidence and to become more involved in opinion-building processes.

Interestingly, just a few weeks before I finished my internship, KAS received a major EU grant that can support projects for the following years. The foundation is currently seeking for a right partner at the municipal level to initiate and implement projects relating to economic and social reforms. While the focus of this grant is rather vague, a KAS team is working to specify where the money can have the most impact. It is amazing how much effort it takes to apply and manage these grants. But having worked with an enthusiastic team of young social entrepreneurs dedicated to Brazil's future, I am convinced that KAS will have a continuing impact on the country's development.

The time at KAS has been very rewarding, not only because I learned a lot about project management, stakeholder management and innovation through the work with my highly experienced colleagues. But also because I believe that I have become part of the solution to some of Brazil's problems. Of course, a German NGO can only have a limited impact on the country's development, but I am certain that we are helping to move Brazil into the right direction to become a country of the future.

Let's make data systems more inclusive.

Data is not for donors. 
Data is not for headquarters.
Data is not for evaluators. 

From paper to Excel to cloud-based systems such as Salesforce, Dev Results, and dhis2, there are currently various tools and systems social impact organizations are using to monitor and collect data to meet their programming and reporting needs. No matter which platform organizations use, a major dilemma with current monitoring systems or software is unequal representation throughout the implementation process, particularly due to an increased focus on the outputs of the tool being implemented. Under these conditions, the process fails to adequately represent an organization's data flow, which begins and ends with the everyday users themselves. More often than not, folks who actually enter data are not part of the decision-making process, design, or adaptation process of new tools. They are simply involved at the end, during training. Not only is this a consulting and implementation dilemma, but also one for designers and developers, who receive feedback from an ailing process. What’s currently dead wrong about the thinking and monitoring systems available today are that they are marketed to, and sometimes built for, the wishes of donors and decision-makers. This leads to systems and implementers flaunting eye-catching graphs, mobile apps, time savings or increased productivity. These selling points are never as valuable as having clean data or strong user adoption, which cannot be achieved without equal and consistent input from an organization's entire user base. Without clean data and strong user adoption, the international development field is a junkyard of failed, drawn out, abandoned or over budget tool implementations. In order for new tools and systems to be more effective, the missing requirement is a more inclusive process in how these tools are marketed, developed, and implemented. 

The day in and day out programmatic level is the most critical part of your organizations data flow. In order to truly get the most out of any monitoring tool or system, data collection needs to be optimized for your organizations daily data needs, specifically for the roles of enumerators, secretaries, and database administrators. These roles should be at the table during the selection and decision-making process for a new  tool or system, and must be involved throughout the implementation. Once tools and processes are optimized from this perspective, results can flow upstream, providing a stronger data chain with more proficient users. Aside from saving time and money spent on fixing and updating systems, this will lead to stronger user adoption, which must be a top priority for any implementation. 

Furthermore, not only is the decision-making and implementation process often flawed, but the thinking that goes behind implementing a new monitoring tool or system also does not usually flow downstream. This has to do with the questions folks want and need answers to across different levels within the organization. The thinking and questions that a monitoring and evaluation manager, CIO, or country director wish to answer should flow downstream towards end users, regardless of the tool, system or software being used. As new tools are implemented, the thinking behind their purpose typically gets diluted into simple training for use down the road. Throughout an implementation, this can be improved by giving all users the necessary agency to adapt tools and the ability to provide feedback at any time during the process. Listen to this feedback and address it. Enumerators, secretaries, and database administrators should feel that the better the data they can collect and manage to answer the questions they have, get the insights they need, and generate the reports they want, the more headquarters, donors, and the international development sector as a whole can work towards better results. This awareness and proficiency with new tools will allow an organization to take full advantage of healthy monitoring and evaluation systems. 

In order to effectively use any platform, we must work to make data processes, data thinking, and data implementations more inclusive. This begins and ends with the everyday user. 

Funding in the middle: Rwanda and the age of social impact

This summer I have had the pleasure of working at Inkomoko, a business accelerator for Rwandan SMEs, which operates under the umbrella of AEC (African Entrepreneur Collective).  As part of their core set of business services, Inkomoko supplies SMEs with a mentor, usually a graduate student or young professional, to help the business grow.  So, when I arrived on the 25th of June, all I knew was that I was going to be embedded with a pork processor and a rice miller.  Being a central part of Inkomo’s package has been both an honor and a responsibility that has given me unrivaled access to the bustling and sometimes troubled world of Rwandan entrepreneurs in the agriculture sector.  

It is hard to distil 7 weeks (so far) into one blog post, so instead I will stick to one main observation.  Rwanda has a funding gap.  Simply put, interest rates are too high for most businesses to take out loans, which leaves the government, non-profits and foundations trying to pick up the slack. Though my time here has been limited, I have now seen this system function and sometimes fail.  Below is a slice from one client this summer.

The Rice Mill

HPS&B is a medium sized rice mill located in the Ruhango district of Rwanda about one and a half hours from Kigali.  They process paddy rice from the countryside into white rice for mass consumption across the district and the capital alike.  Started with personal funds and small loans from Inkomoko they grew tremendously in the first two years of operation.  But at the end of the 2014 season they realized that without a large injection of working capital they were doomed to small profits and slow growth, producing rice well above the international market price. 

Unfortunately at 18% interest with hidden fees, conventional bank loans were simply not an option.  Worse yet, rice is produced throughout the season, with continuous purchases necessary to keep sufficient stocks of raw material. So, paying back a loan month by month is a difficult prospect, rather they would need a loan they could repay at the end of the season at a reasonable rate. 

