New fund for "women's leadership"

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?

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.

Evaluating Advocacy by Evaluating Advocates

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

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?"

Please stop distracting busy people

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.

Happy Anniversary to Us!

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.

What online activism can learn from community organising

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!

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.

Effectiveness in art and in peace building

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!

Systems Approaches in Evaluation

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".

Warmth and Attention

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.

Human Rights Tactics in many languages

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

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?

Donor Playgrounds and Unknowable Outcomes

"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".

Resolution 1325 - 10th Anniversary

(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".