Warning Sign #1: When government officials use the data to set targets like an increase in vaccination or a decrease in cancer numbers, they always use percentages, not absolute numbers. That’s a sign that people know the numbers are wrong and don’t want to rely on them. (Of course, sometimes it just means that the percentage is the right way to look at it. Increasing the number of people in the district with access to clean water by 20% conveys more information than saying you want to increase it by 330,000 people. You need to use your judgment. (as always)

Warning Sign #2: The disaggregation doesn’t make sense. This is a judgment call again – sometimes the data are weird because there is something weird going on (Such as India’s missing girls. We only wish that data was fake.) For example, pregnancy is a major risk factor for anemia. If your rates of anemia in pregnant women are lower than the rates in the general population, something is wonky.

Warning Sign #3: The math doesn’t work. If you know a few true numbers, you can use them to ground-truth the rest of your data. For example, if you know the perinatal mortality rate for the smallest babies, then you can use it to determine whether the reported infant mortality rate makes sense. (This slide deck has the detailed instructions, starting from slide #20.)

The post Three Ways to Spot Bad Data appeared first on Blood and Milk.

It’s a lot better for the local economy to procure the food there. The reason hungry people need food is not because it isn’t present in their country, but because they can’t afford it. If you buy food in country then you are supporting the (generally poor) farmers who grow the food as well as the people who can’t afford to buy it and you are also saving shipping cost.

You want to look very closely at the cultural acceptability of the food you’re shipping. A lot of cultures don’t understand or consume many kinds of beans.

Finally, I really dislike the way their website doesn’t talk about how the meal shipping actually works.

2) Today on twitter, someone asked why all aid workers are rich and white. My answer: they’re not. Most aid workers are nationals of the country the project is in. The reason we think otherwise is because we have racist ideas about who “counts” as an aid worker and because the media focuses on rich white people. Cough, cough, Nick Kristof.

3) I haven’t forgotten the M&E series, but I wanted to get this up while it was topical.

The post Field Notes from the Development Industry 2/28/2013 appeared first on Blood and Milk.

As you may have noticed, monitoring and evaluation is a topic near to my heart. One thing I’ve noticed is that we repeat the same errors, over and over and over. I’ll elaborate on these in my next three posts, but for now, I will tease you with some lists:

The Top Three Monitoring and Evaluation Mistakes Experienced NGOs Make

1. Using the same indicators they’ve always used, even as projects change
2. Too much evaluation, not enough monitoring
3. Leaving M&E up to the M&E team

The Top Three M&E Mistakes New NGOs make

1. Choosing really great indicators that are nearly impossible to measure
2. Confusing a program with an RCT
3. Focusing on the donor’s data needs when choosing indicators

The Top Four M&E Mistakes Everyone Makes

1. Too many indicators
2. Not focusing on data use
3. Too many process indicators, not enough impact indicators
4. The IKEA effect

(photo credit: tgkohn)

The post Ten Common Monitoring and Evaluation Mistakes appeared first on Blood and Milk.

Things get better slowly. Achingly, painfully, snails-race-past slowly. They got better slowly in the US. As Chris Blattman recently pointed out, Andrew Jackson was a child soldier and genocidaire. My parents were married in 1969. If my mom hadn’t insisted on finishing her graduate work first, they would have needed to choose their wedding location with care. Anti-miscegenation laws weren’t eliminated in the US until 1967.

Things get better slowly in development. Sometimes at a speed invisible to the naked eye. Often at a speed invisible to our careers. That’s why we do monitoring and evaluation; it’s meant to catch the accretion of tiny changes that will eventually add up to something that matters. You don’t need to be able to see it when you have numbers to track it.

Of course, not all projects have M&E that works. Sometimes you’re tracking the wrong stuff, and you don’t capture slow change. Sometimes you’re not doing a very good job of tracking anything. That doesn’t mean the intervention isn’t working; it just means your M&E isn’t working. Sometimes it’s not working because it’s not well designed, and sometimes it’s not working because the trade-offs aren’t worth it.

Sometimes you stand there, throwing rocks down a well with no visible change. Just plop, plop, plop. Then, all at once, the water overflows in a big splash. You can’t see that with your naked eye, and the wrong kind of M&E will only capture how many rocks you’ve thrown, not the infinitesimal increases in the water level. But sometimes paying the money to measure the water level means you can’t afford enough rocks to throw.

Look at gay equality in the US. Years and years of discrimination and abuse. Court cases that went nowhere. Change that didn’t come. And then, apparently out of the blue, equality started winning. Now we’ve got gay marriage in Iowa. What do you measure to capture that slow change? The number of failed legislative efforts is a meaningless number; it’s not like you get to 139 and you’re done. Incredibly detailed public opinion polling would catch it, but that’s serious money. Money you could spend on strategic litigation instead.

You need to believe in your theory of change if you can’t measure what you need to.

