Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Blurring Corporate and NGO Lines
Dear Al, On one side you are perfectly right: large corporations do have resources like technical expertise, logistics and capital, that could and should be leveraged to fight poverty (yet be aware of Halliburton's performance in Iraq or the Water-companies in Bolivia). Yet I'm afraid that your definition of NGOs only comprises that type of organization you yourself are involved with: Northern, mostly philanthropic associations, that make their living from donor money and sponsoring/executing smaller or larger, but never large-scale-projects. The term NGO within developing countries extends far beyond this limited vision, as here NGOs are all types of social organizations of the beneficiaries themselves, when they are not established as commercial or public entities. This means a teachers-organization is an NGO -and most of their programs go way beyond classical trade-unions- as they are student-associations, small farmers associations, women's-associations, health-associations and so on. Many of them are confined to a single location, others have found ways of coordination and collaboration on a larger scale, up to whole countries or even beyond. This framework -almost a natural one and not something crafted- joins more expertise on Development-issues, success and failures and the reasons why, then the whole bunch of experts of large multilateral organizations like Worldbank, UNESCO, UNDP, FAO and (!) the big corporations jointly. For a strikingly simple reason: it's their life that's at stake not only success-reports or quarterly earnings. To get again into numbers: let's assume that you need one person-day to train 25 persons in how to use the Internet (or more generally, some ICT-application) for their benefit. This converts into 160,000 person-days to train 4 million farmers or the equivalent of 667 man-years. (Already almost out of scope to be done by highly-skilled and highly-paid professionals of the corporate world: it wouldn't make sense economically with respect to ROI). If we scale it up to let's say 200 Million farmer-families, we would need about 34 thousand person-years to do the job - completely beyond capacity of even the largest corporate entity. And we didn't even take into account that there at least about 50 or 60 local idioms to be considered, hundreds of different cultural traditions and thousands and thousands of different local social settings, in which each needs a sometimes larger sometimes smaller adjustment of training-materials, strategies and settings. So without close-support of local NGOs the task cannot and hence will not be done. Corollary: the true challenge is not getting the corporate-world involved but to get thousands of local NGOs involved as counterparts. The former is almost simple -convince the CEO and the Board of Directors, maybe some important shareholders. The second is the truly hard task, but unavoidable if you would like to succeed on scale. Yours, Cornelio P.S. For some reason MIT-media-lab left India, ATT Bellsouth sold out completely their ICT-business in Latin-American (i.e., even the best of the corporate-world sometimes doesn't match with local conditions and traditions). This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. 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.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Blurring Corporate and NGO Lines
Dear Colleagues, I find the discussion fascinating. I am learning. Thank you all that have shared and that have written me privately. I, for one, am overcome by the question of the alleviation of poverty in all its facets and am especially overwhelmed by questions about urban poverty. I know in the U.S. where I consulted for many years with urban anti-poverty programs, the programs that in my experience worked best in the U.S. were small in scale and often took either: 1) an old-fashioned, 19th century social work model, that is, the facilitator worked with each person on her/his own particular case, meeting the person whole person to whole person and taking on problems one-by-one; or 2) used Saul Alinsky-style organizing practices and confronted en masse the local powers that be, which were sometimes multi-nationals themselves. The most remembered Alinsky-style organizing was done in Rochester, New York. The church-coalition-led mass organization confronted Kodak, the biggest company in the community at the time. I know similar organizing has been going on for years in the riverside slums of Bangkok led by my friend, Fr. Joe Maier and others. The work we did in Vietnam Veterans Against the War was very influenced by Saul Alinsky. There are some interesting and ambitious pieces of work going on in urban areas using IT, but there are other people on this list that can speak to these in a much more informed way than I can. Suffice it to say that in Alinsky-style organizing a) the poor own their organizations; b) things are done nonviolently; and c) no non-violent tactic - or useful tool - is ignored. I am currently more interested in rural poverty and I spoke to one part of Jhai's efforts, the Jhai PC and communication system, in an earlier email. I am particularly interested in last centimeter solutions. In the Jhai PC and communication system case, farmers and their families have come up with three ways to make money (a key thing for them - a good friend once told me each day he must catch a fish - he takes as long as it takes - if he cannot catch a fish, his family is hungry): 1. by beating the closest middle man by finding out the price for their commodities (rice, woven goods) in the local market town by using the VoIP phone to a family member in that town. (There is data on this from InfoDev developed by a project in Senegal using WAP-enhanced cell phones). 2. by developing a local, sit-on-the-ground-and-sell-your-goods market in one village for use by five villages (thus, increasing the multiplier effect in the area), developing it through use of VoIP phones among women in the slower rainy season). 3. by trading with their relatives overseas in such a way that both their relatives and they make money, rather than their relatives sending them remittances. For example, they send a piece of woven goods to America where their cousin sells it in the diaspora for $80. Rather than sending $20 remittance that month, the cousin keeps $20 ($40 up) and sends $60 to the goods owner (who normally would have gotten $10 from the merchant coming through the village). This is family capitalism in its purest form. I would also like to contribute to this discussion by responding to some things that Sam Lanfranco brought up: The core problem for most NGOs is access to resources. The solution, in most cases, is to seek resources from the haves to help/work with the have not's. There are only three ways for NGOs to get resources: 1) seek them as donations; 2) seek them as contracted program/project funds; or 3) act like a business and grow them from revenues. We at Jhai Foundation have some experience with all of these, but perhaps most useful is our experience with business and the 'growing' of revenues. Before I start, I would like to point out that we have never 'cherry-picked' our projects. We work with very poor people, usually people who have no electricity, landlines, nor cell phone connectivity. I can only give you examples from my own experience. I will showcase our coffee project. As a matter of fact, we just spun off our coffee business to a cooperate we helped develop. This makes me very happy. We have developed many relationships over the course of this experiment. We have a relationships with: a) IFC (World Bank) which is helping pay, I think, for organic and fair trade certification work b) a local wet processor, who is becoming a leader of the new cooperative c) a local dry processor who will now have a direct relationship with the new cooperative d) a local exporter who will now have a direct relationship with the new cooperative e) with an importer who both our friend, the roaster, Thanksgiving Coffee, also has a relationship with and who is helping us develop relationships on behalf of the cooperative with other roasters, and who pays the cooperative four times what they were previously getting f) with a roaster who gives us a donation for every pound he sells
