It’s hard to bury parts of your work that you really like, but without which you know the end result will be better!

A year and a half ago I travelled to Kenya and came up with a topic I really wanted to work with.

Getting going with the topic wasn’t that easy. Despite my efforts no Finnish organization seemed really interested in collaborating with me.

I kept looking, and finally found an organization in US working in an area very relevant for my topic.

I was very happy when they invited me on board!

But then I got a job offer from the Embassy of Finland in Nigeria and decided to postpone starting my thesis by 6 months.

When the autumn came I was all excited to finally start working my my topic.

I worked a lot and think I was the worst company for anyone wanting to talk of anything else than my topic.

I was just so excited of exploring my topic and learning new things!

Although some days the work didn’t attract me that much

some days I realized I just had to correct my direction

and some days it felt like such a mess that I wasn’t sure if there would be any direction at all.

But now I’m finalizing my work and it feels really strange – the end of this journey is evidently approaching.

Very sincere thanks to all who have supported and encouraged me!

More money would help, surely.

But in fact, how much would it help?

I’m claiming that really problem with a lot of the private development assistance is that these people, who are carrying out the actual work, are not able to position their efforts behind the common objectives. When the right hand does not know what the left is doing, how could the outcome be even close to optimal? And when so much of the resources are wasted in overlapping work, how much good will the extra money do?

Currently it is basically impossible for a small NGO to know who other similar organizations are working in the same area, and what projects they are running (and it’s very resource-consuming even for a larger one). Most common way of knowing about others is the accidental running into the other organization on the street. Internet helps, but only to a degree: like one of my interviewees said, “Online you find everything, and still you find nothing”.

I have been researching how social media could help in making the work by NGOs and foundations more effective, and have come up with very similar ideas that the today beta-launched Jumo builds on. Their idea is to connect the large audience to the NGOs doing this important work.

Great! I’m all excited that finally someone is applying at least a bit of the same approach that I have!

But still, the site is not what would address my problem. Maybe the later versions will grow to be more than a social network for good. Because I believe that developing such a site from the needs of those doing the actual work would allow them to:

• know easily about the other initiatives, so that they could position their efforts, utilize synergies and reduce overlap.
• keep up with relevant information from their colleagues so that they could do the actual development work better
• and to foster their connections and common identity so that they could actually realize that here we are all aiming for the same things so let’s at least work together.

And that’s what I think would make the private development assistance more effective.

Now the game has changed to heating. Today I woke up wrapped in covers. While getting breakfast, I noted how the heating had been adjusted to 60F, corresponding to 15C! Maybe I’ll send him instead of me back to the snowy Finland!

And so, wrapped in comfy blankets, I’ve spent the Sunday with baptizing and summarizing my overwhelming 100-page creation. My current working title is:

Reconciling the Wild West of Private Development Assistance – Harnessing Social Media for More Effective Private Development Assistance

and in Finnish:

Järjestystä yksityisen kehitysavun villiin länteen? Sosiaalisten medioiden hyödyntäminen yksityisen kehitysavun tuloksellisuuden edistämiseksi

Also, here comes the draft abstract:

Before leaving Washington, I was feeling that my research mishmash of IT, development, sociology, systems thinking, knowledge management, and who knows what, would never make any sense.

Feeling like a mad scientist who had spent too long in her isolated chamber, I landed to Toronto and met my good friend.

And somehow the combination of just explaining my research proposition, literature review findings, and my initial thoughts of the future to my friend’s brother during early morning hours after a very fun night, to his mom over a brunch, and to him while reading my work, took away the anxiety.

It’s been ten days since then, and I’ve today presented the first 60 pages at a Skype thesis seminar session to my fellow students in Helsinki. And in the meanwhile, I’ve written some 20 pages more, including a proposition of how to solve my research problem. I’m finally feeling like uphill is over, and now it’s just to slide down!

