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Rajiv Shah Speaks about USAID Reforms

On June 2, USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah spoke to the InterAction Forum about planned reforms at USAID.  You can read the full text of his candid and impassioned speech here. 

From Dr. Shah’s speech, we get the sense that change really is in the air at USAID.  His key point was that we are in a unique window of opportunity for change over the next 12-18 months.  There is currently an unprecedented political opportunity for global development policy reform: we have a supportive President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Joint Chiefs of Staffs.  Congressional leaders also support reforming foreign aid.  And we are approaching the 50th anniversary of the Foreign Assistance Act, USAID, and the Peace Corps.

Dr. Shah emphasized that USAID is starting to do things differently.  Here are some of the changes planned for USAID:

• more evidence-based programming
• improving effectiveness to stretch tax dollars
• building institutional capacity in partner governments, and aligning programs with local needs and priorities
• creating incentives for good governance
• working towards greater policy and budget capability at USAID
• requesting greater flexibility from Congress
• implementing procurement reform
• broadening USAID’s base of partner organizations
• prioritizing “true and effective” transparency
• treating Foreign Service Nationals better, giving them opportunities and respecting them as professionals
• reducing the data-collection burden on USAID missions and partners, while using the collected data more effectively in planning

The main challenge to reform that Dr. Shah identified is resistance from Congress, because during hard economic times anything having to do with foreign aid is a tough sell.

Dr. Shah also made some requests to InterAction member organizations:

• be more transparent about how funds are being spent, getting the money out of the beltway and into countries
• invest more in training local resources, instead of American experts
• create the conditions for a long-term exit

All in all, an interesting speech and a recommended read.

Water Quality and the Millennium Development Goals

Digging a toilet by communal labor in Fotobi (Eastern Region), Ghana

by Brett Walton, guest blogger

With five years until the deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations has released a series of progress reports. The water and sanitation April 2010 update states that the world is on track to meet the drinking water goal, but will fall far short of the target for sanitation. The problem with the MDGs, however, is that they don’t measure what you think they measure.

The UN established the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 as a metric for improving the lives of the world’s poorest. The goals cover economic, physical and social well-being: maternal health, poverty, gender equality. The MDGs for water and sanitation seek to reduce by half the number of people without access to improved drinking water sources and improved sanitation. The UN provides a list of what qualifies as an ‘improved’ source – boreholes, in-house connections, protected wells, rainwater collection – but the dirty little secret of the drinking water target is that it has nothing to do with the water’s quality.

The water goal is a target that assess infrastructure, not water quality. A community can be using an improved source while still drinking tainted water. A pilot study by the World Health Organization found that the majority of piped systems deliver quality water, but only 40-70 percent of other improved sources meet WHO microbial standards.

This is why the theme of World Water Day this year was water quality. I was in Nairobi, Kenya covering the day’s events for Circle of Blue, a non-profit news agency reporting on water issues, and listened to many speakers discuss the consequences of dirty water. To wit, half of all hospital beds in the developing world are occupied by people with a water-related illness; roughly 90 percent of the waste water in developing countries is dumped untreated into water bodies; and more than 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation facilities.

Water and sanitation are not separate problems, but they are sometimes treated as such. “No policymaker will tell you sanitation comes before drinking water,” said Maurice Bernard from the French Development Agency. Yet, if the drinking water MDG is to have any meaning, it must go hand in hand with sanitation improvements.

Development money alone is not a solution. Zafar Adeel, the UN water chief, told me that past failures occurred because the approach was too technical.

“What historically we have done is to stay focused on water quality, on monitoring and research, but relating it to people’s lives and policies is something that we have not done very well before,” he said.

Bernard said that if he were given $10 billion to invest in clean water he would put it towards capacity building; that is, investment in management, governance and social capital.

National governments, he said, are where most solutions will take place.

It’s difficult to get a handle on a problem you can’t measure. Many people in Nairobi admitted that we don’t know how many people have clean water because it is quite expensive to carry out micro-level water quality testing on a broad scale. To that end, WHO and UNICEF are doing pilot tests in several countries.

Knowing the extent of the problem is a first step. Applying the right medicine is a much farther bound.

A Conversation with Sir Fazle Hasan Abed

An event hosted by Global Washington at the University  of Washington’s Magnusson Health Sciences Building with sponsorship from the UW Department of Global Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, May 25^th 2010.  Open to the public, free of charge.

By Evan Forward

On Tuesday afternoon, I was privileged to attend “A Conversation with Sir Fazle Hasan Abed” at the Magnuson Health Sciences Center.    With Muhammad Yunus’ visit still fresh in my mind from Sunday at Town Hall, I was ready for more inspiration on the same plane.  Abed did not disappoint.  It has me wondering a bit what they have got in the water in Bangladesh that they could produce such world changing figures as Yunus and Abed in the same cohort.

The question of drinking water was the problem that set Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in motion in 1978 to create Brac. Brac is now the largest global development organization in the world in terms of scale and impact having served over 110 million people throughout Asia and Africa to date.  BRAC began when Abed decided to solve the problem of infant mortality in Bangladesh which was at that time largely due to dehydration from water borne illnesses. By creating a program for mothers to learn skills to perform infant oral rehydration, Abed found the solution. A simple model and yet incredibly powerful in its leverage. A piece of knowledge communicated to a mother can save her child.   True.

But Abed’s most remarkable quality, in my mind, is his uncanny ability to scale concept to need. Within months of starting Brac, Abed was leading a staff of more than 5,000 people eradicating diarrhea across the country in larger and larger swaths.  Over the 38 years since, Abed has diversified BRAC into dozens of ventures that touch on education, public health, banking and micro-lending, manufacturing industries, agricultural fields and others.

Questions:

How do you maintain consistent quality in your programming while achieving such radical growth in the scale and scope of your offerings at BRAC (BRAC now employs a work force of over 50,000 people)?

“Quality control.” Abed said simply with a smile. It’s common sense, he seemed to say. Abed continued on to say that Brac has a substantial research and evaluation department that is continually monitoring impact.  Abed explains that impact is what Brac focuses upon when it comes to evaluating which brings to mind the Rick Davies and Jessica Dart’s Most Significant Change methodology.   I recommend checking it out. It’s a complete participatory M&E framework but its even more because the significant change concept can be adapted into many different types of qualitative research methodologies.  You can download the entire guide to it’s use by clicking this link. Or cut and paste: http://www.mande.co.uk/docs/MSCGuide.pdf.

Further on the topic of quality, Abed later shared more insights when he responded to a question about corruption:

“Brac has 182 internal auditors,” Abed replied. Abed explained that this corps of accountants is responsible for checking the books in all of the arenas that Brac ventures in. If any of the numbers are slightly off, they investigate the problem.  Corruption solved.

In addition to continuing to scale its operations in Asia and Africa to service ever more needs, Brac has also decided to move into Haiti. But Abed explains that Brac’s recent entrance into Haiti is not simply intended as relief effort for the crisis that ensued the earthquake.

“When Brac enters a country, it is there for a lifetime,” Abed says without hesitation in his voice, “Brac will be in Haiti for the next 50 to 100 years.”  Life is fleeting perhaps, but a model for action, growth and change such as what Abed’s work has introduced to the world is everlasting.  I believe him what he claims.

I encourage you to have a look at BRAC’s website, www.brac.net.