Different financing, different metrics

As luck would have it, just before I arrived, HPS&B was able to secure patient debt financing from two non-conventional sources.  The first was AEC, which offered its first mid-sized loan ever to HPS&B.  Though USD 50,000 may seem like a lot for a beginning rice mill, this was still only enough to buy and process less than a quarter of their desired seasonal output.  Though a seemingly tall order, they eventually secured a loan to fulfill most of their needs from the RaboBank foundation at 8% interest for 5 months, which was disbursed in May.

AEC’s loan was only available because of HPS&B’s ongoing involvement in Inkomoko.  As a result of this long and fruitful multi-year arrangement AEC felt comfortable offering a large slice of working capital at a relatively low rate.  Only very few companies have the privilege of accessing such financing.  As for RaboBank foundation, even fewer for-profit enterprises have such opportunities. 

As a foundation, RaboBank wants to see that their money is put to good use—and income to entrepreneurs is just not enough.  So in addition to running a business, the foundation expected the company to track a set of social indicators from its participating cooperatives.  Short on staff, I took on the project to help devise and administer a survey to all of their cooperatives to demonstrate the social benefit of their business on the communities with which they work. 

In order to access this sort of patient and cheap debt, HPS&B had to be more than good business people with a profitable prospect.  They had to cast themselves as a social and financial benefit to their constituencies.  They had to prove it to funders. They had to create long relationships with Inkomoko.  And ultimately, they had to devote resources and time to collect data and give me access to their every functioning.  This is no doubt a high bar for an 8% loan.

The future of Africa - looking back at three months in Nairobi and the Obama visit

As my remaining time in Nairobi is running out quickly (three more weeks) I am starting to get nostalgic looking back at a very busy and very fulfilling summer. I will take with me countless of memories and lessons learned. The project I worked on over the summer was extremely rewarding and relevant and in retrospect the late nights and weekends in front of Excel and Powerpoint all well worth it considering how much impact I alone was able to deliver over only three months. And despite the busy work schedule I still managed to find time in the evenings to connect with local entrepreneurs and learn about their ideas not only for great technology platforms but, more importantly, for businesses that generate enormous social impact and profits. Lastly, there was no way to spend three months in Kenya this summer and be able to avoid the frenzy around Obama’s first visit to the country as a president. I wrote about his visit extensively in my last post, today I want to focus on what remains after the helicopters and motorcades left.

During his public appearances in Nairobi, Obama delivered some tough-love messages. He challenged Kenya to tackle three major problems in particular: corruption, sexism, and internal division. Obama's words resonated with me as, unfortunately, I had to experience or witness all three of these problems in some sort of form during my time here. At his appearance at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, Obama struck a more positive tone: "People are being lifted out of poverty, incomes are up, the middle class is growing and young people like you are harnessing technology to change the way Africa is doing business." Adding, “the future of Africa is up to Africans,” and that they should not look “to the outside for salvation.”

The future of Africa is up to Africans. I must have heard that line more than a hundred times during my time here and by now, after three months, have come to understand how true this prediction will turn out to be. In my work, both internally within my organization and in the interaction and work with clients, I engaged with exceptional colleagues and counterparts. From the very beginning of my engagement, I was impressed with how knowledgeable, experienced and confident my peers were. It was my Kenyan counterparts who made my engagement here in Nairobi such an outstanding learning experience and shortly into my time here I had realized that – while I would be able add significant value over the summer – there may be no need for me to come back here after my graduation from Fletcher. Kenyans are already able to source ample talent locally to tackle the countries’ development and public health problems themselves; and going forward they will see little need to fly in Americans or Europeans to do the work for them.

And that is certainly good news. Not so much for me, as I have embraced this country and its people – but its great news for the region. If Kenya can get it right, then neighbors like Tanzania or Uganda will only benefit and eventually the entire East African region will transform. This is not going to happen next month or next year but it will happen much sooner than I thought before I got here. The role of technology will be transformative in this process and I will be eagerly following the stories of the energetic entrepreneurs I met over the past months and likely regret not having invested into their ventures.

Social Impact of Storytelling in Rwanda

Rwanda. Recently hailed the 7th most efficient country worldwide by the World Economic Forum. Globally recognized as the nation with the greatest number of women in parliament at an impressive rate of 64%. Celebrated as one of the only countries on track to meet all its Millennium Development Goals by the end of the year. Without a doubt, an absolutely incredible place to spend the summer working with a small, innovative start-up that will one day impact millions.

The women of Rwanda have been essential agents of change leading the impressive progress the country has made in the last 20 years. Resonate believes that all women have the potential to lead change in their lives and communities, and uses storytelling workshops to empower women and girls to generate change and become leaders. As an intern with Resonate, I have the great fortune of working with three extraordinary Rwandan women who have overcome incredible personal challenges and have become examples of leading change in their own lives and the lives of others.

Gender equality has significant economic and social benefits, and many countries and organizations around the world are striving for this to optimize their growth and development. While Rwanda currently has a high percentage of women in parliament, the leadership gap is still significant at the sector and community levels. Resonate’s storytelling workshops address the issue of gender inequality at the local level.

I have seen the power of engaging women at the community level firsthand through the wide range of responsibilities I’ve had as an intern.  Assisting with Resonate’s Storytelling for Leadership training allowed me to hear the stories of courage told by women who have overcome extraordinary obstacles. Creating a monitoring and evaluation system for Resonate’s leadership camp pilot project exposed me to the impact the organization has made in local communities. Coordinating communications and marketing has enabled me to share these incredible stories and to promote the amazing work the women of Resonate are doing to catalyze change in Rwanda.