As my educational background is engineering, I put the results from the literature review and my Finnish-Nigerian case study into a table, which I then developed into a diagram to show their relations.

I think the result is very interesting.

The blue boxes represent characteristics of the private development assistance sector, and red boxes outcomes or effects. I’ve explained why I relate these boxes in this particular way through different theories ranging from knowledge management to systems thinking and communications theory. The first draft of the diagram is here:

Most initiatives in the development sector seem to focus on such issues as creating common agreements that everyone should follow (sort of compilation of practices like “tell how much money you give”), starting small initiatives of sharing knowledge between the participants, and exploring the different perceptions of knowledge (such as gender-specific knowledge). And most initiatives to make the development aid more efficient seem to try to create major coordination bodies and international agreements. But I’m increasingly thinking that the efficiency of the development assistance is to a large degree a question of the interconnectedness of the different actors. And one of the reasons why they have so little relations to each other is that the information is just so unstructured.

I would like to encourage the readers of this post to contact me if you work on something related or have ideas on the causes and effects of private development assistance efficiency. My email address is ilona dot makinen at gmail dot com.

At this point, my grand conclusion is that if the different actors of private development assistance had better awareness about each other and relevant projects, the development assistance could be considerably more efficient (and this indeed was my hunch when I started with the topic).

When I told this finding to my Peruvian and Russian work colleagues over a happy hour pitcher of sangria, they nodded their heads and said, that’s obvious, isn’t it?

And so I took my head out of the clouds and acknowledged, it is obvious.

I guess that’s reseach: after reading, studying and quoting tens and tens scholars and applying and reasoning their ideas, the outcome is something that one kind of knows as common knowledge.

But when research about knowledge in development sector concentrates on local knowledge, gender specific knowledge, indigenous knowledge and whatever other knowledge, and approaches to coordinating the common work are mostly about face-to-face coordination meetings, one might indeed need the 50 pages of the thesis to prove that point!

The coming week I aim to add little more to my argument from the area of economics (hints on good sources about labor division and the impact of knowledge to the behavior of markets/any actors would be appreciated) and then I will finally start the second, exciting part of my research proposition: how could modern technology help in creating that awareness.

I’ve now written content worth of 24 pages, which corresponds basically to the theoretical background / literature review of my work. It’s was a great journey from development sector’s discourse on the fundamental principles of development assistance to refreshing my memory about knowledge management theories and finally to intensive studying of systems thinking in the wonderful library of George Washington University and applying that into the development world.

I’m a bit nervous to give out this my baby work of 3,5 weeks to my advisers and professor. The approach I’m applying and the point of view that I’m proposing seem to be very alien to the development assistance world. Sometimes my mind fills with hesitation and I start thinking that maybe the approach won’t make sense to anyone else…

Anyway.. here’s the current draft of the contents of my work!

• INTRODUCTION
• BACKGROUND
  • DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE: ORIGINS, TRENDS, AND ROLE OF PRIVATE ASSISTANCE
    • Origins of development assistance
    • Trends in development assistance: proliferation, fragmentation and global endeavor for efficiency
    • Increasing efficiency through coordination
    • The role of private development assistance
  • KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN DEVELOPMENT CO-OPERATION
    • Knowledge management and knowledge management systems
    • Overview of knowledge management in development co-operation
    • Inter-organizational knowledge management
    • Knowledge sharing
    • IT-supported knowledge management
  • SYSTEMS THINKING APPROACH TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
    • Systems thinking and social systems
    • Private development assistance as a social system
    • Systems approach to knowledge management and private development assistance
  • CONCLUSIONS (OR SUMMARY?)
• PRESENTATION OF THE RESEARCH QUESTION
• RESEARCH METHODS
• REFERENCES

home street

The house is a few steps down from H street, one of the nightlife hotspots of Washington. H street is dotted with bars, restaurants and businesses, and during my first three first weeks I’ve grown to like it lots. Despite the area quickly becoming trendier, it has retained its strong character, and there are still dollar stores and credit union shops between the more fashionable places. My neighborhood more diverse than the fancy office area where I work with the tens of thousands other white business people, and it’s more cozy and somehow genuine than U street and 18th in northwest Washington, “where everyone goes”.

