by Valeria Smarrini
Let's say you are concerned with rural poverty alleviation. Maybe you are a government official, or you are doing research, or you just had a brilliant idea and you want to design a project. Maybe your project is already up and running, and you want to be sure it is working properly. Maybe you work in IFAD: in this case, rural poverty is something you are certainly very familiar with.
Options on how to tackle rural development are copious. To make things even more exciting, the whole background of development cooperation is entering a brand new era, as post-2015 is fast approaching and different scenarios are emerging, which focus on different actors, responsibilities, and targets at all levels of ambition.
The thing about rural poverty is that, very often, it just plain complicated. It involves many dimensions, and each and every one of them is very deeply connected to all the others. Look at this from the outside: you pull a thread somewhere and, if you don't really know what you are doing, maybe this will cause some other part of the structure to collapse. Knowing that, you don't really want to experiment when it comes to people's livelihoods.
Let's not be discouraged, though – solutions do exist, and can be found. And this is not a needle-in-a-haystack type of research. What would really be helpful here is a flashlight or, even better, a map.
IFAD happens to have launched a promising tool today, the Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool (MPAT), which has been metaphorically described as a 'roadmap', or a 'dashboard' to better grasp the reality and dynamics of rural poverty, right at its origin: rural villages and households.
MPAT was first custom-designed in 2007, and it received feedback from international experts in various sectors of development through several round of fine-tuning. A beta version of the tool was then developed, tested with some further tweaking and training, evaluated from the European Commission, peer-reviewed by the academic community, and piloted.
The tool is really quite simple to operate. You have your survey templates at the household and village level, a fairly straightforward Excel sheet that does the maths when it's fed with raw data from the survey, and aggregate results for ten different components, spanning from basic needs, such as food security, to equality issues like gender. The idea is to see how these ten dimensions are doing and to also check whether an enabling environment is in place.
Innovation lies in the fact that the tool is based on the needs and the assets of smallholder farmers, and the dimensions it takes into account are all, undeniably, at the core of the rural development debate.
Actually, MPAT does more: it collects perceptions right in the households and villages where the effort to raise people out of poverty begins and ends.
Perceptions are subjective statements, one may argue? Yes, they are. But subjective sounds a lot more like objective when it comes out of those who are the object of the whole rural development effort. So, information obtained through this exercise may be subject to some degree of simplification, but the proxies can certainly be useful in defining priorities, which is a very honest thing to do when dealing with a complex situation. I will steal the words of Alasdair Cohen, project manager of the IFAD Management Team for 2012-2013 MPAT finalization, and say that this tool allows us to "look at qualitative data through a quantitative lens."
See how MPAT can be used as a flashlight, or a map?
And, by the way, it seems to be working. Feedback was shared during the event from colleagues from the Kenya-based NGO Nuru International and IFAD's ProPESCA project in Mozambique – and it was encouraging feedback in both cases.
I will admit I joined the event asking myself why another tool to deal with impact, and soon found myself asking "why not?". I can definitely see this at work for the development community at large, to draft roadmaps to inform decision-making and resource allocation, develop meaningful indicators, design compelling projects that go straight to the point and, last but definitely not least, claim evidence exactly where evidence is needed.
Showing posts with label IMI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IMI. Show all posts
Written by Elaine Reinke
“My social life is very important to me”, declares Jihad Al-Hakimi, Microfinance Manager of the Economic Opportunities Fund in Yemen, grabs his wedding ring from the table and places it above my ipad. As part of this valuation exercise, participants of the Social Return on Investment (SROI) training were asked to bring a number of personal items and rank them by their value – not so easy, given that the 21 trainees had very different views about the value of their belongings.
“My social life is very important to me”, declares Jihad Al-Hakimi, Microfinance Manager of the Economic Opportunities Fund in Yemen, grabs his wedding ring from the table and places it above my ipad. As part of this valuation exercise, participants of the Social Return on Investment (SROI) training were asked to bring a number of personal items and rank them by their value – not so easy, given that the 21 trainees had very different views about the value of their belongings.
