Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul

Invictus by William Ernest Henley (While incarcerated at Robben Island prison, Nelson Mandela recited the poem to other prisoners and was empowered by its message of self-mastery)

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single-issue lives.” - Audre Lorde

'The Indian government has shut the door on NGOs'

This piece in the Guardian says that the government in India is trying to push out international NGOs with the specific aim of suppressing human rights abuses in the country.

This article feels tired.

It assumes that international NGOs are inherently altruistic and seek to serve people and those who are very vulnerable. Yet, it is well-known that international organisations serve donor interests and literally have to account for all their actions in rigourous monitoring and evaluation frameworks. So, it is naive to think that NGOs might not also push the donor perspective (see US or UK government or corporate foundation etc) on local people and culture.

Furthermore, the article doesn't dig deep enough into the real problem, which is equity and justice. Yes, we may need NGOs to counterbalance Government and provide an outlet for complaints and enforcement of justice and yes, we may need international ones that are based abroad on outside resources and so are not liable to be captured by local powerful elites but, the real question is who counterbalances the international NGO? Who handles the limits of power that international NGOs have on local communities? In the protection of people, how do we prevent capture by foreign elites? Why do we need international NGOs to protect local communities anyway? Where is the mechanism that helps them do that for themselves?

It would be 'nice' if NGOs were actually people-driven and people-funded but they are not.  People can be powerless, marginalised and poor and don't have the resources to have their own powerful NGO. An international donor isn't the only answer to this.

Further thinking:
- What are non-international NGOs in India already doing to address human rights abuses?
- What do Indian actors say is needed in human rights?
- What is the value of international solutions for the human rights issue in India? (Beyond simply... Foreigners do human rights better than Indians)
- What examples do we have of communities already protecting themselves from elite interest?

How Neoliberalism affects people

• Labour rights

This LSE paper puts forward a perspective on how neoliberalism affects markets and worker rights. On one hand, bloated Government leads to market inefficiencies but reducing the Government's influence on the system through liberalisation can lead to worse labour rights ...

Marjorie Kelly on the Emergent Ownership Revolution

Do you need something more tangible to use when talking about social business?

Is the 'social purpose' argument a bit thin for you?

According to Marjorie Kelly in Towards Mission-Controlled Corporations: Extractive vs Generative Design there are 5 elements of a generative ownership-driven design framework for social businesses:

1. Membership – How can we have the right people forming part of the business? How can they contribute to the running of the business? What roles and authority can they have?
2. Purpose – What purpose can a business have beyond profit-making for shareholders? What problems might it solve? How is 'wealth', and value spread within the local community?
3. Governance – Who is the board? Who does the board answer to? 
4. Finance – Where does the money come from? Where does it go? How does it circulate through the business? How does it generate wealth and value?
5. Networks – How does the business get access to goods, services, information? How might the exchange be carried out? How might it be non-financial? How might it reach beyond typical boundaries e.g. geography?

Will Starbucks food donations encourage local restaurants and shops to do the same?

Interesting question. Possibly. But as said below by a previous poster the value chain and business processes at large food restaurants look different from those at small restaurants and thus the opportunity for surplus (and thus donations) is different.

Let me add one thought that sprung to mind. In my experience, the other factor that affects the flow of surplus food to the people who need it are the intermediaries in between. For example, small restaurants are not normally able to afford to send/deliver/transport food to charities outside of a couple of miles and small charities are not normally able to absorb this cost either. One idea is that services spring up to help this process/fill a gap. Maybe a group of restaurants band together to hire a van or a group of charities do that ... or even a separate intermediary (maybe... a neighbourhood support scheme paid through by the local authority or even people/citizens/charitable folks who live in the area pay for it). Or possible, someone likes Uber or your local taxi cab company offers this service at a discounted fee.

So, we might see that maybe instead of giving money to charity, people give money in other ways to help restaurants get their food to people who need it.

Originally posted on Quora here

Has anyone applied systems thinking to international development?

The short answer is Yes!

The longer answer is that this area is still undergoing an attrition and evolution with people in the sector trying to shape what this means for them and their work. There is a real dearth of good M&E/impact evaluation support for systems thinkers in development, which makes the work harder. There are some organisations that addressing this issue head on and are moving away from M&E and towards more knowledge, learning and practice. To do this requires building the capacity within field teams, management, senior management and also, with donors.

For me, the most interesting thing is how systems thinking principles are used effectively. The aim should be to help developing countries determine what kind of system they want to have and what people will want to do in the system. A big danger to the space that in our attempts to 'bring about a better way of doing things', we determine what the system should look like *for* countries and we hard code these principles activities and behaviours *for* people. Moreover, integrative, participatory and democratic approaches for systems thinking are often just not enough because it can set up a situation where there is still a dominant thinking that others are being encouraged to conform to or align with.

