Thursday, June 9, 2011

The Oxford Millennium Villages Debate

Africa Can... - End Poverty

In March at Oxford, I had the opportunity to debate John McArthur on the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) evaluation, which is the subject of a paper I co-authored with Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development. The just-published newsletter (pdf)  of Oxford's Center for the Study of African Economies has a nice summary of the debate, and video from the event is here.

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Can ICT increase the impact of agriculture development?

One Acre Fund Blog

At One Acre Fund, we are always thinking about how we can improve the services that we offer to our clients. One potential method for doing so is using technology to enhance our core service model–farm inputs, credit, training, and market facilitation. Before we trial any new innovation, we look at existing models and best practices.

Some existing models for technology use in agriculture were highlighted in a recent seminar hosted by USAID on information and communications technology and its role in agriculture development. The speaker, Judith Payne, is the ICT advisor for USAID's Economic Growth and Africa bureaus. She discussed projects that address several parts of One Acre Fund's service model, including delivery of financial services, agriculture extension, and market access.

One of the most interesting extension projects Payne discussed was Digital Green in India. This nonprofit helps farmers produce videos documenting improved agriculture practices. To improve the quality of the videos and information offered, there is an automated phone line that farmers can call in to provide feedback. It currently operates in about 600 villages with about 42,000 farmers. In an evaluation of the project by Microsoft Research India, researchers found that farmers preferred to watch videos that showed people similar to themselves, and that agriculture "experts" were less trusted. Farmers were also more interested in watching a video if the tools used in the video were available for purchase at the actual video screenings. These findings confirm what One Acre Fund has discovered–farmers trust their peers, and it is important to provide tools in combination with training.

Payne also discussed a market access application called Reuters Market Light. Currently available in twelve states in India, it is being used by 200,000 farmers. They pay a subscription fee of about $4.30 USD per quarter, and receive information on market prices, weather conditions, and farming cycles. Farmers can request information by crop, region, and in their local language. Reuters Market Light is not currently financially sustainable (it employs over 300 full-time staff), and its impact is under evaluation by IFPRI and the University of Oxford.

Both Digital Green and Reuters Market Light could have interesting implications for One Acre Fund's field operations. However, it is important for us to understand their potential to scale, their impact on farmer income, and their financial sustainability. Payne noted that both impact and sustainability have not been given enough attention with most ICT interventions for agriculture. The Microsoft Research India study of Digital Green calculated a per farmer cost of $3.70 USD for the video extension service (with an adoption rate of 85 percent); however, it's unclear if the cost of making and producing the videos was included in this figure, or what the return on investment is for farmers.

Payne strongly recommended that all practitioners planning to pilot ICT innovations should plan their exit strategy and business model from the beginning. As One Acre Fund continues to learn more about the potential for ICT to improve our field operations, we will be focused on how technology can help us reach 1 million farmers by 2020 in a financially sustainable way.

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The Value of Charting Impact

Tactical Philanthropy

On Friday, Bob Ottenhoff wrote about the new Charting Impact initiative that gets nonprofits to answer five questions as part of a public report that is intended to encourage donations and grants to flow towards effective nonprofits.

But can five questions answered with a couple of pages of text really help donors understand which organizations are effective?

I think they can.

Last year, I created my own list of "five questions every nonprofit should be able to answer" with the same intentions of Charting Impact; to help funders understand which organizations are effective. In developing my questions and speaking about them with nonprofits and donors, I've come to the conclusion that with these types of questions, it is how the nonprofit answers them, not the specifics of the answers that matter.

The fact is, there is no short, simple answer that can prove effectiveness. This is true in the for-profit sector as well. Even in a field where the goal (profit) is easily measureable, there are no reliable, simple data that can answer the question of whether an organization is (and will continue to be) effective. But the Charting Impact questions don't seek to get nonprofits to provide any specific data. The elegancy of their approach is that the questions give each nonprofit the freedom to answer in the way that is best suited to their particular situation while requiring that they respond in a manner that reveals the organization's strategic strengths and understanding of the environment in which they operate.'

The questions are:

  1. What is your organization aiming to accomplish?
  2. What are your strategies for making this happen?
  3. What are your organization's capabilities for doing this?
  4. How will your organization know if you are making progress?
  5. What have and haven't you accomplished so far?

By focusing at the level of goal setting and accomplishment, the questions are applicable to any organization trying to achieve any goal.

Given that the projects backers — GuideStar, BBB Wise Giving and Independent Sector — have such reach in the nonprofit sector, I think it is feasible that Charting Impact reports could become standard reports available on most all nonprofit websites for organizations included in the GuideStar database. Encouragingly, unlike so many external review processes that only add to the burden of tasks that nonprofits must accomplish, the Charting Impact report should be relatively simple for effective organizations to complete. Any organization that finds it difficult to complete will find it a highly useful process to go through in their journey towards becoming more effective.

Most importantly, I think the Charting Impact report helps undermine the fantasy that someday we'll have a simple, quantitative rating system that will answer the effectiveness question. While the report is only a starting point in a donor's mission to discover which nonprofits are effective, it does start the journey off in the right direction by asking the most important questions in a standard format while allowing them to be answered in a free form format that recognizes the vast differences between different issue areas and levels of organizational development.

PS: For those nonprofits that think foundations should be subject to the same level of accountability that they require of nonprofits, note that the Charting Impact questions can easily be turned around and asked of funders. In fact, the Hewlett Foundation has already published their report.

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