people-centred development

Donor List - see "page francophone"

2012-02-13T08:54:00.001+01:00

During a recent DR Congo trip, I was asked to put together basic information as to how to mobilise donor funds for organisations working on women's rights. I wrote a short guide - in French - and appended to it a list of relevant donor websites I put together in 2011. That list is in English. If you want to take a peek, go to the column to the left and click on "page francophone - Ressources, Bailleurs". Scroll to the bottom if you are interested in the list only. Bonne chance!

"...and here are our raped women"

2012-01-21T14:48:00.004+01:00

The other day a colleague told me about an evaluation in a war-prone country. The international consultant who led the exercise had called a meeting with the "beneficiaries" - women who used services designed for survivors of gender-based violence. At one point in the meeting, the consultant reportedly asked participants who had been raped to identify themselves by raising a hand.
Does this make you cringe? No? Then, please read on. It is true that in some places some people have blunt ways with survivors of violence. I remember a scene in the Democratic Republic of Congo, several years ago, where someone introduced me to a group of women with the words "and these are our raped women". Would you like to be introduced to a stranger in that way? Now, imagine the memory of that violent incident plunges you back into depression. And rape is taboo in the society you live in and people will ostracise you if they know about it - they won't want to meet you, they won't buy your produce, they'll keep you away from their children...
Even - or especially - in contexts where some people do not seem to respect the survivors' right to privacy and confidentiality, it is a good idea to follow basic ethical rules. Whether you implement a project or you just visit it, you must not do any harm. Reminding rape survivors of their ordeal is bad enough - if you absolutely need them to talk about it, make sure everything is in place to prevent mental health problems and social stigma. A good guide is the PATH/ WHO Publication Researching Violence against Women, available from the PATH web-site. Asking people in public - and even a very small focus group is a public setting - to come forward and identify themselves as "raped women" is simply an insult to women's human rights, and a danger to their well-being and social integration.

End Violence against Women Now: New Learning Modules

2012-01-09T17:05:00.000+01:00

The UN WOMEN Virtual Knowledge Centre endvawnow.org has been enriched with new modules that provide guidance for a range of interventions to end violence against women. Jasmin Rocha and I are the authors of the "Campaigns" module - check it out and feel free to comment (click on the little envelope below) if you come across anything that needs enriching or improving! You can also register on endvawnow.org to indicate your preferences in terms of topics and languages. For the time being, only part of the site is available in French and Spanish, but eventually, everything will be translated.

Wishes for 2012 starting to come through!

2012-01-05T20:48:00.003+01:00

The other day I wrote that I would do more to share findings from evaluations. And now I find out that Oxfam Great Britain has put my whole full big evaluation report on the "We Can" campaign, recommendations and all, in the public domain: ta-taa! Click here if you're interested in campaigning on people's attitudes on gender equality.
The link takes you to the Oxfam Great Britain Policy and Practice web-site, a commendable mine of publications linked to Oxfam work around the world.

Good Resolutions for 2012

2012-01-02T17:37:00.005+01:00

A very healthy and happy 2012 to everyone! At the beginning of this new year I realise how busy and stimulating 2011 was for me: I led two multi-country evaluations and two "strategic reviews", all in the complex fields of human rights, gender justice and peace building. Early in the year, I completed a "real-time" evaluation that had accompanied, over almost three years, the development of a facilitation method for strategic planning in conflict contexts. In October, I applied aspects of that method to plan and facilitate a multi-stakeholder, multi-lingual and inter-continental strategic planning workshop - an exhilarating experience. Between Christmas and New Year's Day, my occasional associate Jasmin Rocha and I made time to finally write up our article that presents the methodology we developed in 2010 to assess quality in work with survivors of violence against women.

What are my resolutions for 2012? I can think of a few:

Insist on working in teams! Combining an "international" evaluator with a "local" expert has proven highly productive. I have also excellent experience working in tandem with academic researchers (like Jasmin Rocha, mentioned above!) who know lots about the possibilities (and pitfalls) of methods in social research.
Convince clients to publish more of their monitoring and evaluation work! So much work is being done on building monitoring systems, on training people in monitoring, on evaluating development interventions - and so little of it is being shared. There are encouraging web-based initiatives to share monitoring & evaluation (M&E) knowledge, such as AWID's Monitoring and Evaluation Wiki. I vow to use them even more and more interactively - i.e. by posting contributions as well. Now, when it comes to sharing the actual findings, sharing seems more difficult. Many organisations that commission evaluations are shy to publicise any lessons learned. A lost opportunity. In the meantime, I'll do my best to -
Share more of the insights I gain in evaluations! Often, contractual obligations prevent me from publishing extracts from actual evaluation reports. But I will continue to spread broader ("anonymised") insights, both on methodologies and on the matters examined, in this blog and elsewhere.

And I will brace myself again for many new surprises - my assignments invariably turn out to be different from what I had imagined in the beginning-; I will factor in flexibility but plan and implement my holidays; and talking about holidays, I must return to my knitting now...

A new blog on Egypt

2011-12-27T11:08:00.001+01:00

Ahmed Badawi, a political economist, has started a witty blog called "Postcard from Egypt". Find it on http://www.transform-egypt.blogspot.com - the first post could be seen as a reflection on order and disorder.

New Call for Proposals!

2011-11-24T20:30:00.000+01:00

Click on the link to find out more: The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women Announces New Call for Proposals | Say NO - UNiTE Attention: they tend to fund rather big projects. Bon courage!

Research on Gender Relations

2011-11-17T10:59:00.001+01:00

There has been an encouraging flurry of research projects, "baseline" studies and evaluations on gender relations. It seems that in recent years, hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of people have been interviewed. They have been asked what they think and do about the roles of men and women, girls and boys (and maybe people who fit into an in-between category) - in the household, at school, at work, in politics and other aspects of life in society. I suspect that quite some people may have undergone several interviews by different research teams, especially in those parts of the world that receive extra donor attention - my mental map shows big blotches of donor interest around Bukavu, Goma, Kabul, Phnom Penh, to name a few places.

Does anyone care as to what that means to the people who are the objects of such studies? People with a professional research background normally do, as they have learnt about the importance of ethics in research. Basically, you don't want to inflict harm on the people you study. The risk of causing potentially lethal mental health problems is particularly high when you investigate gender-based violence - that is why PATH and UNICEF have produced a most commendable guide on Researching Violence Against Women. If you plan to do any research - even just a few interviews - on the subject, do read this guide. It can save lives.

Now, I feel that we should think beyond the recommendations of the PATH/ UNICEF guide if we want to avoid deepening the attitudes and social norms that underpin unequal gender relations and gender-based violence.

Research on social cognition - i.e., on the ways in which people and societies think - shows that even the tiniest gesture or conversation contributes to reinforcing - or weakening - individual attitudes and social norms. Hence, it is important you design and phrase your questions very carefully. For example, the question "it is important for a man to show his wife who is the boss" implicitly transports at least two gender-unequal notions: that (i) the man is the boss (note that he is not referred to as "husband", but as the generic "man"), (ii) he owns "his" wife. Now, if your questionnaire includes the symmetrical question "it is important for a woman to show her husband who is the boss", you may cause some hilarity - but it may be a good way to ensure you do not deepen those stereotypes about men being true men only if they hold power over women. The same applies to questions of the type "A woman should be able to choose her own friends even if her husband disapproves". Again, gender bias could be offset by asking the same question with reversed roles ("a man should be able...").

Imagine a woman being taken through, say, 30 questions, most of which implicitly portray women as having to ask permission from men, as being beaten by men, and so forth. The questions are administered by people who have come from outside, who take notes and who record the interview - a very impressive setting. In my view, such a situation is harmful and very likely to deepen women's sense (the interviewee's and the interviewer's!) of powerlessness. That in turn will prevent them from developing their own strength and power. Likewise, men who are interviewed with similar stereotypical questions (without the "neutralising" questions that would reverse roles) may leave the interview with a deepened feeling it's a true man's duty to control his wife.

Any research is an intervention. That applies to natural science (remember Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?) and even mores so in social science, where the researcher is part of what he studies. Interviews manipulate people's minds. If they reflect the dominant bias and stereotypes about gender relations, they will reinforce such bias and stereotypes, making gender equality and violence-free lives even more distant goals. And they are unfair to both women and men. They ignore the power women (can) have, and the burden "male supremacy" may mean to men.

Do you know anyone who works on these issues? I'd love to hear about that. Please share such information as a comment (below).

A commendable series of "webinars"

2011-11-16T08:18:00.000+01:00

For free on-line seminars on evaluation, click here: Equity-focused evaluations | MY M&E! I particularly recommend the 22 November instalment with Patricia Rogers and Richard Hummelbrunner - on how to make log-frames more effective for complex interventions.

A women's classic, 2011 edition!

2011-11-09T17:27:00.000+01:00

Hooray - "Our Bodies, Ourselves" has been updated, 40 years after the first edition of this classic on women's health and sexuality. Find the table of contents, the introduction, readers' praise and more by clicking on this link: Our Bodies, Ourselves 2011 Edition - Our Bodies Ourselves

New Fund for Young Feminists

2011-11-02T08:07:00.000+01:00

Click here to find out more: Grants Program : FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund

Tips for Multi-Everything Facilitation

2011-11-01T15:54:00.001+01:00

Just got back from an exhilarating multi-country, multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder, multi-language planning workshop. So much "multi" can make workshop planning quite an adventure: Will the participants understand each other, across cultures, disciplines, languages and perspectives? Will those who come with the money listen to those who come with the expertise? Will the participants reach any agreement or useful conclusions within a short (2-day) spell of time?In the end, things appeared to work out beautifully. I see three major factors for such success:

Careful preparation: For every workshop day, I invested some three preparation days - reading background materials; talking to participants representing all the different perspectives that would be at the workshop to find out about expectations and worries; writing up a workshop plan and sharing its different steps with the participants. (And even with all this preparation time, I missed out on a few issues that needed to be dealt with when the workshop started!) But even before the facilitator came in, the organisers made sure that those invited to the workshop were the people who worked on the subject matter and could decide on behalf of their organisations.
Full, balanced participation: To make sure no single voice would dominate the discussion, we agreed that some participants from an organisation that was over-represented at the meeting would be observers and note-takers. The gender balance was quite good, with men only slightly over-represented. The facilitation techniques encouraged every single participant to express herself/ himself calmly. The observers had opportunities to share their feed-back with all, helping me to adapt facilitation to the perceived needs.
High quality interpretation: Yes, conference interpreters are "expensive", but working with a professional translation team is the easiest way to make sure those who don't speak the dominant language can contribute fully to the workshop. Where no professional translation team is available, plan for plenty of extra time for informal, consecutive translation; and intersperse the workshop with small group work in language groups.

Most importantly, the basic rule for any workshop is: it's the participants' workshop, and every single participant who has agreed to give their time and attention to the workshop deserves the same attention, and has the same right to shape the discussions. If facilitators and organisers respect this principle, half of the work is done. The other half is swift, effective follow-up!

Changing perspectives

2011-10-22T14:58:00.002+02:00

A movie full of irony, snitched from Chris Blattman's blog. African anthropologists exploring strange European tribes.

Evaluating efficiency in campaigning

2011-10-13T14:24:00.000+02:00

The OECD Development Co-operation Directorate (DAC) defines efficiency as follows: "Efficiency measures the outputs -- qualitative and quantitative -- in relation to the inputs. It is an economic term which signifies that the aid uses the least costly resources possible in order to achieve the desired results. This generally requires comparing alternative approaches to achieving the same outputs, to see whether the most efficient process has been adopted. When evaluating the efficiency of a programme or a project, it is useful to consider the following questions: Were activities cost-efficient? Were objectives achieved on time? Was the programme or project implemented in the most efficient way compared to alternatives?" (DAC criteria for evaluating development assistance)
All this is nice and clear if you evaluate a project that produces tangible outputs, through predictable processes - as in manufacturing, for example. Things tend to be more complex in social development.

Earlier this year, I conducted an evaluation of an innovative, multi-country campaign which aimed to create a popular movement and a shift in social norms regarding gender equality. How do you apply the DAC definition to such a broad initiative, with such diffuse outcomes? What are the inputs, what are the outputs? You would only cause confusion if, say, you decided to call the campaign activities "inputs" and the social movement its "output". I have seen overly simplistic solutions - of the type, "our agency has spent 200,000 US Dollars on TV announcements which have reached an audience of 2 million people; i.e. at 10 cent per person, which is highly efficient." But what if, in this fictitious example, the viewers totally misunderstood the campaign message, or felt offended by it? Is it efficient to spend 200,000 Dollars on anything that doesn't work?

A few simple moves may help to generate valuable insights on efficiency even in complex settings:

The DAC criteria (relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability) are interdependent. Hence, you cannot look at efficiency in isolation. An activity that is not likely to be useful and that doesn't work is wasteful. Hence, to put it sloppily, start by finding out whether the campaign you examine makes any sense - if it doesn't, then efficiency may not matter anyway!
Efficiency is mainly about the appropriate use of resources. Don't get mesmerised by concepts such as "input" and "output"; squeezing complex realities into ill-fitting concepts only confuses readers. Rather, think of the different types of resources that come into play, for example: people's work time, knowledge and contacts; money; any material assets such as cars and office equipment. Are these resources used appropriately and wisely? "Quality" matters as much as "quantity".
Arguably, the discipline specialised in effective use of resources is management. You can examine decision-making structures and processes on resources against pre-determined standards, for example when conducting a financial audit. Or you can find out from the different people who work with the resources (staff, volunteers, "clients") whether they are satisfied with the resources and the ways in which they are used.
Effective monitoring - purpose-driven observation of what is happening within the campaign and around it - is a key aspect of management. "Efficient" in this context means that the resources used for monitoring (including people's patience) are commensurate to the use of the information thus gathered.

The aspects outlined here are mainly about quality. You can't measure campaign effectiveness by inserting a thermometer somewhere (the strictly "quantitative" approach). You need to find out how the resources are used, and compare that with existing standards or the participants' aspirations. I'd be keen to have more tips on the subject!