In a nutshell, systems thinking for development cannot be the end-goal. It should be a starting point to think about doing development differently and better.

Originally published on Quora here

Habits of a Systems Thinker

Source: www.watersfoundation.org/systems-thinking/habits-of-a-systems-thinker/

A tool for guiding systemic thinking

The Iceberg Illusion

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes ... - Neil Gaiman

Systems thinking skills

Source: Originally found here. Please read and study this concept map, which shows some common skills associated with systems thinking.

How might a systems thinker talk about scaling in emerging markets?

1. Immerse yourself in the chaos
2. Understand the product
3. Look at what is going on in the wider environment
4. Set up some facts - what is the model, what is the impact
5. Figure out what scale will look like
6. Set some objectives
7. Understand cost and value drivers
8. Do market SWOT
9. Set up expansion pathways
10. Systematise basic processes
11. Bring on actors
12. Oversee replication scouting and testing mission
13. Create and use feedback loop to improve systems
14. Systematise complicated processes with expert help
15. De-systemiatise processes, unbundle, de-mystify
16. Set up network of actors and activities and functions
17. Create learning buckets
18. Push through learning through the network
19. Oversee trickle through of information and action
20. Do continuous learning and innovation
21. Systematise
22. De-systemiatise 
23. Create networks
24. Package learning 
25. Distribute learning
26. Oversee trickle through 
27. Do continuous learning and innovation
28. Systematise
29. De-systemiatise 
30. etc

What types of careers are there in international development?

Skills (What you can do!)

• All skills needed!!

Functions (What role you would play!)

You may have 1 or more of these skills!

• Fundraising - storytelling, strategy, communications, budgeting, networking, relationship building, research, project management
• Policy - research, communications, legal, institutional development, relationship building, politics
• Institutional development - research, governance, relationship building, politics
• Economic development - economic modelling, industrial development, market systems strategy, welfare 
• Social welfare - advocacy, social welfare subsidies, charity work, 
• Private sector development - business innovation, enterprise development, enabling environment, entrepreneurship, taxation and legal
• Marketing and retail - commerce, business management, sociology, psychology, policy and/or network development
• Operations - logistics, network management, project management, finance, and/or results measurement 
• HRM - sociology, psychology, training and development, and/or team building
• Finance - finance, strategy, M&E, project management, and/or legal
• Results measurement - finance, strategy, project management, and/or research

New Trends (Where you might position yourself!)

• Market-based development
• Socialist market systems
• Social welfare
• Ethical business
• Fintech
• Behaviourial sciences
• Systems change
• Resilience
• Conflict 
• Livestock
• Healthcare
• Climate and the natural environment
• Informal sector
• NGO organisational development
• Foundation funding

Things to Remember!

• Be different - If you have good ideas that seem too out-of-the-box for traditional work, this could be the right time to build a skills around it and offer that skill to the development space
• Look deeper than large institutions - If you want to learn on the job, develop tangible skills and be part of an impactful project, start at the field and work upwards
• Competences are important - teamwork, patience, time management, critical thinking, adaptability, focus and determination

What does it mean to do ethical business in apparel?

What value do ethical standards bring to the fashion industry?
What does it mean to be ethical in fashion ?
What is the business case for ethical fashion?

• Product development that sources and uses raw materials according to sustainability regulations/norms/codes/standards/values in the industry 
• Product design that reflects stories from different people and different culture (i.e. non-normative, beyond the Western beauty ideal) and in a way that respects ownership and that protects against cultural appropriation for profit
• Innovation based on participative collaboration that understands power structures and control/equality/equity issues 
• Ensuring that wage payments, work health and safety conditions and regulations are observed, external audits and inspections are supported and violence and illegal practices are addressed through a fair justice system (Guardian)
• Working with producers and suppliers in developing countries: meeting regulations and codes and respecting power imbalances in ethical management styles and monitoring systems
• A systemic approach to certification/regulations/norms/codes/standards to bring about sustainability and scale and builds on the successes of supply chain strengthening (multi-stakeholder governance, transparency, independent verification, and third party chain of custody) (Business Fights Poverty)
• Creating a demand for ethical fashion by using multi-channel retail opportunities including pop-ups to showcase the brand the product and the story
• Ensuring that the pricing model allows producers and suppliers to be paid a living/decent wage even when it means charging the retailer or consumer a few pence more. The recent example of dairy farmers in the UK removing milk from supermarket shelves in an attempt to sell it directly to the consumer to get a better price.
• Understanding that in fashion there is economic value to the 'story' in the same way that any brand builds equity - through rational, emotional and behaviourial consumer analysis
• The impact on retail pricing - what is the market willing to pay?
• Businesses that 'work in Africa' do not automatically mean social enterprise or ethical sourcing
• Making your claims of ethical business practices credible and possible to observe and verify. Consumer driven - Mintel found that half of those surveyed said they would only pay more for ethical products if they understood clearly where the extra money went, and 52 per cent said they found information about which foods are ethical confusing (Supplymanagement.com)
• Working on textile waste to minimise, recycle, reuse, upcycle, upgrade, re-configure, re-integrate, and more (The Ethical Fashion Source)

