MAY 2006 - REPORT TO THE GLOBAL BOARD

Scaling Up – The Next Great Challenge in Ending Hunger

By Joan Holmes, President of The Hunger Project

Overview

This is a tremendously important time in the history of The Hunger Project – a time at which The Hunger Project has committed itself to begin the process of scaling up our successful people-centered strategy. In this report, I want to provide the Directors with the background to this commitment, a clear understanding of the first steps we intend to take, and an understanding of the implications of scaling-up for the entire organization.

Background to this commitment

In the late 1980s, The Hunger Project recognized that the traditional, top-down model of development is too ineffective to make a significant dent in rural poverty. In 1990, we began pioneering an alternative approach – a bottom-up approach that empowers people to meet their basic needs sustainably.

In Africa - where people lack the most basic infrastructure – we developed the “epicenter” strategy to empower clusters of rural villages to work together to meet their basic needs through their own self-reliant efforts.

The epicenter strategy addresses the root causes that hold people back – resignation, dependency and severe gender discrimination – and calls forth responsibility, self-reliance and gender equality. The strategy has proven to be effective in 1,000 villages in eight African countries.

Although the response by governments and international agencies has been uniformly positive, this has not resulted in the adoption of this approach by governments. It is our hypothesis that, to date, the strategy has not been implemented at a large enough scale to make the effectiveness and affordability of this approach inescapable to policy makers.

Most development experts would now agree that the next big challenge in ending hunger and poverty in Africa is to take successful interventions to scale. This point was underscored in the strategy documents issued last year by the UN Millennium Project.

The Hunger Project is an unconventional, catalytic, strategic organization that is designed to pioneer strategies to meet each new challenge as it is revealed. We’ve chosen to take on the challenge of proving that scale-up is possible in Africa, and that bottom-up, gender-focused development represents a viable and affordable solution for all of Africa.

I was privileged to declare The Hunger Project’s commitment to begin scaling-up the epicenter strategy at the September 2005 inaugural meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.

What we are committed to do.

To prove that scale-up is possible in Africa, The Hunger Project is going to begin in one region of one of our countries, namely Ghana. We have chosen Ghana because:

• The country has a strong tradition of decentralized democratic governance, and we enjoy good cooperation with the government.
• Our leadership there is strong, and we already have more epicenter communities mobilized in Ghana than any other country.

What we mean when we say “scale up” is two fold:

• In the Eastern Region of Ghana, we will begin mobilizing people to build epicenters at a rate that will ensure an epicenter within 10km (a day’s walk) for every rural family – this is roughly 1 epicenter for each 10,000 people. We will work with the people of these epicenters to ensure that the epicenter programs are financially self-reliant within three years after construction is complete.
• In our existing epicenters (both in Ghana and our 7 other countries, we will increase our level of investment so that all key programs are functioning optimally, and that these – too – achieve self-reliance.

What we will need in the organization

I’ve now been standing squarely in this commitment for six months and I can report that everything looks quite different from this perspective. There are a number of steps we can immediately see that we need to take as an organization.

1.   We need to scale up fundraising, both from private sources and from progressive bilateral sources such as many of the European government agencies.

2.   I need to devote more of my energy to influencing decision makers in governments and development funding agencies.

3.   We need to delineate step-by-step the process of people’s mobilization, and the specific outcomes of each activity so that it can be communicated clearly and convincingly to sophisticated audiences, who can then adopt and replicate our methodology.

4.   We need to put in place a system of independent impact assessment studies of our programs, sufficient to convince large-scale funding agencies to invest in our approach.

5.   We need to strengthen our existing programs by ensuring that the complete set of interventions we’ve developed are implemented consistently worldwide.

We have taken the first steps in all these areas, which I’ll spell out in the following sections.

Scaling-up Fundraising

We have just completed the most successful first quarter in our fundraising ever, having raised more than $7 million in cash and reliable pledges worldwide for 2006 – 35% more than at this time last year, and a level that we did not reach last year until September.  In the US, we already have more high-level ($25,000+) investors, with more money pledged, than we had in all of last year.

While I have been privileged to take on the leadership of our fundraising since mid-2002, and have been successful in having us achieve a 64% increase in sustainable funding since that time, our future demanded that we hire a full-time Director of Philanthropy. I’m thrilled to report that our search was successful and, as of March 8, Mimi Evans is in this post.

Mimi bring a breadth and depth of successful experience in major gifts fundraising, having worked in organizations as diverse as the US Committee for UNICEF and Yale University. She is able to embrace and build on the strategic framework of fundraising that I established, and complement it with a great deal of the latest “science” of fundraising, such as advanced research techniques and new approaches to working with high-level prospects.

When I first met Mimi, I immediately knew that she had the capacity to be The Hunger Project. Her commitment to teamwork, to empowerment, to setting high goals and achieving them all convinced me that she could succeed here. When Mimi first took the stage in front of our most committed investors, staff and fundraising activists at our Vanguard of Leadership conference, she was immediately a member of the family.

Prospects for Institutional and Bilateral Funding

In addition to scaling up private funding, scaling up will require large investments from bilateral donors. During 2005, under the leadership of Tony Blair, European governments committed to significantly increase their funding for Africa.

We now have the beginnings of a track record of receiving and utilizing funds from European bilateral sources (from the Swiss and Norwegians in India and the Dutch in Malawi), and this is our most promising pathway for future funding. The Hunger Project leadership in Europe has many influential contacts, as well as growing success in fundraising. Our upcoming meetings are being held in Europe specifically as a next step in establishing larger-scale funding partnerships.

