Steve Jobs

From his Stanford Commencement Speech - three lesson for life

1. You have to believe the dots will connect in the future

2. You got to find what you love...the only way to do great work is to love what you do...keep looking don't settle

3. Remembering you are going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of being afraid of what you do...death is life's change agent...Don't follow dogma, it is other people's thinking...don't live other people's lives...stay hungry, stay foolish

Rearranging chairs on the Titanic

Part of my job is to coordinate a UN agency's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Strategy. This is part of a UN wide initiative. At the annual meeting of all the Environmental Focal Points of the UN recently at FAO in Rome, I had the chance to share some ideas and hear what other UN organizations are doing to reduce emissions. The Greening the Blue website presents some of these.

Giving up business class

Here is a non official, voluntary idea - instead of the business class we are entitled to in the UN, we will forego the privilege to travel business and head to the back of the plane instead.

Like international chef David Chang, I really LOVE travelling business class but travelling business has around twice the carbon footprint than economy because of the extra space taken up in the plane.

Today, I will blog about the environmental case for going economy and why you shouldn’t worry too much about how much paper you print…

Why is climate change a serious issue?

On current projections, the Earth will be around 9C warmer in places by the end of the century. This means mass extinctions of species (50%+) are likely. For humans it also means billions of people living (and dying) in misery through destroyed agriculture, coastal flooding, lack of water, increased spread of tropical diseases.

The very scary thing though is feedback effects (already being observed) when increasing temperatures unleash further emissions of gases such the release of methane from the tundra of Siberia which further speeds up the warming effect and melts more tundra…(a vicious cycle).

So on current projections of economic growth, there is, as like to say, a nonnegliable risk of catastrophe….or put another way, it is possible that Plant Earth will not be somewhere worth living in the life of our children and grandchildren.

Why bother being a climate altruist?

Taking voluntary actions like flying less or taking the bus to work are seen as futile acts to many. Paul Krugman argues that climate altruism is pointless because you are simply freeing up space for someone to emit carbon. This is partially true and a strong argument for why we need carbon taxes to make markets work in favour of the environment not against it.

But change isn’t happening fast enough - bottom up initiatives are needed to signal to those in power that we will vote for them if they introduce strong green measures.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic

How do we know what is the best action to take to reduce emissions? Everyone is telling us what is best. Supermarkets label food for its carbon to reduce our shopping basket’s carbon footprint. At work we are reminded to reduce printing and turn off lights. But are these actions really that effective or do they just make us feel like we have done something useful?

Simple calculations reveal where we should concentrate our efforts where we work:

In one UN organization (fairly representative of many), emissions per staff member per year are coming from
Lighting an office - around 0.1t CO2 eq
Paper - around 0.2t CO2eq
Travel - one business class to South Africa from Europe equals 3.0t CO2 eq (the per staff average is 9t CO2eq from travel in many UN agencies)

If just one flight to Africa emits 50 times more carbon than a year’s worth of printing, doesn't it makes sense to think more about alternatives to flying than fretting about lights and paper?

Training on project design

Results orientated Project Design

This week I attended an in house training on project design. It was a big commitment of time but valuable for learning more on how to strengthen project design.
This type of exercise should help us to move towards stronger results based management and strengthening accountability in Aid for Trade delivery (see my July in house blog after the A4T Review).
Here are some snapshots of the discussions. It is far from exhaustive - just several “takeaways” that I found interesting.
Outcome and outputs
What is the difference?
There was an exercise to work out what the difference between outcomes or outputs. It became evident that there was a grey area (and thus confusion) between the two. The training was useful to clarify the difference.
The definition used initially in the training was:
Output: a deliverable from the project in terms of a product (e.g. a market guide) or a service (e.g. a training event)
Outcome: the effect of using the output (e.g. a company enjoys greater sales from having used the guide or attending a training event).
Confusion arose due partly to the definition used by the OECD in which the output is not just a deliverable but it “may also include changes resulting from the intervention”. Outcome is described as “the likely…effects of an intervention’s outputs”. There is strongly similarity between these two definitions making it more likely that we will interpret definitions differently.
Committing to outcomes entails risks
We learnt from Irene that one agency (GIZ) does not commit to outcomes – presumably as such a commitment think that means unacceptable levels of risk – an agency has considerably more control over achieving outputs than outcomes.
However, as someone pointed out, it is surprising that the German parliament accepts this. Generally speaking, the taxpayer is paying for outcomes (“poverty reduction “ educating women” “ protecting children from diseases”). Indeed, the MDGs are stated outcomes and the UN and donors are signed up to delivering these.
Agencies making commitments on outcomes (like the UN) have therefore to make a risk assessment of the linkage between outputs and outcomes and preparing the appropriate indicators and baselines for measuring if they have been achieved. Also:
• Sharing best practice and experience, publishing evaluation etc. ensuring feedback loops helps us to learn about these linkages.
• To what extent do linkages vary according to different economic, social and cultural contexts?
• Buy-in or co-financing to the project from national stakeholders can demonstrate that outputs lead to positive outcomes.
• Evaluations of cost effectiveness should measures the ratio between inputs and outcomes (not outputs).
• “the more specific (in defining the outcome and outputs) you are, the better you can manage a project”