Neighborhood identity is a big thing in here. There’s at least two very comprehensive blogs about my area, featuring everything from the schedule of the street construction to bar reviews. Today the whole neighborhood gathered for an annual street festival. The children’s fashion show took place next door to the boxing show; there were small booths selling foods from different parts of the world, a tattoo competition, music in two stages, beer terraces, art, and an air guitar show competition.

Fashion show

Air guitar competition

This is made by a guy who was a scientist for 20 years, and was 'reborn' as an artist

help someone now

DC tattoo was my favorite

h street sunset

Filed under: Life in Washington D.C. ]]> http://tracingaid.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/h-street-identity/feed/ 1 tracingaid street P1020178 P1020193 P1020204 P1020216 P1020228 P1020245 http://tracingaid.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/in-the-world-of-development/ http://tracingaid.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/in-the-world-of-development/#comments Tue, 14 Sep 2010 01:22:02 +0000 tracingaid http://tracingaid.wordpress.com/?p=42 ]]> The modern development assistance has its roots in 1948, when U.S. assisted Europe and Japan to rebuild after the Second World War. Since then the official development assistance has come a long way, from the focus in market based mechanisms in the 80s, funding challenges in the 90s, and the all-embracing Millennium Development Goals in 2000.

Development assistance is about big money. The Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances 2010 estimates that private philanthropy in the U.S. reached over $37 billion dollars, over $10 billion more than the U.S. official development assistance, in 2008. No one really knows the global private flows, but the estimates range from 15-20% to 35% of the total aid.

During the decades of aid, the ecosystem of development actors has diversified from the fairly straightforward model of money flowing directly from rich governments to poor governments, and indirectly through multilateral institutions acting as middlemen, to complicated system with a myriad of heterogeneous actors. Over the last two decades, the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has mushroomed: in 2004 it was estimated that there were over 45,000 NGOs in Africa, with the global number totaling over 320,000. Not only has the number of actors risen, but they are also increasingly fragmented; the same time when the number of aid projects has increased, the average project size has shrunk.

Private actors in development assistance are diverse. They range from informal initiatives, such as the 29-years old Canadian traveling in Bangladesh and raising money through video blogging to foundations set by multimillionaire philanthropists, and projects run by university groups, religious entities and non-governmental organizations. Since mid-1980s, especially the role of NGOs has become increasingly prominent. The skepticism towards governance in developing countries and aspirations to strengthen civil society have made channeling official development funding through NGOs an attractive option. About 13% of the official Finnish development assistance is given through NGOs.

Despite the huge increase in projects and actors, there’s a heavy debate going on whether the aid actually is making any difference. Even the engineering students might have heard of probably the most famous address in the discussion, the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa (A really good book! I recommend!). The official donors have responded to the critique with series of high caliber meetings on the efficiency of the development assistance, in Rome 2003, Paris 2005 and Accra in 2008, and initiated global mechanisms to increase the efficiency.

The problems arousing from the upswing of actors and fragmentation are increasingly associated with a greater need for coordination. While official donors are increasingly taking actions to coordinate their efforts, private actors are still often absent from these attempts. In the meantime, without proper coordination, certain causes or countries receive massive efforts, while others are excluded. The consequences are duplication, overlap and waste of limited resources.

I am especially interested in the private aid, since that’s the “wild west”. The people-to-people nature of private development assistance, and its richness in innovation, diversity and agility challenge the practices from the traditional development donors. However, the new variety among the actors, differences in their structures, internal processes, objectives and forms of legitimacy, is inundating the aid field with a challenge of managing this anarchy.

Would there be anything in the world of knowledge management worth applying to this chaos?

Thesis page count: 7!