attacking poverty - a perspective from Dr. Schaffner

I mentioned previously that I had written a number of the contributing authors of the book Attacking Poverty. Dr. Schaffner from the Fletcher School at Tufts University was kind enough to respond to some of my questions. Her e-mail is posted below.

Dear Josh,

Thanks for your email.

I'm glad you found something useful in the book. I wish I could answer your queries from the perspective of someone who is intimately involved with lots of development organizations, and who is also engaged with lots of current business practices.

Unfortunately, I can only answer from the perspective of an academic economist, who has indirect exposure to a number of development organizations through my work with lots of interesting masters students in the Fletcher school (many of whom have experience in development organizations and undertake research related to what those organizations are doing under my supervision), and who very much wants to see more collaboration happen, both among development organizations and between practitioners and academics.

If I understand correctly, your questions have to do with:

What might productive federation look like among Christian development organizations?
What could such federation hope to accomplish?
How likely is it that individual organizations would buy into this kind of federation?
What contemporary business practices might be useful for helping bring such federations about?

Here's a first pass at my answers:

I suspect there is a lot to gain from federation in the areas of: (1) learning from each others' experiences, (2) reduction in the duplication of efforts of various sort; and (3) increased potential for action in larger arenas (such as lobbying for a world facility for financing and disseminating the results of impact assessments by NGOs).

I suspect that it is difficult to bring this about, because it is hard even for Christians to ignore concerns about turf. This makes it hard to reveal negative lessons, hard to move from independent control to a collaborative approach, etc. But if Christians can't take a sufficiently altruistic perspective and make this happen, then who will?

Perhaps there are target types of people (such as those with training or inclinations in the evaluation direction) within Christian development organizations who are most likely to be sympathetic.

Understanding better how to target individuals within organizations to most effectively promote collaboration would be useful. I don't have enough knowledge about these organizations to make strong suggestions.

It might be a good question to investigate:

Who is sympathetic and who isn't?

I think there are ways to make evaluation and sharing of information more appealing to organizations. I've tried to get at that in my chapter in the book you read. For example, while organizations that want to communicate with a broad range of development actors should probably evaluate the impacts of programs on traditional indicators of development success, they should also feel free to articulate and construct measures for additional features of process and outcomes that they hold to be important.

This can be an important way of enriching discussions, etc.

I'm just guessing that an iterative approach of finding some sympathetic individuals at a range of organizations, hammering out a first model of what collaboration might look like that meets perceived needs, and then floating a proposal for feedback on a larger scale will be required.

Perhaps part of the model would be a document providing a sort of evaluation (or "lessons from experience") template, which organizations could use to share information with each other, and which (when a number of these are accumulated) would facilitate comparative study and the drawing of broader lessons.

I don't know if any of these quick reactions are useful.

If there are any more specific issues you would like to pursue, please let me know.

Best regards, Julie