Since I started  betterplace.org, I have been looking for inspiring ideas in the field of social innovation. Naturally my thinking has been very much shaped by anthropology and thus I have followed with interest anything at the intersection between development and ethnography. Recently one of the useful (and fashionable) concepts has been design thinking.

Design thinking has many overlaps with the anthropological approach, such as starting out with as little preconceived ideas about the research topic  as possible and gaining an empathetic understanding through immersion during fieldwork. It has been pionieered by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and institutionalised at the Hasso Plattner d.school in Stanford (which has a sister institue at the University of Potsdam in Germany, around the corner from where I live in Berlin)

A few months ago IDEO published The Human Centered Design Handbook for NGOs, which

will help you hear people’s needs in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

It is now available in a new, second edition and I highly recommend it to anybody interested in applied social innovation.

Among the many useful tools they advocate in detail is context immersion:

Meeting people where they live, work, and socialize and immersing yourself in their context reveals new insights and unexpected opportunities. Human-Centered Design works best when the designers understand the people they are designing for not just on an intellectual level, but also on an experiential level. Try to do what your constituents do and talk to them about their experience of life in the moment.

On a project in rural India, people said that cultural tradition prevented women from touching men who are not immediate family members. However, by spending several days in a village, the team observed that there were many instances in which trained or uniformed women doing specifi c jobs were able to touch men without any serious problems. These gaps between what people say and what they do are not bad. In fact, seeing these differences may highlight new opportunities; for example, designing a new medical service that could be provided by uniformed women customs.

Earlier this week I attended an inspiring 2 day workshop at the Berlin Civil Society Center.

I wrote an overview about the workshop on my betterplace.org blog, but would like to share it also with Culture Matters readers, as it concerns the development industry about which anthropologists have quite a bit to say.

The topic was “Exploring Mutual Accountability“ and some of the top CEOs and program directors of the large development INGOs (Oxfam, Terre des Hommes, Care, World Vision, Welthungerhilfe etc.) were present, as well as leading civil society think tanks from AccountAbility and Active Philanthropy to Humanitarian Accountability Partnership and Keystone.

Accountability to whom?
For Civil Society Organisations „accountability“ usually means the accountability of organisations receiving funds to those who provide the financial inputs: their donors (governments, corporations, foundations or private individuals).

One of the discussion strands at the workshop concerned how the many different, often conflicting, accountability regimes which different donors demand from organisations and whose fullfillment costs them millions of Euros, can be simplyfied and made more effective. There was a consensus, that there exists a lot of „toxic accountability“ (as Simon Zadek from AccountAbility called it), doing more harm than good.

One prominent ongoing attempt to standardise this kind of accountability is the INGO Accountability Charter, which was presented at the workshop by Jeremy Hobbes, Executive Director of Oxfam International.

 Yet from my perspective, the really important discussions concerned a different accountability: the accountability of development organisations not to their financiers (which consists predominantly of rather technical and financial stuff, such as management procedures), but to the people they are supposed to serve: their clients, i.e. the poor and/or disadvantaged. 

The reason why aid has failed
I have argued again and again (or rather, repeated the wisdom of others…) that the main reason six decades of development aid have failed has to do with the fact, that aid organisations are NOT sufficiently held accountable for their performance. And all too often programs are badly designed and/or executed.

What do donors know about the quality of the charities they support? Some, of course, know a lot, as they are involved in volunteering for a specific organisation. But the majority, don’t know much about how effective a development program has been.

This is a result of the huge power imbalance between NGOs – mostly Western organisations with millions to spend and their clients – often poor, illiterate and badly organized. The latter simply lack a voice. They can’t say what they need, nor complain if the services they recieved were inadequate or even harmful.

In order to empower the poor they need voice, yet this would automaticall take power away from the organisations.

As Burkhard Gnärig, former CEO of Save the Children and Director of the Berlin Civil Socitey Center writes: 

Many civil society organisations talk about partnership, many talk about human rights, children’s rights and self determination but very few grant their local partners and beneficiaries tangible rights comparable to the rights they have to grant their own donors.

