Duncan Green's Blog, page 70

Six things INGOs need to fix to be fit for the future. Mark Goldring’s outgoing reflections

Guest post by my former boss Mark Goldring, first published in the March edition of Governance and Leadership Magazine. Mark was chief executive of Oxfam GB from 2013 until January 2019. This article is based on a talk given to Civil Society Media’s NGO Insight Conference in November 2018. My last year as chief executive of […]

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The sprint towards export-oriented growth in Kenya

Navalayo Osembo shares her views on how a social enterprise is helping economic growth and poverty reduction in Kenya.

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Trying to do something about climate inequality in Sweden

Guest post from Robert Höglund, Head of communications for Oxfam Sweden and coordinator for the network The Climate Goal Initiative.   One of the aspects of inequality that always struck me as especially bizarre is the double inequality around climate change. The richest 10 percent of the world who is most to blame for climate […]

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Will aid help or undermine Mindanao’s new start? Scott Guggenheim is worried.

Community Development guru Scott Guggenheim emailed some provocative thoughts on my piece last week on Mindanao, with much wider relevance to the localization debate, so I asked him to turn it into a blog.   I like your piece but I’m a bit longer in the tooth than you and so slightly less optimistic. You […]

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What’s New in the Private Education Pandora’s Box? A look at developments in the Global South

Guest post from Prachi Srivastava, Associate Professor, University of Western Ontario.   The Economist’s new special report ‘Private education’ (print edition, 13 April 2019) is causing a stir. We’ve been here before. Nearly four years ago, The Economist did a cover story (‘The $1-a-week school’) and briefing (‘Learning unleashed’) on low-fee private schooling (print edition, 1 August 2015) […]

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Audio Summary of FP2P posts w/b 15th April (and a fab redesign for the blog)

Highlight of the week for me was the crisp new design for the blog, thanks to Amy Moran and web designer Ben Newton. Amy sets out the benefits of the new look as: We’ve simplified posts so they’re easier to read. Larger text, no side bar and a centred layout. The homepage now features images, […]

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INGOs and aid’s Middle Income Country trap – what are the options?

Oxfam country directors face an unenviable task – juggling the daily management bureaucracy of the aid sector with the need to keep their eyes on the prize and think about strategy. Luckily, they are also some of the smartest, most politically savvy people in the organization. Here is a 16 minute segment of Philippines country […]

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Is a progressive Islamic revolution happening in the Philippines? Impressions from Mindanao

First instalment from my recent visit to the Philippines:

Something fascinating and strikingly promising is going on the Philippines island of Mindanao. It has very little to do with the grisly headlines of extra-judicial killings and President Duterte’s bloody ‘war on drugs’. It looks like a progressive Islamic revolution is in progress, combining elements of religiosity, women’s rights, armed struggle and grassroots civil society organization. I spent a couple of days last week taking a closer look – here are my (admittedly superficial) impressions.

First the background: After two decades of fighting, a peace agreement confirmed by a plebiscite in January and February this year established the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (BARMM). The deal promises a block grant of US$1.5bn a year to the administration, along with a much higher share of royalties from its plentiful national resources. There will be a new, devolved parliamentary system of government, with the first elections set for 2022. The main protagonists are the Government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (that’s right, MILF – get your sniggering over now please).

To find out more, I met with about ten grassroots leaders – four men and six women. Here are my notes from the

meeting:

‘We are excited and worried’. ‘I put my trust in the new leadership, but CSOs should do their part, supporting the BARMM but reminding them of their promises and ultimate objective – to serve the people.’

Islam plays a crucial role in how these leaders see their task: ‘We have to be firm, especially in our faith. All of us, especially the women, will be watching the leaders, praying that Allah will guide them. The role of the Ulama [network of Islamic scholars] is key – the BTA all took their oaths on the Koran, swearing not to commit corruption, violence or evil.’

Accountability under Islam has more teeth: ‘they are accountable to Allah, in the hereafter as well as to the people in the here and now.’ ‘Accountability is to Allah and to the Bangsamoro people. If someone in the transition authority commits corruption, our first loyalty is to Allah, 2nd to the CSOs, and only 3rd to the government.