That’s an act of faith. Faith is what we’re left with when M&E can’t answer our questions. Faith is a tricky thing. It can get you Freedom Riders or the Mayan apocalypse. You should save your faith for when it’s deserved. But it is, occasionally, deserved. Sometimes we just hang have to in there.

(PS: this one’s for you, Danielle)

photo credit

The post Snail’s Faith: on M&E and the pace of change appeared first on Blood and Milk.

Best ICT Blogs

Wait…What? By Linda Raftree makes me understand what ICT has to do with my actual work

ICTworks updates frequently and has a knack for tying current events to ICT4D.

Best Anonymous Blog

Okay, so obviously the best anonymous blog is Tales from The Hood. But since it doesn’t update any more, we’ll have to go with AidSpeak. (Conflict of interest note: theoretically I am a contributor to AidSpeak but I have not yet actually contributed. I’m sorry, J.)

Best Blog to find out what the Millennials think

WhyDev

Best Complexity Blog

Aid on the Edge of Chaos that Ben Ramalingam really knows what he’s talking about

Best former best economics blog in South Sudan

Roving Bandit

Best Institutional Blog

From Poverty to Power

Best Institutional Blog that should update more

Uncounted

Best Blog That’s Finally Updating As Much As We Always Wanted it to / Best Pictures

Aid Thoughts

Best Link Round-Ups

Do No Harm

IH-Blog

Best Blog That Has Nothing to Do with Development But Will Make You Better at It Anyway

Sociological Images

Best Rectal Microbicide Blog

IRMA – I admit it’s a small category. But IRMA will keep you up to date on an important issue in HIV prevention

The post The BAMBAs, part two appeared first on Blood and Milk.

If Tom Murphy can invent his own blog awards, so can I. I therefore present to you the first annual Blood and Milk blog awards – the BAMBAs:

Best Writing

Owen Barder. No matter how complex the topic is, if Owen’s writing it, I can follow. He also seems like the blogger most commonly cited by entry-level folks on AidSource. Some of them don’t even realize he’s a senior-level professional working for CGD. They just think he’s brilliant.

Best Blogs by Academics

Chris Blattman pretty much owns academic blogging on international development, and for good reason.

Ed Carr Ed’s blog is tough, plainspoken, and willing to tell you the truth in a much firmer way than you might expect.

Marc Bellemare Marc focuses on food and agriculture, with a bit of everything else thrown in. He knows what he’s talking about.

Best all-around keeping up with the everything blogs

Humanosphere Everyone should read this blog. It’s an entertaining overview of everything that’s going on in international development. It’s written by a professional journalist, and it shows.

A View from the Cave Tom Murphy isn’t afraid to offer criticism when he thinks it’s called for, and he covers a huge range of development topics.

Best Global Health Blog that almost never updates any more

Karen Grepin makes complex global health topics understandable, and, as far as I can tell, she is omniscient.

Best Global Health Blog that does update

Sarah Bosely writes a global health blog as part of the Guardian’s excellent coverage of global health and development. This blog can occasionally feel corporate, but it’s full of great content and gets props for being the first mainstream media source to talk about the end of antibiotics.

Best TB Blog

Science Speaks is one of those blogs where you find yourself wanting to share every single post they write.

Best Malaria Blog

Malaria Matters I have a strong bias for blogs that have a voice, not a corporate identity. Bill Brieger’s Malaria Matters blog is a great one.

Best Malaria Blog that never updates, dammit

Topnaman Naman Shah hardly ever updates, but when he does it’s worth reading.

Best Antibiotics Blogs

Maryn McKenna at Wired talks about every new developed in drug-resistant bacteria. Including fecal transplants. Not exactly a beginner’s blog, but you can always google the things you don’t understand.

Antibiotics – the perfect storm is a very wonky, industry-focused blog on the development (or lack thereof) of new antibiotics.

Part two…coming up tomorrow!

The post The BAMBAs, part one appeared first on Blood and Milk.

1. Someone asked me if the new State Department Global Health Diplomacy office is likely to be hiring. Unfortunately, I’d guess no. All the major positions will most likely be staffed with career foreign service officers. They may be hiring support staff. They could pull that staff from existing government administrative employees, or they could hire using a contractor that places people at the State Department. They’ll probably do a mix of both. I don’t know which contractors the State Department is using for personnel right now, but spending some time on clearancejobs.com would probably help you figure it out.

2. After a chance meeting with someone working for a faith-based organization (one of the little ones) I started thinking about their funding model. As far as I can tell, people fundraise in their home countries from their own churches, and use the funding to pay for their overseas time. While overseas, they donate their time to faith-based projects developed by other expats. This means that the projects themselves have a great looking balance sheet. All their (theoretically) expensive labor is volunteer.  This is a similar model to secular projects that require you to pay them if you want to volunteer overseas.