My time working with Resonate has been a very inspiring and educational experience. Although I’ve gained countless insights, I’d like to share a few of the most important lessons I’ve learned about working with a small but mighty social impact organization.

Make every effort to understand the local context.

No doubt you’ve heard this before, but Resonate personifies this advice. Resonate leads by example using an approach that prioritizes working side by side with local women to support their efforts to bring the kind of community change they want to see. Resonate’s founder is from the US, but she has made a concerted effort to surround herself with incredible Rwandan women that serve as lead trainer, operations manager, and operations intern. Working with these women has helped me to understand the importance of asking the right questions and carefully listening to the answers. It may require a longer discussion to arrive at mutual understanding, but I guarantee the time is worth the effort. Understanding the local context and listening to the perspectives of local stakeholders is essential for any social impact organization to be successful in the long-term.

Evaluate, take a step back, evaluate again.

It seems like everyone is talking about program monitoring and evaluation these days – and for good reason. Organizations want to ensure their efforts are creating positive social change and they want to quantify their impact. The ability to measure change effectively also contributes to securing the vital funding from donors and grant programs often needed to continue their work. Small social impact organizations should start by determining the primary outcome they want to measure and focus on doing that well. Although everyone appreciates quantifiable numbers, do not underestimate the utility of mixed methods approaches. Resonate has learned a great deal about opportunities for impact from focus groups and individual interviews. Keep in mind that designing effective M&E systems can be especially challenging in international contexts where differences in language exist. Collaboration with your local team is essential in ensuring that your measurement tools actually measure what you’ve designed them to measure. Take the time to talk it out.

Your idea can make a significant impact.

Resonate was founded on the belief that storytelling is an effective tool to help women and girls build self-confidence and develop leadership skills. After two years of listening to local partners, working through curriculum changes, and responding to local needs, the organization has successfully impacted the lives of over 800 women and girls. Resonate is changing the concept of leadership in Rwandan society by expanding the context of leadership beyond formal positions in government or business to the individual and community levels. The women and girls Resonate works with have discovered the courage to go back to school, seek new employment opportunities, take on new leadership roles at home, and lead change in their lives and communities. All change starts with an idea. Like Resonate, you have the power to create the change you believe in.

Rwanda will undoubtedly continue to prosper. Ensuring gender equality at all levels and supporting women as change-makers in their communities is essential for the country’s success. Resonate helps women and girls to find their voices and to have the confidence to take advantage of leadership opportunities. Storytelling is the spark that inspires women and girls to achieve their goals but it is these women and girls who choose the change they want to lead…and that’s exactly how it should be.

Nairobi ahead of the Obama visit and the Global Entrepreneurship Summit

There is only one topic of conversation in Nairobi these days: Tomorrow President Obama will visit Kenya for the first time as president. A visit that is creating tons of excitement as well as plenty of anxiety. Travelers flying into  or out of Nairobi over the next few days are advised to be at the airport at least six hours in advance due to to numerous police checks on the main highways, roads are 'beautified' in desperate last-minute attempts, and most offices and factories are just shutting down for the long weekend knowing their employees are unlikely to be able to get to the work anyway. Nairobi traffic is a disaster on a regular workday, it will certainly be a nightmare while Obama is visiting. And while the itinerary for the President's visit remains vague and secretive, he is expected to make an appearance at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit to be held in Nairobi over the weekend. In Nairobi, Obama's entourage of businessmen, venture capitalists, and philanthropists will meet an abundance of young innovators who have turned the Kenyan capital into the startup hub of East Africa, if not of the whole continent.

While my work for the Clinton Health Access Initiative certainly keeps me extremely busy and has been enormously rewarding, I frequently try to make time to meet and network with the young Kenyan and international entrepreneurs, hear their ideas, and gain an understanding of how their experiences trying to build an enterprise in the East African region differs from that of their peers in New York, San Francisco or Berlin. One opportunity to learn about Social Impact startups was the a pitch event hosted by VillageCapital which awarded $50k to startups in the field of agriculture. It was amazing to hear the variety of ideas and approaches the entrepreneurs presented, all trying to develop solutions for farmers and farming communities in a part of Africa where farming contributes ~45% of government revenue. The guys behind Mifugo.Trade presented an online livestock exchange that directly connects livestock producers to buyers cutting out the middlemen; the team behind Atikus talked about how they are trying to expand access to credit by increasing the capacity of MSME lenders via re-imagined insurance and technology risk solutions; and my favorite - though not directly related to agriculture - were the founders of Remit.ug who built an online platform for international money transfer to mobile money thus cutting out the expensive and inconvenient established money transfer providers.

What impressed me most while hearing the pitches and talking to the entrepreneurs was that they are not simply trying to copy American or European startup success stories trying to build an African Uber or Yelp. Instead, they are building business models that disrupt their local communities and are specifically designed to empower individuals that formerly had little power in negotiations with more powerful middlemen or corporations. And while technology is changing the way people do business anywhere, it has carries particular power for the poor and previously disadvantaged in East Afica. Providing technology solutions for these communities and also making money while doing it, just seems like a very rewarding way of doing business.

Obama's visit will give the local startup community its well-deserved time in the limelight. After he leaves and life returns to normal in Nairobi, I will be hopefully be able to get back to the office and have an opportunity to talk more about the work I have been doing over the past two months for CHAI in my next post.