We are particularly worried about the traditional politicians in the transition authority, many of them nominated by government – they are ‘the masters of all evil things.’’

I go round the room and ask how they became leaders. They are very frank:

Families with generations of combatants, with many fathers, mothers and relatives lost as ‘martyrs’ over decades of fighting

The obligatory selfie: Front from Duncan’s left side – Alonto Mongrar (SINDAW), Romie Guialel (MAGNETO), Nasser Bulindao (FBCSO), Hja Giobay Diocolano (KFPAI)
Back from left side – Jan Areef Masrud (MAP), Evhoy Villaruel (COM), Rahima Silongan (FUMBWMPC), Juhaira Bayan (KFPAI), Ruby Andong (WOMB)

Nearly all of them went to university, apart from one older woman who cut short her studies to go to the mountains, where she trained as a medic but also to fight. ‘I carried a gun and a stethoscope.’
Early beginnings: ‘in high school I was asked to collect a cup of rice per month per family to feed the fighters.’

Later we visit Raissa Jajurie, an impressive human rights lawyer who is now the Minister of Social Social Services and Welfare:

‘I worked in small CSOs for 20 plus years, as an advocate and part of the peace process. Everything happened so fast – I only heard officially that I was to be part of the transition authority when they phoned me up and told me to go to Manila for the oath-taking!

Many of us have never been anywhere near government, and all its processes. Some of us have come pretty well straight from the mountains. The UN has offered to help, but it’s hard even to find time to accept such offers when facing so many daily tasks.

We plan to tap CSOs for cooperation, ‘feedbacking’ and synergies. We have resources, but many limitations – CSOs can help. This ministry was notorious for its corruption and inefficiency, so we need help from outside to make people understand the need for change.’

Finally, regular readers will know that I have a thing about zakat – the Muslim tradition of annual tithing, which seems to me to have huge potential to fund socially progressive causes. So I was pretty stoked when I met Jurma Tikmasan of the Tarbilang Foundation, which is doing exactly that. Back to my notes:

Jurma is a women’s rights activist suffering from a bad cold. So in addition to her headscarf, she is wearing a surgical mask to try and avoid passing it on. But in the interests of sound quality, she agrees to take it off for the interview. We discuss her Foundation’s work, in particular working on women’s rights in Muslim communities and how they work with progressive scholars (the Ulama) to fight prejudice among less educated community Imams.

But later over dinner, she laughingly fills in some important details on how they won over the Ulama (Muslim scholars). When a group of assertive, highly qualified young women started questioning the misuse of the Koran, they got a hostile reception. So they switched to rope-a-dope tactics, demurely asking the scholars for guidance on ‘certain passages we ‘did not understand’’. Forced to read and think about them, the Ulama started coming round to a more progressive/accurate understanding, and an alliance was born. It ended in the Ulama writing a fatwa and a set of sermons on women’s reproductive health. which has been used all over Southeast Asia.

Here’s an extract of my interview with Jurma (8m)

And a quick vlog from me in front of the amazing Grand Mosque in Cobato, Mindanao – apologies for flapping notebook covering the lens!

 

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Are INGO advocacy and campaigning up to today’s challenges?

BOND

We know from successful campaigns in the past, such as the anti-slavery movement of the 19th century, that it is possible to achieve intentional systemic change, and that civil society can play a pivotal role.  But are civil society’s current approaches to advocacy and campaigning up to today’s challenges?

Civil society advocacy and campaigning have contributed to important changes in government and company policy and practice on a range of issues, including climate, access to medicines, landmines, labour and indigenous rights, gender justice, and tax justice. Along the way they have also learned a lot along the way about what does and doesn’t work.

Yet despite widespread public disenchantment with the establishment and its broken economic model, civil society’s change strategies are not yet winning over enough people to support the transformational solutions we need. And it sometimes seems, at least in the UK, as if civil society is fragmented and firefighting myriad, unrelated, single issues even though many are symptoms of the same structural causes.

