Daniel O'Neil

DEC--A goldmine of information locked behind a weak website

Several years ago, USAID created a beautiful repository for all those progress reports, lessons learned reports, and technical studies that it generates: The Development Experience Clearinghouse. From its frontpage:

USAID's Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC) is the largest online resource for USAID funded technical and program documentation, with over 62700documents available for electronic download.

The idea of the site is wonderful--to make all of the documents that are generated by USAID and its contractors publically available. I use it frequently when I need to research a new project or country. I love that my old reports are available through the site including quite a bibliography from our Hurricane Georges Project. I love getting the weekly email with the lists of all of the new titles. The variety is quite inspiring:

• Ataulfo mango in Chiapas : a value chain analysis
  
• Finance in value chain analysis : a synthesis paper
  
• Grassroots civic education and media for democracy in Egypt : final report
  
• Strengthening the accountability and transparency of the legislative process in the West Bank/Gaza (BATAN) : project final report
  
• Microfinance and HIV/AIDS : the role of donors and funders  
• A new approach to estimating abortion rates
•   Quality programs for orphans and vulnerable children : a facilitator's guide to establishing service standard

This past week's email contained around 130 titles. Sure, some of the reports are very specialized or just routine progress reports. However, there must be a lot of great information buried in this pile of reports. Unfortunately, it remains buried. I am intrequed to learn what was learned during the grassroots civic education project in Eygpt, but I fear that the report is just a routine, "we did what we promised to do" report. I don't have time to wade through 130 reports a week.

I would love to see one of two things happen:

1. Have the DEC website switch to a youtube format: The information page for each report would include both a counter to show how popular it is and a place to leave comments. You could easily see which reports are most popular (and in theory most interesting) for any category or country. The comments would let you know what other people thought of the report (or the project).
2. Have a New York Times  "Review of Books" style newsletter that also comes out each week. This review could highlight the best new reports and dig out some of the buried jewels. Alternately, this could be a great subject for a blog: The USAID Report Review. Ideally, you would have reviewers from the different fields and from different geographic areas. If the review or blog attracted enough attention, it could even improve the quality of the reports themselves as people actually competed to be highlighted in the blog. 

The options are not exclusive--the youtube-type site would make it easier to identify reports that needed a review. I doubt that USAID will take the chance of opening up the site to comments and ratings. However, what about starting a blog to review the USAID reports? Anyone intersested? 

International Development vs the International Development Industry

Seth Godin has a great post today entitled "Music vs the Music Industry." His opening paragraph is as follows:

The music industry is really focused on the ‘industry’ part and not so much on the ‘music’ part. This is the greatest moment in the history of music if your dream is to distribute as much music as possible to as many people as possible, or if your goal is to make it as easy as possible to become heard as a musician. There’s never been a time like this before. So if your focus is on music, it’s great. If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate and vinyl, it’s horrible. The shift that is happening right now is that the people who insist on keeping the world as it was are going to get more and more frustrated until they lose their jobs. People who want to invent a whole new set of rules, a new paradigm, can’t believe their good fortune and how lucky they are that the people in the industry aren’t noticing an opportunity...

Those of us in international development face a similar paradox. This is a great time to be implementing projects overseas. National staff are far better educated and far more capable than they were twenty years ago. The world is a flatter place with more opportunities for everyone. Finally, it is much easier to connect to fellow practitioners, families, and friends (when I started working overseas twenty years ago, mail took two weeks in either direction and international phone calls were as high as $13/minute!). The combination of better people, more opportunities, and better communication makes our work much easier.

Unfortunately for us expatriates, these trends also make us less important. When I started working overseas, most projects had several expats. Now, many international NGOs have only one fully paid expat and the national staffs run the projects. Additionally, national NGOs have become significant competitors for funding. Nationalizing the development business is a great trend, unless you are part of the international development industry and are looking to win contracts. 

The international NGOs that are growing tend to fall into one of two categories:

1. Hot Spot Heroes: Organizations like CHF International have grown dramatically by moving into hot spots like Iraq and Afghanistan. Others have grown by focusing on the natural disasters that seem to have hit with increasing frequency (earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis). In all of these cases, the international organizations are moving into areas where the local capacity does not yet exist or has been overwhelmed by the problems.

2. US Retail: Some NGOs have carved niches for themselves by creating a product that sells in the US or European market. Traditional versions of this are the adopt-a-kid campaigns of Plan International, World Vision, and Save the Children. Newer versions are the internet campaigns of Globalgiving.com or Kiva. Either way, the International NGO's role is more and more just collecting funds from overseas and transferring it to a local partner.

The organizations that focus on obtaining grants from major donors are struggling. The latest downturn in the economy has meant that not only is competition stiffer, but there is less funding available. 

As a frontline worker in development, I feel the pinch. Why should an organization hire an expatriate like myself and incur the cost of my housing, my kids' school fees, and my salary when they could hire a local far cheaper? I am fortunate that I already have my 10,000 hours of practice in and therefore will always be needed. However, I work with a lot of interns and volunteers. They frequently ask me how to get into international development work. I tell than that I don't know anymore. The game has changed. It is a great time for international development, but a tough time for the international development industry.