The 99 per cent

2011-10-12T17:42:00.000+02:00

Moving testimonies from the protesters on Wall Street: We Are the 99 Percent

Aid Effectiveness?

2011-09-28T09:06:00.001+02:00

An incisive article about the part donors play in development effectiveness - just click on the link at the end of this paragraph. Owen Barder shows that government donors have fulfilled only one of the promise they made to increase aid effectiveness. Good reading! In my view, monitoring systems and evaluations should always factor in the donor's role. Their action - or non-action - may have just as much (or even more) weight than anything that happens "on the ground".
What Happens When Donors Fail to Meet Their Commitments? | Owen Barder | Global Development: Views from the Center

Good reading on "results-based" approaches vs. complexity

2011-09-12T08:20:00.000+02:00

Highly commendable: an incisive article on results-based approaches in development. The author, Harry Jones, explains how ill-conceived application of "results-based management" tools may yield an overly simplistic picture of reality. Unwanted "side effects" are likely to occur. Click on the link to read the full article:
Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Blog : Managing better for results, not just measuring them better: lessons on complexity for the results agenda

Monitoring on Women's Rights

2011-09-09T10:26:00.002+02:00

A few days ago I shared a link to AWID's recent publications on monitoring and evaluation for women's rights. To tell from the enthusiastic response it received, it fills a gap. You can find the publication by clicking on its title: Strengthening Monitoring and Evaluation for Women's Rights: Thirteen Insights for Women's Organisations. It is part of an eminently legible and commendable series written by Srilatha Batliwala and Alexandra Pittman. They have also published Strengthening Monitoring and Evaluation for Women's Rights: Twelve Insights for Donors and a broader critique of monitoring and evaluation in development co-operation on women's rights, Capturing Change in Women's Realities.
Now, do not expect to find a "pick-up-and-go" monitoring framework that any organisation can just slot into its systems without pain or effort. Anyone who promises such one-size-fits-all solutions should be distrusted.
The "Insights" booklets focus on basic principles that should guide organisations when building monitoring and evaluation systems - which should be crafted to the needs and resources of the individual organisation, in its specific context. The booklets can also come in handy when an organisation draws up TOR for external evaluators or other consultants involved in planning, monitoring and evaluation. Capturing Change includes a rich section that exposes the advantages and shortcomings of frameworks and tools commonly used in monitoring and evaluation in development work on women's rights.
Try also Alexandra Pittman's interactive M&E "wiki" - click here to get there.

Attitude Change on VAW

2011-08-11T17:09:00.005+02:00

I had a useful conversation with social psychologist Prof. Alexander Redlich (Hamburg) last month. What follows below is what I have distilled from my notes.

Violence against women is closely linked to individual attitudes and social norms on women’s and men’s roles in society.

Societies construct and are built on implicit norms that define differences, e.g. between men and women, and between young and old. We are socialised to function according to these norms; they are “hard-wired” in our brains. Neurologists estimate that only 40 out of 1,000,000 actions a person undertakes are preceded by a conscious decision. Everything else happens without any thought – reasoning often comes after an action has been taken.

Deeply internalised norms are hardly ever questioned; in the opposite, they tend to be reinforced in social interaction. For example, when tennis player Boris Becker stated, “I played like a woman”, he contributed to reinforcing perceptions about the difference between the sexes: “real men” being posited as aggressive and tough, as opposed to sensitive, soft, “feminine” behaviour. The many forms of violence against women are powerful instruments to reinforce implicit gender-inequitable norms, and thus reinforce social acceptance of “male dominance” vs. “feminine submissiveness”. But even well-meaning research with survivors of VAW is likely to contribute to deepening inequality when it posits women as victims and men as (potential) perpetrators. Both men and women are victims of social norms that lock them into opposing roles – and both are perpetrators in that they enact and enforce these social roles with others, including children, who may soak up these norms as absolute truths.

One of the founders of social psychology, Kurt Lewin, defined three key steps in attitude change: "unfreeze" - "change" - "freeze". That is, “frozen” internalised social norms must be “unfrozen” – i.e. something hitherto “obvious” and “natural” must be recognised as a social construct, a man-made thing that can be changed. Then, change can happen. Subsequently, to prevent individuals from sliding back into “old ways”, the new, changed attitudes must be reinforced (“frozen”).

When several people behave in a “new” way, they contribute to changing the “old” social norm. When others react positively to “new” behaviour, “new” behaviour becomes more desirable and practicable. If “new” behaviour is repeated by many over an extended spell of time, new social norms are built; the new behaviour becomes part of the repertoire of “natural” behaviour.

Enjoying Indian Hospitality

2011-08-04T07:58:00.002+02:00

Greetings from the road... This blog has been silent for a few weeks because I am knee-deep in a six-country evaluation of a unique 7-year campaign. One of the case studies is in India - I am writing this from New Delhi.

Now, last week I developed high fever and had to be hospitalised. The first time in my life to be in a hospital as a patient!!! After four days on IV drips, I am back to life and full of new insights:

Adversity can hide amazing delights. When I could not use my right hand because it was attached to the drip, my left hand and my feet developed fascinating new modes of cooperation. I felt like a child learning to crawl. And a bit like a monkey. That was strangely enjoyable.
The low labour costs in India make that hospitals are staffed in ways German doctors and patients can only dream of: a dizzying abundance of cleaners, catering staff, two levels of assistant nurses, two levels of nurses, two levels of doctors... On the days when I had high fever, a constant stream of people came to look after me. I did realise at some point, though, that cleaners, caterers and "lower-level" nurses were hoping for tips. Don't know how low those low labour costs go.
Indian hospital food is the perfect Indian food for me. I think I shall look out for a nursing home in Kerala or some other women-friendly beautiful state to spend my old old days..
And: having people who care look after you is half of the cure! Loads and loads of thanks to those who have helped me through the procedures and the emotional stress!

On Jargon, again!

2011-07-01T07:57:00.004+02:00

The evaluators Patricia Rogers and Jane Davidson share a blog called Genuine Evaluation - about "real, genuine, authentic, practical evaluation". And they have posted this glorious video from Blackadder, a timelessly mad British TV series from the 1980s. It's about one of my pet hates - abusive use of jargon! Click HERE, enjoy... and don't worry if you don't get everything...

New fund for "women's leadership"

2011-06-24T12:16:00.003+02:00

The Dutch government has launched a new fund, which is to replace the MDG3 fund. It is called FLOW and it holds EUR 70 million for initiatives "to strengthen the opportunities for women and girls". Full guidelines are available HERE. The deadline for applications is 29 July - just a month from now!

Efficiency vs. Sustainability?

2011-06-21T08:15:00.011+02:00

The recent months have been so busy with exhilarating complex work; I hardly find any time to share any of the many inspiring thoughts I keep coming across! Here is a beautiful one: is efficiency good for sustainable development? As Robert Lukesch, a regional development specialist, pointed out at a recent DeGEval conference (German Evaluation Association), redundancy, i.e. having more than one set of resources to perform a certain activity, is a vital feature in living organisms and ecosystems. For example, we have two kidneys so that we can continue to live if one of them fails. Redundancy increases the resilience of living systems. More on this topic on www.resalliance.org.

The Berlin underground railroad system (S-Bahn) is an excellent example for poor resilience due to excessive "efficiency". When the harsh winter 2010 damaged a large number of trains, the entire system ground to a near-halt and restarted at a very, very slow pace. As of June 2011, the trains are still shorter, i.e. more crowded, than before. The reason: for the sake of "efficiency", S-Bahn management apparently reduced routine maintenance work and closed most of its repair workshops, laying off cohorts of expert staff. The few remaining workshops have been struggling to fix trains that broke down half a year ago.

The lesson: excessive "efficiency" kills "sustainability". Efficiency may also sabotage innovation, as Lukesch points out in a recent study on resilience (available in German here). You can be efficient when you know exactly what you're doing and which is the least onerous way of doing it. When you innovate, by definition, you cannot know exactly what happens next. Innovation means trying out new things, exploring untrodden paths, making mistakes and learning from them: all that looks quite wasteful when watched through "efficiency" goggles.

Does that mean that the much-revered OECD/DAC principles "relevance - effectiveness - efficiency - impact - sustainability" are mutually exclusive? In any case, it is useful to take a careful look at the assumptions behind these principles, and the way in which these assumptions come together - or not...

Evaluating Advocacy by Evaluating Advocates

2011-06-07T08:57:00.004+02:00

A charming idea! An article by Steven Teles and Mark Schmitt in the Stanford Social Innovation Review acknowledges that evaluating advocacy is notoriously difficult. Advocacy has many dimensions and it intervenes in complex political processes - hence it may take decades until the desired policy change takes place. Teles and Schmitt say, rather than getting impatient about initiatives that don't produce any tangible results within the typical one- to three-year grant period, donors should evaluate the advocates: "Evaluating advocacy organizations means paying close attention to the value they generate for others, rather than only focusing on their direct impacts." Great idea! A longer version of the article is available on the Hewlett Foundation website.

No more nameless faces

2011-05-11T09:14:00.006+02:00

The latest copy of Forced Migration (FMR), a free review published by the Refugee Studies Centre (Oxford) comes with a fresh look on photographs of "poor people": many pictures are edited ("pixellated") so that people's faces cannot be recognised. This is wonderful, because it drives home the point that the dignity and security of every human person must be respected. As the editors put it, "FMR is distributed around the world in print and is freely accessible online. (...) We ourselves have no way to be sure that the people in the photographs could have given truly informed consent for their image to be used by us. Would they have understood that their image might be seen by people all around the world, and that it would live on the virtual world for potentially many, many years?"

I'd wish this laudable move could be made by the public relations (PR) departments of development agencies, which continue to present us with sometimes billboard-sized portraits of nameless strangers "who need your help" or who are doing incredibly well because of the agency that wants your donation. I remember from an earlier job that PR colleagues would take photographs I brought from "the field", and then they'd invent names for some people displayed in the pictures so as to increase "human interest" in fundraising letters. I had asked people whether it was OK to take photographs for our web-site, but I had not asked them whether they wanted to appear under a fake name... How can an organisation possibly aspire to "do good" in the world if it uses people as a commodity, a simple advertisement prop? It is immoral at all times; in conflict situations, it can even be lethal.

Please stop distracting busy people

2011-04-04T19:19:00.020+02:00

Just got back from South East Asia, where I have advised a human rights organisation. I had a hard time trying to make sense of the reports the organisation wrote to its donors. The information was sorted into three categories: "outputs", "outcomes" and "impact". For example, the fact that they organised a workshop was an "output"; the number of people who participated in the workshop was an "outcome", and the amount of extra knowledge people seemed to have after the workshop was called "impact". You can imagine that it was not easy to read those reports.

When I asked people in that organisation why they had that strange way of cutting reality into fine slices with uneven contours, they said it was "results-based management" and they had learnt it in a 10-day training course which their entire senior management team had to attend. For a full two weeks. Human rights had to wait.

Those who had attended the course found it a bit "theoretical", they said, and they were not sure they used the concepts correctly. I asked to see the course materials. It mentioned drops, ripples and waves. It said that the "results chain" was made up of "inputs", "outputs", "outcomes" and "impact". (Ah. And how about the results?) A "result", it said, was "a describable or measurable change resulting from a cause and effect relationship". (Ah. Then, what in life is NOT a result?) People, it said, are "inputs" to a project. "Outputs", it said, are "short term" and "participants are involved". Do you see what I mean?

Imagine a dozen of busy, brave human rights workers who run an organisation that assists hundreds of people in dire need every week. Imagine those people with their heavy responsibilities locked into a conference room for ten full days, gazing at Power Point slides and ruminating monstruously muddled concepts of strictly no practical use to their work. How many phones rang during those ten days with no-one answering them? How many people in that country were NOT released from illegal pre-trial detention during those two weeks, leaving their relatives in distress and poverty, because no-one was there to defend them?

I am sure the donors who organise and / or fund such "capacity building" do it with the best intentions. But could they build some "capacities" that have something to do with people's actual work? And the "receipients" who find themselves in an incomprehensible and pointless training course, why do they not get up after half a day and say, "I have had enough of this. Now, let me tell you what we really need..."? Does anyone think of those "ultimate beneficiaries" down the line, the lives of those we have promised to save and improve?

Happy Anniversary to Us!

2011-03-08T15:48:00.004+01:00

It's the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, a day of celebration and commemoration "invented" by Clara Zetkin. Clara Zetkin was a leading German and European socialist politician until she had to flee from Nazi Germany in 1932.

In today's Germany, we're still at the stage of discussing whether companies and institutions should introduce positive discrimination to make sure at least 30% - less than one-third - of their leading positions are held by women. One of Germany's key international development agencies, GIZ (the fusion of former GTZ, DED and InWEnt) does not count any woman among its 7-strong Board. What would Clara Zetkin think? Has anything changed since 1911?

The Guardian Weekly offers rich material around the international women's day on its web-site. You can also go straight to International Women's Day, an internet hub on activities around the globe. Hackers reportedly attacked the site several times today, but it has been restored.

When you look up "Women's Rights" on Wikipedia, you'll invariably find a blurb "The neutrality of this article is disputed". What is it that makes some people so mad about women's rights?

What online activism can learn from community organising

2011-02-27T10:08:00.002+01:00

Rootwork is a group (a firm?) specialised in internet technology for non-profit organisations. An April 2010 article on their web-page has been sitting on top of my bookmarks for months, waiting to be shared here. It is called What online activism can learn from community organising (click on the title to get to the full article). The author, Ivan Boothe, reminds people working on social change of five key aspects in effective community organising (and any broader form of campaigning, I believe): movement-building, strategy, community accountability, going where the people are, and cultivating leadership. Technology, he points out, is not a strategy in itself a web-site or an e-mail petition, for example, only make sense if they are part of a broader strategy, carried forward by committed people who talk and listen to the people they seek to convince.

By the way, the Tactical Technology Collective provides excellent information on how to use the internet for campaigns, in clear step-by-step guides one can download for free.