So what more could civil society do to ensure its advocacy and campaigning supports the needed structural changes? Here are some potential ways we could raise our game:

Develop common campaigns across sectors to jointly tackle key underlying structural causes of poverty, inequality and environmental breakdown. One key contender for joint action could be changing current corporate rules that prioritize short-term profit at the expense of workers, communities, health and the environment. But are we prepared to subsume our own brands and widen our alliances beyond the usual suspects in the interests of collective action?

Build a constituency for change beyond existing supporters. We could spend more time interactively listening to and learning from people about their concerns and finding common ground. We could also highlight and build solidarity around the shared problems of low wages, insecurity and environmental destruction afflicting wide sections of people, both South and North – alongside the plight of the most vulnerable. We could test out more inclusive narratives and unifying frames while still calling out injustices.  For instance, the Freedom to Marry Campaign won over conflicted voters in the US when it switched from talking about equal rights for same sex couples to love and commitment.

Strengthen the voice of civil society. Large NGOs are regularly criticised for crowding out other civil society voices and are often not good at managing their own power relations with them. We need to work with donors to change reporting requirements so we can support informal grassroots organisations and social movements, often key drivers of change, without imposing our own agendas on them.  Could we also spend more time supporting people to become change-makers themselves, rather than just mobilising them to support pre-cooked campaigns?

Promote solutions. Could we do more to test, package and promote radical solutions and alternatives, as well as critique problems? Do we need to stick with campaigns for the longer term to ensure policy wins translate into real benefits for people?

Build trust. Crucially, how can we strengthen our own sources of legitimacy and accountability and hence also win more allies to the cause?

To tackle systemic challenges, we will need to widen our sometimes narrow and formulaic advocacy and campaigning tactics. For instance, too often advocacy and campaigning still focuses on influencing formal, visible forms of power. This remains vital, but women’s rights organisations have stressed the need to also tackle invisible power such as deeply rooted and often unconscious cultural beliefs, social norms and behaviours. Oxfam and others are doing much more to challenge gendered social norms on violence against women and women’s care, for

Rabat, Morocco, November 24, 2013. The placard reads, “In memory of all women victims of violence”. © 2013 Reuters

instance.

But there is still much more civil society could do.  We still often assume that if we provide the right information people will change their attitudes and hence behaviours. But people do not necessarily act rationally and their behaviours often interact with, and are shaped by, wider social, technical, cultural and political factors. For instance, while many people are concerned about climate-breakdown they often feel disempowered to act.  Addressing these

wider influences involves a wider range of change strategies than simply providing and framing information, as a recent discussion paper highlights.

In sum, we need to act urgently and collectively to tackle the key structural causes of poverty and injustice and help channel the current wave of public disenchantment towards humane, just and sustainable solutions.   If we do not, others will inevitably do so towards chauvinistic, unjust and unsustainable ones.

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Links I Liked

2.0 (Sudan and Algeria, so far), the military jump in to forestall a revolution, toppling dictators when popular pressure becomes overwhelming. But what comes next? Recent precedents (Egypt, Thailand) are hardly encouraging.

Cross country comparisons of patience, risk-taking, trust, altruism and reciprocity.

Life-long learning for campaigners. Some good advice and links here from Tom Baker

And some important analysis of aid trends, in ascending order of geekiness:

“Bilateral aid – direct, country-to-country assistance – to the least developed countries fell by 3% in 2018, with support to the African continent down 4% and humanitarian assistance dropping by 8%.”

Blended finance (using public money to ‘crowd in’ private) is not all it’s cracked up to be. $1 of public institution investment leverages just $0.75 in private investment, falling to $0.37 in low-income countries. New ODI report ht Jesse Griffiths

And the winner is…. ‘Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning for Complex Programs in Complex Contexts: Three Facility Case Studies’. Important for us ‘Thinking and Working Politically’ types

And back to Sudan. The inspiring women leading the protests, and an interview with Alaa Salah, a 22-year-old architecture student who became the face of the revolution

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