3. As I’ve mentioned before, monitoring your project implementation is useless if you can’t actually change your intervention based on the results. That’s what matters in a project designed to improve people’s lives. (A research project is a different animal, and changing the intervention would defeat the purpose.)  Bottom Up Thinking recently published a nicely nuanced take on the issue.

4. We’re posting three times a week over on Tomorrow Global. If you’re not interested in the exploration of my deepest fears for the future, you might like Danielle Parsons’ in depth looks at HIV issues or Lorea Russell’s explorations in social entrepreneurship, emergency relief, and other international development topics. Please come by and leave a comment.  The commenters make Blood and Milk a thousand times better than it would be with just me. I’d love to see that at Tomorrow Global.

5. I am learning to use video as part of my job, which means I spend a lot of evenings watching YouTube videos about global health. (You envy me my exciting life, I know you do.) I’ve been putting them up with brief comments at Global Health Videos. The site is really just meant for me (thus the total lack of design) but I offer it in case it’s useful to someone else.

6. My husband just left for a two month guest worker stint in another country. My mom does all our cooking and has a totally different view of healthy food than I do. Also, she and I are sharing a winter coat so we can only go out one at a time. Apparently I’ve lived in the developing world for so long I no longer have First World Problems. (note: I’m not that broke. I have a winter coat coming soon in our shipment from Dushanbe and I’m too cheap to buy one just for the next two weeks.)

(Photo credit, me, from my new daily photoblog)

The post Field Notes from the Development Industry: 1/13/2013 appeared first on Blood and Milk.

1. Thinking you’re the only one who’s ever tried to do what you’re doing.
2. Brushing your teeth with tap water.
3. Believing all problems have solutions.
4. Mistaking the capital city for the country as a whole.
5. Building a lot of technical capacity without making sure that someone is ready to use that capacity.

The post Starting a Land War in Asia: the Five Classic Aid Worker Blunders appeared first on Blood and Milk.

Last year, my husband and I decided to organize our charitable giving. Instead of making haphazard choices all along, we now give a set percentage of our income at the end of every year. Any smaller donations through the year don’t count toward that amount. That means that I can give to my friends’ pet causes without guilt or doing tons of research – it doesn’t take away from the real charitable giving.

This year, we’re giving to fight drug resistant tuberculosis. I think it’s one of the biggest threats to global health, and we’re really at a point now where investment can avert a disaster. We haven’t chosen our recipient yet; we’re just starting our research and I could use some help. Here’s who we’re looking at:

Partners in Health was one of the first organizations to recognize the threat of MDR TB and look for ways to stop it. Giving to them would be support for patient care.

PATH is doing a whole range of anti-TB activities, and I like their focus on health systems and service integration.

The Stop TB partnership is the big global group that provides grants, works on policy, and does advocacy work on TB issues. It’s closely connected to the WHO. Giving to them would address everything at once, but we’d also be funding (admittedly possibly important) bureaucracy.

MSF - Doctors without Borders - was also quick to recognize the threat of MDR TB, and they ran some of the first MDR TB programs in the former USSR. They explicitly don’t do development work, though, and I worry about how that philosophy fits with the need to integrate TB care into overall health services.

The TB Alliance supports science and research for better TB care and treatment. So giving to them would help stop TB at its source. On the other hand, they seem to be pretty well funded already.

We could chose a small NGO project on TB from Global Giving, and totally make their day.

Finally, we could go one level up and give to the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics. They support research and policy on antibiotics in general, not just for TB.

I’m starting my research now – everything I outlined in this old blog post, plus talking to TB experts I know and people who work for the NGOs I’ve mentioned. I tell everyone that the commenters on this blog are way smarter than me, though, and I’d love your input. Who should we give to? Why? Am I missing any good organizations? Would you argue for something other than TB?

photo credit: isafmedia

The post Advice needed – charitable giving on TB appeared first on Blood and Milk.

It’s a little early to say happy new year, but this week is full of family time and I’m not sure I’ll be able to blog again before 2013.

2012 was a rough year for me. I lost my dad this August, and we had a terrible health scare in February. Those traumas, though, also reminded me how very lucky I am. I am surrounded by good people, both in person and online. I am tremendously grateful for their love and support, and for the gifts I’ve been given by the world at large.

I want to say thank you. I’ve thanked my friends in person. I’ve thanked my twitter friends. I’ve done careful and loving charitable giving.

But, like the Little Drummer Boy, I don’t have enough money to make much difference. I need to give of my own skills. And what I can do is blog. So I dragged two of my smartest friends kicking and screaming onto the web and we started something new.

Here’s our blog: Tomorrow Global. It’s an attempt to shape a better future by thinking seriously about what comes next. Blood and Milk is designed to be useful to me; it helps me think. Tomorrow Global is meant for the reader. We’ve got a global health and development focus, but that’s a big tent. We update Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with new posts.

I hope you like it. I hope it’s useful. Right now, it’s my best gift.

The post Happy new year! appeared first on Blood and Milk.