---
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/10/lithuanian-migrants-chicken-catchers-trafficked-uk-egg-farms-sue-worst-gangmaster-ever
http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/recycling-on-the-high-street-3-different-approaches

A systems perspective to supply chain development

In classic economic theory, making products cheaper by reducing the cost of goods (COGS) can mean removing the intermediaries in the supply chain where margin might be absorbed. This means system actors, such as agents, middlemen/women, traders, small retailers (kiosks) are vulnerable to the disintermediation. However, in low-income countries, this has a system wide effect: this will limit the supply of goods and services to marginalized populations, such as smallholder farmers or the urban poor and this will reduce employment and revenue generation by cutting the poor out of the system. Moreover, in times of desperation, this will naturally create conflict and instability that will have even more far-reaching effects beyond the original supply chain.

Things to remember:

• For real wide-scale change, take a step back and think more systemically and less narrowly and think about the wider impact of any intervention in business operations, pricing and COGS. 
• Rather than a focus on cost, price and money, consider gains that bring about long-term growth, such as quality, value and service-driven loyalty
• Yes, eliminating supply chain actors may reduce the cost of goods along the way, but there is no guarantee that this will be passed on to the customer.  
• Intermediaries are the backbone of a system and agents, traders, kiosks are ever present in a market - work through them rather than against them or by sidelining them
• Look at where the incentives lie. For a supplier, that wants to shed certain costs, who might be willing to take them on? Who might benefit? Who might see the value in managing this transaction directly? This is essentially the origination of outsourcing.
• Consider how the market could function better. As a supplier, you may be incurring a huge cost getting products to the consumer. However, if a retailer can offer a better coordination function, then it would make more sense to switch to wholesale operations. Many retailers in developing countries do this albeit with  need for capacity building around effective management. 

New to international development - Where to look for job opportunities?

Books

• Amartya Sen 'Development As Freedom'
• Dambisa Moyo 'Dead Aid'

Research/Think Tanks

• Overseas Development Institute
• International Institute for Environment and Development

Opportunities are for more seasoned development professionals with 5 years or so experience

CSR Networks

• Ethical Trading Initiative
• Ethical Performance
• Triple Pundit

Opportunities are emerging - from communications to technical assistance on projects

Social Business

• Stanford Social Innovation Review
• Business Fights Poverty
• Inclusive Business Practitioner Hub

Opportunities are emerging - technical assistance, field work

Corporate Foundations

• Rockefeller Foundation
• Gates Foundation
• ASPEN Institute

International Charities

• International Red Cross
• World Vision
• Save the Children
• Oxfam

Opportunities are communications, fundraising, project management, team coaching; may provide training to get you field-ready (smaller NGOs might be willing and able to send you directly to the field)

Development Consultancies

• DAI
• Adam Smith International
• Cardno Emerging Markets
• GIZ
• ITAD
• The Springfield Centre

Opportunities are in research, policy, monitoring and evaluation, project management; long term roles will get you field-ready on formal secondments or assignments, however, generally the roles are West-based

Practitioner Networks

• BOND
• Beam Exchange

Opportunities are for seasoned professionals with 5-8 years experience under their belt

An illustration on mental models for systems thinking

The graphic was originally found on Twitter posted by Amy Koo ‏@awykoo, who had come across it at a sustainability and systems workshop in November 2015: http://watersfoundation.org/category/newsletter-archives/march-2014/

Why might some poverty reduction project incorporate behaviour change theories?

