Date: 2024-04-28 Page is: DBtxt003.php L0913-TVM-MMW-000011
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TrueValueMetrics ... Peter Burgess Manuscript
Making Management Work for Relief and Development |
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Chapter 11
Support What is Already There |
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Support Existing Initiatives
What value analysis shows It is expensive to start something. It is expensive to close something down. The most efficient time is when something is operating just fine. What this suggests is that relief and development performance would be improved if good existing activities were kept going longer ... if resources could be applied to keeping existing activities going. Most Efficient Operations My own experience in operations has been that the most efficient time is when there is continuing operations and some growth. The growth helps to optimize use of staff without the difficulty of having to change staff and let people go. This is, of course, almost the exact opposite of the main thrust of the relief and development sector which does not like to keep a project going beyond, say, five years, or preferably less. Huge inventory of existing initiatives All over the world there are good things going on in a variety of sectors and in many different forms. The existing activities need support, sometimes technical, most often, financial. These are activities that are already ongoing. They might not amount to much in the big picture where it is fashionable ... and valueless ... to talk about and , but in the local places where they operate they are very important and very valuable. Because they already exist and a lot of the expensive stuff associated with getting started is over and done with, support results in 100% incremental value ... and the value adding is enormous. Where money is a significant constraint, a small amount of money can leverage all sort of extra activity and have a result that is out of all proportion to the amount involved. What form should support take? Support can take many different forms. The most valuable support is usually associated with a reasonable level of knowledge about what is needed. Support that removes a constraint and allows all sorts of other resources or strengths to be used to best effect is the best. The least valuable support is support where there is a lot of donor conditionality and the cost of the conditionality is higher than the value of the support. This is also, sadly, the most common form of support that is offered. The key forms of desirable support are:
Most worthwhile activities in the relief and development sector are constrained in some way. Often the constraint is money. A small amount of incremental money in an organization already doing good work can be very valuable. I am comfortable arguing that there can be real tangible value that is ten times the money provided. It is a crying shame that the norm of management information in the relief and development sector cannot show this and prove it to be so in a systematic way ... but my personal observations make me comfortable with the statement. Appropriate gifts in kind Gifts in kind can be very helpful, but sometimes this is problematic. The cost of ocean shipping around the world is extremely high, the problems of handling import procedures, and the problems of local transport. And then there is the problem of setting up, and discovering that all sorts of thing just do not quite fit. Money is a lot easier. Help with negotiating the operating environment Sometimes it is possible for an outsider to be helpful in getting something going that cannot be done by a local team. Most of the time local people can get things done more effectively than an outsider, but from time to time there are situations where an outsider can help. Help with relevant and appropriate learning Help with relevant and appropriate learning can be of enormous value. Education is helpful, but it becomes most valuable with experience, and sometimes local experience has been constrained and is out of date relative to what is now possible. People to people contact in a technical or professional sharing of learning is potentially very useful. Being friends And there are plenty of situations where just being friendly can be helpful. As an accountant, I am not sure how to value friendship ... but that does not mean it does not have value. Maybe the word to use is “priceless”. Friendship is certainly one of the important driving forces of human society ... and this dimension of support should be encouraged as much as practical. A Host of Existing Initiatives Tens of thousands of opportunities There are a host of opportunities in all sorts of locations and in a variety of activities. They are a good place to provide support. Many of the initiatives are extremely worthwhile and doing amazing things with very limited resources. Orphans There are people and organizations already doing amazing work looking after orphans. Are they doing it well? Are they doing it in the best possible way? Probably not. But does it really matter. The VALUE of what they are doing is huge. It really does not matter if it is not the most “efficient” because the most efficient will probably never get done. So let us just praise the fact that these initiatives are going on. It would be great if they could grow. It would be great if they could be replicated. It would be great if they could become more “efficient” But most of all it is already great because some people have chosen to do something of huge value. Hospice care With millions of people malnourished and at risk of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other chronic diseases, hospice care is a tremendous need. Almost every family in the poor 50% of the world has to handle the crisis of premature death; whether it is children, women in childbirth, young adults or older vulnerable adults. Care is often given by members of the family ... a terrible disruption to the already fragile family economy. And if the burden is too onerous, the family gets hungrier and hungrier and less and less able to cope. The results are hideous. These results are, however, common. Helping a community with its needs for hospice care are incredibly valuable. There are emerging vehicles to get modest amounts of money from donors to community based care givers. Schools Schools in the “south” are places of enormous hope, but they are struggling with very limited resources. Children in the “south” want to have the opportunity of school. Parents, who themselves have had no chance for education, will struggle to make it possible for their children to go to school. Schools are short of everything except students ... most government budgets are inadequate to supply all that is desirable, and parents are mostly poor and unable to help very much. School