Chris Blattman

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Aid workers: when will we ever learn?

So in Jeannie’s new role as research director at IRC, she and I have been brainstorming about how to assist learning  in the field—both IRC’s expat aid workers and national staff.

It seems to us that aid organizations and workers–not just IRC–enjoy opportunities to engage with the latest thinking and research–be it the new foreign aid treatise, the latest child nutrition study, a useful impact evaluation, or articles on project management. Presumably the quality of aid would benefit too.

Cost, bandwidth, and logistics of education materials are all big barriers. But these barriers are falling in the information age, even in Africa, and it seems to us there’s room for something new.

Our thought: these are no longer the important barriers. Three more human ones look more imposing.

First, a lot of people aren’t in the habit of reading, either because they don’t like it or (more likely) they want to, but (like many of us) they find it hard to turn aspiration into action, especially in the frantic business of aid.

Second, it’s one thing to read more research, and another to read it critically. Alone. Without falling asleep.

And third, it’s another great leap entirely to turn reading into application.

You might add that most research is horrific to read–all too true–but I think enough well-written stuff is out there to keep us all busy for a fair while.

It occurred to me: these are problems I face too, and they pay me to read all day. What if my incentives were to just get things done?

So what to do?

Well, blogs and podcasts are proliferating. See my favorites on the sidebar, right. One reason I think people like blogs, particularly academic ones, is that it helps them not just stay current, but also stay part of an intellectual milieu with people of like interests. Well, at least that’s why I love my development blogs.

Another good idea: CARE has an e-learning program online, the CARE Academy. (The more I learn about CARE, the more I love them.) It looks to be free and open, so other organizations (including IRC) don’t have to reinvent distance education. Kudos to CARE.

I’m also told that Mercy Corps sends out a weekly e-mail along the lines of, “if you only read one thing this week, read this.” Also a great idea.

That’s great. But not everyone sits behind a computer (especially national staff) and none of these solutions surmount our three human barriers.

We have two ideas, and we’re curious what you think.

First, where do field workers spend 50 percent of their time? In Land Cruisers. Bumpy, dusty Land Cruisers. One simple idea: podcasts and books on tape. A captive and otherwise bored audience, and probably enthusiastic too.

Our second idea is a bit more involved, but it’s the one that excites me most: reading clubs for aid workers.

The idea comes from a meld of suburban books clubs we all know, and the journal clubs that hospitals run for their doctors to stay current.

But this one is much, much bigger than a single hospital. I dream of self-organizing clubs from Goma to Kathmandu. Guidelines, suggestions and PDFs on a blog (all optional) plus discussion forums and user-generated reading guides. Maybe we can even arrange podcast interviews with authors (Owen Barder: I’m looking at you).

NGO HQs can even incent their staff by offering to pay for the bi-weekly lunch or dinner. Or shipping the occasional package of books when PDFs just won’t suffice.

I’m also hoping a handful of bloggers could help us lead the fray. (Bill, Duncan, Alanna, and Katmanda: consider this fair warning.)

We might even need some techy innovations. (Erik and Eric, you’re in my sights.)

Hm. This is starting to sound like some nerdy gathering of the Superfriends.

Readers in the field, what I’d love to hear from you:

  • What do you do to keep learning?
  • Are we crazy?
  • Do you have a suggestion, or a better idea?
  • And, failing the above, any ideas on the name of the program? (Nothing catches on like a cute name.)

26 Responses

  1. I have been involved with various strategies to develop a learning culture amongst national staff. I do agree that more involvement of humanitarian workers in local research projects is a good approach which in my experience has proved to be useful. One approach I felt that worked well was in organizing a four week ‘Development Studies Course’ for national (and international) staff at the regional and country level which was very effective. The idea was to provide focused space and resources for staff to read, debate and analyze development issues relevant to the country or region. The issues were presented by academics (from NGOs or local Universities) and not based on contemporary fads as referred to above. This approach is resource and time intensive but did encourage learning and analytical skills.

  2. What about information in French (or Portuguese, etc) for development initiatives coming out of anglophone countries and organizations? This is a huge barrier for those of us working in Francophone countries – there is a wealth of info being produced that is not accessible to many in the field. I love the idea of podcasts that would be listenable in the car. Is there any chance of distribution through some radio channels? Generally, CDs would be most accessible outside of downloads. If a car has only tapes, the CDs could be taped onsite. If someone has an aux jack, the podcasts could be transferred to mp3 players. Even at home making dinner, I might listen to bits about development when I would not read a document during my meal.

