Some recent appearances on the internets:

I wrote about birth kits for the Disruptive Women in Healthcare blog. I love that blog, so it was a big thrill to be asked to contribute.

I talked to Hildy Gottlieb about community and connectedeness, for philanthropy.com. It’s a podcast, which is very cool.

I was quoted in this somewhat superficial Mother Jones article on TOMS shoes and the BOGO model. (In fact, what they quoted was my very old aidwatch post on not sending used junk to Haiti. I am starting to think that one post may be my biggest legacy to international aid.)

Dave Algoso wrote a nice review of my global health book. Among other things, he points out that it’s very, very short so you shouldn’t worry that reading it will be a major time commitment. (Side note: my mother recommends skipping the chapter on TB because it’s really really scary.)

Should you wish to follow me, I’m on twitter with a steady stream of articles on health, development, random personal commentary, and occasional request for proofreaders. I don’t automatically follow back, or my head would explode, but I do pay attention to my followers.

AidSource is the social network for aid workers. I cofounded it with J from Tales from the Hood and Shotgun Shack. It just crossed a thousand members, and it’s an amazing community of people all over the world who are involved in aid and development. It has already become an essential professional resource for me, and a great way to meet new people. Right now, AidSource is a labor of love – the three of us are funding it out of pocket. Our hope is to someday make it self-sustaining.

Motherhood and international development are linked for me. I’ve been working in development longer than I’ve been a parent, but becoming a mom changed the whole way I do this. My children are the core of my work, now. I want a better world for my sons. And my job influences my parenting. The links go back and forth, in dozens of ways. Together, they’re my life’s work – my boys and whatever good I do in development. The heart of both, though, comes down to one thing.

It’s not about me.

It doesn’t matter if I’m a good mother. What matters is that my boys are happy, healthy, and sane. The quality or worthiness or good intentions of development projects doesn’t matter either, if they don’t improve people’s lives.

To use some monitoring and evaluation jargon, it’s not about inputs. It’s about impact, and I’m just an input.

I’ve got to admit, it’s taken years for me to figure this out. I think my son was two years old before I figured out that “Am I a good mom?” was the wrong question to ask. I realized it when I was at work; I suspect I was actually making a logframe at the time.

The key to being good at development work – and motherhood – is leaving your ego behind. The longer I raise my children, the longer I do aid work, the better I get at taking myself out of it. It’s not about being liked, or likeable. It’s about being useful.

New-to-me note:
Okay, full disclosure (please don’t throw tomatoes at your screen), I read Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky… and I liked it.

I did not agree with their perspective on everything–there were points with which I very much disagreed. However, I appreciate that the book at least increased awareness about global economic, education, and health issues (especially for women) that might not be common conversation fodder (obstetric fistulas) for the average reader–for me, anything that helps increase awareness of things happening in other parts of the world is a good thing.

That said, the knight in shining armor metastory does no one any favors. It’s not realistic, it infantilizes the distressed damsels (and their brethren) in need of rescuing, and, ultimately, seems counterproductive to the goals of development, which is just inefficient and that’s annoying. So, bring on the counter-story, Alanna, even if that means you get to be labeled “controversial” (i.e., realistic). -MN

I just figured out why people call me controversial, when I hold the same opinions as pretty much everyone else who works in international development. (I’ve written about this before; I am just the one who writes this all down.)

It’s because my views don’t match the media narrative about development – the metastory. And unless you’re done an unusually pragmatic course on international development, or actually worked in this field, the only story you have about international development is that one you learn from the media.

Nick Kristof is the most prominent example of the typical media narrative: whites in shining armor, helpless poor people in need of our charity, simple programs with immediate, long-term impact. Basically, international development is easy if you just care enough and are ready to spend some money. Good solutions are right around the corner!

Nobody who actually works in this field believes the metastory any more. But the media keep looking for that story, because it’s the one that the reporters all know. A few journalists – Glenna Gordon, Jina Moore, and Stephanie Strom come to mind – have been writing about development long enough that they know they field, too. They write different stories.

But the others, the ones working international affairs or disasters or whatever – they come looking for the same old story and they find it. (Penelope Trunk has a good take on this phenomenon.) I do a lot more media than ever gets published; no one ever wants my quotes because they don’t match the metastory.

Three of the topics no one wants my opinion on:

1.       Innovation – to use a deeply American sports metaphor, focusing exclusively on innovation is like throwing a Hail Mary pass when we ought to just use our running game. [1] Spend too much time chasing innovation, and you run the risk of failing to support the boring programs that are proven to work.

