1.  Ensure gender is at the center of what we do.  Free and empower women who often prove to be the responsible family members who will push for change.

2. Use bottom-up approaches, working people-to-people, to achieve self-reliance.  Increase dialogue between local development efforts and national level efforts.  This includes listening among donors and collaborating together. Consider development as a means to create freedom of action and being as an important concept.

3.  Do local level empowerment, starting from the bottom up:  local governments, groups and others.  Work with local systems and cultures.

4. Emphasize effectiveness of development efforts over efficiency (fast mobilization, quick hits, etc.).  Effective development efforts take more time, slowing down the process to achieve greater buy-in and participation.  Starting slowly, first empower people and give them ownership of the activities.   Spend time with people to build trust.

5.  Highlight social transformation in development efforts to achieve the people’s self-reliance. Assist developing the person’s whole life and destiny.

6.  During project implementation, build in communication mechanisms to achieve feedback.  Follow up on the feedback.

7.  Re-invent the current aid model; build in more adaptability.

8.  Include systematic feedback mechanisms, which go beyond the project.  At the end of an aid effort, aid providers should do a client (aid recipient) survey to determine, “How’d we do?”  In impact analysis, include local client feedback.

9.  Develop cost-effective methods for doing M&E, such as developing a local capacity to do M&E.

10.  Ensure accountability in development programs, which is largely absent now.

Learning Events following the theme of “Fielding Effective
Development Teams are being scheduled for May-August 2012.  Stay tuned!

• Actionable insights into the source of leadership and performance limitations
• Tools for enhancing performance and effectiveness
• Ability to determine what would be a major breakthrough for your organization
• An accessible model for a new paradigm in international development.

The next working session will take place on July 19 and 20,  2012 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. inWashington D.C.  Follow-up coaching and mentoring groups are also available to support participants to achieve the outcomes they define in this program.

Companies and organizations represented at recent working sessions include:

AZMJ                                                  CARANA Corporation

Cardno Emerging Markets        Checchi and Company Consulting

Chemonics International           Glevum Associates

Fintrac                                               Kaizen Consulting

Making Cents International     Segura Associates

Weidemann International        Environmental Protection Agency

The Mitchell Group                     

The Billion Dollar Solution that Isn’t:

How Systems Modeling in Foreign Aid Could Save Billions and Serve the Poor

by  Monika Aring and Bobbin Teegarden 

Development, 2012, 55(1), (71–80) r, 2012 Society for International Development 1011-6370/12

http://www.sidint.net/net/development

Recent youth uprisings throughout the Middle East occurred in large part because of joblessness and lack of hope for a better future for the region’s 20-35 year old population.  A recent Foreign Affairs article (Goldstone, 2010) points out that 9 out of 10 of the world’s children under 15 live in developing countries. In this article we contend that much of the foreign aid for economic and job growth in poor countries cannot work because the underlying assumption – that outside experts can fix the problem – is misguided.  We suggest that aid could achieve far better results if donors could distinguish between two opposite problem archetypes – technical and adaptive- systems problems.  Technical problems are problems for which societies have already developed solutions that work.  Adaptive system problems are new problems for which a society has not yet developed a sustainable solution.  The reliance on experts is effective for problems for which a technical solution is appropriate – for example a house on fire.  Experts, in this case firefighters, come in and do the work that’s needed to put out the fire.   Experts, however, are usually helpless when it comes to fixing adaptive-systems problems, for example, arson in a community.  Instead of sending in outside experts, such as firefighters, hard work has to be done by members of the community who need to come together, listen and talk to each other, identify the underlying problem and determine the best solution.  In this article we suggest that the lack of jobs and sustainable livelihoods are at their core complex adaptive-systems problems that have to be solved by the system’s stakeholders.  To be sure, many adaptive-systems problems contain technical problems where outside experts can help, for example, identifying best practice in certifying skills. However, no well meaning donor can do what it takes to have a country or community create jobs and livelihoods.  A small handful of countries and many communities have done the hard adaptive work to grow their economies and provide sustainable livelihoods for their citizens.  We provide the example of one country and suggest that recent advances in modeling complex systems can help stakeholders in communities and countries improve their ability to work together to grow their economies, create jobs, and build skills.