  3. Your analysis misses an important factor that stops practitioners critically reading research based literature on humanitarian aid. This is the mounting pressure to carry out humanitarian work in conformity with the kind of procedural manual that is now produced by the IASC. Many of these manuals are unnecessary lengthy, based on contemporary fads rather than on empirical research, and very tedious to read. In so far as their prescriptions ever were evidence based, they become obsolete within a couple of years. Today’s requirement is to follow the prescriptions rather than to use evidence-based studies in a problem-solving mode.

    This is not to under-rate the importance of a minimum standard document such as the Sphere Handbook. Nevertheless, the humanitarian reform, supported by many donors, has brought with it a new culture, downgrading problem analysis, research and innovation, and substituting a focus on standards and procedures. Turning back this tide is an important step to avoid stagnation in aid work, to encourage innovation and ensuring evolution of more effective and efficient modes of intervention. Moving the focus away from procedural manuals is important not only for creating time and incentive for people to read and discuss the kind of research that can better inform their work, but also for maintaining the motivation for thinking and creative people to remain in humanitarian work.

    As for the issue of how to encourage learning, I agree with Vasco pyjamas on the contribution of technical meetings carried out in a spirit of professional honesty – and probably we need more study of how to create the ambience that ensures such openness and honesty in meetings! Nevertheless, information from such meetings does not always filter down to field level. Ranil is also right that it is not always obvious how the more academic of research should be turned into practice. In some cases research may seem too far removed from the field. In other cases people may feel uncertain about its quality, and lack necessary knowledge to appraise the research methodology. In this regard, those of us who have one foot in the world of academia and one in practice have a special responsibility to encourage our academic colleagues to engage more fully with issues of practice – even if only by writing the odd paragraph on possible applications of their findings, and encouraging debate .

    Robert is right to draws attention to the need for field level workers to exchange knowledge among themselves. Ian goes beyond this, and highlights the importance of having field level workers as partners in knowledge building. For research to be useful at field level, it needs to take account of local context. More involvement of humanitarian workers in local research projects can help to ensure usefulness. Such involvement does not have to entail an increased work load for field workers. Those who baulk at the thought of more collection and systematisation of data, can often contribute useful information from their everyday experience.

    If just a small amount of the money spent on expensive meetings in Geneva were used to support field level staff conduct simple studies of impact, document lessons learned, and share their day to day experiences, it would make for a much more vibrant humanitarian community, and better informed action

  4. if someone put that stack of nber papers on my bookshelf on an mp3, i might listen (and i think most of your blog readers would too). is your audience people who already buy into the idea of using information and data to support projects? if yes, then i think the podcasts and bookclubs are feasible. my experience is that most of the people who implement (or supervise the implementation of) development programs sms and chat and sleep in cruisers; and even if you gave them a paper about new evidence in their country about their field on a podcast, they would choose a nap (which is likely long overdue). my experience is that in-person dissemination has the greatest potential if you are really trying to hit mainstream development workers. talk to your IPA buddies from CMF – they do some of the best dissemination of rigorous research that i’ve seen, and have made lots of converts to evidence and data. once they are converted, then they might be ready for your podcast or book club.

  5. I think the problem isn’t necessarily the research. I mean, research papers have to be dry to some extent. Otherwise it becomes storytelling or an opinion piece. But while writing a paper you often need to try to be objective. The purpose isn’t necessarily to appeal to a mass audience – and I don’t know if it should be. Although, I agree that I definitely wouldn’t want to read a lot of these papers in my free time.

    I think the solution would be like you said some sort of podcasts or blogs that summarize the major research findings. There have to be ways to summarize important work without diminishing it’s findings and also while making it interesting – perhaps by interspersing stories and interviews with real people. I find that interviews with the experts are much more interesting and keep people’s attentions more than just dry material itself.

    Either way I think it’s going to be a challenge because this is a huge task to take on! Good luck!