Implementing a cloud-based tool to track drug rehabilitation services and patients in Santiago, Chile

Corporación La Esperanza (CLE) has been offering free outpatient and residential drug rehabilitation services to underserved communities across Chile since 1995. They’ve gone from one clinic to seven during this time, allowing them to provide a much needed lifeline for over 500 men and women every year. As a nonprofit working closely with the Servicio Nacional para la Prevención y Rehabilitación del Consumo de Drogas y Alcohol (SENDA), donors and government officials constantly pose different requirements and questions about CLE's program, making impact a moving target. 

Folks who’ve worked at CLE can readily tell you countless stories and anecdotes on how the program has improved peoples lives, warmly remembering those that have managed to turn their life around after suffering from years of addiction. Dedicated directors, therapists, and staff use these stories and collective experiences to improve the quality of the program everyday. Over the last few years, CLE has found that using these stories might not be enough to prove the success of the program. Externally, the trends from the clinical, governmental, and donor communities have been to demonstrate impact based on outputs, graphs, and reports, constantly asking CLE for statistics. Internally, CLE staff have been greatly interested in knowing their impact by applying new treatments with evaluation frameworks, developing indicators, and conducting an evaluation of their patients and services. 

Meeting both these external and internal needs requires clean data. A lot of clean data. This has proven to be a logistical and administrative challenge, given that all their medical records in the past twenty years are kept on paper. Questions like “how many patients between the ages of 19-25 have used crack cocaine” requires days of effort for already overwhelmed administrative staff. Gathering and disseminating these numbers is simply not what people should spend time doing. In 2012, CLE implemented an Excel based database that allowed them to keep digital records for the first time. In order to manage the volume of data, changes to the forms being used, and administrative capacity of staff, compromises had to be made and data collection was kept to a minimum. Additionally, the Excel tool became logistically difficult as heavy files needed to be mailed or sent by couriers in USB drives to headquarters when an update or an report was needed. Ultimately, all of these headaches can lead to bad data, jeopardizing both internal and external goals.

Understanding these limitations, the project at hand is using a cloud-based tool to replace the Excel tool and provide additional functionality for CLE staff. This requires replicating the current data flow and analyses, while allowing CLE to take advantage of new functionality where improvements can be made. The goal is in improving the quality of and access to data across the organization. 

At the launch of the project, the central questions we set out to guide the implementation were: 

• How can data help us achieve better results?
• How can we improve access to data across the organization?
• What is the value added of having a cloud-based system of record?
• Once we have this data, what do we want to know about our services and patients?

Currently, the new tool is built to track the same data that the Excel database contained so as to minimize change management. We’ve also been able to effectively migrate all digital data from each clinic into the new system in a matter of days. As forms change, new fields can be added with just a few clicks. Data privacy and security can be maintained using permissions and roles. New functionality allows clinics to collaborate using an internal social platform. Reports and dashboards are programmed once, updated automatically, and universally accesible as new records are created. Statistics, graphs, and reports can be pulled as needed for all staff in the organization. Business development staff no longer have to ask clinics to drop everything to generate a report for a new donor. Data is no longer a task or a simple output but can now be seen as a resource. 

Regardless of these technological and system improvements, some of our guiding questions still remain unanswered. Whatever tool organizations use, simply collecting data might never get you those answers. However, having clean data can give rise to new questions or uncover answers that were previously obscured. Improved systems can lead to more time thinking about data instead crunching it. Increased data transparency can lead to greater collaboration across the organization. Having already bridged the data process with a new tool, the current challenge lies in bridging the tool with the institution of data - why are we collecting it, what are we learning from it, how is it important to my role, how do we manage it. The most difficult challenge, however, will be in bridging any tool with improved outcomes and improved services for nonprofits like CLE. 

Greetings from Jerry Blakeley regarding new Blog portal

Finally we have this ready for you to post Blogs and we are most anxious to hear from you. If you have any questions or difficulties getting signed up and posting Blogs please email me at:

jblakeley615@gmail.com

Providing market access to handicrafts artisans in India

I interned in the summer with Access development services in Delhi and Jaipur, India. Access is a livelihoods organization working with 10000 artisans across the country. They do this through a network of 300+ full time employees spread across major states in India where they work on the ground with artisan clusters.

The artisans are mostly nomadic in nature and lack formal education/ training. They have been trained over the years by a combination of trial end error and passing on of skills across generations. Understandably, they are not connected to formal banking systems and also have poor working conditions. For example- for work involving lac beads, the artisans need to sit around a mini fire kiln and work. This combined with a 49 degree Celsius outside temperature make it real difficult for the people to work.

Access works towards connecting these people to the mainstream by linking them to banks, providing training and development and providing access to different markets.

As part of my internship I focused on the market access bit. Streamlining the production and quality process and tie ups with major e-commerce networks followed. Recently, the products were launched online under the brand JJADE which stands for Jaipur Jewelry Artisans Development Project. Artisans were individually identified on their creations on the lines of designerwear to provide them with a sense of belonging and motivation.

Additionally, I worked towards setting up a production cluster that would iron out the inefficiencies in operating within individual clusters. The organisation had started a production cluster where they would gather the workers and make them work on a daily wage basis. I worked toward the optimization of this model and to understand the replicability of the model across clusters.

Creating a new kind of value in Cambodia: early struggles and small victories

When I first heard about the launch of Development Innovations (DI) in Cambodia I was at once delighted and shocked. The stated aim of DI, a lab funded by USAID and implemented by private contractor Development Alternatives International (DAI), is to catalyze development solutions through the use of technology. I was drawn in by the use of ICT4D, or information and communications technology for development, especially with all the traction around the use of tech in the field of development whether health, education, agriculture, or disaster relief. But what really caught my attention was the more nuanced, less flashy part of the project; DI claims to be a space, not a solution in and of itself, where people and organizations can connect, and ideas can take flight. I deeply appreciate this sentiment, and was more than a bit surprised to see it undertaken by the likes of USAID, given the risk in the unknown and untested.