Money for Humanitarian Innovation- use it to support girls!

2011-02-23T11:48:00.008+01:00

The Humanitarian Innovation Fund has been launched, with its own site and acronym HIF. It describes itself as "a landmark grant-making fund to support organisations working in countries struck by humanitarian crises, such as Haiti or Pakistan, to develop, test and share new technologies and processes that will make humanitarian aid more effective and cost-efficient in the future." The first call for proposals is out. Organisations with ideas, apply! I trust there is plenty of room for humanitarian innovation, especially when it comes to ensuring women and girls can fully participate in humanitarian work, their voices are listened to and their needs are catered for.

Girls! Just yesterday I had a conversation with a child rights expert. We agreed that there is a huge problem: work on women's rights tend to lose sight of girls, who have their own needs. Work on child rights tends to be gender-blind, which in today's world means it forgets about the specific aspirations and needs of girls. Please, never forget the girls, and girls, speak up and don't allow anyone to forget you!

Effectiveness in art and in peace building

2011-02-19T14:23:00.012+01:00

I have been meaning to jot down notes on this for months but things have been so busy...

Late last year the German Institute for Foreign Relations (known here as IfA) organised a day-long research dialogue with twelve women and men - half of them professionally involved in peace building, the other half in art. I had the privilege to participate as a representative of the peace building crowd. The idea, devised by researcher Vera Kahlenberg, was to explore together what "effectiveness" ("Wirksamkeit" in German) meant within our respective disciplines and practice.

Vera Kahlenberg divided us into "mixed" pairs, gave us a handful of broad questions and audio recorders, and sent us off, two by two, into quiet rooms with the assignment to dialogue for two hours. I was matched up with Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, an Argentinian-Armenian artist living in Berlin. I am at a loss trying to describe her rich and intricate work - take a look at her web site!

It was an extremely inspiring conversation. I realised that the way in which Silvina described her way of working was highly relevant to peace and development work. As Silvina sees it, the artist perceives herself and shares these self-perceptions with others, which generates new ideas among those who view or participate in her art work, as well as new questions for the artist.

Isn't that reminiscent of the "learning spirals", "feed-back loops" and "action research cycles" we use in development? But the thing that development workers often shy away from is critical questioning of their own self-perception and the motivations behind their actions. Development professionals are not "neutral", trivial machines whose only purpose it is to bring peace and welfare to "poor countries" according to a standardised path that would work in any context. We are human beings, carrying our own histories, our ties with many other people, and rich and sometimes contradictory aspirations with us, and we interact with other individuals, each of them unique and unpredictable! I believe that being aware of our own mental "baggage", and unpacking, re-sorting and enriching this baggage every now and then with other people's perceptions, makes us more effective in supporting others in their own development.

The other learning from this event has been about dialogue across disciplines. It has been extremely enriching and enjoyable to explain our conceptual worlds to each other and draw surprising comparisons. In a final plenary session, we reflected on discoveries made in these dialogues. Again, an inspiring, lively discussion that made participants eager to remain in contact, and to find new opportunities for stimulation from different disciplines.

Many thanks to the host institute, IfA, for making this happen! Vera Kahlenberg will generate a publication from this event.

Systems Approaches in Evaluation

2011-01-28T16:10:00.007+01:00

The Evaluation Unit of GIZ (ex-GTZ - the organisation implementing a large portion of Germany's official development co-operation) held an international conference early this week, with the title "Systemic Approaches in Evaluation" (25-26 January). It was a huge jamboree bringing together some 200, predominantly German, participants, plus guests from around the world, who exchanged views on "traditional" methods vs. "systemic approaches" vs. "sistematisación".

There was some discussion as to whether "systemic" work was new; some inferred it was a "fashion" --- but the participants were so busy marvelling at the many facets of "systemic" techniques presented at the conference that no-one seemed to bother defining BOUNDARIES (a key concept in systems thinking) of "systemic approaches" and "traditional evaluation" respectively. Certainly many different PERSPECTIVES (another major concept) were represented, and the many networking opportunities may have produced effects in terms of INTER-RELATIONSHIPS (number 1 in the trinity of core concepts proposed by keynote speaker Richard Hummelbrunner). It was pointed out that distinguishing between simple, complicated and complex matters could help; and that a "classical" log-frame model could be turbo-charged by adding a little attention to context and the dynamic, ever-changing nature of life.... And: "Don't try to put the whole world into a single results chain - use several ones!"

The conference documentation should go on its web-site soon - it should be available somewhere near this link or through a search on the new GIZ web-site.

Warmth and Attention

2011-01-06T13:23:00.014+01:00

At this cold time of the year, at least for inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere, I realise that I have not yet written about work that I did last year with my occasional associate Jasmin Rocha, PhD candidate in social sciences. We visited organisations working with women survivors of violence in Mozambique, Guatemala and Nicaragua to find out what they considered to be "quality services" for survivors of violence against women. The purpose of this "sense-making" exercise was to generate ideas for an international NGO as to how they could best monitor their grantees' work in this extremely complex field.
It was an extremely interesting and stimulating assignment. We gathered many different views. One organisation we have visited, for example, has found it unacceptable to speak of "services", as this word suggests a business relationship rather than the type of feminist, women-centred support the organisation strives to provide. Others have expressed opposite views, seeing themselves as impartial, professional mediators in family disputes - "service providers" indeed.
When we looked through our findings, we realised that all these different views could be sorted into a limited number of dimensions: access to "services", "service" process, human resources, co-operation & co-ordination with others, and desired results. Within these five common dimensions, we found some 20 common indicators for quality. In each country and each context, these indicators denote somewhat different realities - but "warmth" and "attention" keep coming up as key parameters. That is why we called the mini-blog publishing our results "calidad y calidez" - "quality and warmth" in Spanish. Find the mini-blog in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish by clicking HERE. The blog opens on a "welcome" message; to navigate to its main body, click on the language button of your choice.

Jasmin and I would welcome any comments and suggestions on the mini-blog - we'll work on an article later this year and can use constructive criticism!
The picture is from a poster by the Mozambican organisation Forum Mulher.

Compiled musings on complexity

2010-12-25T19:35:00.004+01:00

Happy end-of-2010! To mark the occasion, I am compiling blog posts for easier access on SCRIBD. If this works out, find my first instalment - musings on complexity - by following this link. Interesting how my own style goes from rather plain to rather complex and then back to plain. And if that doesn't work, try this:

Complexity - Collected Musings 2009-2010

Human Rights Tactics in many languages

2010-12-14T17:09:00.003+01:00

In case this has escaped your attention: New Tactics for Human Rights offers, on its website, a whole range of resources for human rights workers around the world. A comprehensive overview is available as a manual here: New Tactics in Human Rights - A Resource for Practitioners. The link takes you to a page where you can download the full manual in English, and sections thereof in : Arabic, Bengali, Croatian, Farsi, French, Hebrew, Indonesian, Mayan, Mongolian, Polish, Russian, Kiswahili, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu and Uzbek! A range of other resources are available on-line. Highly commendable.

Simple Words about Complexity

2010-11-25T09:53:00.007+01:00

In a helpful comment about my recent post "Donor Playgrounds and Unknowable Outcomes", my friend Hélène complains about jargon. Why do we use fancy words? One reason is that sometimes such elaborate terminology (= fancy words) is more accurate than simpler language - but only if everyone involved has the same understanding of the words used. Then, fancy words convey the impression that you know exactly what you are talking about. And finally, fancy words make harsh truths sound elegant and not too painful - especially if the one who reads/ listens does not understand what you mean. But then, what's the point in saying anything if it is not understood?

Since I believe that some of the more complicated texts I have posted in recent weeks are really important and I enjoy writing exercises, I shall summarise the texts in plain terms, for people who are not fond of jargon. Here's the first instalment: a crude plain-speak version of my post Donor Playgrounds and Unknowable Outcomes. Attention: I don't mean to offend anyone!

Adam Fforde and Katrin Seidel, two knowledgeable people who have spent a long time working in and researching on Cambodia, gave great presentations in Berlin earlier this week. Put plainly, what they said could be boiled down to this:

People who pay for and carry out development projects often pretend they know what they are doing, because they hold university degrees and they have done the same kinds of things in other places.
Usually, they are convinced that what they do will improve other people's lives, and they believe that they know exactly what changes are needed to improve other people's lives and what must be done to make these changes happen.
The reality is that many people who say they are experts in development have no idea of what life is really like in the places where they work and how people's lives change. Often, they don't even bother asking ordinary people about their ideas and what they would like to do to improve their own lives.
People who say they are development experts tend to contradict each other and make mistakes all the time. Those mistakes can have terrible consequences for other people.
To make matters worse, many "experts" don't pay attention to what happens around them. Sometimes, their work may mess up other people's lives, stir up quarrels and worse. But ordinary people who suffer from the "experts'" work have nowhere to go if they want to complain, or stop that "expert" work altogether.

Now, to end this terrible situation, more people who pay for and who carry out development work should start to listen to local people and learn about their lives. They must know that "expert" work is very dangerous and must be watched carefully by everyone who works with "experts". If something goes wrong, it has to be stopped.

(This is fun. I think I'll do this to some other texts. Watch this space.)

Funding for Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women

2010-11-25T09:13:00.004+01:00

Straight from UNIFEM: "The United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) today launched its annual global Call for Proposals for programmes that support country-level efforts to end violence against women and girls."

Deadline for proposals: January 20, 2011. Follow this link to find out the rest:

UN Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women - Gender Issues: Violence Against Women - UNIFEM

Donor Playgrounds and Unknowable Outcomes

2010-11-24T11:07:00.013+01:00

"Donor Playground Cambodia" is the title of a highly commendable paper Adam Fforde and Katrin Seidel have contributed to a conference on development policy, Thinking Ahead, organised by the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin. A core theme of their paper: "the tensions created by the belief that development is both a known product of interventions guided by predictive knowledge, and the sense that, really, the future is unknowable".

Cambodia is presented as a case study - it is a "donor playground" in that more than half of its national budget is still funded through development assistance, and that the country has been a field for massive "experimental donor interventions" since the early 1990s. It appears that the huge body of experience built over almost two decades has spawned only patchy and inconsistent knowledge on "what works"; the authors note "a plethora of statements about cause and effect that are inconsistent and ignore each other". Government officials, donors and NGOs seem to hold highly conflicting assumptions about each other's work; local processes that exist independently from donor agendas appear to receive too little attention. In some fields, the country has recorded enormous progress, e.g. in agricultural productivity, "despite" the absence of policy requirements as defined by donors. Massive donor investment in land registration has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in land conflicts, but donors have apparently missed the opportunity to examine their policies more carefully - or learn about "traditional" types of land tenure in Cambodia before introducing new systems.

The case study illustrates three central theses pointed out in Fforde's short conference presentation. They could be summarised as follows:

Development policy is likely to be counterproductive if it relies on linear, cause-to-effect thinking which assumes that the effects of development interventions are straightforward and predictable. Such "lock-frame" notions (I borrow the term from R. Hummelbrunner - see my earlier post on Beyond Logframe) may exclude genuine, effective engagement with and among those who are supposed to "benefit" from development policies.
Development "experts" do not intervene in socio-culturally or politically "neutral" contexts. "What works here" will not necessarily "work there": there is no empirical evidence to prove that "best practice" can be transposed from one context (e.g. country, "community") to another. The widespread idea that universal experts' recipes can be applied anywhere makes it hard to gain a specific understanding of specific contexts. It also clouds the politics that guide decisions on development interventions.
The debate on aid effectiveness tends to frame problems of human rights and power assymmetries in terms of effective delivery of aid programmes. Political oversight of development interventions is limited and lacks complaint mechanisms that would allow "target populations" to claim their rights and hold development actors to account.

A first step to overcome these problems would be to shed the assumption of "knowability", and plan with "adaptive reference frames" that are built on contributions from wide, diverse groups of stakeholders, among whom the "target populations" play a central role. "Beneficiaries" should not only contribute their knowledge (which must be acknowledged to start with), but also get the opportunity to complain about development projects that affect them.

The full Fforde/ Seidel paper is available as part of the conference materials - find it here. A cold kept me away from the actual conference here in Berlin (still on-going as of today), but I could follow the presentation on my computer screen via livestream - a wonderful technology!

Resolution 1325 - 10th Anniversary

2010-11-02T18:48:00.010+01:00

(Logo: Gunda Werner Institute, HBS)

After a decade of deafening silence around Resolution 1325, a flurry of activities has broken out to celebrate its 10th anniversary: New York, Brussels, Geneva, Vienna, Beirut and other attractive locations host international conferences. This year's 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence also plugs into the topic, with the theme "Structures of Violence: Defining the Intersections of Militarism and Violence against Women".

I picked the easiest option: a conference at the Boell Foundation, within walking distance from my home: "Overcoming Crises, Ending Armed Conflict - Men's and Women's Peace Policy Strategies". It was a pleasure to meet interesting women from women's, peace and development organisations, and a small handful of men involved in masculinity research, to share our indignation about the absence of a German government policy on the Resolution. Not that we would have done much about that in the last ten years - I hadn't even noticed Germany had not fulfilled its international obligations in that respect, as I was busy complaining about the absence of women's voices elsewhere...

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security urges States and the UN institutions to ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels in conflict prevention, management and resolution. It calls for (i) negotiating and implementing peace agreements with a gender perspective, (ii) gender sensitivity training for anyone involved in peacekeeping operations, and (iii) specific measures to prevent and punish sexual violence in situations of armed conflict. Find the full Resolution here. Commonly, its key aspects are summarised as the three "P's": participation, prevention and protection.

Most importantly, Resolution 1325 explicitly refers to the Geneva Conventions (1949), arguably one of the most respected pieces of international humanitarian law. This is where the Resolution belongs - into the mainstream of international law implementation. As long as it remains tucked away into the "ghetto" of women's movements, to put it a bit dramatically (and I know we're not a ghetto anymore... still...), it won't get anywhere. It doesn't have to be that way: I heard at the conference that in Serbia, the government institution in charge of implementing Resolution 1325 was the Ministry of Defense - not some resource-poor donor-driven short-lived Ministry of Gender. Apologies for sounding polemic!