buildings are often very basic, and terribly overcrowded. There are shortages of desks and chairs, textbooks, paper and pencils, blackboards and chalk. Teachers improvise in all sorts of ways ... and of course, there is a shortage of teachers, especially of trained and experienced teachers. Resources that get to teachers and to the schools is of enormous value. Some teachers need something as basic as chalk ... students need a chalkboard, or just paper and pencil. The class needs “a textbook”. Yes ... there is a shortage of schools and classroom space ... but there are a lot of places where classroom space is not the constraint ... it is the availability of a little bit of resource to pay for a teacher and to pay for some supplies. Again, there are organizations emerging that are working to get resources to teachers and schools in communities all over the world. Churches and faith based organizations Churches and faith based organizations are very important in a lot of communities in the “south”. Some of these organizations have long histories of doing very valuable work, and are increasingly joined by new faith based organizations seeking to be helpful. One of the strengths of the churches, mosques and other faith based organizations is that they have membership in a lot of communities ... probably more than any other organization except national political organizations. The work that has been done by these organizations is enormous, but not as widely known as it should be. And to the extent that the activities are not as socio-economically desirable as one might wish, or there is a political opposition to the activity, there is some level of opaqueness to what has been going on. There is a potential for friends of these churches, mosques and other faith based organizations to help fund and expand the activities. Some of this is happening, but it is far from the scale that it could be. Telecenters Helping to establish and sustain telecenters is potentially very valuable. The poor “south” has a serious deficit in telecommunications infrastructure for telephone and Internet access. There are a growing number of telecenters that serve poor communities ... but they do not have an easy time:
Telecenters can help do for the remote poor “south” what free public libraries did for the “north” quite early in the industrial revolution. Professional groups The professional community in the “south” has huge potential, but is practically ignored by the official relief and development sector and the global community of international corporations. There are “south” professionals in many fields and they can be engaged in a much more substantive way than they have been in the past. The emergence of technology professionals in India as a driver of India's international standing in technology shows what is possible. Accountants from the “south” are as good as they get, but they need to have opportunity and to be engaged professionally in an appropriate way. Ghanaian accountants have had a very good professional reputation for a long time. Involving “south” professional in a more substantive way can change the dynamic of the relief and development sector significantly and rapidly and provide a very solid foundation for better performance. Professionals in the “South” India has shown what a local professional class can do, but there are good local professionals almost everywhere in the “south”. In the area of accounting, there is no reason whatsoever for local accounting to be anything but first class. In my experience as a corporate CFO with offices in many countries in the “south”, the accounting was excellent. As in anything where excellence is the goal, there was appropriate training, supervision and oversight. The Global Fund created a system of Local Fund Agents and contracted with high profile international professional firms to serve as its eyes and ears on the ground. It did not work very well and was expensive. It would have been so much better to engage local professionals to serve as the eyes and ears ... and perhaps then get some useful information about what was going on. Experience is an issue ... but competence and potential are not. The “south” will get a lot more success when its professionals rather than its politicians are center stage of development. Universities There are many universities in the “south”, most of them doing a lot with not very much. These universities can benefit a lot from appropriate help. There are many ways in which there can be valuable help ranging from simply money to support the institution's budget, to working with specific faculty and researchers on projects, to joint “north” / “south” institutional collaboration, to scholarships for the students, to scholarships for the graduating students for further studies. The universities are very much in place and the potential of the people associated with the universities is huge and the potential of these institutions as an access point for local knowledge is also huge. ODA organizations The Official Development Assistance (ODA) organizations, or as I prefer, the Official Relief and Development Assistance (ORDA) organizations handle a very large annual fund flow. The aggregate amount is something more than $50 billion a year, and maybe soon to reach $100 billion a year. There is some question about the amount, and how important it is in relation the other big fund flows: (1) private sector capital market fund flows; and, (2) the flow of migrants' remittances. With fund flows of this magnitude, performance improvement should be a top priority. ORDA organizations should be aggressively engaged so that they are encouraged to focus on performance improvement, and supported in every way possible. More than anything else they should be encouraged in every way possible to: (1) be transparent about their performance; and, (2) be held to account so that there is positive reinforcement for good performance and accountability for poor performance. Alternative and extra funding for the ORDA organizations from the private sector or through private philanthropic grants should not be the main thrust of support, but rather, helping to make better use of the existing fund flows. The whole value chain from origination of the funds with “north” governments and the capital market (in the case of the World Bank and the regional development banks) to the eventual final beneficiary should be the subject of aggressive value analysis and public scrutiny. While more information is being made available to the public by posting information to websites ... it is voluminous and not at all easy to use analytically. While it is a step in the right direction, it is not yet by any means the quality of information that is needed and reasonable to expect from organizations of the stature of the World Bank or the UN. |
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