  6. I think the diagnosis isspot on. I think thesuggestions are good ones, but are both huge in scope and still don’t fully address the probelm. I agree with Paul that the gap between research and practice is often too wide. The answer to this isn’t just to improve the relevance of research though – a lot of useful information on what works “in practice” is based not on research, but on practice and personal experience of other aid workers – the challenge is to distil and validate this some way, and to find ways of connecting those people who share common challenges who can learn from one another.
    Adding NGOs lunches to share development inthe trenches war stories, and also using interviews and podcasts to distributre them could be agood supplement to the research based stuff.

    To address J’s point – we need to find a way to allow people to seruptitiously read/listen to blogs/podcasts while seeming to pay attention in long meetings. A useful area for innovation if I ever heard one.

  7. I agree with many of the comments above, and I use many of the media and sources listed above at different times, depending on the context and subject. I agree that there does not seem to be any real shortage of either information or opinion out there about what/how aid workers should do their jobs. The bigger challenge, I think, is sifting through what is there to find what is actually useful and relevant to one’s own situation.

    Blogs seem to fill some of that need when one’s trusted/favorite bloggers recommend articles, books or sites for reveiw.

    It seems that there’s also a need for aid workers and researchers to improve their writing skills. As you suggest, there can be no better cure for insomnia than reading research. And so it would seem that those who want what they have to say to be heard further and by more people, would be well served by writing in a way that doesn’t put people to sleep.

    Final, minor point: In my experience, more time is spent in meetings than in a dusty landcruiser.

  8. hmm. interesting thoughts. I’ve been working in aid in the field for the last five years, and I specialise in aid effectiveness, an area which gives itself particularly to research. My feelings are:

    1) having worked in Government as a policy writer before in non-development work, I think there’s a clear pattern: specialists read the academic lit; generalists tend not to.

    2) There are areas where academic work is interesting, but so narrowly focused and defined that they are of little practical relevance. Much of the work on aid effectiveness, for example, is written from some kind of imaginary third perspective that is neither implementor (including developing country Government) nor donor. This makes is particularly difficult to translate it into policy except at an inappropriate level. Matt (my esteemed colleague at aid thoughts) recently made this point really well about donor aid allocations using formulas.

    3) Access to the good stuff is poor but improving. I constantly moan about no longer having JSTOR. But some people, like Rodrik, tend to pdf and publish a lot of their work.

    4) You don’t perhaps take enought note of the middle ground between the academic and policy work, which takes the form of policy-oriented research documents. the WB do a lot of this, and most bilaterals commission at least one piece per year per country; the problem is with the exception of Bank and UN publications, they are massively underpublicised, so much goes unread; but Bank and UN stuff gets circulated via e-mail like wildfire, regardless of quality.

    5) Could the real issue be whether academics are asking the right questions? Perhaps surrounded by books and JSTOR, you’re losing sight of the sometimes simple realities that aid workers witness and recognise as real barriers. Take economics. As an economist living in Malawi for 4 years, one who studied history to well pre-capitalist times on 2 continents at a great uni for history, I immediately recognised that Malawi has a multiplicity of pre-and post-capitalist economic forms. Yet little literature recognises this, when it is so clearly fundamental to the success of any economic policy. Not that I agree with all he writes, but de Soto is one of the few who have engaged with the question.

    6) Finally, if academic writing is to have a better impact, it must also be targetted better. You can’t just write on what must be done in abstract terms. We need to know at what level it has to occur? Is it only the heads of agency or ministers who can do it? or is it for the middle-management and programme designers? or even the hands-on implementers?

    I’m on holiday, but I feel a blog about this coming on…

  9. To answer your question: Yes, you’re crazy. These kinds of ‘learning’ initiatives have been started in organizations of all types for years and most barely make it past conception.

    But I do think you mentioned one mildly feasible idea: Have the NGO’s pay for a biweekly lunch.

    When I worked in development most of the learning took place at the bars and restaurants anyway. That’s where you could exchange stories and learn from others. After a long day, reading anything technical is just…. Well crazy.

    So if NGOs want to pay for some regularly organized lunch or dinner where information or book club like activities could take place, I think that is as close as you could get to what you’re looking to accomplish.

  10. I love to read – really love to read – and I am obsessed with global health and development. I am that colleague who’s always forwarding new articles. And even I blanch when faced with a 67 page PDF, even when it’s on a topic I care about. I agree with Paul and Asiyah – very few people have time to read something and decide how it applies to their work. We need it spelled out – this is how this should affect your practice.