2.       Crowdsourcing – I think it’s just one more way of collecting data. And the problem with data has never been getting enough of it – the problem has always been getting the right data and then knowing how to use it. A new data collection method doesn’t solve the problem of what to do with it once collected.

3.       The future of international development – It’s not mobile technology, social entrepreneurship, or heat stable vaccines. It’s partnership, where donors and recipients recognize that both gain from the process. It will mean businesses getting involved in development because they’ll benefit from it, and the slow erosion of exploitative fundraising efforts because the communities who benefit will help to design the campaigns. This isn’t going to happen overnight, but it is what the future will look like.

Those aren’t exactly radical, contrarian opinions. Everyone I work with would agree with me, as would almost every development professional I know. But they’re not the story.

[1] Random aside: I grew up watching American football with my dad. We lived in Syracuse but cheered for the Dallas Cowboys because it was the 80s, he was an immigrant, and the Cowboys were America’s team. By the time my brother hit elementary school, we discovered Central New Yorkers supported the Buffalo Bills and switched allegiances.

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photo credit: wili_hybrid

New-to-me note:
I’ve worked peripherally in international development for several years as an editor at a couple of big IGOs, and I studied international service for my BA.

Now, however, I’m close to getting off the HQ sidelines and into the mix of things–I’m finally going to school after being out for a loooong time to pursue a master’s degree so I can, as Alanna puts it, do the kinds of jobs that I want to do. I admit that  a lot of my motivations are similar to Alanna’s, and, thanks to my experience at IGOs, I think (hope?) I’m realistic about what I’m getting myself into, but it’s definitely still interesting and useful for me to read about this line of work from a veteran of the sector. I think that a lot of people new to international development/aid will find the frank perspective she offers below helpful. – MN

Photo credit: Alanna Shaikh

J from Tales from the Hood posted his “why I do this” story recently, and reading it started me thinking why I do this work myself. There’s a lot of twisted up stuff in my explanation – about wanting adventure, and doing what you’re good at, and the things my parents expected of me. But it really comes down to this:

It’s an awful fucking world out there. We are wrecking our planet, from Lake Erie to the Niger Delta. We’re killing each other with bullets and machetes and pollution and indifference to the needs of others. Humans are devastating machines that decimate each other and everything around us.

I can’t stand still while that happens. I don’t honestly think I am going to do much good. What can one person actually do? But the only way to avoid despair is to take action. If I didn’t try to do something I would never get out of bed. I took the action that struck me as most needed and – truly – most fun. International development. I like living overseas. I like learning other cultures. I like facing the weird problems of this life and knowing how to open a metal can with a paring knife. And I believe that poverty in most of the world is far worse than what we have in the US. (Even taking into account Mississippi and Appalachia.)

And I turned out to be good at it. Going to grad school for global health was like being a fish who finally found water. After flailing my way through Georgetown, fighting and bleeding for a GPA that rounded up to 3, I sailed right through my graduate degree and finished with a GPA of 3.97. And it wasn’t even hard. It was a lot of work, but it was joy.

Once I do something, I don’t do it badly. If I am going to work in international development I am going to do the best possible job of it that I can. That’s why I have this blog – to help me figure out how to do it better. That’s why I read so much (I link to most of it on my Twitter feed).

If you’re looking for the career-type info on how I ended up doing this, it’s very calculated. Here’s the short version, which leaves out all the embarrassing detours:

I have wanted to be an aid worker for literally as long as I can remember. When I was 16 I decided to go to Georgetown because it had a good reputation for international relations. I choose my work-study job to be internationally focused. I interned with a small international NGO. My first job out of school was a disaster, but the second was an internship with the American University in Cairo that let me live in Egypt for a year. While at AUC, I figured out I needed grad school, and an MPH, for all the jobs I really wanted. So I went to grad school, and interned and networked and studied foreign language while I was there. Then I finished school and networked my way into an unpaid internship in Uzbekistan. I got a paying job in Tashkent after that and the rest has been pretty standard.

(Photo credit: me. I took it out my windshield while driving the other day. It’s the tallest flagpole in the world, shown next to the president of Tajikistan’s palace.)

The last day of the conference was fascinating. The negotiating delegates were up late last night working out the wording of the document; this morning you could tell a lot of people were worse for wear. It was the kind of thing diplomats train for. Horse-trading, side switching, and shifting alliances. They had to delay all the closing activities while translators frantically got the final text ready in all languages. You can find a description of final text of the Doha mandate here.

In terms of my own experience, I think the best adjective for this trip would be humbling. First, the size of the conference, and the size of the UN system implied by this conference. I am not sure I ever realized just how massive the UN is, as a set of agencies.