Let's hope Resolution 1325, and the more recent ones that add extra precision (1820, 1888, 1889) will garner more attention and commitment in the coming decade and become part and parcel of established international law. Jan Egeland, former UN Undersecretary General, is reported to have said that no peace treaty should be accepted unless women signed on to it. "Which women?", somebody asked during the conference. "Which men?", one might be tempted to ask back.

Greetings from a busy workshop

2010-10-23T15:51:00.010+02:00

Bujumbura, late October: strategy planning with 30 in one room!

Development speak in many tongues - look it up here

2010-10-23T14:23:00.013+02:00

Yesterday in Bujumbura, friends described to me how they had managed to reduce the incidence of particularly violent forms of forced marriage involving abduction and gang rape in their home region, up in the High Plateaux of Southern South Kivu (DRC). It was extremely enlightening, but also sort of surreal because of their generous use of development jargon. Terms such as "baseline assessment", "participatory survey", "target groups", "sensitisation" and "awareness-raising" punctuated every sentence, hiding to some extent what really happened.

I am not fond of jargon. But in some situations, e.g. when applying for donor funds, you need to throw in a few appropriate pieces of jargon, and if it's just to convey an impression of competency. In an attempt to set standards for the use of such terms, the OECD Development assistance committee published a Glossary of Key Terms in Evaluation and Results-Based Management in 2002. You can find its original English, French and Spanish version here. Unfortunately, the glossary is still little known, even though handy Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Turkish versions are available.

I would encourage you to try out these links and spread them widely. These glossaries do help to foster understanding through a more accurate use of terms.

The glossaries are so well hidden that it has taken me more than an hour to find a rather obscure OECD-DAC evaluation page that lists its translations. On the way there, I stumbled across an amazing array of compilations of multilingual glossaries in all kinds of disciplines, for example 100 search engines, which recommends a glossary on aeronautics, among many others. It felt like looking up something in an encyclopaedia and getting lost for the rest of the afternoon.

Tools again - nicely presented

2010-09-11T18:29:00.004+02:00

This is my 101st blog post! Time flies!

I have subscribed to the delightful Pelican mailing list. The pelican, by the way, was the symbol of the Huguenots, that French protestant sect who fled religious prosecution. A statue of a pelican commemorates their arrival in Berlin some time in the... hm... late 17th century. Anyway, this is what I learnt on the mailing list today: the One World Trust has launched a new site, somewhat pompously called Accountability Tools for Policy Research.

It has a handy dial on its starting page, where you can select three different search criteria, which take you to time-tested tools and resources for further study. For example, I selected "Stakeholders: Partners; Process: Strategy Setting; Principles: Participation". I was presented with APPA (Appreciative Participatory Planning and Action), Cause-Effect Diagram, Conference Management and Presentation, Critical Timelines, Episode Studies, Evolving Storylines, Future Search Conference, Graffiti wall, Hierarchical Card Sorting (HCS), Historical Trends and Timelines, Institutional Linkage Diagram, Learning Systems Methodology, Local Level Participation Planning Approach (LLPPA), Most Significant Change (MSC), Multiple Perspectives, Net-Map, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PCA), Participatory Rural Communication Appraisal (PRCA), Peer Review, Rapid Appraisal of Agricultural Knowledge Systems (RAAKS), Scenario Testing and Visioning, Scoping/ Situation Analysis (turns out this is a new name for SWOT), Social Network Analysis (SNA), Soft Systems Methodology CATWOE Analysis, Stakeholder Consultation, Technology of Participation (ToP, one of my favourites), Weighted Checklists.

Quite a bagful! If there is one thing our sector is good at, it's in churning out new acronyms and dressing up simplified social science tools in new clothes. Nevertheless, it's great to see all these useful tools in one place and so easily accessible. You click on one tools and you're taken to a short list of quality references that can be downloaded. Happy browsing.

Beyond Logframe

2010-08-12T11:40:00.014+02:00

The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has published an excellent booklet titled Beyond Logframe: Using Systems Concepts in Evaluation, which you can download in English from its web-site. I am particularly enthusiastic about the first article by Richard Hummelbrunner Beyond Logframe: Critique, Variations and Alternatives. Since I experienced difficulties downloading the document from the Japanese site, I summarise some main points below. If you'd like to have a copy of the full article via e-mail, please let me know - for those who have my ordinary e-mail address, use that one, for those who don't, try micraab(at)web.de and be prepared to wait for a few days.

As pointed out by Hummelbrunner, the Logical Framework Approach (LFA) was initially designed as a military planning approach, for a context of strong central control and sharply defined goals. USAID adapted the LFA to the development context in the late 1960s. Since then, it has been adopted in development planning and monitoring throughout the world, to attain a near-monopoly in development planning. The LFA has its merits, as it helps to conceptualise interventions in a uniform, formalised way. Logical frameworks ("logframes"), if well-designed, can provide a convenient, simple overview of the main features of an intervention.

The problem is, "[the LFA] reflects a management style which demands precisely structured and quantifiable objectives ("management by objectives"), assuming that the actors dispose of all relevant information and operate in rather stable environments. The focus is on the delivery of activities and outputs, and on the achievement of intended effects through intended routes." In development, you are likely to deal with multiple stakeholders who hold different opinions and interests, in fluctuating situations which may require more flexibility than the LFA can accommodate. Hummelbrunner introduces the terms "logic-less frame", "lack-frame" and "lock-frame" to illustrate the dilemmas of applying a simple tool to a complex reality. "Logic-less frames" are invented to justify an existing project design, e.g. when institutional donor funding is sought for an on-going activity. The "lack-frame" over-simplifies, omitting vital aspects of a project as it ties activities and objectives into a linear cause-to-effect chain. Finally, the "lock-frame" blocks learning and adaptation to new opportunities and risks. Power imbalances between unequal "partners" in development programmes exacerbate these difficulties. Hummelbrunner presents his observations from a real-life case, an EU programme in Eastern Europe: "tunnel vision" dissociating projects from their contexts, "mechanistic" styles of implementation which focus on conformity to pre-established plans, and lack of involvement of local actors, local assets and expertise are listed as common problems associated with excessive reliance on the LFA. In monitoring and evaluation, the LFA is of limited value, as "tunnel vision" and the over-emphasis on compliance with pre-defined plans fail to capture the complexity of development processes. "People operate with a much higher level of complexity than can possibly be included in a logframe, so the neat logic does not work in reality."

Hummelbrunner shows how variations of the LFA can palliate some of these deficiencies: Project Cycle Management (PCA) offers more opportunities for participation and adjustment - provided its LFA elements are not over-emphasised; Social Network Analysis (SNA) captures complex relationships that linear stage models such as the LFA cannot do justice to; and Outcome Mapping (OM) focuses attention on changes in behaviours, relationships, actions and activities of individuals and groups, as seen from different perspectives and taking into account the contributions of other actors.

Systemic Project Management offers a total departure from the LFA, picturing development work as intervening in a constellation of mutually interlocking systems and sub-systems with their own processes, which are more or less directly related to producing (or inhibiting) the desired outputs and outcomes. In contrast to the centralised control system underlying the LFA, Hummelbrunner proposes three level of systemic management: normative management, i.e. policy that defines the vision guiding the project; strategic management by supervisory entities, e.g. steering committees, which decide on the effective use of resources ("to do the right things"); and operative level management ("to do things right") carried out through decentralised coordination teams or service providers. No pyramidal hierarchy of command and control is needed; systemic project management relies on the self-organising capacity of the sub-systems.

All these different options deserve to be explored more systematically - as the author concludes: "A frame exists for a more 'logical' use of logframe - provided this frame is noticed and used."

For E-campaigners

2010-08-09T10:26:00.003+02:00

Hunting for quality step-by-step guides for campaigners, I have come across yet another exciting site - it's Tactical Tech. Try its "Toolkits and Guides" link for pleasantly designed, clear guides on online advocacy, internet security, working with audio and video, SMS campaigning and so on. The guides are recent - 2009 and 2010 - which is important in this rapidly evolving sector. And since you're at it, also drop by at TakeBacktheTech as a good example for effective internet campaigning.

UN Women!

2010-07-14T11:48:00.004+02:00

On 2 July, the United Nations General Assembly finally decided to establish UN Women, a merger of four existing UN structures for the advancement of women - UNIFEM, DAW, OSAGI and INSTRAW - with a US$ 500 million budget. That is only half of what the campaigners for UN Women had asked for, but a fair start. For more information, I recommend the special issue of the UNIFEM e-newsletter Currents.

Lovely Sites full of Tools

2010-06-26T21:56:00.003+02:00

I realise I must update my link lists some time soon. Meanwhile, I have come across two enormously commendable sites, one from Canada, one from Australia.

Social Analysis Systems offers loads of tools for community-based research, organisational learning, project planning and evaluation, and other forms of public engagement. You'll find tools for actor-mapping, scenario construction, critical path drawing, risk assessment - I haven't counted the tools but there are many and the instructions appear easy to use. The sites speaks Español, Français, Bengali, Nepali and Marathi!

The Change Agency is an independent activist training initiative from Australia. Their site includes a rich section with the title "Training Resources", grouped under four dimensions: social action skills, big picture thinking and political analysis (including strategy), organisational development and maintenance, and personal development and life skills. Just the section on organisational development contains 27 resources - many in the shape of one or two pages of essential advice.

Careful - you may start rummaging around and spend the rest of your day in these sites!

Monitoring - It's the process that matters

2010-06-12T13:57:00.011+02:00

Monitoring is about gathering information that helps us to function effectively, and about verifying whether we do the right things in the right ways. It is a natural part of human life - for example, every morning, I monitor the weather to determine what to wear so as to stay fresh and dry throughout the day. Monitoring makes me more effective in my life.

Monitoring is also supposed to make international development more effective. The trouble is that many people seem to think you can enhance the effectiveness of virtually anything by producing tables with figures on them, preferably SMART ones. Opinions differ, even within a single agency, as to whether it's the objectives, the indicators, the assumptions, the results or something in-between that has to be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound/ timely). The consensus appears to be: whatever we talk about, it better be SMART, and SMART is when there are figures attached.

In response to this trend, larger NGOs have designated specific people whose main task it is to produce SMART figures to impress donors. One large and much admired agricultural organisation I have worked with employed a small crowd of good-looking young women much appreciated in donor meetings and fluent in several languages. They wrote proposals and reports to the donors, in English, French, Spanish and even Italian. They set the numbers of farmers to be trained, of seedlings to be planted and of acres to be watered. The rest of the organisation, as a senior member once confessed to me, continued to do their work, to the best of their knowledge and skills, and in blissful ignorance of those figures. The report-writing team produced its reports to the donors, never to be translated into the local language, estimated the attainment of the targets at, say, 71% for the farmers, at 103% for the seedlings and maybe 94% for the acres. When donors visited, the people who did the actual work in the fields picked the sites they considered particularly successful or interesting and took the donors there. I was among the donors and found those visits far more enlightening and convincing than the figures in the reports. What the visits tended to leave unclear was what had not worked well, and why. In that respect, I guess was hardly more ignorant than the report writing staff. But the people who did the actual work knew very well what they were doing, and could see the differences between successful and less successful parts of their project. They were in touch with farmers, discussing what worked out nicely and what the difficulties were, and they looked around to spot any interesting opportunity, or some risk that needed to be reckoned with. That was real monitoring. The tables were fake.

I believe donors can be convinced to pay more attention to real monitoring. One key step is to recognise that personal accounts are a legitimate way to find out about facts, and that figures can only give a fragmentary and distorted image of reality. Numbers are useful for budgeting, accounting, physics, engineering and other activities that require maths. Numbers can give an idea of the size or scope of something - but they don't tell us what exactly that "something" is. A classical example: a support centre for survivors of violence receives 40 clients' visits in February and 20 in March. Does that mean that February is a more dangerous month than March? Or does it mean that the centre's activities have caused a 50% drop in violence in the community in one month's time? Does it mean that 20 out of the 40 February clients have been killed, leaving only 20 for March? You can spend weeks interpreting such figures, and twist them either way to match your argument.

But the support centre in this example could also organise monthly staff meetings where everyone shares good and bad experience from the past month. Such meetings are SMART if they focus on specific topics and are run at regular intervals. They don't necessarily produce figures, but they generate knowledge and disseminate it throughout the organisation. Regular exchanges between the women and men who actually do the work are an excellent way to ensure an organisation keeps learning and adapting itself to new challenges.

I know a human rights organisation which has played a consistently important role in its society over decades. I believe that a main factor for the organisation's success is its system of monthly day-long staff conferences, which maintain a constant flow of internal learning. In those meetings, people do not fill in charts of benchmarks and indicators. They monitor, in a qualitative way that is adapted to the complexity of reality, what happens within and around their organisation. Such regular, appropriate monitoring processes keep engaging all members of the organisation in reviewing their work, thus enhancing the organisation's effectiveness. Reports to donors that are based on knowledge distilled through such a process give a precise, comprehensive and eminently legible idea of an organisation's work. Of course you may still need to include figures - but only those that matter, and only as one part of a bigger picture.

A gentle way towards changed attitudes and practice

2010-05-26T15:52:00.003+02:00

The Indian NGO Sathi for All Partnerships (SAFP) uses pragmatic ways of enhancing women's access to resources such as land, housing and water.

Where inequalities are so prevalent and deeply rooted as in South Asia, it may seem futile to aim for instant equality of resources between women and men. Hence, SAFP starts with smaller steps, obtaining resources for women from those who control the resources. SAFP advocates nudge planners to take into account not only women’s traditional roles, but also their individual rights (see SAFP illustration above). The focus is on increasing women’s agency, e.g. as agricultural producers.