    For example, when the data started tricking in on zinc and ORS, we didn’t know what to do with that. Should we start procuring zinc to pair with ORS? Should we wait for the WHO to change the formula of the packets? What about in places where people were making ORS at home from salt and sugar – what then?

  11. I am not an aid worker, but I often think about how to keep myself reading. I’ve found that since graduating in the spring, I read orders of magnitude more – having a bit of time and intellectual energy to spare seems to be the key for me.

    But I have to second your podcast/audiobook suggestion. Over the last few years, even when I’m not reading much I find I can keep up with audio content, if only while walking to and from the subway, cooking, grocery shopping. The force feeding of audio content has gotten me through a few books I know I would not have read otherwise, due to density, dryness, etc.

  12. Chris, this is a slightly OT link for Jeannie. She may already have come across ALNAP (Active learning network for aid workers), but this kind of stuff is their speciality.

    http://www.alnap.org/events/25th.aspx

    I contributed to a report they have just published on how to make aid workers in the field more innovative (models we can learn from the private sector, etc.) which addresses some of the points you raise

    http://www.alnap.org/pool/files/8rhach3.pdf

  13. If I get a field job soon, it will be my first “real” (red: non-internship) one and I will WANT those podcasts. Also, Asiyah’s bullet-pointed summaries –very important.

  14. Following Punditus’ thought: Much as practitioners on the ground might benefit from reading, thinking and sharing ideas on research, we come up against organizational barriers that must be addressed otherwise, the well-read staff on the ground will become further frustrated and disenchanted with the bureaucracy preventing them from their first priority — helping others in need. Some questions to consider: Is senior staff committed to act upon the research? What ideologies are senior staff or funders or policy makers embracing? What structural/organizational barriers are senior staff trying to juggle — funding, politics, compliance, etc.? Will senior staff support on the ground workers in the implementation>sustainabilty stages? What if approaches conflict — whose research (theories) will be embraced and promoted? Will all staff engage in evaluation to understand what worked or not, why and how to make work next time? When things work can we replicate and sustain and grow? Do on the ground workers think/have the time to engage in something different from business as usual?

  15. This is what I wanted when I was in the field:
    – Short bullet-points on relevant topics (please don’t tell me about the ocean when I’m in a land-locked country). Focus the learning material to the particular country/region.

    AREU (Afghanistan Research Evaluation Unit) came up with talking points pieces that I used to like. They did a good job of translating academic research to accessible date, in my opinion.

    – I love the podcast idea. If you want local field-workers to learn from it, remember to keep the English clear (not much slang & clearly spoken).

  16. A lot of field staff work on research projects (either coordinating or actually carrying them out). Others work with local organizations, or are involved with creating research in other ways. Maybe the approach should be to create a network with a more narrow focus, to share research done by and for field workers, so that the info being shared is relevant and useful. That way we are not appearing to force aid workers in the field to read material produced by HQ and academic centers about everything under the sun.

  17. I’d say that there is no shortage of information advising aid workers how to do their jobs. There are lots of research centers, coordination mechanisms, books on best practices, etc. Many of which are useful, many of which aren’t. In some ways, there is almost too much to digest – particularly as Paul said, over the slow internet connection in Bujumbura.

    I can’t imagine that too many people at decision making levels will have the time to read new studies on bednet programs in Kabul, before deciding starting a bednet program Goma, since not only local contexts but also funding realities, operational realities, etc are very different. Even if it is a great study academically, that doesn’t give any assurances it will be applicable before the time is already invested in reading.

    It would be helpful I think to have more information grouped geographically, like Reliefweb or the various OCHA sites, but with including more analysis and introspection, since even a poorly-executed study of a previous initiative in an area where you are working can provide important data and lessons.

    I’d also suggest that for academic groups and research centers, producing more impartial literature reviews (like your economics and civil war one), but on concrete topics like Malaria Prevention or Returnee Shelter Projects, would be useful to help bring people up to speed on what works, and synthesizing a lot of information so people can decide what studies they want to read more about.

    Two other thoughts -it would be great to integrate such a thing into a site that is already existing (humanitarian info, or Reliefweb) without creating yet another “coordination” mechanism

    -punditus is right that a lot of program design doesn’t come from the field, HQ types are pretty important too.

  18. This is kind of a weird statement to me — one of the big things I’ve come to understand from aid studies and accounts from the field is that aid workers themselves are stunningly disempowered. That while they’re the folks on the ground doing stuff, the lack of reliable information combined with the ideological bents of the folks who are funding things means that the concept of an aidor class with independent interests is not meaningful.

