Learn more at our website
twitter.com/PDTglobal:
Here at Building Markets, we have a tendency to put all our eggs in one basket. The eggs, in this case, are our donors. Supporting entrepreneurs with high impact services requires resources, and there are only so many donors who can foot the bill. We depend on these donors, and we are extremely grateful to them. But it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t make our monotonous pie look a little bit more like this one:
Large government donors – who happen to be our biggest funders – have all sorts of stipulations regarding the money they give nonprofit organizations like Building Markets. This includes everything from which indicators to collect data on to what percent of the funds can be spent on administration and fundraising costs. Sounds like a complaint is coming, but I assure you it’s not. Stipulations are necessary and are an important way to ensure that donors and their implementers are on the same page and making an impact. Standards are always important, even if some might be misguided or have adverse consequences.
However, having donors like these often means that our projects are less flexible, less efficient and less experimental. If a donor tells us we have funding for two years, then that’s all we’ve got, no matter what happens in country during those two years. Likewise, how are we going to know the best way to improve upon our projects if we can’t experiment?
With a variety of donors, some of whom won’t have strict requirements, we’ll be able to run experiments, improve our services, adapt to each country’s special needs and better vocalize our projects and their impact.
But of course, it’s easier said then done, and we’re hungry for more – which is where Global Giving comes in.
Global Giving can be instrumental in raising unrestricted money that will act as an extra cushion to enable us to experiment and improve our projects. Simply put: Global Giving can make us a better organization.
In order to have a permanent profile on Global Giving, we first must raise $4,000 from 50 unique donors during the month of September! That’s a lot of eggs, and we’re going to need help. So if you believe in what Building Markets is about: empowerment not handouts, entrepreneurs not helpless victims, investment not aid – and more importantly, you want us to get even better at it, then please consider donating to our Global Giving page. Help us weave ourselves another basket.
And today, all of your donations - which can be as little as $10 - are being boosted by 15%!
Mobile money has been trumpeted as a means to transform financial transactions in Haiti, where only about 10 percent of people use traditional banks but 85 percent of households have access to a mobile phone.
About a year after the earthquake, USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced plans to fund a mobile money initiative in Haiti that would allow customers to send and receive payments via cell phone. USAID contributed $5 million toward the project while the Gates Foundation donated $10 million. Both have hyped mobile money’s effect in Haiti, USAID using its blog to imply that the service could “transform” the country. Fast Company reported that it’s “taking off and allowing commerce to flourish.” Together, the country’s two major mobile operators recently surpassed the one millionth mobile money transaction.
But as the AP reported yesterday, mobile money in Haiti may be as much about hype—or at least potential—as substance:
As yet, though, few Haitians are buying the idea, which has become one of many post-quake projects to fall short of expectations and a reminder of how hard it is to change a society that has been repeatedly set back by political upheaval and natural disasters.
While there are nearly 800,000 registered mobile money users and more than 800 agent locations—places where customers can deposit or withdraw mobile funds—the AP reports that the services have only 22,000 regular users. The main reasons for slow uptake seem to lack of familiarity or fear of the unknown.
“I’m not going to invest my money in something I don’t see,” James Alexis, a 33-year-old truck driver in Port-au-Prince, told the AP.
Literacy rates can proxy for technological literacy, and in Haiti only about half of the adult population is literate. Unsurprisingly, more than 60 percent of early mobile money adopters had at least a secondary education.
The AP quotes Marteen Boute, former CEO of Digicel-Haiti, the country’s largest cell company, talking about obstacles to uptake:
“Our main lesson learned is how difficult it is to educate customers,” said Boute, who is now a senior adviser to the Jamaica-based company. “When we launched the service we assumed it would be something like selling a mobile phone, where you stick a mobile phone into someone’s hand and almost anyone can start using it quite quickly because it’s very easy to understand. With a mobile banking service or a mobile money service it’s not quite that easy.”
One of the first and most successful mobile money services, known as M-Pesa and also funded by the Gates Foundation, started in Kenya in 2007. Seventy-three percent of Kenyans use mobile money, which has eased transferring and storing of money for millions there. Yet in stark contrast to Haiti, almost 90 percent of Kenyan adults are literate. And reporting on M-Pesa in 2010, The Economist noted a few of the disparate elements required for mobile money success: “the right technology, simple marketing, partnerships with banks, support from regulators.”
Still, there may be opportunities to foster adoption of the services in Haiti by marketing to companies, non-profits, and the government in lieu of individual mobile users. A recently announced conditional cash transfer program through which the Haitian Government will pay mothers who keep their children in school will use mobile money. World Vision and UNDP have both used the services to pay staff or to transfer funds to aid recipients.
If your employer or an aid program pays you with mobile money reliably and regularly for months, you might be more inclined to trust and adopt the service for personal transactions.
