For the past few years, I have spent most of my professional time providing various IT solutions for clients within the international donor and foreign aid community. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this arena, it is comprised of organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank (to name a few.) Recently, a relative newcomer to the international development community, the Millennium Challenge Corporation has been threatened with budget cuts, based on a negative reception to the pace at which (to put it frankly) they are spending US taxpayer dollars.
I pondered this predicament, read (and agreed with) the MCC CEO’s response, and got to thinking…Hmmm…what could help this situation? I understand international development work. I understand technology (debatable). Surely, there is a solution out there…
How about large-scale reporting on the progress of development efforts within the recipient countries? Maybe…but that sounds like a harrowing “enterprise business intelligence” implementation. Not my first choice, as I tend to share the opinion of 37singals on those sorts of things.
How about modifying the structure of the organization to better “shift our focus and speed implementation of those Compacts”? (Compact Implementation = spending money). Perhaps…but without changing a sound and innovative business model, isn’t this mere optics? No matter how HQ draws the org chart, insightful, measured, and sustainable development work, properly executed in the hands of recipient countries does (and should) take time.
What could it possibly be?
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Eureka! I say that Enteprise 2.0 (shocker) is part, if not all, of the answer. Specifically, I posit that just as Jeff Bezos told Amazon, MCC should “aggressively expose themselves”. MCC has already taken a step in the right direction with Ambassador John J. Danilovich’s CEO blog. As the head of a government agency not only is this blog a superb way to tell the story behind the numbers, but it appears he is part of a very limited crowd using this medium. So why not take this a step further and expose all of MCC. Take the next logical step and use the creation of rich online communities, comprised of recipient country stakeholders, MCC project managers, US taxpayers, and contracted consultants to bring the complexities of international development work out of the bureaucratic closet and into the light of transparency.
The “Part” Answer - Pick a singe project, from a single compact and use something like Jive’s Clearspace X to expose and possibly crowdsource a component of the work. As the project progresses, the challenges of difficult development work are not only exposed to the public as rationale for the perceived slow burn rate, but possible solutions may arise from people not directly assigned project work. If MCC invests in the community, the community will invest in them.
The “All” Answer - Expose everything and transform MCC into the fabled “completely transparent organization”. Through the encouragement of pervasive stakeholder participation, the exposition of development work may result in a shift away from the traditional (yet flawed) metric of $ spent = success. Instead, success is measured based on richness of community, contribution to other communities, better, faster, cheaper problem solving, and finally the undeniable proof that MCC’s low headcount leverage model is a novel and viable approach to development work.
If MCC were to further embrace the tenets of Enterprise 2.0, I believe they stand an excellent chance to use their business model to not only change the way development work is accomplished, but also the basis by which its success is measured.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Matt G // Feb 15, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Alright - I’ll bite:
First off, I agree with pretty much everything you said. Increasing the speed of Compact implementation, just by setting a time limit on the process, will most likely have a negative impact on the quality of the Compacts.
So, how does MCC spend the money effectively while keeping congress (and, by extension, the general tax payer) happy?
Well, like I said, I agree that creating a more transparent process, from the very beginning will not only keep congressional oversight informed but also, hopefully, more involved.
Compact creation and implementation is certainly a high-profile issue. It is currently a fairly long, cumbersome, costly, and somewhat disorganized process. Will a more interactive Compact development process reduce the amount of time it takes to implement and start funding? Probably not at first. But it will help create a flexible set of best practices that all stakeholders can learn from. I’m sure there would be some people, internally at the MCC as well as in the Compact countries, that would not like every aspect of this messy process brought public. However, I think this could create an extremely healthy dialogue to a process that is still far from refined.
As the Compact matures into a funded group of projects, another question arises. How are we sure that this money is being spent effectively? Daily updates from project sites by the individual projects’ managers, as well as continuously updated disbursement/liquidation by project budget would be a start. Of course, as Nate brought up, what does it mean that the MCC built three miles of road in Ghana? Let’s say it links an agricultural area with a port. That still doesn’t put the effectiveness of money spent into real terms. The most important part of this process is measuring the economic effects that this road has versus the amount of money spent on the project. This is another long, difficult process. MCC is actually set up to make these measurements. Making these measurements public, and in real time will not only help create more useful measurements for MCC, it will also help other aid organizations get away from measuring head count, or pure outputs, as effectiveness.
I do see some challenges. One is the availability of infrastructure in some MCC countries that would allow for consistent online content review and comment. I know Nate disagrees with this. But there are a number of places in the US that I’ve worked that don’t have reliable phone lines, which would constantly bring our connections down - I’m talking about semi-rural places in California and Colorado, as well as Montana and Oregon. Another challenge is helping with the learning curve, albeit a short one, with creating online content and developing the necessary interactive tools. Finally, it would be a fairly long process, requiring quite a few people, to create the tipping point where these practices would be adopted consistently.
…pretty small challenges, especially for the possible impact.
2 Jay Hariani // Feb 17, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Nate - I think that taking the principals of open, transparent organizations to the donor community makes so much sense - it might even be more obvious then it is for the commercial sector.
As a taxpayer, I’d love to see what I’m getting for my money. Right now, it’s not apparent to many US citizens what benefits stem from this work.
I still don’t understand why the innerworkings of development projects aren’t open to more scrutiny. Involving the public can only lead to better results in the long run. The question is, how does one go about convincing them of the benefits?
3 Transparent Development – Part Deux // Mar 4, 2008 at 8:35 pm
[...] to think about the possible connections between recent press on Wal-Mart’s buyer blogging, my post about transparent development, and Jay’s post about sound corporate blogging. And henceforth the following idea came to [...]
4 J Nash // Mar 21, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Good post, Nate. I agree completely. MCC requires ongoing public consultations and transparency as our partner countries implement their various Compact projects. Some of this is done through the web - for example, every MCA unit must have a website where they post all project documents, contracts, procurement plans, progress reports, etc. Although some of this “consultation” turns out to be more of an information push with limited opportunities for the public to engage or provide comments on the nature or scope of the peojects.
We should keep in mind that the kind of “drawing back the velvet curtains” that you recommend for Compact implementation could have serious political repercussions for those currently running the countries where we have Compacts. In fact, issues related to the pace and quality of Compact implementation have already become political issues in several of our Compact countries that are facing national/local elections. I can envision a public workspace used for “crowdsourcing” a Compact problem being highjacked and manipulated for political purposes. If a country’s leadership decides to engage in this type of ultra-transparency with a full understanding of the risks/benefits, then so be it. But, MCC could never force this type of transparency on our Compact countries.
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