    Maybe you’re trying to create something fundamentally new and different. Maybe you’re trying to get some good work done by engaging in sort of informal systematic defrauding of funding agencies. But boy howdy is this a bigger deal than you’re letting on.

  19. Earlier this year, I started working in a program quality and learning-type role in a head office, after having spent four years in the field (the last posting being Somalia). My job is partly doing what you are describing here — helping aid workers in the field learn. We have constantly asked ourselves in our team here how we can do this best.

    It would appear there are actually two questions to be answered here. One is WHAT do we need to communicate to help aid workers learn, and then, HOW do we communicate it. Regarding the ‘what’, I think Paul (above) describes it well as “distilling program-relevant research to development practitioners”. With this, there is actually a lot of information that is sector or sub-sector specific. Eg., specific to food security practioners or health practitioners. But even with more generic information (eg., in monitoring and evaluation, or in programming approaches), there is a lot of information out there. But the challenge is distilling the ‘information’ into ‘knowledge’, ‘intelligence’ or indeed, ‘wisdom’. Perhaps the it is the role of sector specialist or program specialists who sit in head offices to do such distilling / filtering, or to help those in the field do the same.

    The next issue is the ‘how’ to communicate. I would agree with Paul above that podcasts are difficult for places with bad bandwidth. It was difficult for me to download podcasts in Nairobi last year, though with the new cable, I understand things have improved. Though, pods are great for car trips and those diabolical flights.

    For our team here, we have been trailing a multi-user practitioners blog through our intranet. It’s only a few months new, but still, I’m fast realising that a large proportion of development practitioners / humanitarian workers (at least in our organisation, which is a major international NGO) are not that are savvy with blogs. Plus, it takes a fairly gifted writer to hold one’s interest. And, as I keep on getting reminded, most people in the field are time poor and don’t even have time to scratch themselves.

    From my perspective having been a food security / livelihoods specialist, I have to say that my best learning has occured from technical coordination meetings. It’s something pretty special to sit in a room of fellow practitioners and debate things, and to draw inspiration from the work of others’. Then, once we have exchanged contact details and head off back to our respective bases, to be able to then keep in contact and exchange proposals, report and bounce ideas. But again, these meetings or workshops need well-organised facilitation, and a culture of honesty and openness, and willingness to be honest about mistakes.

    I would also add that it is critical to have the organisational culture right for learning. It’s not just the policy-level valuing of learning that is important, but also providing the space and resources (money for analysis, money for trips, IT platforms, etc) for learning to occur. Plus, each project design should include features for learning, but also sharing the learning. Learning takes time and space, and needs to be planned and written into logframes and workplans.

    And finally, I am not sure book clubs really work, largely because people tend to not have the same sector expertise when they are in a same field office.

  20. Pingback: humanitarian.info
  21. I tried to do this w/ the papers that made up Rodrik’s latest book, as they are all available as .pdfs and I thought everyone could access them. Set up a wiki w/ links and places where people could comment and spammed all my friends/coworkers to join in. People from Argentina, Ecuador, Australia, Kenya and California all joined up, but only one person made it past the abstract of the first article (it wasn’t even me!).

    The content would have to be incredibly accessible and engaging for this to have any shot. And it would probably be too risky to be worth spending the time to generate/assimilate the content.

  22. Hi Chris,

    In my experience, the problem is not that people don’t have time or can’t be bothered to read, it is that the gap between academic research and practice is just too wide. With some exceptions (e.g. IPA), researchers don’t have incentives to do work that is directly applicable to the field. e.g. where are the followup studies to the Dupas malaria work? Should NGOs all stop selling bednets on the basis of a single study? Hardly. The major bodies that are tasked with producing policy-relevant research tend to be too ideological, low quality, targeted at policy-makers rather that program people or just too vague. e.g. improve local participation.

    I have been trying to put together a reading list of blogs with program-relevant research for some friends in NGOs, but I have not been all that successful. The blogs on your blogroll are entertaining and interesting, but it doesn’t seem like any of them could be described as “distilling program-relevant research to development practitioners”.

    I’d love to hear some recommendations about what you think could actually be useful to directors of NGOs.

    The podcast idea is good too. Except for trying to download them in Bujumbura.

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