SAFP’s “Gender Resource Equality Advocates” have convinced decision-makers at all levels to reckon with women's needs for more equitable access to resources. The measures promoted by SAFP range from enlarging toilet cubicles for women workers so that there is room for breast-feeding or re-draping a sari, to designing housing where women can perform both care and production roles in the same neighbourhood, and to district planning that reserves land and resources to "Women's Resource Equity Zones" (WREZ). To ensure women can actually claim and manage WREZ space, SAFP facilitates the emergence of local women's groups around specific sectors of activity.

In Tamil Nadu, SAFP has convinced a wind energy company to open up 100 acres of arable land around the windmills for cultivation by women's groups. Parks, parking lots and “waste land” are other unused spaces that SAFP helps populate with women’s economic activity. The more “fundamentalist” feminists among us may feel uncomfortable about the idea of recycling “leftover” space – but access to land and management of productive assets represent huge steps towards empowerment and greater independence for the women involved. In many contexts, such gradual change “from below” can make it easier for communities to gradually revise their attitudes and practice than more strident forms of advocacy.

Movies that are bad for Women

2010-05-08T21:39:00.005+02:00

Societies are shaped by everyone's everyday actions. In turn, what we see around us shapes our own thoughts and deeds. And vice-versa. And the other way round. And so on.

Probably animated by this spirit - everything matters, and everyone can do something about it - Alison Bechdel, a comic strip author, put together three basic rules to assess whether a film is worth watching. The film needs to

1. have at least two women in it

2. who talk to each other

3. about something besides a man.

Try it. You'll be surprised. In Avatar, for example, there are women - but they only talk about a man. In "Up", another recent success, women don't talk to each other at all. The films that challenge stereotypes about women's roles in society are few and far between. It's a man's world on the silver screen.

View and add movies on the bechdel list: HERE. The picture above is adapted from Allison Bechdel's blog, which you can find HERE. It displays the comic strip that is at the origin of the Bechdel rule.

Output Outcome Impact Blues

2010-05-04T19:57:00.004+02:00

A glorious and instructive song for evaluators, available from the very respectable Institute of Development Research, so it can't be wrong. Click here to enjoy it.

In Memoriam: Alice Miller (1923-2010)

2010-04-27T13:28:00.010+02:00

Last week Alice Miller died. The Swiss psychologist, who achieved international fame with her 1979 book The Drama of the Gifted Child and subsequent publications, devoted her professional life to research on child abuse and its consequences. Alice Miller's books, translated into 30 languages, show how child abuse and violent behaviour in adult life - such as domestic violence, sexual abuse, even terrorism and political dictatorship - are interrelated.

Until early last year, Alice Miller kept her extremely informative website up to date. Please have a look at the site; it includes rich materials in English and French. I feel that anyone working on such issues as violence against women or conflict resolution can benefit from Alice Miller's work. Violence, including war and forms of oppression, are not "only" political and social phenomena. Violence is instilled by mothers, fathers, close relatives, teachers, in many different ways, and is transmitted to subsequent generations. Violence is right inside us and needs to be recognised and addressed so that we become more effective at ending violence.

The International Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits all violence against children. Yet, although most States in the world have ratified the Convention, relatively little seems to be done to ensure a safe and secure upbringing to children. "Corporal punishment" is still common in countless families and schools across the world. Sexual abuse in families and at schools is notoriously underreported - note how many years, often decades, it has taken for the survivors of abuse in church-run institutions to "come out" with their stories in recent months. Alice Miller was among the first to break the silence on child abuse.

By the way, my very first blog post is on her article on The Roots of Violence. Still eminently commendable!

Siyanda again

2010-04-19T12:44:00.003+02:00

A while ago I recommended the Siyanda mainstreaming gender equality web-site as a reliable source of up-to-date resources on gender and development. You can contribute to enriching Siyanda by uploading recent research and tools - it's quite easy and straightforward to follow the instructions on the site.

In recent weeks, I have received a growing numbers of consultancy requests from people I had not been in touch with before. They said they found me via the Siyanda Gender experts' and consultants' database. It seems to be used more systematically by agencies and consultancy bureaux who look for new collaborators. For those who wish to make themselves known beyond familiar circles, it may be a good idea to register!

"Culture" vs. law enforcement

2010-04-05T16:47:00.006+02:00

Just came across a "context analysis" for an African country. In its short section on education - tiny compared to the ample deliberations on economic opportunities - the text claims that "cultural factors leading to early marriage and pregnancy" keep girls out of schools.
This is the first time I read pregnancies are caused by culture! I always thought they had to do with sexual intercourse, wanted or unwanted, and lack of appropriate contraception. And I used to believe that early marriage, prohibited in most countries nowadays, had to do with poor law enforcement, with the youngsters' burning desire to escape violence suffered at the hands of their own parents and to live their own sexuality, with economic constraints and yes, with practices that turn women into mere objects of exchange. All those acts are not carried out by some ominous monster called Culture, but by reasonably autonomous persons who make deliberate decisions.
I am so tired of hearing "those guys have a culture problem". No-one blames "Christian Culture" for massive child abuse perpetrated by priests and other church personnel - decades of crimes that the media only just started talking about. If a person does harm to another person, then it is the perpetrator who should be held responsible. After that, you can start thinking what favoured his crime, or what made that it was not punished. But first, make sure no-one gets a free ride.

Africa for Women's Rights

2010-03-16T12:37:00.008+01:00

An alliance of African human rights groups has launched a campaign for the ratification of the basic treaties for women's rights: the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Optional Protocol to CEDAW, and the Protocol to the African Charta on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol). Find the campaign blog here!
The map, gleaned from the website of the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) shows which countries have ratified all treaties (green), two out of three (yellow), only one (orange) or none (red).

Why work for more equal societies?

2010-03-13T15:11:00.001+01:00

Because in highly unequal societies, even the rich are unhappier than in more equal ones! Find the evidence on The Equality Trust

EVAW - resources on violence against women

2010-03-13T13:12:00.007+01:00

UNIFEM has launched its virtual knowledge centre on ending violence against women (ENDVAWNOW.ORG) in three languages - English, French and Spanish. It includes a step-by-step guide for people who run projects or campaigns against VAW (Start Here: Programming Essentials, M&E) which are quite generic, i.e. they could be applied to virtually any kind of project.
The more interesting part are the twelve Programming Modules, which cover a broad range of topics including, among others, Adolescence & Youth, Conflict/Post-Conflict, Men & Boys and Safe Cities. Under each module, you'll find an introduction, guiding principles, basic tips for implementation, ideas for monitoring and a list of references.
The snag is that the site is still under construction, so you won't be able to retrieve any documents for some of the modules, and some links are dodgy. But it is an initiative worth watching.

"Culture" and how to deal with it

2010-03-06T17:57:00.005+01:00

Last month I had the provilege to evaluate an impressive programme, run by the Cambodian human rights organisation ADHOC and its partners, on the Khmer Rouge Trials. While preparing for my research in Cambodia, I came across a few articles written by “Western” observers who raised doubts regarding the appropriateness of trials in the context of “Cambodian culture”. One author, an anthropologist, pointed out that the dominant religion in Cambodia was Theravada Buddhism, which in her opinion favoured a forgiving attitude, as opposed to international criminal justice.

I don't know. Christanism has been preaching universal love for millenaries and still manages to get away with crusades in the Middle Ages, child soldiers in Uganda and war in Afghanistan, to quote but a few major inconsistencies. Why should Buddhism have a stronger influence on people's actions than any other religion?

And then, I tend to feel uncomfortable when people socialised in Europe, the USA or other “Northern” places, make pronouncements as to what is appropriate for a “culture” they know only from books and more or less brief “field trips”. What is it that makes outsiders lump an entire faraway nation into a single, immovable concept of “culture”? And why do they only interview monks and village elders to find out what the country's “culture” is like, and not office workers, school teachers and other people who live ordinary lives full of culture, and who make up the majority of the country's population?

Fortunately the exotic perspectives of “Northern” observers exert an extremely limited influence on the way people construct and explain their realities in Cambodia. Listening to the women and men I interviewed, I was delighted to observe how Buddhism could be bent to fit everyone's needs. A few telling quotes: “The Khmer Rouge Trials follow Buddhist principles – you do good, you get good, you do bad, you are punished.” Or: "Forgiveness? That's the monks' business; they are not allowed to get angry. I am angry and I want these genocide criminals to be punished." Or else: “I have become a civil party to the Khmer Rouge trials because I must obtain justice for my relatives' deaths – otherwise I'll be reborn as a cat or a dog!"

This is how I like culture - as a whole menu of ideas we can pick from to support what we're doing.

30 Years of CEDAW

2010-02-03T11:40:00.003+01:00

The Convention on the Eliminiation of All forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has turned 30. Siyanda has compiled a whole set of recent publications around this anniversary and plenty of other helpful sources on CEDAW which you can find here. For those who don't know yet: The UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women publishes country reports, including NGO shadow reports, on the web - usually in several languages. For most recent reports on Armenia, Cameroon, Germany, Guatemala and others, for example, look here.

Collaborative Technologies and Social Change

2010-02-02T18:36:00.014+01:00

The (Canadian) International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has published its Strategic Framework for 2010-2015, which you can find here (and in French and Spanish, near here). One section (para.115) starts with the title Collaborative Technologies and Social Change: "Collaborative technologies, which harness the power of social networks, are transforming the ways in which social change takes place. For example, health workers and communities in Sri Lanka can monitor and report the emergence of infectious diseases; taxi drivers in Accra have carbon sensors in their cars and can track levels of pollution in different parts of the city at different moments of the day; Twitter-enabled flash mobs in Iran highlight how individuals can mobilize collective action in unprecedented ways."
Interesting to read this after a stimulating three-day meeting with people involved in the We Can (End All Violence against Women) Campaign! We Can is about empowering individuals to promote gender equity and reduce violence against women within their own social networks. One could see the campaign as a new social network or safe social space which enables individuals to take a fresh look at gender-based inequalities and violence within their societies, and do something about it, in their own daily lives. Web-based collaborative technologies can play a role in that (see, for example, the British Columbia We Can site), but in many places, the We Can campaign is driven by real life person-to-person interaction. Maybe not an unprecedented way to mobilise collective action, but certainly one of the most effective ones. (Photograph: Janine Ngungu from DRC discussing the campaign with a Nairobi activist)

Girls Count

2010-01-07T11:18:00.006+01:00

The Center for Global Development, a US-based organisation, has published its report Girls Count - A Global Investment and Action Agenda. The 100-page document is brand new (December 2009) and nicely presented. It provides lots of gender-disaggregated data (e.g. on schooling, employment and HIV/AIDS), and it promotes the message that investing in adolescent girls is essential for the world's future.
I have not had a chance to read the full document yet, but I am happy it exists! However, at first, quick perusal, I have come across two things that are somewhat disturbing:
(1) Sexual and other gender-based violence at and around schools -an issue frequently raised by adolescent school girls and young women as their number one health and security threat- is not clearly addressed as an obstacle against girls' formal education. It is mentioned on p.59, in the chapter on reproductive health, but swept away with the assertion that women who go to school "are less likely to have sex than those out of school". No identifiable source quoted to support this assertion ("data show that..."). It is upsetting that this extremely serious problem tends to receive so little attention from the "Education for All" crowd.
(2) I am also uncomfortable with the idea that girls are an object to invest in. A recent speech by Hilary Clinton comes with this sentence: "Women and girls are one of the world's greatest untapped resources and a terrific return on investment". Now, while I find it laudable for a senior politician to acknowledge that more resources should be used for women's advancement, I object against being lumped into the image of an "untapped resource" likely to yield a "terrific return on investment". This kind of language, representing women as objects of economic gain, reinforces a logic which is contrary to the idea of women as conscious, autonomous human beings. Women in positions of authority - such as Mrs. Clinton - often end up adopting this "male" vantage point. As you may have noticed, Clinton does not say "we are the greatest untapped resource". I suppose she, too, prefers to define herself as an agent of development - and not an object. In psychology, you call this "identification with the aggressor" or Stockholm syndrome.
Ever heard a phrase of the type "men are one of the world's most ill-used resources, wreaking havoc on our health and security"? Yet...

Methods for Development

2010-01-07T10:57:00.003+01:00

The website method finder displays, in an easy-to-use, organised way, methods for the kind of research and planning we do in development programmes. Each method is briefly described in terms of its main purposes, advantages & limitations, principles and procedures, and usually assorted with an example. English is the main language, but you'll also find translations into Arabic, Russian and ... Khmer! Désolée, les amis francophones ... perdón...

Public Affairs via You Tube - UChannel

2009-12-30T13:25:00.009+01:00

During a casual google search, I came across this wonderful site where you can download high quality,full-length lectures by academics, policy makers and other articulate, well-informed people on a wide range of subjects, all related to public and international affairs. UChannel is hosted by Princeton University and free of charge for its users (you need a reasonably fast internet connection, though). Its videos are posted on YouTube as well (but I doubt that applies to all of them).
Last night I watched, on this channel, a presentation by Roland Petit, former International Prosecutor at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, which I recommend to anyone who wants to know about the structure and functioning of this extraordinary court. This morning, I was most impressed by Louise Arbour's lecture on Human Rights and the extremely rich questions and answers following it.
On the same channel, you can find a speech by Sayyed Mustafa Kamal, Mayor of Karachi, on the challenges of modern urbanism, and a whole series of lectures on Surveillance and Privacy in an Age of National Insecurity, a series on juvenile justice --- and much, much more...

Where are the Men?

2009-12-17T09:00:00.009+01:00

In a recent workshop on gender-sensitive monitoring, I found myself with some 18 women and one man - the latter being there, as he admitted, because the group was the only one to work in a language he understood. Most participants were well informed of and experienced in gender mainstreaming. Many felt there was a continued necessity to maintain gender mainstreaming as a separate item on the agenda, lest it would be dropped altogether. But we would have preferred to be a more "mixed" group - not quarantined in the women's ward, a sad déjà vu for those among us who have been "doing gender" for decades. Maybe we should have formed sub-groups and swarmed out to infect parallel, non-gender focused working groups with the gender bacillus?
What is it that keeps men from talking (and walking) gender? Often, gender-sensitive work is not sufficiently rewarded; gender-insensitive work not sufficiently sanctioned. Where gender policies come with significant "carrots" and "sticks", you will find men working on gender. I know highly visible and successful initiatives on masculinity, e.g. the FEMNET Men to Men programme in Kenya, and I know highly committed, respected and well-earning male gender specialists. More and more mainstream NGOs build gender sensitivity into their staff appraisal systems and enforce policies that deny funding to gender-insensitive programmes. I have also noticed that organisations which actively promote diversity in its broad sense, including sexual orientation, are more open to challenging gender stereotypes and offer a more propitious climate for men promoting gender-sensitive ways of working. Where men are allies and partners in promoting gender mainstreaming, half of the job is done.
Here's a resolution for 2010: find ways of winning over men!