Considering the multiple realities of
different stakeholders – that’s a core principle of SROI. Being a participatory
method to assess the social, environmental, economic and other dimensions of
benefits resulting from development interventions, it can be used at different
stages of the project cycle: at the onset in support of planning and appraisal,
during implementation for monitoring, and at completion for evaluation.
Under IFAD’s Innovation Mainstreaming
Initiative, the Near East, North Africa and Europe Division is testing SROI as
a new means to generate evidence-based knowledge and learning in IFAD-funded
projects. Together with Fons van der Velden and Pol de Greve from Context, International Cooperation
Foundation, a Netherlands-based social business providing capacity development
support to development actors and social enterprises, I travelled to North
Kordofan, Sudan, for the first SROI pilot.
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| This women of Elhamair community explains how her life changed due to the water yard. |
In the state capital El Obeid we met the male
and female trainees from different projects and line ministries in Sudan and
Yemen to embark on a joint learning journey over the coming 12 days. Following Context’s
SROI
manual, we started off with a three day classroom (yet practical) training covering
the nine steps of SROI – but there went the theory. Allowing the participants to
get their hands on the matter, the training has been embedded into assessing water-related
activities in the IFAD-supported Western Sudan Resource Management Project.
And off we went to the field: divided into
two groups, we visited the villages of Elhamair and Sawarda to capture and understand
the invested resources and benefits for the local community generated by a
Hafir (open pond for rainwater harvesting) and a water yard (elevated groundwater
tank) that were constructed by the project in 2011 – and the value the
beneficiaries attached to these resources and benefits.
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| Pol de Greve, Mohamed Y. Elnour and Ahmed H. S. Mohammed take detailed notes of resources and benefits connected to the water yard. |
For the group visiting the water yard in
Elhamair, the first day in the community felt like a piece of cake: the training
participants were impressively skilled facilitators letting the villagers tell
their story of the water yard and how it changed their lives. At the end of the
day, the community had developed its own theory of change and listed all resources,
including their value, that were invested in the water yard. On the next day,
we started understanding what Oscar Wilde meant by “some people always know the
price but not the value”: the training participants teased out a list of some 43
benefits – but helping the beneficiaries to value these was a quite challenging
task, especially when it came to intangible and indirect benefits such as
reduced tensions among settlers and nomads, and empowerment of women through
water users committees. But we made it – and the community rewarded us with a remarkable
performance of traditional dance, singing and poetry.
Back in the classroom, we jointly reflected
on the lessons learned from our field work, and then rolled up our sleeves to
embark on the process of verification, analysis and report-writing for both
case studies. By triangulating different sources of data, the training
participants calculated the total value of all invested resources versus
benefits to derive the SROI ratio. It turned out that for every dollar
invested, the project generated a benefit worth 1.66 dollars in case of the Hafir
and 2.5 dollars for the water yard. Pretty impressive, yet a number is just
number. The important part of SROI is what Pol and Fons call “narrative
numeracy”, that is embedding the number into a narrative which reveals the
story behind and captures those elements that are most difficult to measure. By
considering the views of multiple stakeholders, developing this story is where
project-based learning is happening.
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| Focus group discussion with selected community members under a shady tree of Elhamair village. |
At closing time, participants looked back
over the entire process and developed follow-up action plans in their
respective project teams. They are now keen to conduct additional case studies and
integrate these into project reporting, use SROI in mid-term reviews, organize
SROI planning workshops at country-level and provide SROI training to
government partners. Their plans and reflections fed into a debriefing with
more than 20 government officials and local leaders in El Obeid, including HE
the State Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources, who also opened our
workshop. The discussions demonstrated profound interest among different
stakeholders in using SROI as a contribution to improve results measurement at
strategic level. This will also guide Pol, Fons and myself in designing the
next steps in our joint innovation project: organizing a second on-the-job
training in another country in the region, and pulling the threads together in
a Rome-based reflection cum write shop to develop a meaningful knowledge
product on IFAD’s first experience with SROI for wider dissemination.