Then, of course, the size of the problems we’re facing. This was not a conference heavy on optimism. It was a review of the massive challenges we’re looking at, and, for me, just how uncertain we are of the way forward. I met more than one person who was certain of what needs to happen next for sustainable development, but people have been certain before.

That was the last thing that humbled me. I just know so little. Sure, I can design a child survival project. But I don’t know how to tell who’s right about our global economic future. And that scares me.

Disclosure: My trip to Doha was funded by APCO, which has been contracted by the Qatari Ministry of Trade to support UNCTAD. They don’t have editorial control over my writing, and they don’t pay me to post.

I was lucky enough to hear two Arab Civil society activists speak the other day. The Arab spring has been one of the major undercurrents of UNCTAD XIII. These speeches were different, though – they were by women.

The first speaker was Zainab Salbi, Founder and President of Women for Women International. Her speech was inspiring – almost over the top – but she ended with a list of suggestions that really impressed me. None of it is new or unexpected, but it’s a well-phrased list that sums up some major needs:

1. Don’t protect women in the name of culture. Women can make their own choices.
2. Female participation needs to be more than symbolic. That means you don’t have two women in a group of 100 people. You have fifty.
3. Don’t use the politics of women to navigate between religious and secular influences.
4. It’s time to spend real money on women. Not just for their sake, but for the sake of the global economy.
5. To Arab women: keep speaking up. The Arab spring, and our participation, was just the beginning. If this is a mountain we’re barely halfway up.

Ms. Salbi was followed by Amira Yahyaoui, who was at the conference representing youth. Of every she had to say, what stuck with me was a cry from the heart, that I suspect every woman alive has thought. “It’s 2012. Why are we still arguing about this? I want to argue about something new.”

Disclosure: My trip to Doha was funded by APCO, which has been contracted by the Qatari Ministry of Trade to support UNCTAD. They don’t have editorial control over my writing, and they don’t pay me to post.

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Amira Yahyaoui at the World Economic Forum
Photo credit: World Economic Forum

So, UNCTAD is a working conference. I’m used to going to health and development conferences, where the purpose of the meeting is to share and discuss information. It’s different being at UNCTAD, where there is an actual task they’re trying to achieve. It’s probably why this conference is so unholy long. Six days is an awful lot of conferencing.

The goal of the conference is the Doha accord, which will guide UNCTAD for the next four years. The formal debate takes place in a large auditorium, in a set of sessions called the Committee of the Whole. The real work, though, is done in small meetings. You see clumps of people all over this conference discussing draft language and which countries have agreed to what. It’s a contentious process; the wealthy countries and the developing countries have very different ideas of what the final product should look like. It’s a combination of public posturing and closed door meetings where delegates wrangle over adjective choices. Asia Times has <a href=”http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ND24Dj03.html”>a useful description of the process</a>, and the newspaper sides firmly with the developing countries on substance.

The other thing being discussed at UNCTAD is a report from the UN Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) criticizing UNCTAD. It called UNCATD inefficient, badly run, and not providing the value for money that it used to. Developing countries and a prominent group of former UNCTAD personnel have characterized the report as a politically-motivated attack on UNCTAD’s role as a finance contrarian.  The report itself is <a href=”http://www.unjiu.org/data/reports/2012/en2012_01.pdf”>available publicly for anyone to read at the JIU website</a>, so the debate isn’t about content.

Cuba was the first at the conference to bring the elephant into the room. At the opening plenary, which was meant to focus on procedure, the representative from Cuba explicitly blamed “Price Waterhouse bias” for the report’s contents. Broadly, the wealthy countries are citing the report as an accurate description of stagnation and poor management at UNCTAD and are asking for substantial change. The countries of the developing world generally view the JIU report as an attack on UNCTAD’s mandate.

So, those are the two discussions going on here. One official, one an undercurrent. UNCTAD will have to reply formally to the JIU report at some point, but not in the Doha accord, however it turns out.

Disclosure: My trip to Doha was funded by APCO, which has been contracted by the Qatari Ministry of Trade to support UNCTAD. They don’t have editorial control over my writing, and they don’t pay me to post.

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photo credit: Bug-E

UNCTAD Day Four

I am getting tired of the chronological format, and we’ve got a lot of days left. Today I’ll just offer up some observations:

• The first half of the high-level event on women in development depressed me. Heavy on platitudes and generalities, light on any real ideas. I also heard a lot of boring old tropes recycled – women don’t want to work outside the home, changing policy doesn’t help when culture is the problem.