In my previous life (before Fletcher), I helped to start up a cafe that doubled as an alternative learning space for a forum called Open Workshops in Battambang, Cambodia's second largest city. With a small mix of curious foreigners and Khmer students, we hosted workshops on a variety of topics from how to use social media to women's health to zine making to coding sessions. We leveraged the collective brainpower of interested parties, and had a great time building this informal learning environment. Today the cafe still stands as a training ground for young people, but the open workshop has suffered a crisis of energy and human resources. Originally we hoped it would catalyze projects, increase sharing of important information between NGOs doing vital work, and generally energize a young, high potential group. Unfortunately, this has not been the lasting legacy for a number of reasons, not least the difficulty in getting NGOs to spend the time to share ideas and collectively problem solve. Thus I went into the summer working with DI wearing my Battambang goggles, wondering if the story would change when a large development aid organization attempted a similar feat.

What's so special about DI?

DI is significant on several fronts that resonated with me. First, there was obviously a group of USAID personnel, involved in designing the project, that saw Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capitol city, as being a place fit for such an extraordinary undertaking, the likes of innovation hubs in Nairobi and Singapore. Second that USAID was willing to hedge bets on the success of the innovation lab concept at all, that even attempting it is worthwhile (and to the tune of 3 years and a generous budget). And for proof of concept, there is only very recently a small sampling of literature about other such undertakings. Two similar lab models, the World Bank's infoDev mobile labs and hubs, and UNICEF's Innovation Labs, both launched in 2011, so rigorous evaluations and impact studies are still underway.

A Summary of the project

DI launched in October 2013, and only moved into its current spacious four floor office setup in March 2014, so it's safe to say the project is still in start up state. The lab has three main objectives which all revolve around CSOs (civil society organizations) gaining increased access to and understanding of technology tools for development, and TSPs (technology providers) understanding their pivotal role in working with CSOs, and finally incentivizing both CSOs and TSPs to work together. Essentially, DI is creating a physical marketplace wherein these two sectors can learn about the other, and get set on their way towards creating tools, and solutions to Cambodia's most pressing social issues.

The DI Lab has several components: the "Innovation Resource Center", the Lab space itself, several different series including "Mobile Monday", "Technovation", "Women in Tech", and "Global Leaders", a "Lab Rats" gathering, a "Talent Development Program", and of course a grant fund. If that sounds complicated, that's because it is. So who is using DI, and how? Who should be using DI? How should they be using it? These are all questions I asked when I arrived at the lab, and questions that DI is actively trying to address in outreach communications and branding efforts. The truth is that it is all of these things and more, and DI itself is just waiting for a victory in one area in order to brand itself as the it place.

Complications

For the moment, participation in the DI lab and in events largely revolves around the grant fund, a pool of money for CSOs to develop and deploy their tech based programs. While in theory this should be a relatively hands off process, where the Lab simply invites CSOs to submit proposals, DI is finding that the capacity within CSOs to develop sophisticated, realistic programs is lacking. Further, many CSOs do not have enough experience or in-house knowledge to approach a TSP to assist in the development of a program to then propose to the grant fund. Of course, this is partly the reason why the IRC exists, to connect the CSOs and TSPs so that they might collaborate on the early stage tech development.

One assumption that DI makes is that CSOs do not have the depth in tech to design a tech program, and that often, they are approaching their solution, rather than the actual problem first. For instance, an education CSO might see a tablet as the answer to literacy problems, but perhaps further thought needs to be given to who exactly is using the tablet, what information should go on, and how to first introduce it to stakeholders. Technology is no different from other interventions, but it is often seen as a magic wand. Similarly, TSPs may have an ideal vision of how technology would actually work, but they are very unfamiliar with the stakeholder groups that would use and benefit from the technology. DI very much sees its role as bridging this gap. How best to bridge the gap, while also demonstrating the value of the relationship so that it can be transactional in the future remains a massive challenge. We spent hours building a process that would be sensitive enough to the future relationship, and landed on what is sure to be iterated in the near future; in our latest version the IRC uses vouchers worth $10,000 awarded to CSOs with promising ideas to use towards working to further test the technology with one of our partner TSPs. In my last weeks, we were just piloting this version with CEDAC, a large agricultural CSO, looking to develop "cloud based database" to improve communications between Cambodian producers and consumers of organic vegetables for a more efficient matching of supply and demand.

My specific role as Sustainability Fellow

Even though I assisted with a few different aspects of the lab, I went into the summer with a clear mandate set for me by DI (if not, it would have taken me the entire summer just to narrow it down). My role was to delve into the sustainability of the Lab, a crucial task, and problematically one that often gets overlooked especially in early stages when projects are busy trying to prove their worth. Sustainability for DI means the ability to pay for itself once the initial USAID funding expires in 2016. It is tempting to daydream about all of the possible private partnerships that might catapult the lab forward, the largest telecoms or internet provider, Mozilla or Google. But the lab would be amiss not to ask what exactly it is that should be sustained. According to USAID, it is the physical space that is the lab that should continue beyond the funding period, rather than any trainings or programs or events. In my opinion they have it backwards; the legacy should be a culture of innovation, perhaps more difficult to measure but surely more worthwhile.

