Dear Colleagues, I believe Peter's description below is meritorious and deserves careful thought. There are a number of issues which need to be clearly taken into account:
1) As the major lending institutions, who are in the process of country debt forgiveness, understand, there is a minimum level of the economy that is needed before we can expect normal enterprise development to occur. Expecting investments before this threshold has been reached imaybe false hope and maybe establishing a foundation for failure. Micro loans and sweat equity only work within selective parameters and are not a universal panacea. And, expecting the investment to behave in a neoclassical economic model may not be the appropriate way to value the return for the investment, regardless of form. 2) The investing organizations do realize that there are often excessive amounts of funds that are dissapated by the time the original funding is allocated. Some of this can be laid at the feet of the NGO or other organization in the field. But, a large part of the problem is the total lack of trust that funding agencies have and thus the layers of bureaucratic reporting and management which is superimposed on the projects because of this need to provide compliance. In other words, there is an element of the "self-fulfilling prophesy" here, due in part to the remoteness of those who release the money from the daily needs of the final recipients. And the allocation of developed world compliance standards can almost exceed the cost of the project itself. I have seen costs for evaluations equal between 10 and 30% of the total grant, not including the fiscal management overhead. 3) Volunteers are not a free commodity to any organization. The temporal nature and varied level of competencies and knowledge require signifcant management to properly utilize the latent talent. Organizatins have real overheads which need to be acknowledged so that the project can reach maximum benefit. At times, it may be worth the cost of highly qualified or even over-qualified professionals than to "make do" with under funded volunteer organizations. 4) Accessing funding is expensive. It chews up talent and time which often would be better working in the field. Yet few funding sources want to be of the sustaining type. They are expecting a cashflow model to get the projects off the grant path. Again, referring to "one" above, some systems are so far below the survival level that these highly leveraged grants may never, at the current levels allow the project to rise up above the surface. In an Internet world, new models for development need to be addressed. At the present time approaches such as those suggested by Peter's description, below, are paliatives, patches which are attempting to fix a neoclassical approach to development. Most of the ICT4D models are in the same spirit, whether in the developed or developing world. What is even more important is that the small "shining" exceptions are being held up almost as faith offerings and being integrated into "lessons learned" in the academic community and thus being perpetuated when new thinking should be forthcoming. thoughts? tom abeles On 6/16/05, Peter Burgess wrote: > Speaking for the Transparency and Accountability Network, and our new > program to help raise money for relief and development activities, we > are looking for activities that demonstrably improve the quality of life > in a community. This requires some baseline information about the > community, some information about the planned activities, and a review > of the community metrics periodically after the activity has been > implemented. Something that costs $100 should facilitate an increment in > community value of some multiplier of this ... perhaps as much as > $1,000. > > From our perspective, external funds are only valuable when they help > make local resources, especially human resources and local natural > resources, productive. Our expectation is that funds used for one > purpose will get repaid, and then go on to facilitate some other needed > work. > > We are not very interested in the organization that implements the > activity. In fact the less organization the better, since too much of > relief and development assistance funding is used to strengthen an > organization rather than delivering activities to the intended community > beneficiaries. Having said that, an organization that has successfully > done relief and development activities and can show results is a plus. ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