Indicators
The value of my Friends and Links
An indicator is a factor that shows evidence of an outcome being achieved. (e.g. sales increase of an entrepreneur). We reviewed weak and strong indicators, again from project documents.
The IMDIS type indicators explain outputs but are not so useful indicators of outcomes. For example reporting on the number of workshops organized does not tell us anything about outcome (i.e. companies learning about market trends and changing their business strategy as a result).
Related indicators being used by projects like “Number of buyers contacted” also provide an incomplete picture. The number of buyers is not that informative. For example, when an agency takes companies to a trade fair, we want to know the quality of buyers’ enquiries (i.e. ones that lead to business) from buyers, not the number of enquiries. One high quality enquiry can be worth more in terms of sales or a long term partnership than 10 vague or low value enquiries.

Social networking indicators are analogous. Having lots of “Friends” on Facebook doesn’t tell me anything about the quality of those friends. Similarly, a job-seeking graduate would prefer to be to one influential executive than 10 low level employees.
Assessing risk
We reviewed risks and assumptions from project documents according to
• measures for the level of probability (of the assumption holding) and
• the likely impact on the project if the assumption doesn’t hold.
If you can apply a quantitative value (say from 1-4), multiplying the two gives a rating of risk, thus allowing Management to get a snapshot of risk. An appealing idea, but shouldn’t be a substitute for careful analysis of the risks and assumptions.
Re-planning
Logframes do not need to be written in stone.
They can be revised during implementation. If, for example, external factors changed (e.g. if market conditions change).
In the 90s changing the logframe was viewed negatively by evaluators. Now evaluators take the reverse opinion, that changes are welcome, shows that project is flexible and adaptive to changing conditions (e.g. in the market, socio-economic conditions). Do we have the scope for that, particularly with respect to what we have agreed with donors? Yes, if they are agreeing to outcomes – how we get there (the type of activities and outputs or the “road” we follow) should allow for flexibility. The mid-term evaluation is an opportunity to re-evaluate the planned outputs and even outcome.
Poorly designed projects can be approved for political, disbursement pressures. However, the organization will pay the price later (outcomes not achieved, financial problems etc)
A step too far? Applying logframes to family life
We heard from several participants anecdotes that logframes were being applied to personal lives, including:
• An assessment of whether it was a good idea to get married – risks and assumptions revolved around the fact the two were from very different cultures. His fiancée wasn’t impressed.
• Used for planning a family weekend
• Used for resolving a family conflict between in-laws (“Outcome”: harmony between in laws “Outputs” Built capacity of in-laws to show kindness and understanding etc etc?)

Other takeaways
“we must be in learning mode, not punishment“
“project management is a learnable skill”
“evaluation is mainly a learning exercise, not policing”
Having a scoring system based on a World Bank type checklist would be “instructive and bring transparency” to the review process.

Beekeeping project in Helmand

The US and UK armies are promoting beekeeping as an alternative to growing opium. The main challenges are
does the income generated compare well with opium production? maybe if combined with other crops
is there enough pollen in this desert area? yes as it draws on poppies and helps stimulate new planting of trees and crops
are the Taliban a threat? yes, the men turning up to be trained in beekeeping are potential targets for the Taliban as they are cooperating with the West. gives you an idea of how desperate people there are to find a way to earn a living

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XDzjgFlgrE&feature=player_embedded

Using the F word in a Swiss bank

Today I went to my bank in Geneva and they were playing Fxxx You by Lily Allen. Does this mean that the F word is ok to use in a bank? More likely is that Lily Allen has de powered it to such an extent that respectable places like Swiss banks are happy to play it out loud to accompany your request for an overdraft...

Impact evaluation in trade projects

The first chapter of Where to Spend the Next Million presented at the A4T Review and edited by World Bank staffers is an essential primer for those interested in Impact Evaluation in trade. Here is an overview of what the authors said.