#IMI Country Office Immersion for Innovation– Guatemala, 1-8 December 2012
This visit has been a valuable chance to examine the current administrative procedures and see what opportunities are available for innovation that could be repeated at other offices. Some difficulties that ICO colleagues face with procedures are due to the fact that existing IFAD administrative procedures have been created and designed to be carried out in IFAD HQ. During my mission I discussed with the ICO colleagues the new Travel Procedures that will be set up shortly, and made a list of procedures for which they have problems, or that are too costly. In this view the revision of the existing travel procedures was a good example of mutual benefit for both IFAD HQ and ICOs: a less HQ-centric approach in setting-up new procedures and redefining existing procedures will help, also in terms of time and budget savings. This kind of approach was also shared by our ICO colleagues that were enthusiastic of the idea.
The mission was also very exciting, as Guatemala city is a city surrounded by four active volcanoes that give rise to breath-taking sunsets!
Also the country-side is of a deep green that leaves you speechless, such as the “Cooperativa Mujeres 4 Pinos” which is an impressive example of women cooperative.
Started about 30 years ago, 70 women produce vegetables, collaborate with producers to identify production schemes and contract those who can meet quality and quantity targets, also fixing product prices.
Also thanks to IFAD funding, Cooperativa Mujeres Cuatro Pinos is now an industry that produce, package and sells its products. Recently they started exporting their products to the United States and have achieved an annual growth rate of 50 per cent in vegetable exports over the past 4 years.
Colleagues of ICOs were so nice that I would stay in Guatemala much more! Hospitality is something that doesn’t make a small difference when you’re in a foreign country…
I recommend this experience to everyone, especially to my colleagues who wish to touch with their hands the sense of our work in IFAD. IMI initiative was a great opportunity for me and I think it showed how important can be the GS contribution to make IFAD and ICO collaboration easier and effective.
Definitely a very formative experience for me, that I am confident will be useful to IFAD too.
Written by Semina Fazelbhoy and Claudio Priori
China country office (20-27 October 2012)
by Semina
Before leaving for Beijing I was apprehensive to travel alone to China-so many worries: the long flight, the arrival late evening, the language (despite the efforts I could learn only few words in Chinese before leaving) and of course worry of not answering all HR-related queries.
All my worries were futile-because although the flight was long (Emirates) and in spite of travelling economy class, I had lots of leg-room, the food was delicious and the people sitting next to me were friendly. Upon arrival at Beijing airport I was received by a very nice Chinese UNDP driver-we of course communicated in sign language! The hotel staff were friendly and I learned lots of new words, " 你好" Nihao (hello) was my first one.
I had healthy discussions with the ICO staff and we covered several HR topics. In the same office compound, I met staff of WFP, UNDP and UNDSS all of whom were readily available to cover topics ranging from recruitment to security.
The ICO staff were thrilled to receive the country office administrative handbook and the communications toolkit. They were enthralled to learn the usage of LMS and most of all they felt honoured that someone from HQ-HR was present in person to answer their numerous queries. They constantly mentioned that they now feel more included as IFAD staff and less isolated!
Beijing is a beautiful, safe, city, with wide streets and fashionable shops. The food is light and cheap and the portions huge. Yes, language can be a challenge, but you can get by if you learn a few key words in Chinese and speak to the young people who are only too eager to practise their English.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to visit China and would love to return to China someday to learn more about their language and culture.
Ghana country office (26-30 November 2012)
by Claudio
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| Accra: Local market |
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Claudio and Sarah working together! |
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| In the office with our colleagues Ulac, Sarah and Daniel |
We are now working on these suggestions .......new ideas will shortly be discussed with Management.
Keep reading the blogs to know more!!
I am fervently looking forward to my next duty travel….
