The Devil in the Details

I am back from a week's vacation and fired up about this blog. First, permit me to gripe a little about NGOs. After that, I'll give you an update on the business plan that outlines the structure of a fund to support conservation activities in Cambodia.

I heart NGOs
How do you get NGOs to hire you as a consultant? Or how do you start doing meaningful work in an area already canvassed by lots of existing organizations? From the perspective of a private company interested in working on development issues, the NGO world can be a weird animal for the following reasons (warning--broad generalizations may follow):

1. It is hard to quantify impact (that is not to say it cannot be done). I've started to feel that NGOs, intentionally or not, use confusion techniques similar to retail supermarkets. Have you noticed that with all the limited-time discounts, super-saving coupons and special offers to card members, it can be very difficult to compare the price of one product, say cornflakes, from one supermarket to the next? Now take that to the next level -- with NGOs it can be next to impossible to compare product offerings! They have different approaches to working with communities, different training models, and so on and so forth.

2. People in the NGO world complain about the inefficiencies of government, yet when it comes to getting work done (using the right tools and people to look at a problem), the environment can become as political as trying to unseat a Raytheon or a Bechtel from its government contract. In a competition for funding, no one wants to rock the boat and let in an organization that could, god-forbid, do the work more efficiently.

It's about who you know, and about proposing something that doesn't undermine the way that the NGO is perceived by its funder. This can be tricky if you are trying to improve how the NGO operates and by extension its impact -- you can't be subcontracted for something the NGO has already promised its funder that it can do.

(side note: the last organization I worked for sometimes hilariously billed itself as a Government Organized Non-Governmental Organization -- work that out!)

3. There is no way to fund everything, but little attempt to define priorities in terms of their comparative costs, impacts and ease of implementation.

4. International NGOs can devise strategies for paying local beneficiaries according to incentive systems, but very rarely are equivalent incentive structures applied to payment of the NGOs that thought up those strategies.

5. NGOs (maybe with the exception of some well-run microfinance outfits) are ill-equipped to manage successful local sustainable development. First, it can be very difficult to raise the funding required for conservation/poverty eradication through such programs. Second, you can't pay/force people to be entrepreneurial. Third, many businesses fail.

Phew. I will stop at those five big ones. There is a lot I like about the NGO model, but also a lot I think can be improved. NGOs in my opinion should act more like for-profits in the way that for-profits are beholden to shareholders, and are accountable for operating results.

Whether or not it is required by funders, or whether funders have different requirements, NGOs should define for themselves the impacts that they want to engender through their work, where possible quantify those impacts and then measure themselves and their employees against those goals.

Business Planning for Conservation
So my boss is back from a prolonged trip to the US and we're starting to have more of the kind of conversations I like about the business plan (where we talk about nitty-gritty details, romanticize about how things should work, and generally organize stuff).

In collaboration with the Big International NGOs on the ground, CCIF has gained an understanding of the costs of funding conservation in the Cardamoms Protected Area Network, and has a bottom-up cost model, that when complete, should give the user flexibility in determining what the endowment will and won't support (costs can be scaled by function, by protected area, or by activity). The cost model, in theory, is based on management plans that were grounded in a multi-stakeholder consultative process conducted by the BINGOs. To give you a little background -- management plans are extensive documents that outline conservation objectives and address what activities need to be accomplished to ensure those objectives are met.

What we're trying to do in the business plan is to allow the model to tell a story: here is what is being done currently and how much it is costing everyone (baseline), here is the level of activity required to achieve a series of minimum conservation objectives and how much it would cost. The fund cannot cover the costs of all conservation in the area (I think I talked about this in an earlier blog), so within this scope, here is a list of priorities for the fund to cover and how much those priorities would cost. The cost of the 'priorities' scenario is the target capitalization. However, even this amount may be more than the funding that can be raised in the first years of the endowment.

Therefore, we need to show what can be achieved if the fund starts out with the amounts organizations have so far verbally committed (no handshakes) to funding and then ramps up to the targeted level of capitalization.

Easy, right? Just pull together some fancy text and graphs and you're done. In a way, I guess that's right. The text has to be persuasive and critical, but not biased or offensive and the numbers well-grounded; the visuals have to tell the story better than the text; and most importantly the document as a whole has to get other groups talking. I think it will take a number of drafts before CCIF is in a position to solicit feedback. Because we did not/could not begin work on the business plan until week six-seven of a ten week internship, it means I will likely have to leave the business plan in draft form.

Well, that's all for now. Next week is the last week of my internship (I can hardly believe it! I am beginning to have Bali-separation-anxiety). I will spend the majority of it in Phnom Penh with a colleague conducting interviews that will inform the business plan. See you then.