Scale up begins!
October 2006
Executive Summary
Since our May meeting, The Hunger Project has launched its most ambitious initiative to date – a first-ever demonstration in Africa that our integrated, bottom-up, gender-focused strategies can be taken to scale. With a $5 million challenge grant from the Robertson Foundation, we have begun our demonstration of scale-up in the Eastern Region of Ghana.
Scale-up has ramifications far beyond the Eastern Region of Ghana. It requires new organizational capabilities in program, fundraising and financial management, new levels of professionalism, and new expressions of leadership. This report will highlight some of the steps we are already taking, and will set the stage for our Board discussion on October 22.
The Eastern Region Scale-up Demonstration
Experts agree, and the report of the UN Millennium Project underscored, that the next great challenge is not merely to demonstrate isolated project success, but to demonstrate that successful strategies can be taken to full national scale.
This is very important if we intend to impact policy makers, and alter the effectiveness with which billions of dollars of official development resources are used. Our experience has been that while policy makers are favorably impressed when they see our strategies, our effectiveness is based on a framework of thinking so foreign to the conventional top-down, service-delivery model that our work does not register as a viable alternative for national policy.
We intend that our demonstration will achieve policy impact through a five-prong strategy:
- We will demonstrate, in the Eastern Region of Ghana, that our epicenter strategy can be scaled up at a rate consistent with establishing over 10 years an epicenter within a day’s walk (10 km) of everyone who needs it. We estimate that this will require 112 epicenters, or roughly one per each 10,000 rural residents, at a total cost of $40 million over 10 years. The Robertson Foundation – through their first-ever international grant – has powerfully started this process with a $5 million grant over 5 years, part of which is a challenge to raise the next $4 million.
- We will ensure that a state-of-the art, irrefutable independent evaluation is carried out. The Robertson Foundation has also allocated $1 million over the next 10 years to carry out this evaluation, and is making arrangements with the Institute for Social Science and Economic Research (ISSER) in Ghana, and with experts from Yale and Berkeley to carry out the evaluation in the Eastern Region. The evaluation will meet the “gold standard” for such studies, by randomized selection of the first wave of communities to be invited to participate in the epicenter process, with the others serving as the “control groups.” The study will track local progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, and statistically demonstrate the difference in progress between epicenter villages and “control” villages.
- In addition, we are committed to strengthen all other epicenters through a “Best Practices” initiative. We will identify the most effective innovations from our epicenters across Africa, and mobilize the leadership and resources to make those best practices available at all our epicenters. This is important not only for the empowerment and well-being of every community we mobilize, but also to ensure that when policy makers visit our epicenters in any country, they will see an excellent demonstration of all aspects of the methodology.
- We have systematized our methodology through improved communications. This will enable our program and fundraising staff and our investor constituency to better understand and effectively convey how this methodology works. People will understand step by step, through four clearly articulated phases, how the epicenter strategy achieves self-reliance in five years. This communication not only describes the specific activities of the people in the epicenter communities, but also who they become through each phase of the process.
- As these elements take hold, we will also need to create a strategy for stronger influence and partnership with government. Already, partnership with district-level government is an integral part of the epicenter strategy, but our ultimate goal will be to have national and international agencies allocate the human and financial resources necessary to implement integrated, bottom-up, gender-focused strategies to full national scale.
Greatly increasing our effectiveness with foundation fundraising will play an extremely important role in bridging the gap between our current scale of action and full-scale implementation by national governments. This is an area where the members of the Board can make important contributions through their experience and contacts, and we will discuss this in detail during the meeting.
Outreach for funding and influence
As you know, one reason we held our last Board meeting in Europe was to work with our European colleagues to expand our network of relationships with government agencies, NGOs and foundations. This resulted in my participation in meetings with agencies in the Netherlands and Switzerland, where I also participated in the UBS Philanthropy Forum, and meetings attended by Drs Coonrod and Tadesse. Subsequently, our country directors from both India and Bangladesh have addressed agencies and foundations in Europe, meetings have been held in Africa, and a range of proposals have been presented which are still under consideration. It is clear from these meetings that this will require a rigorous and sustained effort over time to establish the institutional partnerships that will be required for scale-up.
During this period, I have also continued to serve on the board for the Yara Prize for a Green Revolution in Africa. Our participation there has been to emphasize the point made by the UN Secretary General in 2003 – that a Green Revolution in Africa will only succeed if it is a Gender Revolution. I’m pleased that this year the Yara Prize was awarded to two African women, including our 1998 Africa Prize Laureate Celina Cossa.
Refining our strategy in India
The same elements of the scale-up strategy – expansion / evaluation / best practices and clear communications – will be applied to all of our programs. Our primary achievements in these scale-up distinctions in India during this period include:
- Best practices: Within our overall strategy to empower elected women panchayat leaders as key change agents for the end of hunger, different states have pioneered different interventions beyond the Women’s Leadership Workshop, including empowering panchayats to create systematic action plans for meeting basic needs known in India as “micro plans”, formation of women into federations for mutual empowerment and advocacy, and an advanced leadership training program called the “Aagaz Academy.” A goal this year was to standardize this methodology across the states in an optimum way, and this has been achieved. Our leadership across India has identified which interventions are best implemented in each of the 5-years of a woman’s elected term, and this 5-year empowerment strategy will now be a framework used by all the states. After the first of the year, I will meet with senior Indian staff to further review – refine – and develop communications based on this framework.