In order to provide helpful recommendations towards lab sustainability, I spent much of the summer meeting with various DI community members. Meetings with lab members, prospective lab members, representatives from other labs and hubs (of which there are a handful), meetings with young tech entrepreneurs, seasoned tech professionals, large telecoms, university deans, and the list goes on. The first step, as I saw it, was getting the story from the community we were serving. Who are they, what are the challenges they face, and how might the lab, with our resources and mission, fill gaps for them. I found that the needs and hopes of our networks were not so disparate, that there was overlap that might actually result in some shared value. In one instance, I heard from several of our young techie lab members that they were looking for android skills. In an unrelated meeting with a mobile application company based in Phnom Penh, a hiring manager shared with me that they had not hired any Cambodians for android app development in over a year, and that this lack of local intellectual capital is a sore spot for them. It also happens that the DI Lab needs tech assistance; the lab is creating rolodex of tech professionals that would pair well with CSOs coming into the lab for innovation assistance. The complementary needs of Cambodian techies, a technology company, and the lab itself open different combinations for collaboration that would benefit each party. While thinking about sustainability I used Strategyzer, a dynamic online tool for business model canvassing that allows you to do preliminary calculations to evaluate potential value propositions and revenue streams. I appreciated a more complex take on the business model canvas, and would recommend this tool to others, though beware it can run quite slowly.

Highlights

Of course, the conversations I had were just the beginning of the sustainability challenge. Thought I spent the bulk of my time thinking about this creation of shared value, I enjoyed taking part in a number of projects. I organized the first "Lab Rats" event to link the community of labs and hubs in Phnom Penh and throughout Cambodia. I was also able to participate in a staff retreat and help generate ideas for the year two workplan to send to USAID. As part of the "Junior Global Leaders" series I gave a short talk on how Social Network Analysis can be used for local organizations and businesses. By virtue of my creative colleagues, I also got involved in an event promoting design and modification of everyday objects, an event that coincided with the launch of the first 3D printer in Cambodia. The combination of work and related extracurricular events around the "design" and "innovation" themes drove me to dig deeper into the meanings behind these flat buzz words. This next academic year at Fletcher, I'll be continuing to seek stronger understandings of how these concepts can improve international development, specifically when it comes to entrepreneurial endeavors.

And the summer was not all work; on the contrary there were enough office parties, Mekong sunset cruises, and flash dances to keep us all busy. One of the strangest events I found myself participating in was a flash dance choreographed by my boss, a Fletcher graduate, to Pharrell's Happy, which was set to the beloved Madison dance (a favorite for Cambodians since the 1950s) amid the backdrop of the Soviet era Olympic Stadium in the center of bustling Phnom Penh. With so much packed in a tiny summer, I think I will be unpacking the experience in the semesters to come, and into my career ahead.

Colombo Updates

This is Deepti Jayakrishnan, the Fellow from Colombo, Sri Lanka!

I am an Indian lawyer in the first year of the MALD program at Fletcher and currently a Blakeley Fellow, consulting for Educate Lanka Foundation Inc., a DC based non-profit operating in Sri Lanka. I am very grateful to the Blakeley Foundation for making the project possible!

Educate Lanka was founded by Sri Lankan youth, for Sri Lankan youth, in 2007. Today it has over 60 volunteers of different nationalities and only three full time employees to administer the educational needs of a diverse portfolio of students spread across seven of Sri Lanka’s nine provinces.

Why, you may ask, isn’t education free in Sri Lanka?

Yes, it is. But according to several studies, the most recent being “Initiative for Sri Lankan Education,” undertaken by the Harvard Graduate School of Education in April 2013, school-related fees and the opportunity costs associated with sending a child to school are often the main blocking factors to secondary education. Hence the poor in Sri Lanka are unable to afford the “free education.”

Using an online platform via <educatelanka.org> Educate Lanka has raised over $250,000 for the education of 600+ Sri Lankan youth and children until date. These come from donors from around the world who can look at student profiles and contribute $10, $15 or $25 per month towards expenses of a student to stay in primary, high school or University respectively.

What next for a Lankan student, after a degree?

According to 2012 data from the National Human Resources and Employment Policy, every year an estimated 140,000 students complete general education without having acquired job-related skills. The Technical and Vocational Education and Training system is expected to fill the gap but employers consider it not very relevant in meeting their needs.

With seven years’ experience of being a provider of financial support under its belt, Educate Lanka created a program for mentorship and skills development to fill exactly this gap. Realizing that students need larger amounts to pursue vocational skills training or higher degrees, Educate Lanka also began exploring options other than scholarships.

And what this Blakeley Fellow did this summer…!

Given my background as a lawyer with experience in the financial services sector, my role in the last three months was to assist Educate Lanka in examining the possibility of micro-financing higher education for its scholarship recipients, submitting related reports, reviewing legal documentation and assisting with the process of registration as a local entity. I put my negotiation and communication skills to good use while finding corporations, to partner with Educate Lanka, for its mentorship and skills development program. I also supervised an intern from American University, who accompanied the Educate Lanka team on field trips and helped create online profiles for Educate Lanka officers. These officers are teachers or retired civil servants who volunteer their time as Liaison Officers; they are responsible for screening students and acting as a liaison between the online donors and the scholarship recipients.

I set about accomplishing the above tasks by drafting partnership proposals, grant applications, legal templates for lease agreement and undertaking by scholarship recipient to abide by Educate Lanka conditions (such as attending workshops, coaching students, permission to Educate Lanka to use/publicize their application information), a project report to apply for tax exemption and also, a memorandum of understanding to formalize the relationship between Educate Lanka and its 14 Liaison Officers. All these tasks required meeting the relevant people, scattered across the island.

Thanks to the Blakeley grant, I have been able to assist Educate Lanka in its mission to empower economically disadvantaged children and youth by enhancing their access to educational, financial and employment opportunities!