Influence in the International Community

As you know, my participation on the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force has led to an increasing number of opportunities for me to participate in influential gatherings, and I intend to direct an increasing amount of my time to this purpose. One example we discussed last fall is the Clinton Global Initiative, which is an ongoing opportunity. In January, I had the opportunity to give a keynote address at the Microsoft Women’s Conference, addressing 1,500 women immediately following an address by Bill Gates. I have now received further invitations, including speaking to the women of the Yara Corporation in Norway, where I also serve on the board of their foundation’s annual prize, and at the UBS Philanthropy Forum in Geneva. In addition, I will soon meet with leadership of the Swiss Development Corporation.

In order to free up my energies to do this while at the same time strengthening and scaling up the organization, we intend to hire a new, full-time Chief Operating Officer. John Coonrod has held this post along with many other accountabilities for our Asian and Latin America programs, communications and technology.

For us to succeed in scaling up, the new COO must be an expert in implementation – bringing new strength and consistency to our programs around the world. She or he must be able to lead and manage the organization. The COO must be able to locate and hire highly qualified people when the need arises and ensure that they embody the principles of The Hunger Project.

As you also know, Steve Rossi has completed his service as our CFO. During the interim period leading to hiring a full-time COO, our auditors have assured us that our controller Lena Ariola is able to fill the financial management aspects of the CFO position. The other major component of our CFO post was human resources, which are a much better fit to the new post of COO. Once our new COO is in place, we will review the situation.

Delineating our Epicenter Methodology Step-by-Step

An important milestone in the scale-up commitment was my trip to Ghana earlier this month. One of my central realizations from this trip is that we will only be able to scale-up our funding when we can do a far better job of communicating our epicenter strategy in terms of a specific sequence of action steps and the results achieved by each of these steps in improving the lives of the people in the rural communities.

For example, mobilizing and empowering people for self-reliant action is at the heart of our work – yet this process is not well understood in the international development community. We used the opportunity of being in Ghana to begin to delineate this process in highly specific terms.

Independent Impact Assessment

In addition to a more detailed communication of our methodology, we also need to invest in serious, professionally-conducted studies that assess our impact. In recent months, we have surveyed the field of impact assessment and established relationships with some of the leading practitioners in the field. Our initial assumption – that impact assessment is a highly developed field that we need to plug into – has proven to be false. The literature on the subject focuses on the lack of effective impact assessment.

We have launched a project to carry out an initial independent impact assessment in Ghana, and discover in the process how to do this up to the standard of excellence that is a hallmark of The Hunger Project.

Strengthening our programs

In addition to doing a better job of communicating our methodology and measuring its impact, scaling-up requires us to ensure that the best aspects of the methodology that we’ve developed are implemented consistently everywhere that we work. We have begun this process and I envision that this will be a key responsibility of our new COO – to work effectively with program leadership around the world to review where we stand with our own best practices.

Milestones of Accomplishment

As we look at what is needed for our first scale-up demonstration in Ghana, it’s important to recognize that all our programs continue to expand and succeed in 12 other developing countries. Details of these accomplishments are included in the reports which follow. Here I will highlight a few key milestones since our last meeting.

• In India – as the nation’s leading NGO committed to women in local democracy as the critical pathway to ending hunger and poverty, 2005 was the year we seized opportunities presented by a new central government more committed to this principle. At the request of the central government, The Hunger Project met with state governments and civil society to promote the importance of strengthening local democracy by building the capabilities of local representatives.
• In Bangladesh, our direct empowerment of local democracy expanded from 350 to 450 clusters of villages, and our two coalitions working for political reforms have grown dramatically in the run up to parliamentary elections that will take place at the end of 2006. The Hunger Project-Bangladesh is far ahead in measuring the impact of its work – be sure to look at the grid of results in their report.
• Across Africa, our integrated, bottom-up epicenter strategy has expanded to 79 epicenters and 113 sub-epicenters, providing 3 million people with new opportunities for better health, education, nutrition and income.
• In Ethiopia, 23 investors from 4 countries attended the formal inauguration of our first epicenter and began the process of mobilization in two more.
• For Mozambique, we secured 3-year commitments from underwriting investors, hired our country director and began work to mobilize the first two epicenters.
• In Mexico, we have expanded our new, decentralized, gender-focused strategy into Chiapas, the poorest state in the country.
• In Bolivia, we participated with 4 like-minded organizations across the country to greatly increase the participation of rural, indigenous people in the political process – contributing to the election of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, an individual who once served as a volunteer with ACLO, our Bolivian partner organization. President Morales has drawn down ACLO’s senior staff in forming his cabinet – a good problem to deal with!

Fundraising

As you will hear from the Audit and Finance Committee, 2005 was a solid year of financial growth. For many years we have held the vision of becoming a $10 million organization, and we surpassed that goal in 2005. We are well on our way to significant growth in our fundraising in 2006, and are poised to begin a whole new era of large-scale financial partnerships with governments, foundations and corporations.

While institutional money is critical, it will take some time before we have it. In addition, it may very well be for specific countries or programs. The importance of scaling-up our individual fundraising and investment cannot be overstated.

As has always been the case, our ability to take on each new challenge depends on the commitment, generosity and financial leadership of individuals.