But at least for now, most Haitians have yet to be convinced to trade in their tangible cash for e-money.
Photo via flickr user Todd Huffman
A good reminder that what works in one place might not work (or might need serious adjustments) in another place.
For Haiti Rewired, I featured Build Change, an organization helping repair and retrofit Haitian homes. Here’s an excerpt:Using local techniques and materials, Build Change tweaks construction practices to make homes earthquake and hurricane resistant. The organization currently operates in three neighborhoods in and around Port-au-Prince, and aims to construct and retrofit about 1,500 new buildings by July. It has capacity to continue to do 1,500 additional structures every six months.
Once [founder Elizabeth] Hausler completed her PhD in civil engineering at U.C. Berkeley, she went to India on a Fulbright fellowship to study post-earthquake reconstruction and noticed two contrasting approaches: The first, led by the Indian government, provided grants to let homeowners rebuild for themselves, with a requirement that they adhere to a few simple building standards.
“And then you had the NGOs,” says Hausler, “some of whom were really supportive of this approach, but others who were doing it the old way—just coming in and building the same house for everyone and not really taking into consideration the homeowners’ preferences.”
The top-down approach led by outsiders fared much worse than the inclusive, bottom-up one that allowed homeowners to control their own reconstruction.
Read the entire thing here.
Photo by me for Haiti Rewired/Wired.com
Another great piece from Tate. Sound engineering! Excellent.
My latest piece for GOOD is up on their website: “What A Box of Sea Cucumbers Teaches Us About Foreign Aid.” It’s a feature that tries to weave together a story about a Haitian sea cucumber exporter, an NGO that’s working to get more aid money spent locally in places like Haiti instead of in places like Washington D.C., and USAID’s reform agenda that’s largely aimed at spending more money locally. Here’s an excerpt:
[Ernst] Charles, a Haitian-American who grew up in Boston, moved to Haiti in 2005 to build cell phone towers for a telecom company. Once he finished his two-year contract, he decided to stay in his parents’ native country and start Sonac Agricole, a lobster exporting business. He later branched out into cocoa bean exports, and, eventually, sea cucumbers.
He credits Building Markets, an organization that connects local businesses to regional and global supply chains, with much of his export success. The NGO’s database of verified Haitian businesses gave Sonac Agricole essential credibility with Hong Kong importers.
But Charles’ business is an outlier—most of Building Markets’ (formerly known as Peace Dividend Trust) work involves helping Haitian firms apply for contracts from organizations like USAID and the United Nations.
In Haiti, USAID awarded only 0.02 percent of contracts for fiscal years 2010 and 2011 to local firms, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. By contrast, nearly 80 percent of such contracts went to government contractors in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland. Chemonics and Development Alternatives, Inc., two of USAID’s top six vendors for fiscal year 2011, combined to receive more than $1 billion of the Agency’s $15 billion in global program funding for the year.
Read the entire piece here, which provides more detail about why Asians are so into sea cucumbers.
There were a few things I didn’t have space to delve into in the piece, like recent opposition to USAID’s proposed reforms by some American contractors and large NGOs.
Merci beaucoup, Tate! Y’all should check out the piece, and check out Tate’s other work as well.
A fantastic post from CGDev on where all that money donors gave to Haiti ended up. Spoiler alert: we don’t really know where most of it ended up, but only 0.02% of USAID money went to Haitian firms and businesses.
(Want to fix that? Want to know why it’s important to fix that? Talk to us, or watch our video.)
(Source: buildingmarkets.org, via professorbutterscotch)
AJE The Stream presents - #African aid: helpful or hazardous?
Does foreign aid to Africa do more harm than good?
Here’s some more TMS Ruge for you - great questions and thoughts on on The Stream.
Given the discussions in the video, what do you guys think?
If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.
What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony’s indictment is more equitable civil society, more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice.
Teju Cole has some really interesting points that we’ve seen multiple times in aid, development, and charity efforts.
Great video by PDT Global on aid ineffectiveness.
Look, it’s us! Thanks for sharing, K :)
Britian’s Conservative government is taking a “tough love” approach to foreign aid, threatening to withhold millions of dollars to countries that persecute gays and lesbians. The southern African nation of Malawi has already had its payments sliced by about $30 million, after it sentenced a gay couple to 14 months of hard labor for holding an engagement party. Fellow “anti-gay” countries Uganda and Ghana could lose millions, too. “I want Britain to be a global beacon for reform,” says Prime Minister David Cameron. Is this a good use of foreign aid?
An interesting question. There are those among us who believe that aid should never be used for political purposes, but there are definitely those who believe we should protect and promote human rights using whatever means possible. Anyone else got a perspective to share?
(via pol102)