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Blurring Corporate and NGO Lines
Al Hammond [EMAIL PROTECTED] is correct when he observes: Vickram Crishna offers interesting insights--and I accept that the world is more complicated and that boundaries are often blurred in practice. ...[text deleted].. Nonetheless, until recently, few socially-minded entrepreneurs were starting for-profit businesses aimed at serving the poor, and few large companies consciously adopted strategies aimed at low-income markets, and now it is distinctly more than a few--we are looking, potentially, at a paradigm shift here. We are on a slippery slope here. In one direction we slide into generalities about what could be. In the other direction we slide into danger. At the core of this discussion is the helping relationship, or more bluntly, the gifting relationship. At the core we are talking about how the haves help the have nots to reduce the quality of life gap that divides them. The world has a long history of gifting relationships, most built within communities and ranging -in practice- from simple giving to more sensitive joint efforts with all those desirable partnership properties we are so keen to identify as essential. The world has a long history of good (and bad) corporate participation in such efforts, some carried on as charitable gifting and some carried on as social entrepreneur efforts. It comes as no surprise that within an era where entrepreneurship is touted, that we have the emergence of NGOs looking to carry out socially progressive business and focus on social capital schemes. The driver at the heart of this is no different than that which has been at the heart of utopian community efforts across time. Can we work together and can we do better? There is nothing wrong with the motive, the WHY. The challenges come with the WHAT and HOW. The corporate sector may just want to Do good, it may be looking to More markets, or it may be trying to blend both. That is obvious and efforts can be judged as they unfold. What is less obvious but more slippery is the roles for NGOs here. For most NGOs the WHY motive is laudable. The problems arrise with the WHAT and HOW. The core problem for most NGOs is access to resources. The solution, in most cases, is to seek resources from the haves to help/work with the have not's. There are only three ways for NGOs to get resources: 1) seek them as donations; 2) seek them as contracted program/project funds; or 3) act like a business and grow them from revenues. The risk here is that the HOW drives the WHAT. This is the problem of what I call The NGO dance. Simply put, the problem for the NGO is either Who do you dance with? or Who do you dance for? Dancing WITH and dancing FOR are long recognized as two very different kinds of dance activity. It is worth looking at recent history here. When the United States, addressing the United Nations, identified NGOs as partners in the US effort in Iraq, a noticable shutter went through the NGO community. This, as well as the use of contracted companies for reconstruction work in IRAQ, blurred the line between NGOs and others in that tragic situation. There are other factors at work of course, but the safe space for NGO work has been diminished. Blurring the lines is not always useful. Likewise, those NGOs who decide to dance to their own music, by growing revenues from a business model, run the risk of the HOW perverting both the WHAT and the WHY? Sometimes the appropriate reponse to an offer of a helping hand, or a novel internal business strategy, is to say Thanks but no Thanks. This is frequently the appropriate response for the have nots of the world, and may be the response that NGOs should consider if they wish to remain true to their vision and their mission. Better to be small and part of the solution than to be large and part of the problem. Enter the dance with caution. Sam Lanfranco Distributed Knowledge Project York University This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. 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.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
[GKD-DOTCOM] Blurring Corporate and NGO Lines
Vickram Crishna offers interesting insights--and I accept that the world is more complicated and that boundaries are often blurred in practice. How do we understand the recent marketing partnership between Care and Hindustan Lever in rural India--is it business (yes) or social development (yes)? Nonetheless, until recently, few socially-minded entrepreneurs were starting for-profit businesses aimed at serving the poor, and few large companies consciously adopted strategies aimed at low-income markets, and now it is distinctly more than a few--we are looking, potentially, at a paradigm shift here. We can measure this shift in two ways - the amount of investment aimed at serving low-income customers, or the number of households who receive goods and services that meet their needs and at prices and distribution points that they can afford/access. I like the household or customer-centered metric. So if we're serious about making a dent in poverty, ask yourself this question: how many NGOs can reliably provide service to a million customers or clients every day? How many developing country governments? Not many, in either case, although governments in some countries are learning to use ICT to provide scale in service delivery. Then ask how many large corporations can provide service to a million, or even 10 million, customers every day? The answer is pretty obvious. So if we're talking about improving the quality of life for 100's of millions of people, then we better be talking about how to use the capabilities of large companies--their management skills, logistic capability, access to finance and technology, etc., in addition to the needed efforts of NGOs and governments. To me, the most salient fact of the ITC e-choupal model (which is not perfect--not only caste, but also gender is a barrier in some areas) is that it already reaches and empowers close to 4 million farmers, and is growing rapidly. Allen L. Hammond Vice President for Innovation Special Projects World Resources Institute 10 G Street NE Washington, DC 20002 USA V (202) 729- F (202) 729-7775 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.wri.org www.digitaldividend.org This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. 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.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