One of the results is, that in many non-Western countries, development organisations are considered less trustworthy than corporations: 

1. This is especially significant as CSOs spend hundreds of millions of Euros/Dollars in Asia and Latin America for the supposed benefit of the local population. The discrepancy between resources allocated and trust obtained indicates a strong lack of accountability, with a resulting lack of appropriateness of the projects CSOs run.

Give your clients a voice
Only beneficiary feedback can redress this situation. And some of the participants were very frank about badly run projects of their own organisations or that of others. Nevertheless there seemed to be a real gulf between the large INGOs and the participants representing leading think tanks and expert organisations.

Whereas the former acknowledged: yes, the situation is bad and we definitely need to incorporate more feedback from our „primary constituents“, the latter tend to look for more radical solutions.

The key questions revolved around: How much power are you willing to yield to others? How much voice are you willing to give to others, which – very probably – will challenge your work?

Thinking about it, it seems unlikely that INGOs will change fundamentaly. It seems very difficult to truthfully incorporate negative feedback, without completely undermining an organisation. „What do you do“, asked one participant, „if in a beneficiary evaluation, you find out that 85% or more of the recipients state that your organisations work has been useless or even harmful to them?“ Giving truthfull feedback might hugely undermine an NGO brand.

Yet, as the concept paper of the workshop rightly pointed out:

Empowering beneficiaries to seriously hold their donors accountable will do more for raising the average quality of projects than any other single step.

Here I obviously get very, very excited about the potential of betterplace.org and our web of trust. Because already now recipients can give feedback on services recieved. If the intervention they receive is on betterplace.org, they can post a statement as a visitor or advocate (well, the terminology for these roles will have to be rethought, as a refugee in a camp is hardly a „visitor“) on the project page.

So far only a few do so, such as the Namibian Benson Muramba, who wrote a visitors statement about what the funds received meant to him. Or the palestinian project Cinema Jenin, were (so far) 15 advocates, among them a number of local inhabitants, and 3 visitors voice their interest in the project and follow its realization. 

But it is not hard to imagine, how this feature can be used for massive real-time reporting.

Better capital allocation
Thus it is with great excitement, that we are planning a cooperation between Good Root and Keystone International, with the aim of bridging the power gap by giving more people a voice and thus making it possible for donors to get a much more reliable impression of project quality. The result would be that more money is spend on those projects which deliver effective social change and that ineffective projects would feel the need to change their approaches. This is hardly as easy as it sounds, as social change is often difficult to measure. Still this is no excuse not to use those state of the art impact tools which sit around, waiting to be implemented. 

A group of us — anthropology PhD students and faculty — working on China’s development projects, investment, related migration flows and their implications around the globe — have started a new blog, MqVU (the name reflects that it will very soon be a joint venture between people based at Macquarie University in Sydney and the Free University, or VU, in Amsterdam). Give us a few days and then visit us!

The new version of the Firefox web browser was released yesterday with much fanfare in circles that get excited about web browsers. The Mozilla folk were attempting to crack a Guinness Book record for the most downloads in one day, and they appear to have been successful with reportedly more than 8 million copies of the program downloaded in the first 24 hours (as I write the figure is in excess of 10 million).

Okay, but what does this have to do with anthropology?

What prompted me to write this post is the interactive map of global downloads Mozilla posted on their website here.  Although this is not Mozilla’s intention, this provides a graphic example of the discrepancies between access to IT globally.  Most striking are the grey areas with low downloads which cover most of Africa. Note that the figures are raw numbers of downloads rather than per capita figures, so this skews the impression somewhat.  For example, China seems to be right up there with best of them but the figure of 160 odd thousand downloads about the same as Australia, with only about 2% of the population.

The most intriguing detail for me though is the large number of downloads in Iran, the USA’s current enemy number 1; more than downloads in Australia, China, Russia, Canada, Italy or Brazil.  (The map is always evolving, so these facts are only true at the moment of writing.)  What is going on there?  What is the source of this enormous Iranian interest in the premier open source web browser?  Is there widespread hatred of Internet Explorer and Microsoft?  Or does Firefox simply provide excellent Farsi support?  Are similar factors regarding the take-up of technology at work to the ones Greg pointed out in a recent post, and would targetted ethnographic work help to shed some light on this ‘anomaly’?