• Things got much better in the afternoon. The incomparable Mary Robinson gave a firm and detailed talk on how we can start including women immediately and the panel discussion that followed. The overall consensus was that good policy has a significant impact on women’s inclusion into public life, and good policy runs the gamut from maternity leave to quotas for political participation.

• I met a woman who was so stunningly racist that I sat there listening to her, totally incredulous and spent the next hour processing that she’d really said all that. Among other things, she told me the problem with Arabs is that they have too much pride, the Middle East is barbaric and doomed, and that Arab civil society activists are cute.

• Speaking of civil society activities, I was on the bus with a bunch of them coming back from the conference venue. The buses run at random, so there’s a lot of waiting, so we all go to know each other. I am always surprised by how wealthy many civil society people are, although it makes sense when you consider it. You don’t have time to start or join an NGO if you’re struggling for money, and the kind of polish that gets you to international conferences is more often found in people with cash.

Disclosure: My trip to Doha was funded by APCO, which has been contracted by the Qatari Ministry of Trade to support UNCTAD. They don’t have editorial control over my writing, and they don’t pay me to post.

I started my day off with a visit to the UNCTAD exhibition hall. I wrote about it in my previous post; let’s just say it left me with some concerns. It does have a free lunch, though, which was exciting to discover. The conference offers snacks all day except for 12-3 pm, when they take away all the jalapeno poppers and petit fours to force you to go buy your lunch. Or, apparently, go eat in the exhibit hall.

After the exhibition, I attended a panel on trade and poverty reduction. One presenter stated that the developing countries now trade more with each other than they do with the North. Lee Crawfurd called shenanigans on that factoid on twitter, and I was unable to find any data source for it.

That was followed by a stint watching the general UNCTAD debate, where nations presented their general statements. Some highlights: Indonesia talked about the need to remove trade barriers and avoid protectionism, but couched it within the now familiar rhetoric of south-south cooperation and triangular cooperation. China brought up quantitative easing as an obstacle to global financial recovery. Switzerland expressed its pleasure that the JIU Report was going to be properly addresses, and Israel talked about its development and said that it was ready to train other countries to follow their path. I watched as many introductory statements as I could personally face, and then snuck out to go write a blog post.

And then…drumroll…the most energetic meeting I had attended yet: the High Level Panel Discussion on Debt Crisis Prevention and Management. Seriously, people were getting there early so they’d have good seats. The purpose of the panel was to discuss a set of non-binding regulations to regulate both the borrowing and lending of capital. The idea was that lenders as well as borrowers should be restricted from participating creating excess debt, as opposed to just focusing on debtors. I had to leave the meeting before it ended, but when I left the panel members were very supportive of the new regulations. They were promulgated in January and published on the web, so there was plenty of time for everyone to review them before coming to Doha.

Tomorrow, I’m looking forward to the High-Level event on women in development.

Today’s UNCTAD buzzwords:

• Agriculture value chains
• South-south trade
• Missing links in trade
• Transparent and inclusive

Disclosure: My trip to Doha was funded by APCO, which has been contracted by the Qatari Ministry of Trade to support UNCTAD. They don’t have editorial control over my writing, and they don’t pay me to post.

This morning I went to the exhibition hall at UNCTAD. It was a sad little effort. I saw a man weaving a traditional basket while checking his smart phone, a woman doing an oil painting of a horse while checking her smart phone, and an array of food and handicrafts. There were booths from Qatar’s major banks, a steel company, a newly maritime construction company, and two or three oil companies.

My first thought was of irony. UNCTAD’s angry response to the harm done by globalization and international financial structures, accompanied by two banks, two oil companies, and a steel manufacturer?

My second thought was more complex. It’s pretty clearly that the multinationals who anchor the global economy – and are being blamed in this meeting – see no risk to their corporate futures from UNCTAD, or they wouldn’t have set up their shiny displays.

Maybe we broke this global economy, but we bought it first.

It makes me wonder if anyone is really big-picture thinking about how all of this fits together. UNCTAD delegates are calling for more government intervention into the economy, more taxation on investments, and more FDI, all at the same time. They want an explanation for what went wrong from the same hapless souls who steered us wrong in the first place. Do we really think suddenly everyone is smarter now?

Maybe there is an elephant in this room, and I am looking at a trunk and a tail and some wrinkly skin. But it seems more like a pile of limbs and eyeballs that don’t add up to any living beast.

Disclosure: My trip to Doha was funded by APCO, which has been contracted by the Qatari Ministry of Trade to support UNCTAD. They don’t have editorial control over my writing, and they don’t pay me to post.

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Photo credit: CrankyPK