Murabeho Rwanda, but hopefully not for long

It’s hard to believe that I’m sending my final greetings from Kigali. Today is my last day in the office with the African Entrepreneur Collective’s local partner, Inkomoko Entrepreneur Development. These past ten weeks have soared above and beyond any expectations that I had about my work this summer – I’ve learned so much, witnessed the hard work and long hours that my clients and all of the Inkomoko staff put in every day, and had fun getting to know them in and out of the office, too. Rwanda has definitely found a permanent place in my heart.  

Both of the clients that I’ve worked with, HPS&B, a rice processing company, and Hollanda FairFoods, Rwanda’s first potato chip company, have had incredible opportunities for growth come their way over the past several weeks. I’ve had the chance to work with both of them on preparing for meetings with international investors looking to make potential equity investments in each company. While private equity investment is a relatively new idea for many of East Africa’s SMEs, the trend for investment is growing as investment confidence increases and the SMEs themselves better understand the possibilities of equity investment.

It has been a fantastic learning opportunity for me and for each of my clients to be a part of this growing trend and to collaborate on achieving company targets and goals. While it’s sad for me to leave at such an exciting time for both HPS&B and Hollanda FairFoods, I’m looking forward to keeping up with them back in the US and watching their companies grow from afar.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express my gratitude enough to the Blakeley Foundation for making all of this possible for me—thank you so much for all that you do. I’m looking forward to seeing all of the Blakeley Fellows back at Fletcher in just a few weeks and learning more about each of our experiences! See you again soon in Massachusetts. And murabeho—goodbye—Rwanda, but hopefully not for long.

Reflections on a Summer in Dhaka

As I begin the last week of work at my summer internship at BRAC, a development agency headquartered in Dhaka, Bangladesh, it is hard not to be overwhelmed with amazement that my time here is coming to a close. Summer in Dhaka has been everything one might imagine of life in this South Asian city – incessant noise, daredevil streets, the beautiful call to prayer, the pounding heat and hair curling humidity. It has also been a summer of invitations, iftars, a newfound gratitude for cloudy days, an addiction to sweet milky tea and a growing willingness to throw myself into a street filled with oncoming traffic. It has been a summer of mobile money and planning, of working and waiting. I have learned to strive to achieve my goals but to slow down and recognize the need for patience. It was a summer learning to live in a developing country. The fierce competition of the streets belies the disregard for time. A half hour? Forty-five minutes? A day? Two weeks? Time has a different meaning here. Even the lethargic opening of stores baffled me at first, before I slowed down my mornings and learned to savor the morning hours before rushing into the bustle of the day.

Dhaka teaches those who live in this crowded, vibrant city to appreciate the duality of life. Everything comes with a price. The rain cools the city. The downpours also create rivulets of mud on the bumpy sidewalks that inevitably cover my salwar kameez with droplets of street dirt. The hot, scorching sun creates the type of heat that will make you sweat while lying in bed naked with the fan on full blast. The same sun dries the streets and makes the walk to work dusty but clean. When in Dhaka, it is an art to appreciate the good in every situation and release the frustration of the bad. (And in general, Bangladesh is an excellent way to hone one’s sense of humor. There’s nothing like tackling a cockroach-infested room after a day in the field to help you see the absurdities of life. Or so it seemed at the time – in hindsight, it may have been the exhaustion showing itself…)

This is a hard city to live in. It pushes at you, mentally and physically, with car horns and the press of bodies upon bodies. There is so much need here, need that is sharply highlighted by the oases of luxury apartment buildings with swimming pools shimmering on rooftops. The contrast makes my head spin each time I come face to face with the stark differences between worlds here. Poverty in Bangladesh is a systematic need that cannot be solved by one person. Mentally I know this, but it is hard to shake the sneaky feeling of shame that starts to stick to you after walking past beggar after beggar, the same people stationed everyday on their specific tile of sidewalk by handlers in the early morning hours.

Perhaps I came with the expectation that working at BRAC would provide some sort of mental peace, an image coming from the idea that I would be doing my miniscule part to improve life in Bangladesh. More likely I didn’t comprehend the reality of life in Dhaka until I was immersed in this strange, scary, beautiful, and complex culture. It’s amazing how fuzzy the start of my summer seems now that I exist in the peculiar twilight zone of those who are about to leave a country.

I did have certain expectations for my work at BRAC. I came to assist BRAC’s Social Innovation Lab (SIL) with its Innovation Fund for Mobile Money. Which indeed I have – but of course not in the manner I expected. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting SIL’s Innovation Fund to encourage the transition from cash to mobile money within BRAC. SIL is facilitating the process change to mobile money within BRAC; it is not implementing the mobile money pilots. Rather, other BRAC programs are implementing pilot projects. To be selected for an internal “grant” from the Innovation Fund, programs needed to submit an idea regarding how to incorporate mobile money into a project to an Innovation Challenge run by SIL. BRAC employees voted on the projects in the challenge, and then the list was narrowed to semi-finalists in May. Final projects were selected on June 1, right on time. Idealistically, I expected to head straight to the field and see bKash, the first and most commonly used mobile money platform in Bangladesh, being incorporated into projects. Instead, I have come to see the tremendous complexity that accompanies changing a system. The transition from cash to mobile money requires coordination and cooperation between many departments, and at an NGO of BRAC’s magnitude, that is no small hurdle. Steadily, SIL has progressed with the final seven mobile money pilots that were selected, but the programs are just starting implementation of the pilots now.