Scott Thill at Alternet has published an article on the social impact of climate change.  The article goes as far as coining a new term: ‘envirogee’.  The implication seems to be that ‘refugee’ has a certain amount of baggage, being intrinsically associated with political persecution.  We are entering an age, mainly due to climate change, but also because of other cheery current/future phenomena such as peak oil, in which the traditional definitions of refugee will need to change to retain relevance.  The article is certainly polemic in tone, but I think it does the job of provoking thought on what the world is going to look like in the not too distant future and how our understandings of human movement, human rights, national boundaries and so on.  Here’s an excerpt:

Chew on this word, jargon lovers. Envirogee.

It carries more 21st century buzz than its semi-official designation climate refugee, which is a displaced individual who has been forced to migrate because of environmental devastation. Maybe the buzzword will catch on faster and shed some much-needed light on what will become a serious problem, probably by the end of this or the next decade. That light is crucial, because so far envirogees haven’t been fully recognized by those who certify the civil liberties of Earth’s various populations, whether that is the United Nations or local and national governments whose people are increasingly on the move for a whole new set of devastating reasons.

In short, immigration is about to enter a new phase, which resembles an old one with a 21st century twist. For thousands of years, humanity has fled across Earth’s surface fearing instability and in search of sustainability. But that resource war has kicked into overdrive thanks to our current climate crisis — a manufactured war with its own clock.

And the clock is ticking.

From earthquakes in China to cyclones in Myanmar to water rationing in Los Angeles, societies are shifting like their borders. And all the outcry over so-called illegal immigration neglects to answer one time-honored question: If the borders aren’t standing still, why should the people who live in their outlines do so? Especially when they’re under attack from catastrophic floods, fires, droughts and any number of other environmental dangers?

Right now, the 1951 Geneva Convention does not recognize the envirogee phenomenon, instead focusing on immigration as a result of political persecution. But then again, it was established over five decades ago when Earth’s climate was anything but a terrorist. But the Geneva Convention, like everything that must adapt or die, needs to mutate in time with the rest of the world and its hyperconsuming inhabitants in order to remain relevant in our still-new millennium.

Following on from Nursel’s recent post, I’d like to draw readers to a recent New York Times article about the “global food crisis”. According to the article, rising commodities prices, especially fuel and food prices, are producing unprecedented stress and anger across the globe, resulting in unrest and even riots. The article includes disturbing descriptions of people in Haiti eating concoctions made in part from mud in order to still their hunger pains. It is worth being reminded that what is experienced as a bit of additional pain at the checkout for the world’s wealthy can be an issue of survival for the world’s poor.

The article states:

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Significantly, the article also acknowledges the interconnectedness of the global economy in that rising prices have “pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies”. The production of biofuels putting upward pressure in prices is mentioned, though the competition between animals and humans for grains is not.

Given the likely future impact of rising fuel prices, climate change, the expansion of economies such as China and India on food production and prices, the fact that the situation appears already to be so bad is worrying indeed.

See also the NYT’s index of articles on food prices.

George Monbiot’s latest article ‘The Pleasures of the Flesh’ on 15 April 2008  is about the causes of the current global food crisis. Currently there are food crises in 37 countries. Monbiot says “the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1).” and according to the World Bank one hundred million people could become poorer by the high prices. Actually there is no scarcity of food; for example “at 2.1 bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records” and “it beat the previous year’s by almost 5%”.

A significant amount of food produced are used as biofuels; for instance according to the World Bank “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year”. And according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), this year 2.13 bn tonnes is likely to be consumed, and only 1.01bn will feed people. Monbiot complains that now in the UK, all sellers of transport fuel have to mix fuel with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. He says: “In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate. “

Monbiot also discusses the other cause of the food crisis, which “is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer”. This year 100 m tonnes food will be used as biofuels, and a bigger amount, 760 m tonnes, will be used to feed animals. Since meat consumption in Asia and Latin America has been booming, and the UN estimates that the population will rise to 9bn by 2050, Monbiot tries to answer the question “What level of meat-eating would be sustainable?” and he says “ If you care about hunger, eat less meat”.

