My "working out loud" experiment - here we go!

Virtually all website with tips for bloggers will tell you that consistency is the name of the game.  My last post was over 5 months ago, which kind off defeats the purpose right?   I've been meaning to write more often, and will try to blog about why blogging professionally is more difficult when it is not part of your established work priorities  - all the more so when you're on the road or in meetings upwards of 70% of the time. 

But enough of that.  Today, I'm starting another experiment, namely "working out loud".  I'm really not sure I'm cut out for it (I'm the kind of person that thought laptop privacy screens were an overdue invention!)  - but the cool kids in my CGIAR network are doing it, and I thought I'd give it a try.   Last week was my first official #fridayupdate and one of the comments I received is that it was too long for a Yammer post - and that I should blog about it and link back from Yammer.  So here we are.  I wasn't sure that a public post would be the way to go about work stuff, but then I remembered that we're publicly funded, so I really should put my work out there in case it would be useful for someone.    With that, here we go - WOL update for the week ending 6 June 2014:

On Monday we hosted a team from INSEAD / Toto Agriculture, led by Phil Parker and Ioana Popescu.   They are in advanced stages of preparing a 2.0 version of their system, which aims to have all the relevant information possible about agriculture available to various groups (extension officers, radio stations, etc.) in a customizable.  The Facebook of global Ag if you will.   Some seriously cool stuff.  They'd like to get ILRI content on livestock into the system, and it would be nice if we manage to find a way to make it work.  I am a bit skeptical, because we are anything but agile, and they plan to move very quick.   Ioana's work dovetails Toto, but is focusing on establishing individual credit scoring systems for smallholder farmers.  Could be a real game-changer in financial services at the BOP if it takes off. 

On Tuesday morning, we sent out the draft CGIAR Capacity Development Guidelines for the 2nd round of CRPs. The document offers recommendations on how CGIAR and boundary partners can successfully implement strategies for CapDev and highlights the key advantages offered by CapDev to CRPs, centers and partners. It was initially drafted by members of the CGIAR CapDev CoP, at a Writeshop held 7-9 April 2014 in Montpellier, France. The current version is a result of peer-reviewed by the CapDev CoP members during April-May 2014. I am really delighted to be part of the core team that is taking this forward.   We plan to actively seek feedback from Center DGs, CRP Directors and other internal and external stakeholders for feedback ahead of the next CapDev CoP Annual Meeting in early September.

I had a number of meeting with my colleague Ben Lukuyu around the work we're undertaking to revamp the Feed Assessment Tool (FEAST) and make it more accessible and less dependent on 1-2 high level experts within ILRI.  I'm having so much fun in this process - pure instructional design bliss - and so happy to be able to introduce such CapDev / learning aspects into our work.  This week we shortlisted proposal from consultants based on a mock assignment, and we were very impressed with the quality of proposals.  We then had phone interviews later in the week and are hoping to finalize with a consultant next week  - so I can start working with them to deliver a re-designed blended learning course before a FEAST summit in Vietnam in September.  

I also had a meeting with the IBLI team this week, and we've decided to go ahead with the preparation of a Harvard-Style case study on the program.  We have a consultant lined up, and I'm gearing up to write my notes of the proposed approach and management dilemmas later today.   The aim is to have the case study ready before September, so I can test it in my course on "financial services at the BOP at the IOMBA / University of Geneva.  Very ambitious schedule, but hey - nothing ventured nothing gained, right?!

The new mNutrition project is finally signed - and we got a job ad posted for a  Quality Assurance Officer to who will work under me (and closely with my colleague Delia Grace) to manage a range of quality assurance procedures, and provide advice and guidance concerning mNutrition quality assurance systems and their implementation.  Some press releases on mNutrition are being planned, so more on this in a future update. 

Apart from that, lots of work around performance approvals, preparation for a revision of ILRI's Fellowship Guidelines, follow up on Livestock and Fish work in Uganda, and more - but will stop here for today.

Cash transfers and more - an interesting debate is brewing

Over the past few months, there seems to be an avalanche of studies and debates discussing cash transfers to the poor as a new paradigm in aid financing. 

A recent (refreshingly well balanced) article in the Economist entitled Pennies from heaven  summarized the topic nicely in its sub-headline:  "Giving money directly to poor people works surprisingly well. But it cannot deal with the deeper causes of poverty".

It makes reference to some of the evidence around, which in a nutshell shows that unconditional cash transfers do work well in SOME circumstances.  The most cited case, GiveDirectly's work in Kenya (see here and here) is important for a number of reasons, not least bring the issue - supported by rigorous evaluation - to the forefront of the debate on what should be the minimal benchmark for financing development work - the so called "better value than cash" requirement that would be the onus of future development projects.

On the other hand, the conditions that enable it (including a good spatial proxy for intra-village poverty, high mobile money penetration, etc etc.) would not be easily found in most places.  More importantly, UCTs do not seem to succeed in generating great development outcome in every context (and frankly, we shouldn't expect them - or anything - to):  Despite Chris Blattman explicit mention in a recent post entitled Is it nuts to give money to the poor? not to quote him on it yet, I'll do just that: "One is a tough case: street youth and petty criminals in Monrovia. The early signs are that the cash ran through them (but don’t quote me yet, since I haven’t seen half the data). The other is a tough case too: a horserace between getting a factory job and getting a grant to start your own business, both compared to neither intervention. The early signs on cash transfers are not promising, but again, less than half the data are in. So maybe I, and GiveDirectly, will prove ourselves wrong."

The issue is of course more nuanced, as pointed out in the article, as well as many other commentary's  - notably Berk Ozler's posts on the matter (see a good summary here) - and we basically do not know enough (yet) about when Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCTs) would work at all, and work better than other interventions - such as Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs).   One of the best reviews of UCTs and CCTs so far is a Campbell Collaboration Systematic Review on the Relative Effectiveness of Conditional and Unconditional Cash Transfers for Schooling Outcomes in Developing Countries (link).  It main finding is that "... both CCTs and UCTs improve the odds of being enrolled in and attending school compared to no cash transfer program.  ...   programs that are explicitly conditional, monitor compliance and penalize non-compliance have substantively larger effects (60% improvement in odds of enrollment). Unlike enrollment and attendance, the effectiveness of cash transfer programs on improving test scores is small at best. More research is needed that looks at longer term outcomes such as test scores, as well as on evaluating UCTs more generally."    So, clearly, we are witnessing the early days of this debate - and what a potentially important one it is.  Chris Blattman believes it will remake the charity map in his lifetime.  Here's hoping.  As someone working for a (largish) organization in the periphery of the debate - the wonderful world of research on agriculture for development - where we are (still, for now) discussing funding cycles of 10-15 years within a "contribution instead of attribution" paradigm, I am fascinated by this debate's potential impact and am so happy to see it brewing up a storm. 

On a similar vein, and something to blog about in the future, is Development Impact Bonds.  The next big thing in this aid financing debate.  If you're curious, have a look at the (always excellent) Center for Global Development page on the topic (here) and this nice short blog post entitled Who Has First DIBs?