I have assisted by applying some hard gained skills from Fletcher’s DM&E series: formulating indicators, definitions, baseline plans, and evaluation plans. I have also put these skills to use by designing and piloting an internal knowledge management database for BRAC pilot projects. SIL is a dynamic team, and I have been fortunate to work with several team members on multiple projects simultaneously. Mobile money has been a huge focus of my summer, but my attention has also been dedicated to knowledge management systems and research. I have gone to the field, but not as often as I had originally hoped. Yet I gained knowledge and experience that I could not have imagined when accepting my internship in March. The task of incorporating mobile money into an organization is much more intricate a challenge than I could have anticipated from Medford.

I am grateful to have spent my summer at BRAC in Dhaka. My time here has been both enlightening and difficult; at the risk of sounding trite, this internship has been a learning experience. Fortunately, it is immediately applicable to my next challenge: working with the Akanksha Foundation, an educational NGO, in India. While in Bangladesh, I received word that I will be an America India Foundation William J. Clinton Fellow in Pune, India from September 2014 through June 2015. My return to Fletcher has been postponed for a year. And while a (large) part of me yearns to reunite with my friends and professors in Medford this fall, all of me is ready to see India.

After my summer in Dhaka, I’m ready.

Final Thoughts from South Africa

Through the smoke coming from the braii (South African BBQ) one could hear the chimes of local entrepreneurs discussing African business, local beer and wine in hand. It was a gathering of the businesses in the cool, up-and-coming 44 Stanley complex, a converted factory that now hosts media and ad agencies, architects, cafes, local artisan shops, a beer garden, and our Endeavor office.

Everyone was friendly, interested to know what each other did and where they came from. Almost nobody was from Johannesburg, but come here since Joburg is the hub of the South African economy. In my time here I have consistently run into a similar conversation – “there is a huge talent shortage and these new laws are only going to make it worse.”

As my time in South Africa comes to a close I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect on this overarching theme, as it strikes at the heart of my Fletcher education.

Entrepreneurship is abuzz in Joburg as the national unemployment rate is 25% and the government looks to solve the problem through entrepreneurship. One of the critical ways it does this is by legislating how businesses must employ black people, and spend money supporting SME black enterprises and entrepreneurs.  This policy, BBBEE (Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment), has extreme effects on the SA economy so let me take a second to explain it further. Businesses get a score (level 1-8, 1 being the highest and 8 lowest) based upon factors in five areas:

1. Ownership – Amount of black ownership
2. Management Control – Amount of black executive leadership and voting rights
3. Skills Development – Amount of black employees and skills training received
4. Enterprise and Supplier Development – Amount of spending on suppliers who are black enterprises; contributions to economic development programs that benefit black businesses
5. Socio-economic Development – 1% of NOPAT (net operating profit at tax) must be spent on economic development that is geared towards income generating activities for black beneficiaries

One should also note that SA has some of the most labor-friendly employment laws, making it very difficult to fire an employee.

You can imagine the many ways BBBEE affects business, from administrative costs to limiting the pool of candidates it can hire. This would not be an outrageous issue if there were well-qualified candidates, but alas the SA education system is horrendous! For example, a recent World Economic Forum Report ranked South Africa the worst in the world for math and science education.

Historically, South Africa has had the largest and most advanced economy in Africa. However, recent data shows Nigeria to now be the largest economy in Africa. At Fletcher we live at that intersection of economics, politics and society – and nowhere is that more relevant than this topic in South Africa. The combination of a poor education system, which has many causes, and a poor BBBEE policy has choked South African businesses, and thereby stifled the economy. Businesses must divert skills and resources from their primary business activities to adhere to BBBEE, making them less competitive and productive. They must also get employees trained-up so they are capable of doing their jobs, and highly skilled labor is expensive. Yet, despite these factors there is still a skills shortage in SA. Normally, this would be a great opportunity for a young professional like myself, but alas the government has passed new legislation that extremely restricts importing labor to ‘critical skills’. My favorite example of a ‘critical skill’ - sheep shearer.

Since being in SA I have heard of a Fletcher alum who has lived in SA for several years being stuck in DC for weeks due to his visa being “in process”; his visa has been “being processed” for two years. A friend and her boyfriend who employ more than 10 people whose visa is now expiring within 90 days, their extension was denied. An American who has lived in SA for 11 years, owns a home, has a family and employs several people who might have to spend a year in the US waiting for a visa renewal because nobody knows how to implement the new legislation. The government’s justification for this poor law is the same old excuse -- foreigners are stealing jobs. This is just sad. Poor government policies seem to be based upon a poor understanding of economics. As Keynes explained, a dollar is worth more than a dollar having pass-through effects in the economy. Ricardo’s theory of competitive advantage, another underpinning of a globalized economy, hinges upon the idea that countries are better off importing what they are not good at and exporting what they have a competitive advantage in -- in this case SA needs to import skilled labor. Skilled labor, like myself, will not be stealing a job, but filling one that will actually help grow the economy; thereby having knock-on effects that are likely to create other jobs for many of those unskilled unemployed people.

I recognize that there are real and valid reasons for the government’s policies, rooted in a tumultuous history. Yet, the inherit problems will not be solved in a short time-frame. Should SA radically reform its education so that labor is capable of filling the need, it will take at least a decade. It is true that there are two worlds in SA rich and poor, where skin color is often the clear delineation. Yet the current policies will not alleviate this for the masses. My primary lesson from my time in SA is that poor policies rooted in xenophobia will only further stifle the country’s economic progress and make it harder to achieve the government’s aim. It might think it’s winning the battle, but it is slowly losing the war. SA must continue its efforts to reform the education system, while opening up its economy to skilled labor if it wanted to thrive.