Impact Evaluation (IE) is challenging to carry out in the trade context but A4T is not exempt from using IE methods. Trade exceptionalism – the notion that trade related interventions are inherently not amenable to IE – is…”groundless”.

The primary concern that the authors address is the attribution problem of project outcomes, i.e. to come up with workable methodologies that can show the impact of the project and what would have happened in the absence of the intervention.

This is a difficult exercise because many outside influences can confound the identification of a programme or policy’s impact. For instance, an export promotion scheme put in place in 2007 would see its positive impact confounded by the negative impact of the global crisis of 2008-9; a simple before-after comparison of outcomes is likely to suggest a negative impact of the programme.

How do you filter out these influences? We would want to know how beneficiary firms would have performed in the absence of the programme (presumably worse). For this we need a data set of firms that benefited from the programme (“the treatment group”) and non-beneficiaries (the control group).

Randomised control experiments (the “gold standard”) can be used when evaluation is built into the design of programs. However, the authors stress that we need not be wedded to RCTs. They discuss the use of Difference in Differences, a methodology that compares differences in outcomes instead of comparing levels. These have been applied for example by the IADB to assess the effectiveness of TPOs in six Latin American countries as well as their agricultural sector projects.

The picture that emerged from the IADB study (in Chapter 2 of the book by Christian Volpe Martincus, listed on the TPO Network) was that export promotion was effective in facilitating export expansion along the “extensive margin” i.e. resulting in greater diversity of exports and they were more useful for SMEs rather than large companies (who did not face such severe information asymmetry problems).

Also of interest is the reference to a study by Lederman on the performance of Export Promotion Agencies which showed through a survey of EPAs across 88 developed and developing countries that EPA services were very important for “overcoming foreign trade barriers and solving asymmetric information problems associated with exports of differentiated goods…” and that there were strong diminishing returns, suggesting “small is beautiful” as far as EPAs are concerned.

The study ends by advocating the “mainstreaming” of IE into trade projects.

“Trade interventions have so far escaped the rising tide of evaluation methods and there is no justification for trade exceptionalism”

The key barriers to progress are not conceptual. Rather they concern incentive issues, as IEs are costly, burdensome, lengthy and not necessarily aligned with project managers’ incentives. In order to overcome these barriers, four avenues must be explored

1. The burden imposed on project managers should be relieved by making IE a separate exercise carried out by specialists, albeit in collaboration with project managers
2. Beneficiary governments must buy into the process
3. Costs should be reduced, for example through building local IE capacities
4. IE results should prioritize learning over monitoring

“Care is needed in the interpretation of IE results because premature conclusions could easily provoke backlash and because a considerable accumulation of evidence is needed to yield truly valuable new knowledge”

Evaluation and counter bureaucracy

Following the thread from my blog Monday….

World Bank evaluation expert Aaditya Mattoo warned the Aid for Trade meeting against the tyranny of measurement in evaluation. That we should not avoid programme evaluation simply because we can not perfectly measure the impact of activities.

Former USAID chief Andrew Natsios draws a similar conclusion in his much quoted paper ‘The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development’ and highlighted today from Oxfam blogger Duncan Green.

Natsios refers to the tension in the development world between the compliance side of aid programs (the counter bureaucracy) and the technical program side and that this “imbalance threatens program integrity”.

He continues that the “counter bureaucracy ignores a central principle of development theory—that those development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those programs that are most transformational are the least measurable.”

What makes this report fun to read is not just the lively debate in the main document but the inclusion at the beginning of an ironic memo from the Duke of Wellington complaining about England’s own version of the counter bureaucracy during the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

“Gentlemen,

Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by His Majesty’s ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters.

We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.

Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:

1.) To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or, perchance…
2.) To see to it the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.
Your most obedient servant,
Wellington”

Natsios summarizes the problem with the current compliance system as:

• Excessive focus on compliance requirements to the exclusion of other work, such as program implementation, with enormous opportunity costs
• Perverse incentives against program innovation, risk taking, and funding for new partners and approaches to development
• The Obsessive Measurement Disorder for judging programs that limits funding for the most transformational development sectors
• The focus on the short term over the long term
• The subtle but insidious redefinition of development to de-emphasize good development practice, policy reform, institution building, and sustainability.

Natsios ends, “Let me conclude with one simple question asked in a different form by the Duke of Wellington. Do Washington policy makers wish USAID, PEPFAR, and the MCC to implement serious development programs or comply with the demands of the Regulatory Lords of Washington? They cannot do both.”