- Evaluation: There are two aspects of the impact of our strategy in India: the transformation in the leadership and full participation of the elected women themselves, and the progress of their panchayats in meeting basic human needs. We are currently at the stage of tracking, evaluating and completing initial studies on the impact on women’s leadership, and we believe that the microplanning process – as it is established in all the panchayats with which we work – will provide the basis for systematically tracking progress in meeting basic needs.
- Influence: This year our Sarojini Naidu Prize for Best Reporting on Women and Panchayati Raj was hosted at the home of the Minister of Panchayati Raj. This represented a significant jump in the perceived level of official importance in India, and included participation by ambassadors from Switzerland and Norway whose governments are major funding partners of our program in India.
Strengthening Democracy in Bangladesh
The heart of our program in Bangladesh is to strengthen local democracy to be an effective vehicle through which people can meet their basic needs. Our demonstration of this continues to grow – we are now working directly with 493 clusters of villages with a total population of approximately 10 million people. We recently held our 1,000th animator training, and there are now more than 80,000 trained animators across the country.
This progress stands in stark contrast to the overall deterioration of the political climate in Bangladesh, particularly now in the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for early in 2007. The Hunger Project-Bangladesh is in the forefront of efforts pressing for reforms so that the elections can be clean, and that the criminalization of politics can be reversed. The Hunger Project was the catalyst for a national coalition – SHUJAN – which is pressing for reforms. In addition, we took the historic step of creating a website providing public access, in Bangla, to the complete national voter registration list for the first time. The voter list is a key element of the struggle for reform, as the government has recently added millions more names to the rolls – so many that, with their inclusion, voter registration would far exceed the total eligible population.
Milestones in Latin America
Each of our program countries in Latin America have achieved significant milestones recently.
In Mexico, in Zacatecas, we have signed our first-ever agreement with a state government for The Hunger Project to train government staff to implement our bottom-up rural development strategy. In addition, we have further refined our own strategies to improve our impact in empowering indigenous women to achieve their highest priority, which is to establish officially-registered income-generating enterprises.
In Bolivia, our partner ACLO celebrated its 40th anniversary at the very moment when its long held vision of a new national constitution that secures the rights of the indigenous majority is becoming a reality. A delegation of Hunger Project staff and investors traveled to Bolivia to participate in the anniversary meetings, including the launch of a new 5-year strategy for ACLO.
In Peru, recent national elections brought to office several of the indigenous women who have been empowered through the work of our partner Chirapaq – including two members of Congress, ten local and provincial representatives and two regional leaders..
Expanding Fundraising
Mimi Evans, our new director of philanthropy, has included in this notebook her own report on our fundraising activities of the past six months. Bottom line – despite a disappointing slow down during the summer months, our fundraising for the year to date is well ahead of this time last year, and we have growing confidence that we can achieve this year’s ambitious fundraising target.
An important breakthrough in our high-level fundraising has been the commitment of five of our highest-level investors (including our fellow board member Steve Sherwood) to provide a challenge match of up to $500,000 for new commitments of 2006 money through the completion of our Africa Prize events this month, with the goal of generating a total of $1 million by Sunday October 22. Our highest current-year fall event fundraising to date is only 1/3 of this, so this will truly represent a breakthrough in our fundraising.
The Robertson Challenge Grant mentioned above is a profoundly important breakthrough for us – our first-ever multi-year, multi-million-dollar commitment, and we intend to build on this grant to significantly expand our foundation fundraising in the months ahead. To fulfill the conditions of the grant, we must raise $1 million per year in new matching funds for the Eastern Region scale-up. The first $500,000 of these matching funds must be received by the end of July 2007.
Strengthening the organizational capacity for scale-up
We have taken several steps to strengthen our organizational capabilities while maintaining and actually reducing our historically low overhead rates.
At our last board meeting, we announced the intention to launch a search for a full-time COO, to expand our organizational capacity to meet the challenges of scale-up. A task force including George Weiss of the Board, Charles Deull and members of the staff have worked with the leading nonprofit search firm, and have interviewed a range of candidates. If this process continues well, we hope for this person to be on board by the end of this year.
Our controller and acting CFO Lena Ariola has completed our first-ever consolidated audit across all program countries, and we are implementing consolidated financial reporting on a monthly basis.
We have filled new staff positions, and formed new task forces among existing staff, to strengthen our capabilities to work effectively with foundation proposals globally, and to coordinate and align priorities across the organization.
Our research internship program was expanded last year to support our growing policy influence activities, and has recently been strengthened with a legal intern in support of our policy reform work in Bangaldesh and a Washington DC liaison. Our interns are deeply grounded in the principles of The Hunger Project, and – as Hunger Project alumni – report that they bring this experience to their careers in international development.