Career tips?

2009-12-12T14:28:00.007+01:00

A friend has sent a "Dr.Job" column of German women's magazine PETRA to me, where a reader asks, "why does nobody listen to me at work meetings?"

The answer reads as follows: "Most likely this has to do with three classical misunderstandings that happen when women and men are in a meeting together: 1. Women talk too early. 2. Women address themselves to everyone, instead of talking to the boss only. 3. Women are too polite."
Without the slightest hint of irony, "Dr.Job" subsequently elaborates on the need to never avert your obedient eyes from your superior's face, to ignore any interruptions that may come from colleagues, and to have others speak first so that you can study your boss's reactions and adjust your speech accordingly.
I am not sure this has anything to do with gender - to me it just sounds like a military-style corporate culture. Not sure this is what will prompt the kind of creative thinking we need to save the world...

Graphic graph

2009-11-27T11:41:00.004+01:00

Whilst preparing for a workshop on gender-sensitive monitoring, I have come across the chart above. It shows -graphically!- the employment gap between women and men in Pakistan. The corners of the pentagon are: labour force participation rate, employment-to-population ratio, share in non-agricultural employment, share in wage and salaried employment, share in vulerable employment. The white shape shows the relevant percentages for men; the red one those for women. The only indicator where women surpass men is the share in vulnerable employment - subsistence agriculture, "informal" sector.
You may say that Pakistan is a place where women suffer particularly severe social restrictions in terms - but hey, the country was ruled by a woman not so long ago!

Gender and Religion - Böll documentation ready

2009-11-23T08:21:00.007+01:00

The Heinrich Böll Foundation has completed the documentation for an exciting conference which took place in June this year, Religion Revisited. You'll find also a link to the broader multi-year project Religion, Politics and Gender Equality. My personal impressions of the conference are recorded among my June postings (3 posts, starting from Feminism and Religion), which you'll find by clicking on "June" in the BLOG ARCHIVE at the left side of this page. It includes a reflection on the workshop Feminism and Religion, facilitated by Homa Hoodfar from Canada and Iran. And here's a video trailer for the conference: click here!

A rant against shenmeyisi

2009-11-15T12:06:00.024+01:00

Any professional discipline comes with jargon. Jargon can make communication more precise and straightforward. For example, when you drop the word "AK47", most people interested in weapons will know precisely what you're talking about and there is no need to spend any further time on explaining what you mean. Unfortunately, jargon can also make communication less effective, especially with concepts that are open to multiple, divergent interpretations. Or when people don't bother translating jargon (which can indeed be difficult when you don't know exactly what you want or need to say, to start with...). That is a serious and widespread problem in the development sector.
Just a few minutes ago I started reading a comprehensive evaluation report, nearly 70 pages written in French in a country where French is an official language, as well as other languages that most Europeans do not understand. Right in the middle of the executive summary, the very key and probably only pages most users of the report will read, I come across this sentence: la planification et le suivi portent plutôt sur les 'outputs' et pas assez sur les 'outcome' Quoi? Translated into English, this sentence would run: Planning and monitoring focus on 'produits' rather than 'effet direct'. Eh?
There are official glossaries of evaluation terminology anyone can download from the internet (e.g. the OECD glossary, available in many languages)! Why force-feed linguistic barbarisms on busy people? In many countries I have worked in, many "ordinary" people are fluent in at least one European and several "local" languages - do they have to learn English development jargon as well? If we want people to understand what we say, wouldn't it be more straightforward to use one of the languages they understand? How can we expect anybody to obtain any practical benefit from the "learning" and "capacity building" we pretend to offer if we can't express ourselves clearly? Do we really believe that the acquisition and indiscriminate use of funky vocabulary is a sign of superior knowledge? *sigh*

PS for those among us who don't speak Chinese: "shenmeyisi" in Mandarin Chinese means "what does it mean?" There is absolutely no need to have this term in the title line, but as you may have noticed, it creates slight confusion and thus potentially demonstrates the intellectual superiority of the author and jargon user - or does it? ;-)

WikiProgress "for healthy societies"

2009-11-08T20:51:00.021+01:00

...is the title of a fairly new virtual space for sharing information on ways of evaluating progress in societies. A casual visit suggests the site is still under construction - but aren't all wikis under permanent construction? The link TOPICS includes a valuable set of categories, which are discussed to varying degrees of depth. I have peeked into Material Well-Being, which includes interesting references, Inequality, which presents the Gini Coefficient and links to gender inequality assessment tools, Physical and Mental Health, which offers a round-up of key health matters, and Knowledge and Understanding, which in my opinion would gain from extra input by knowledgeable people who define these concepts in their broad sense.
The link Community Portal lists a stimulating set of press clippings about the recent 3rd OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy in Busan, Korea. Recurring themes are the recognition that GDP (gross domestic product) growth does not necessarily reflect social process, and that ways of assessing quality of life deserve increased attention.
How to determine levels of freedom, security and contentment? For the time being, WikiProgress doesn't offer any revolutionary answers, but intriguing links. Regarding happiness, for example, it connects you to the World Database of Happiness, a register of scientific reasearch on subjective appreciation of life. There I read, under Happiness of Nations, that in 2007 people surveyed in the Democratic Republic of Congo ranked their quality of life at 4.2 (rank 0 representing the worst possible life, 10 the best possible life). In that year, Germans ranked their life at 6.07, Sierra Leonians at 3, Chinese at 4.9, US-Americans at 7, Turks at 5.2, Russians at 5, Brazilians at 6.3, Yemeni at 4.5. I wonder whether that means that life in the USA is better than in Germany, or that Germans are just grumpy...

Fighting Poverty with Facts

2009-10-25T17:53:00.003+01:00

The IDRC, a reliable source of practice-oriented development research, has published the results of its decade-long research in 15 countries of Africa and Asia on community-based monitoring systems. The idea is to empower ordinary citizens, including those who tend to be excluded from public decison-making (women, illiterate people...), to provide sound evidence for poverty and development within their own communities, so as to enhance the effectiveness of development interventions and hold local authorities to account. A special web-site offers extensive information including the book "Fighting Poverty with Facts" by Celia Reyes and Evan Due; everything is available in French and Spanish as well.

What GNP per what capita?

2009-10-13T10:13:00.004+02:00

I am working on a background paper on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC has conducted its last census in 1984, very few births and deaths are formally recorded, public services are in shambles - which makes that no-one can really say how many people live in the country and how they are spread. Most of the country's economy (many sources say 90%) is classified as "informal" - people growing what they need for their subsistance, selling this and that on the market, trading goods and services, digging for gold. A large part of the trade of the rich mineral resources goes unrecorded: for example, most of the country's gold is reportedly smuggled to Uganda, whose gold exports are far superior to the amounts Uganda can produce. No-one has a clear idea of the money that changes hands in illegal arms trading - only that it must be a lot, given the abundance of small weapons in the DRC.
Yet, when you visit the web-sites of eminently established institutions such as UNDP, OECD, the World Bank or the African Development Bank, you discover precise statistics on GNP per capita. The problem is, the data I find on those sites vary from US$ 85 to US$ 714. Just to make this clear: one organisation says, in 2007, the average gross national prouct of the DRC has been US$ 85 per citizen, while another source says, it has been US$ 714, and most situate it somewhere between 150 and 300 US$. If you're lucky, the web-site contains the raw data which these calculations are based on and you can check the underlying assumptions. It makes a huge difference whether you assume the current population of the DRC is 58 million or 68 million people; no-one really knows...
But does it make any sense at all to calculate GNP/capita based on official GNP statistics when an estimated 90% of CNP goes unrecorded? Then again, anyone who has been to the DRC will confirm that the GNP per capita must be abysmally low, at least for most citizens and in terms of purchasing power parity, as the manifestations of most dire poverty are ubiquitous. Or does the GINI coefficient of inequality need dramatic revision, to take into account of all those hidden riches concentrated in the hands of what must be very, very few people?
Precise statistics in utterly imprecise environments are to be taken with a huge ladle of salt.

A minute of silence for young women in the Democratic Republic of Congo

2009-09-29T18:06:00.009+02:00

Researching recent DR Congo data, I have come across this 2007 UNFPA/ Population Council report on DRC youth, and especially young women: The adolescent experience in depth. It contains some harrowing statistics. This table, taken from the report, speaks for itself. It shows that up to 90% of 15-25-year-old females in DRC believe that wife beating is justified under certain conditions (simple, day-to-day conditions, such as arguments within the couple, the wife leaving the house without asking the husband's permission...). The lowest rate is just above 75%, in the country's capital city, Kinshasa.

Bottom Line

2009-09-28T16:14:00.013+02:00

Would you vote for this candidate?
This blog is not about German politics. It is about gender issues, among others - and I think we have a gender issue here.
When I first cycled past this poster advertising for an otherwise respectable left-wing party, I took it for a joke. I thought it was sabotage, by neo-nazis or the like...
It was no joke. Ms. Wawzyniak, partly depicted here, has gained a seat in parliament - to some extent at least - by displaying her back side, and only her back side, on her only campaign poster (to be utterly precise: the only poster of hers I have noticed). What you see here is the full poster image.
The litmus test for sexist images is switching roles. Would Barak Obama have had a chance in the USA if he had run his entire election campaign with an image of his derrière? Or, say, Nicolas Sarkozy in France? Or, let the imagination flow, Joseph Kabila in D.R.Congo or, think big, Jacob Zuma in South Africa?
Ms. Wawzyniak's party came 2nd in that part of Berlin, after the Green Party. But please, Ms. Wawzyniak, when you stand for election again in four years: leave your buttocks where they belong and show us your face. I don't want a mere bum in parliament.

Women's Em_ent or EmPOWERment?

2009-09-17T09:39:00.009+02:00

Listen to this enlightening podcast by Prof. Andrea Cornwall on what the mainstream development industry has done to women's empowerment- and how you can go about it differently.
A brief written summary is available on this IDS page. Do click at the bottom of that page to download the half-hour speech: I find it riveting! After some 35 minutes, you'll hear a short documentary film soundtrack in Arabic (no sub-titles in the audio file...), followed by questions and answers (in English again).
Cornwall explains that empowerment is not about "giving that woman a chicken" - "empowerment light" which leaves men, or the society as a whole, completely out of the picture. Empowerment as shifting the boundaries of the possible is what we should be after - supporting women to find power so as to engage differently within their societies. Prof. Cornwall quotes some compelling examples.

Monitoring without SMART objectives

2009-09-08T19:11:00.012+02:00

Just returned from an energising workshop on monitoring the We Can (End All Violence against Women) Campaign in East and Central Africa. The campaign objectives - causing a shift in social attitudes, getting people to take a visible stand against VAW (violence against women), building and strengthening popular movements and alliances against VAW - are not really what project planners call SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound). Does that mean that no meaningful monitoring can take place?
Brainstorming through the WHY, WHAT and HOW of monitoring the campaign, some 25 participants from Kenya, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo have concluded that there is plenty of meaningful monitoring to be done, even without baselines or control groups. People are not inanimate objects, you don't need a thermometer or scales to determine whether they have changed: you can simply ask them and observe what they're doing! When you ask, make sure you remember WHY you ask - the purpose of your monitoring - and WHAT it is that you are looking for.
The WHAT can be quite abstract, e.g. an intangible concept like "greater awareness", "campaign ownership". When you come to the HOW - the ways in which you use indicators, i.e. pointers that show what kind of change has happened - then you must be concrete. An indicator for commitment? Check whether people show up for meetings. An indicator for attitude change? Ask people to tell you precisely what has changed in their thinking and actions. For campaign visibility? Record in which places you see the logo, or find out whether preachers and other opinion leaders mention the campaign messages...
Of course, using these indicators is not as straightforward as applying a tape measure to assess the length of an object. A tape measure shows one dimension. Social change has millions of dimensions. By making deliberate decisions as to WHAT aspects of change we look for, WHY and HOW, by combining different kinds of indicators (e.g. qualitative and quantitative), different methods of data gathering (e.g. interviews and direct observation), different view-points (e.g. testimonies from campaign participants and from external observers) and by recording our data systematically, we can obtain reasonably reliable information on how we are doing with a campaign and what outcomes it produces.

Milestones - or millstones around your neck?

2009-08-19T16:33:00.005+02:00

People in development agencies like milestones - not the real life objects, but those imaginary markers which indicate that a project is progressing as planned - or not. Craftspeople, engineers, cooks and other people who work with tangible objects know what milestones they need to pass on the way to the finished product. Sometimes traditional ceremonies accompany the passing of such milestones - for example, in Germany people have a ceremony when they complete the roof structure of a house.
How do you set milestones for non-tangible processes, as we keep encountering them in social development and campaigning? Think of the example of the We Can End all Violence Against Women Campaign: When you try to prompt hundreds, maybe thousands and ultimately millions of people to reflect on their own attitudes and take action to end violence against women (VAW), you are likely to get thousands, ultimately millions of different reactions and response. Human societies are hypercomplex systems; anything that happens triggers a wave of repercussions, only few of which can be reliably predicted. Where are you going to look for your milestones?
The makers of a campaign design it with an implicit or explicit theory in mind as to what immediate reactions the campaign will trigger among its participants and addressees, and what actions may flow from these first reactions. We can represent the expected or hoped-for chain reaction as a a flow chart, as a causal pathway, as a logical framework connecting inputs + outputs + outcomes + impact... but we must remember that these causal connections are only imaginary products of the theory behind the campaign design. A key part of monitoring innovative work is to test the hypotheses or assumptions that underly the project or campaign design. In innovative work, we need to find out what happens to our theories in real life, whether actions and reactions follow our theoretical causal connections or whether they take different paths.
Hence, milestones based on theoretical knowledge and hopes as to what could happen may turn into millstones around our necks, weighing down our thinking and preventing us from capturing the rich information we need to test our assumptions. No milestones in uncharted territory: you better set the milestones on your return, after you have completed your journey, recalling what happened where. And then travel again, to verify whether the same milestones reappear at each journey...