Nudges
(behaviour change tactics)

• Commitment device. A commitment device is a choice that an individual makes in the present which restricts his own set of choices in the future, often as a means of controlling future impulsive behavior and limiting choices to those that reflect long-term goals.
• Temptation bundling 
• Loss aversion. More pain with loss than the pleasure for what we gain. The customers that cancel with you are more worried about what they will lose than what they could gain by switching and going elsewhere

System actors
(for market actors integrating nudges)
Market actors who may be interested in behaviour change nudges are diverse. We see commercial enterprises looking to develop a customer base within a low-income population at the bottom-of-the-pyramid; we see Governments wanting to affect the behaviour of citizens such as through giving up smoking, reducing speeds on the roads and paying taxes on time; and we see opinion leaders/institutions/social networks wanting to influence and change socio-cultural dynamics - think of #blacklivesmatter.

System change
(why?)
We think that some behaviour change nudging is needed when the context is new for people, such as a unprecedented growth in the market economy, or recent modernisation, or evolving non-traditional systems, or new sectors and economic activity that require new practice and behaviours.

Facilitation using behaviour change
(for development practitioners)

• Avoid prescribing behaviour. Instead, help system actors find the behaviour they want to adopt; let it be self-deterministic and self-motivated. This makes it easier to find the right nudge - through the process, system actors will indicate the right nudge for them and what it will take to adhere to the effects of the nudge. 
• Be intuitive and look for deeper narratives. System actors will tell you what they want but this will not be overt, out-loud and obvious. This will be through their attitudes, behaviours, mindset, actions, and perceptions. You will need to read all of these cues to understand the full script of what the actor is (not) saying to you.
• Look into the socio-economic benefits for sharing the costs of desgining and implementing nudges and the socio-economic benefits for the value created. This should be the basis for programming the nudge into the market system
• Celebrate the effort not just the intellect. Telling people that they are smart and intelligent can create situations where the individual relies on their intelligence to get them through complex situations. Often what is needed more is a combination of patience, commitment, sacrifice, and possibly super-normal hard work (= effort)

RCTs in poverty reduction and development: why are some practitioners abandoning RCTs?

This blogpost about ethics in international development is about a randomised control trial (RCT) in Kenya. In the experiment, some households in Kenya were given unconditional cash transfers of either USD 404 or USD 1525. The researchers found, unsurprisingly, that the lucky ones were happier and that their unlucky neighbours were unhappy. The paper is aptly titled “Your Gain is my Pain”.

Most importantly, however, the blogger reflects on why this type of research is done at all: "Am I the only one to think that is not ethical dishing out large sums of money in small communities and observing how jealous and unhappy this makes the unlucky members of these tight knit communities?" 

For myself, as a development practitioner with a systems thinking perspective, RCTs can come across as having very limited usefulness and application. They can also be quite machine-based: they either choose to wilfully ignore human behaviour or they simply limit their interactions with other disciplines (psychology, sociology, anthropology) so that they can create more simple hypotheses. Thus, it is felt that the applicability of an RCT for complex problems (such as systemic poverty) is limited.

The RCT we have seen from Kenya seems to fall into that trap too. This RCT seems to need to test the notion that poor people in Kenya might not exhibit the same reactions and behaviours as other people. As if the nature of the human condition (in Africa) is under exploration. To me, this is strange and feels like the original hypotheses might have been drastically distilled and reduced down to overly simplified thoughts.

I wonder how the findings would actually be useful to policy and projects. Who might need proofs from an RCT that Kenyans are like any other human being? How could such research be useful for development planning at an economic or social level? Why is the notion that proving that desperation, jealously and unhappiness occurs among very poor people is valuable? I would also wonder what long-lasting impact this type of research would have on social relationships in the communities in the future.

Globally, there is a large community of development practitioner who feel that RCTs in poverty interventions are not ethical and not useful. From my conversations with them, they make the following points:

1. In many RCTs, an assumption is made that the the groups will not be communicating with each other. However, it is actually very difficult to have demarcated and clear boundaries for the treatment groups to be adequately isolated. People talk. Information can flow through multiple channels and through multiple mechanisms (face-to-face, mobile phone, internet, etc) across groups, geographies, social hierarchies, institutions, etc. 
2. In RCTs, people might be very desperate because of the psychological and social impact of poverty and crisis. In this case all the RCT does is exacerbate that desperation and exacerbate those behaviours that present themselves when people are in desperate situations. The results are therefore naturally biased and skewed and outlying when compared to any group at any point in time. This is not adequately recognised in RCTs and thus not at all reflected when RCTs attempt to influence policy and project applications.
3. Over time, the RCT can have a lasting negative impact. Those RCTs which test the type of reactions as the one featured here in Kenya - jealousy and unhappiness - can damage social relationships between individuals and groups even after the trial has ended. Real people are not as adept to switching off their pain and trauma (and any additional feelings of betrayal, anger, envy, frustration, etc.) as machines might be able to!