At the end of his article, George Monbiot says:

Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

Normally, I wouldn’t cross-post from the other anthropology site that I do, but my partner-in-blogging on Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende, has been putting up some great posts that could just have easily been featured on Culture Matters because they’re about applying anthropology in all sorts of ways. I won’t reference them all, but I thought I’d flag a couple that might be of special interest to those involved with applied anthropology:

In Cellphones Save The World, Lende looks at an article in The New York Times on Jan Chipchase, a ‘human-behavior researcher’ and ‘user-anthropologist’ who works for Nokia. Daniel provides an extensive commentary on the original article in the NYT magazine, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?; both would likely be of interest to Culture Matters readers. Lende follows up his original commentary with more information on Jan Chipchase here.

Another post explores an ongoing project, Digital Ethnography, at Kansas State University, with a couple of good video clips including A Vision of Students Today.

Finally, and I’m just sampling from a few of his April posts, there’s a series on obesity that looks at the ‘obesity epidemic’ from a holistic, anthropological perspective. There’s several posts, but the last (which have links to the earlier ones) are On the Causes of Obesity: Common Sense or Interacting Systems and Human Biology and Models for Obesity.

Like I said, normally, I wouldn’t shamelessly cross-plug posts on the two blogs, but since I’m not the one doing the postings, and I really do think that they’re great examples of applying anthropology to pressing practical issues like poverty or public health, I’m breaking my usual rule for self-restraint.

Lately I have kept a very low profile on Culture Matters. One of the reasons for this is a project I would like to put up for discussion today: www.betterplace.org, an internet platform I co-founded and have been working on for the past 10 months. It went online last friday and I would greatly appreciate the feedback of all Culture Matters contributors and readers. Its a very applied project and I hope to learn from those of you who have a much deeper understanding of the development field than I do.

betterplace connects people who need help with their social projects, with others, who want to contribute to them by giving time, knowhow, donations in kind and money. It combines Web 2.0. tools with the world of development projects and aims to improve the way people can organize support for their projects, as well as give donors the chance to find the very initiatives they want to support. The platform is designed to make development projects and transactions as transparent as possible and and enable donors to get real feedback for their contributions.

betterplace is a non-profit foundation and its use is free (we finance the operational costs with the help of private sponsors, as well as the fees companies pay in order to be able to show their CSR on the platform).

The great thing about such a platform is that it can continuously be adapted to the interests and needs of different participants. We have many features in the pipeline and are open to any suggestions. Thus, please let me know your thoughts: Is the format suitable for the self-presentation of grassroots projects and social entrepreneurs? Does it encourage the exchanges we envision? And – which social projects do you know well and would you like to see on betterplace?

George Monbiot has just written a powerful article about the dangers of biofuels.   Amongst other things, he points out the enormous social impact they will have if agricultural land is increasingly used for vehicles during a time of unprecedented demand to produce food in the Third World.  Essentially, the increasing production of biofuels, unless strictly regulated, means that the cars of the rich will compete with the poor of the world for food — and market forces will determine that cars win this battle.

I see here shades of the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960s, in which advanced agricultural techniques, the use of chemical fertilizers and machinery was sold to Third World farmers as a panacaea that would bring them out of a state of ‘underdevelopment’.  In effect, the benefits for the West were much greater.  Consumers benefitted from a drop in global food prices, but the Third World farmers encouraged to mass produce monocrops were left with large debts and diminishing returns on their harvests.  In a similar way, biofuels, presented as a Good Thing will turn out to be anything but for the global South.

Monbiot writes:

Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels “might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further.”(5) This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”(6). Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.

The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%(7). Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame – by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand – but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.

They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices. They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and – as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced last week(8) – keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500 billion kilometre mark for the first time last year(9). But it doesn’t matter: we just have to change the fuel we use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people being pushed off their land remain unheard.

And, because they only apparently benefit the environment, but in fact produce much greater levels of greenhouse gases when deforestation and the fertilisers used to grow them are taken into account, they are going do more harm than good for everyone.