Linda Mayoux's commendable site

2009-08-16T18:00:00.002+02:00

Linda Mayoux, who has long experience on gender and development - and especially micro-finance in South Asia runs a web-site which includes all her highly commendable articles. It's called LINDASWEBS and contains sufficient material for an enlightening day of browsing...

NGO Capacity Building - Free Resources

2009-07-31T20:01:00.004+02:00

Networklearning offers a host of links to free on-line resources about topics and techniques that are important for development NGOs - including in French, Arabic and Somali languages. I have not studied them in detail - discover for yourself on networklearning.

Technical Solutions to Social Problems?

2009-07-21T21:06:00.015+02:00

"If only I had teeth down there" was the title of a public discussion organised by Terre des Femmes, a Berlin-based group specialised in women's rights (Monday 20). Sonnet Ehlers, the South African inventor of Rape-aXe, presented the prototype of her "anti-rape condom" for women. Rape-aXe does not prevent rape - it only makes penetration extremely short and painful for the perpetrator: rigid barbs drill into his skin and stay there. The device cannot be removed from the perpetrator's body without medical assistance. For a graphic explanation, consult the official site. Ms. Ehlers says Rape-aXe buys time - while the perpetrator recovers from the shock of finding his parts trapped inside the "condom", his victim may get away.
The overwhelmingly female attendance was divided over the benefits and risks associated with Rape-aXe, which is expected to hit the world market in October 2009. It may be a powerful deterrent. But what if, as an undesired outcome, attacks on young girls, less likely to carry the device than adult women, increase? Ms. Ehlers says she works on a protective device for children as well. Isn't it child abuse, objects a participant, when you insert devices into a girls' body - even if they are meant to protect her from assault? And who can afford these devices, anyway, if they must be replaced every 24 hours?
Ms. Ehlers's answers to the many questions are stern, curt, sometimes polemic and often evasive, especially when it comes to psychological and social issues. As evidence for effectiveness, she mentions discussions held in prisons with "many rapists" and in unspecified townships.
Technical solutions to social problems? I'm unconvinced. But the device is stunning indeed.

Culture Unplugged

2009-07-20T14:16:00.003+02:00

Watch this virtual film festival on-line: Culture Unplugged shows an extraordinary collection of films far from the "mainstream". An astonishing mix.

Forum Theatre in Berlin

2009-07-20T11:17:00.009+02:00

At the recent Gender is Happening one-week extravaganza by the Gunda Werner Institute in Berlin (Heinrich Böll Foundation - German blog here), Aki Krishnamurty facilitated three workshops which culminated in a public performance. For those who don't know Forum Theatre: it is a method for awareness-raising and social transformation developed by Augusto Boal as the Theatre of the Oppressed: click here for a page by the International Theatre of the Oppressed Organisation; there's also a comprehensive entry on Wikipedia. In a nutshell: professional or amateur actors perform a rehearsed play or a short sketch which demonstrates aspects of oppression relevant to the audience. In our Berlin example, Aki Krishnamurty and her workshop participants had agreed that sexual harrassment in public spaces was a good example for oppression linked to gender inequality. They have performed a sketch in which a woman who walks her dog is being bothered by unknown people in different ways: the first one silently exchanges flirtatuous glances with her; the second one follows her around with verbal sexual advances. Eventually our heroine walks off, helpless and upset. Aki Krishnamurty comes on stage to ask the audience: "What happened?" And, "how could she react differently so that she can continue walking her dog without being bothered?" Members of the audience are asked to come on stage and show how they would act differently; the actors react as they judge fit.
The result was overwhelming. Each person who came on stage had something radically different to offer; from friendly dialogue to fistfight. Every re-enactment of the scene prompted new reactions. Hot debate arose between the participants - is it OK to counter violence with violence? Are older women better equipped to deal with harrassment than younger ones? Does age matter? Are we being racist in our portrayal of the aggressors? The discussion continued beyond the session; even on my way home, hours later, I continued to mull over the different options and opinions. I had not expected this approach to work this powerfully among seasoned "gender experts". Which proves again how important it is to immerse oneself personally and deeply into the methods we develop for "others", who in reality aren't that "other" at all...

Men's Forum

2009-07-07T08:51:00.006+02:00

At today's instalment of Gender is Happening (with its German language site), two men from an informal group called Men's Forum (an inadequate rendering of the German name Forum Männer) animated a workshop recalling the history of the German men's movement, which emerged in the 1970's as a reaction to femiminist groups radically opposing co-operation with men. The movement was never very big, touching mainly left-wing heterosexual West Germans with high levels of formal education, but it continues in annual "men's meetings". And it has drawn upon a rich body of publications, mainly from the 1970's and 1980's, which explore sources of nefarious attributes of "masculinity" (violence...) and seek new, more acceptable forms of masculinity (e.g. Robert Bly, Norbert Ney, Pilgrim). In the 1980's, German publishing house Rororo issued a series entirely devoted to the concept of masculinity, with the motto: "Sexually and socially speaking, the man is an idiot."
This type of self-flagellation has ceased, I believe, and it has served its purpose. Unfortunately, the facilitators did not discuss the anti-feminist "backlash" that descended upon Europe in the 1990's, nor the newer, stimulating concept of queerness, which seemed familiar and dear to most workshop participants.

Gender is Happening

2009-07-06T16:10:00.004+02:00

Love Me Gender is the motto of a one-week extravaganza at the Gunda Werner Institute, the feminist branch of Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin: a rich succession of events around gender identity, policies and practice... A (German language) blog informs about panel discussions, film projections and workshops - including queer poetry slams and a three-day crash course in drawing comics (Title: Any Tool is a Weapon if You Hold it Right). I have joined a group of volunteer blog reporters to produce my impressions in English here and, eventually, in German on the official site. Tonight, workshop on masculinities. To be continued - this blog is going to be devoted to Love Me Gender for the rest of the week.

European Court ruling on domestic violence

2009-07-01T10:53:00.005+02:00

Landmark Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)! On 9 June, Court members unanimously found that the State of Turkey had failed to fulfil its responsibility to protect the human rights of a woman whose violent husband had repeatedly attacked her and killed her mother. Remember the international law concept of due diligence, touched upon in my April 2009 posting? The Turkish government had failed to protect the applicant's human rights by allowing Turkish courts and police to maintain a laisser-faire attitude towards domestic violence. For full details, including a link to the complete judgement, try the international law blog IntLawGrrls! This judgement comes at a time when 47 European Ministers of Justice, united at a Council of Europe meeting in Norway, have formally committed themselves to take more effective measures against domestic violence. For information on that meeting, click here.

A plea for quality in M&E

2009-06-30T09:05:00.007+02:00

Like the previous entry, this post is -remotely- inspired by Philipp Mayring's handbook on qualitative content analysis (in German, 10th edition 2008). Mayring is a professor of psychology --- now don't run away! Psychology can teach us a lot about assessing fuzzy development processes.
As shown in the post below, any scientific analysis rests on qualitative steps which determine what is important, how the "what" should be measured, and how the measurements should be interpreted. These steps are taken by researchers, i.e. by common mortals. There is no absolute truth (leaving aside religious beliefs) - there are only theories. Even theories that come with figures are just theories, to be confirmed or refuted in subsequent rounds of research.
When researchers do not explain what assumptions and decisions underly their data-gathering and analysis, they are easily challenged. A recent posting on Duncan Green's blog describes how Oxford economics professor Paul Collier, in his latest book War, Guns and Votes, mixes and matches statistics to produce amazing guesses. They are just guesses: to his credit, Collier admits that. But a sentence of the type "an annual expenditure of $100m on peacekeepers reduces the cumulative ten-year risk of reversion to conflict very substantially from about 38% to 17%" does suggest a direct cause-to-effect connection - while it's just a wild guess, a bold simplification of extremely complex realities, a provocative entry point for a discussion.

"Hard" figures that cannot be verified by a close exam of the ways in which they have been collected, selected and correlated are just numbers; they don't prove anything. Unfortunately, monitoring and evaluation in development programmes, meant not just to provoke discussion, but to verify progress and draw learning for the people involved, is often influenced by "naive" number worship. Where "what can be counted" receives more attention than "what matters most and how can we best find out", we may end up with "placebo" indicators. "Placebo" because they may make us feel better and they may placate donors for a while, but they don't cure ignorance.

Quantitative is qualitative, too...

2009-06-26T14:53:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I read an advertisement for a body lotion scientifically proven* to better the skin of 80% of lotion users. The *footnote explained that, in a trial bringing together twenty women, 80% stated the lotion made their skin feel smoother. Does that sound scientific enough? In any case, it illustrates how you turn qualitative judgements (respondents' reported feelings) into "hard" figures, a procedure which as such is not "manipulative" but established scientific practice.
As a matter of fact, qualitative judgements are at the roots of all quantitative measurement, even in natural sciences: you need to decide what exactly you want to measure and determine how to establish a scale before you can start counting. When Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius developed his temperature scale (1742), he based it on the qualitative observation that water evaporated when heated and solidified when cooled. Then he established a scale which put the boiling point at 0 and the freezing point at 100 (no typing mistake - the original Celsius scale is the reverse of what you find on today's thermometers). He decided that the intervals on the scale would be equal. There could have been other solutions: for example, the Richter magnitude scale, used to measure seismic energy released in earthquakes, is logarithmic: point 5 on the Richter scale comes with a shaking magnitude that is ten times stronger than at point 4.
Qualitative analysis establishes concepts, categories and instruments for measuring. Only after all this qualitative work is done, you can take your quantitative measurement: you look at the thermometer and you read 28°C. If you're a big fan of quantitative indicators, enjoy this moment, because it is brief, as the analysis that follows will be qualitative: is 28°C hot, warm, mild, cool or a bit chilly?

Direct democracy in Germany

2009-06-24T10:19:00.004+02:00

At the tender age of 47 I discover that I can submit electronic petitions to my national parliament, or support existing protests against or suggestions for new laws. For Germans: Jede/r kann eine Petition beim Bundestag einreichen, bzw. bestehende öffentliche Petitionen unterstützen. Im Moment gibt es da 75, z.B. gegen die Besteuerung von Kondomen (wichtig gegen HIV/AIDS), zu Fragen des Arbeits-, Miet-, Sozial-, Steuer- und Verkehrsrechts und vielem mehr, was BürgerInnen im täglichen Leben beschäftigt. Politische Beteiligung auch zwischen den Wahlen. Hier ist die Petitionsseite - Registrieren dauert 3 Minuten.

The Girl Effect

2009-06-23T20:23:00.004+02:00

It's from the Nike Foundation and it somewhat naively endorses linear models of development but still it's beautiful. They call it the girl effect.
This is one among many informative links Chris Roche from Oxfam Australia quotes in his recent post on a most commendable site, the Forum on the Future of Aid.

Are you listening?

2009-06-23T20:05:00.006+02:00

Global Voices est un portail d'information multi-lingue - cliquez sur "here" à la fin du texte pour voir. --- Global Voices is a rich, multi-lingual compilation of blog posts around the world - a great source of news that don't make it into mainstream media. Look it up here. --- Global Voices, in vielen Sprachen, auch auf Deutsch, und voller Informationen, die woanders schwer zu finden sind.

Count your shoes

2009-06-19T10:18:00.005+02:00

Since 2000, the German development bank KfW has organised public panel discussions on globalisation. In its 50th instalment on 16 June, three Africans and two Europeans, one woman and four men, discussed the topic "development is the future". Dirk Messner, Director of the German Institute for Devlopment Policy (DIE) emphasised the need to address climate change; Simon Maxwell from the British Overseas Development Institue (ODI) called for Europeans to unite their efforts in a common development policy and enhanced coherence between development and other policies. Francis Appiah (African Peer Review Mechanism APRM) reiterated the appeal for better co-ordinated, multilateral approaches. He said government officials in Ghana spent about 300 days a year in donor meetings of all kinds... Norah Uwaraga, ED of a consultancy bureau, pointed to the potential benefits of carbon emissions trading to the lives of "ordinary" Africans.
Just before the champagne was brought in to celebrate the 50th instalment of the KfW panels, a listener from Botswana took the microphone. She came with an issue no-one on the panel had addressed: mass consumption as a driving force of environmental destruction and global injustice. I have travelled to many rich countries and I am amazed by what people here consider necessary for a good life. Just the number of shoes you have is absurd. How can a single person need so many pairs of shoes? Applause. Then the doors open to a rich buffet: beef carpaccio, salmon and petits fours. It's a strange world.
For those who wish to deepen the topic, I recommend Story of Stuff or the quite spectacular new film Home, both free downloads.

IDB, IDP and other acronyms

2009-06-14T21:42:00.004+02:00

Consult the Aid glossary of Development Initatives, a consultancy bureau. It does not offer much on social science concepts, but helpful explanations of terms and acronyms around multilateral institutions, financial aid and the jargon that comes with huge programmes. The terms "gender" or "gender mainstreaming" do not appear, but maybe that means that everybody has understood what that is about by now? Or have they been mainstreamed away...?

Feminism and Religion

2009-06-07T21:56:00.020+02:00

Yesterday, at the Religion Revisited conference (scroll down for more posts on the topic), I joined the workshop Religious Feminists - Allies in the struggle for Women's Rights, facilitated by Homa Hoodfar from Concordia University, Montreal (photograph above by Annemarie Lopez, IAW). What is special about "religious feminism" as compared to "secular feminism" - and does it matter what kind of feminist you are?
We have not reached any definition of "religous feminists": feminists who happen to be religious, feminists who argue within religious frameworks or who are part of religious institutions, religious women who happen to be feminists? But there is a distinction between "religious" and "secular" feminists, and in some contexts it matters. In Iran, feminists who declare themselves as secular tend to be discredited as "extreme" or "Western"-influenced. Statements by Polish participants suggest that the situation is not that different in today's Catholic Poland. In Iran, religious feminists, appearing "moderate", have managed to obtain significant adjustments in Islamic (shari'a) family law. (The phrase making the best out of a bad situation comes to my mind.) Women in rural areas apparently speak of rights we know from CEDAW as their "Islamic rights" - who cares about the labelling, as long as the rights are known?

President Ahmadinejad's government has dismantled most of the gains Iranian feminists patiently accumulated over 25 years of activism. But the effects of a recent campaign against stoning, a shari'a punishment for women found guilty of "adultery", have survived: the revised criminal code, about to be adopted, does not include the stoning punishment. "Bearded men" have found a sharia-based reason for this welcome omission. Shadi Sadr, prominent Iranian lawyer, women's rights activist and participant in our workshop, has explained the secular character of the anti-stoning campaign, focussing on the "backwardness" of stoning and its harmful impact on Iran's image abroad. International networking has been an element of the campaign.
In "Western" circles, feminists who introduce themselves as "religious" tend to meet skepticism. When I say I am a religious feminist people think I'm backward or something. But I insist! a typically German-looking "tall blonde" states. True, many religious women's groupings defend values that contradict basic women's rights. These groups can hardly be considered as feminist. But there are feminists who claim their churches, who conquer spaces within religion and who add their voices to broader women's movements.
Interestingly, a German participant referred to the "tall blonde", who had not mentioned her religious affiliation, as a Christian. A quick exchange of baffled glances. No-one escapes sterotyping, anywhere.
Migrant feminists face a special predicament, as an example from Canada illustrates. For reasons of "cultural diversity", the Canadian State of Ontario was about to permit the use of shari'a family law in Muslim communities. Muslim feminists, active in organisations such as the Canadian Council of Muslim Women and Women Living under Muslim Laws, launched a campaign against shari'a rule in Canada. Apparently, it took enormous efforts to win "mainstream" Canadian women's groups for this cause: non-Muslim feminists were worried to be considered racist. The only international letter of support came from the Iranian women's movement - which reportedly enhanced campaign credibility in the eyes of Canadian lawmakers... Eventually, the dangerous precedent in Canadian law was averted. Muslim women in Canada continue to be entitled to the same rights as their non-Muslim peers. (Click HERE for campaign information.)

Secularism, Citizenship and Gender Equality

2009-06-07T21:49:00.006+02:00

...is the title of the opening lecture on Saturday at Religion Revisited (see post below) delivered by Deniz Kandiyoti from the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She explains how the meaning and practice of both secularism and citizenship derive from specific historical contexts. Turkey and India serve as illustrations for secularisms in crisis. A telling example is the near-religious cult devoted in Turkey to great secularist Ataturk. Illiberal secularism may affect women's rights just as negatively as religious dogma... In India, the key national dilemma - finding an integrative narrative in a post-colonial society divided by religious and caste cleavages - has produced a pluralism that accentuates rather than weakens the role of religion in public life, because it is a political pluralism, says Kandiyoti, not a religious one.
An intervention by Cassandra Balchin (Women Living under Muslim Laws) pointed to the risks associated with superficial "religious pluralism": When governments talk about dialoguing with religion, they invite the bearded men - who tend to be ineffective in protecting women's rights.
By the way, against commonly held views, many European countries are not secular. In Germany for example, the Reichskonkordat between the Nazi regime and the Holy See has never been abolished...

"Religion Revisited"

2009-06-05T22:31:00.005+02:00

This is the title of an international conference at the Gunda Werner Institute (Böll Foundation) in Berlin, with the topic Women's Rights and the Political Instrumentalisation of Religion. The two-day event is part of the 11-country UNRISD research project Religion, Politics and Gender Equality, which will publish its final report in October 2009. Tonight, the opening panel brought together José Casanova (Sociology of Religion, Georgetown University, USA), Anne Phillips (Gender Institute and Government Department, London School of Economics, UK), Farida Shaheed (Shirkat Gah Resource Centre, Pakistan) and Agnieszka Graff (Warsaw University, Poland). The full keynote addresses by Profs. Casanova and Phillips can be downloaded in PDF form (click on the names). Casanova notes a growing de-privatisation of religion: Religion, which he defines as a "discursive reality", appears to conquer increasing space in civil society, politics and the State. He sees this as a problem only if religion encroaches on the free exercise of democracy and human rights (including women's rights - and the right to practise one's religion). The same reserve applies to secularism... Casanova calls for a clear distinction between religious institutions and religious individuals. Phillips's speech, titled Religion - Ally, Threat or just Religion? puts equal emphasis on the exercise of individual human rights. She cautions against a corporatist understanding of religion by which a few spokesmen define what "their" religion is about. Or, as Shaheed puts it: belonging to a community does not give you equality within that community. To make things more complicated, Phillips points out that a focus on individual rights comes with dilemma, too: e.g. religious Muslims in the UK may prefer to have problems related to "family law" solved by shari'a councils, which are tolerated in the UK. If the UK government prohibits them, it impedes on the religious freedoms of Muslims. But allowing these councils to function is likely to give women a less equitable deal than the secular UK personal status law... The ensuing discussion suggests that traditionally "the State" (law and law enforcement) has been most effective at limiting religious practice where it impedes the exercise of individual rights.
Shaheed notices that sexual rights appear to capture most attention among religious authorities; Casanova speaks of "feminism" as having replaced "communism" as the scariest spectre haunting traditional religious establishment. To which Phillips adds an optimistic note: in her opinion, the apparent fixation of religious authorities on sexuality indicates that gender relations are not unquestioned anymore.
Finally, a participant representing the "Romanian Green Youth" stood up to ask the panelists what role they would see for religion? Graff: equal participation in a pluralistic society. Casanova agrees, and: it's the personal experience that counts (as suggested by a feminist, "pro-choice", veiled catholic nun who tells us about activities of dissident Catholic institutions in Spain). Phillips: One principle of the society I want to live in is equality. Shaheed sees the separation of State and religion as the only way to guarantee space for everyone.

R2P and women in conflict

2009-06-03T19:53:00.006+02:00

The feminist Gunda Werner Institut (Böll Foundation, Berlin) convened an experts' meeting on 27 May on the Right to Protect (R2P), a fairly new concept in international law, and its implications on women. The bottom line: R2P is innovative in that it places human rights above State sovereignty, traditionally held inviolable in international law. But this political concept does not come with new enforcement mechanisms: it is still the UN Security Council that determines whether a State has proven incapable of protecting its citizens' human rights, in which case R2P can justify military intervention. R2P is NOT an automatic license to invade; it is a looming threat or, phrased more positively, an invitation to governments to strengthen national mechanisms protecting human rights.
Women's rights have served as an excuse for military intervention, e.g. in Afghanistan. Have international invaders taken any targeted measures to enhance Afghan women's rights? The experts are sceptical. There is little evidence of international efforts to have women's voices heard - arguably, armies are not the place where you would expect that to happen (even though one participant in the meeting called for gender training for military personnel).
Recently, R2P has been invoked in connection with the Darfur conflict. Annette Weber, Horn of Africa specialist at SWP (German government think tank) points out that the nature of the conflict and the sheer size of the territory involved make military intervention an unlikely path to protecting civilians' lives. Meanwhile, classical diplomatic instruments have been underused.

Bonne nouvelle!

2009-05-26T21:10:00.006+02:00

La documentation Genre et Gouvernance par BRIDGE (Université de Sussex) existe désormais en francais, espagnol et portugais. Cliquez sur HERE (ci-dessous en bleu) pour y accéder, et pour trouver d'autres kits d'information BRIDGE à l'usage des professionnels du développement.
The BRIDGE "cutting edge" pack on Gender and Governance is now available in French, Spanish and Portuguese translations: to download it, click > HERE. For those who don't know the BRIDGE packs yet, do rummage around on the site - these information packs are concise, up-to-date, great companions to anyone involved in social development and free.

Organisations in systems theory

2009-05-25T13:58:00.005+02:00

Fritz B. Simon, psychiatrist-turned-management consultant (sic!) is a prolific author of highly legible books bringing together systems theory and real life practice. His Introduction to Organisational Systems Theory (my -slightly inaccurate- translation of the German title, Einführung in die systemische Organisationstheorie) is delightful to read, but so condensed that any attempt to summarise it would fail. I just want to share a couple of highlights...
A salient feature of organisations is that they can do one thing and its opposite at the same time. Think of an oil company which causes horrid environmental degradation in, say, Nigeria, while funding wildlife protection schemes in some other part of the planet. Such apparent inconsistency is not necessarily a symptom of dysfunction. In the opposite, it is one of the reasons why organisations come into being: when you're on your own, you can only do one thing in one place at a time; when you're an organised group, you can be in many places and do many things at the same time; and if it serves your purpose to do things that contradict each other, then that's possible, too.
And what is an organisation's first purpose? Here we come to autopoiesis, a term coined by neurobiologist H.Maturana to desigate the process by which all living beings continuously create themselves and keep themselves alive. Applied to organisations, autopoiesis means that the main purpose of an organisation is its self-perpetuation, regardless of stated missions and aims. Organisations are living beings, and living beings care about their own survival. This is a tough piece to swallow for development agencies, who like to say that their job is to put themselves out of business. But it may explain some of the apparent inconsistencies in our behaviour...

"We Can" launched in the Netherlands

2009-04-30T21:18:00.004+02:00

It's "We Can", tout court, not "yes we can": The We Can End All Violence against Women campaign has been launched in the Netherlands. Reaching beyond feminist circles, "We Can" attempts to make large numbers of women and men realise that the personal is political, and encourage them to undertake practical steps in their daily lives to end inequalities between the sexes and violence against women. People can take a pledge to become change makers on the campaign website (in Dutch), and download materials including the signature reproduced here. Don't speak Dutch? There is another informative site on "We Can" in the Northern hemisphere: wecanbc.ca, filled with material on the campaign in British Columbia, Canada. The campaign originated in South Asia: wecanendvaw.org

Communication on Gender-Based Violence

2009-04-19T18:57:00.004+02:00

Better late than never - just discovered a 2003 resource by UNIFEM: Making a Difference - Strategic Communications to End Violence against Women, available from the UNIFEM site. Apart from lots of practical advice, it includes this amazing story from Eastern Europe:

A billboard campaign in the Czech Republic for Nokia ‘hands free’ telephone accessories showed a man molesting a woman now that his hands were ‘free’ from holding the phone receiver. To protest the ad, the Prague Centre for Gender Studies collected electronic signatures via their website and presented them to the Czech Advertising Standards
Council, the Czech State Administration Office and the Finnish headquarters of Nokia. The letter to Finland stated that this kind of sexist advertising contradicts Nokia’s brand identity. Within 14 days of receiving the letter, the Finns withdrew the billboard.
Adapted from a story told by Lenka Simerska, Bratislava Strategic Communications Workshop, October 2001.

Literature on Gender-Based Violence

2009-04-12T16:42:00.006+02:00

These days I have been going through heaps of publications on violence against women (VAW), many of which you'll find via the Siyanda portal. A few highlights:

Researching Violence against Women – a Practical Guide for Researchers and Activists by Mary Ellsberg and Lori Heise (2005), produced by WHO and PATH, seems indeed highly practical. I put a link here - attention, it'll take you to a massive PDF file that brings the whole book! It starts with definitions, basic facts and statistics on VAW, to then present the steps of research on VAW, such as ethical considerations, developing a research strategy, tools for measuring violence, building a research team (!), data collection and analysis. The book is well-structured, full of helpful checklists, charts and illustrations - a hands-on guideline for designing and conducting surveys. Its annex includes a collection of web-based resources.

Even less recent but still nice and eminently readable: The Swedish International Cooperation Agency (SIDA) distributes a research report titled Ending Gender-Based Violence: A Call for Global Action to Involve Men (2004).

For those who are interested in using international law to hold their governments accountable: the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on VAW has just completed its 15^th year. You will find plenty of resources under "Violence against Women" on UN Women Watch. The principle of due diligence makes it possible for women’s rights advocates to hold states accountable: Under international law, a State may be responsible for acts of violence against women committed by non-state actors if it fails with due diligence to prevent, stop and investigate acts of violence, punish perpetrators and provide compensation to the victims, as specified in General Recommendation 19 (1992) of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The legal concept of due diligence clarifies the responsibility of States to make women’s rights a reality. This responsibility is enshrined within the established requirement of exercising due diligence to respect, protect, fulfil and promote human rights.
Exercising due diligence includes actions with respect to prevention, investigation of violations of human rights that have occurred and prosecution of perpetrators through fair proceedings. It also requires that adequate reparations be made to victims, including compensation, justice and rehabilitation. (From the 2005 Report on Good Practices in Combating and Eliminating VAW, UN Division for the Advancement of Women.

Funding for Women's Groups (II)

2009-03-30T19:45:00.008+02:00

Here's another helpful, if slightly dated (2006) source on fundraising for women's organisations, a WORD document you can download from Siyanda - click here. For plenty of publications on mainstreaming gender equality, rummage about in the Siyanda site; it's rich!
As I am writing this I stumble across an entire website for networking between women's funds, the Women's Funding Network. The site includes a directory of its members with links to websites; if you go through these carefully you may well identify potential donors.

The Listening Project

2009-03-28T14:05:00.004+01:00

CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, best known for Do No Harm, its peace and conflict impact assessment tool, launched LISTEN in 2007. Under this initiative, the "receipients" of international aid, rather than its "providers", voice their views on international aid. Reports on listening exercises with wide ranges of informers in 13 countries can be downloaded from the CDA site. They are useful background information for appraisal or strategic planning exercises - and they remind us of the importance of seeking and keeping in contact with people beyond the microcosm of international aid systems.