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What’s your theory of a solution to community identified need?
March 2010 Newsletter
Online Learning

Developing a theory of how we plan to address the problems discovered last month with the Ten Seed Technique.
Last month, we prioritized a set of community identified problems. Now is your opportunity to develop a theory of how to solve these problems, and to begin exploring specific activities that will fulfill your theory through discussions with colleagues, through your own experience, and through Internet searches.

Sample of prioritized needs that online students have uncovered within their communities:
Income generation, clean water, access to education, poor sanitation, gender equality, migration, lack of vocational skills, chronic diarrhea and malnutrition in small children, lack of roads to villages, marginalization, shelter, food shortages, illiteracy, environmental degradation, drought, lack of irrigation for agriculture, community revitalization, adapting to climate change and overpopulation.

A theory is just that. In the development world it’s called a theory of change; it’s your theory of what changes in behavior or changes in infrastructure will need to be realized to solve a problem. Your theory of change will include the interventions/activities that you are proposing will address problem.

Here is a well developed Problem Statement:

[Problems and underlying causes] (1) Children from 100 families in four Guatemalan villages are frequently ill with chronic diarrhea caused by little knowledge of health and hygiene, and (2) chronically undernourished caused by little knowledge of nutrition, and a shortage of food reserves which contribute to [Negative Impacts] (a) stunting (reduced physical and mental development) and a reduction of their ability to participate in (b) family/community activities and (c) attend and concentrate in school.

Here are some clues to get you off to a good start
1. The simpler your problem statement is the easier it will be to develop a theory of change.
2. The more information that you can find about project interventions that have shown evidence of having worked to solve your problem the greater the likelihood that:

a. your theory of change will be a good one
b. our project will have long-term impact

Investigating if there is a scientific basis that our proposed theory and activities have worked on other projects.
Suppose that you are a mother whose children are suffering, and an unknown organization came to you with a plan to help your children. Wouldn’t you want that plan to work?

Suppose that you are a donor hoping that your donations will fulfill some need. Wouldn’t you want your donations to have an impact?

Suppose that you were a local NGO hoping to improve the lives of your people. Wouldn’t you want to be successful?

Today it is acknowledged that development programs haven’t kept up with increasing need. One of the very simple reasons is that organizations are copying what other organizations are doing without stopping to check if their programs are working and having any lasting impact.

There is an extraordinarily simple solution to this and that is to do a bit of research to see if any scientific studies have been done about the effectiveness of your proposed activities. For those of us who are human beings, this can be quite challenging. We think something will work, we fall in love with the idea, we become obsessed with the idea, and we won’t let go of it.

But what if 100 other organizations have tried the idea, evaluators have evaluated the outcomes, and unfortunately came to the conclusion that the intervention/activity did not address the problem?

So, at this early stage, before you fall in love with your idea, you have the opportunity to research whether there is a basis in scientific evidence that it works.

Both universities and forward thinking organizations monitor projects in an effort to determine if they are achieving their desired impact. The results of many of those studies are available online.

So take your three favorite activities, and search the Internet to see if scientists have found evidence that our chosen activities work to solve the problem statement that we prepared.

What is a scientific, peer-reviewed, document?
A cornerstone idea behind science is that investigators don’t let their personal thoughts, feelings and needs become muddled with the results of their investigation. One of the techniques for ensuring that is to share a draft of their study with their scientific peers. If their peers feel that a scientist has not kept an arm’s length distance in their analysis, they will recommend corrections. This becomes known as a peer-reviewed study. It is these studies that we’re looking for.

Let’s go to Google Scholar. With a good collection of keywords, Google is tremendously powerful and can lead you to many papers that are freely downloadable online. Make sure that they’re from a reputable university or research institute.

These documents will give you an abstract or executive summary that will tell you in one paragraph the results of the study. The body of the study will give you the information on why the activity did or did not work and under what circumstances.

Next month we will see how to organize this information into a simple project outline and a goal statement. They outline will lead naturally into a Logic Framework in preparation for a presentation to a donor.

Sincerely,

Tim Magee

Giving Communities their Voice
February 2010 Newsletter

The first weekly project in our online course on designing and funding sustainable projects ,“From the Ground Up” was so successful that I wanted to share the technique we used for a community needs assessment in this newsletter: The Ten Seed Technique.

Successful Launch of Online Learning
The course caught me by surprise. So many people contacted us that we needed to cap enrollment. 50 people from 31 different countries are taking the course which is being delivered in both English and in Spanish. Enough people missed enrollment that we are offering the course again beginning March 2. Thanks to generous donors we were able to award 7 scholarships.

There are two very exciting aspects of the course.
One is that participants are using the course to design real projects with real communities on the ground. The second is the cross-hemisphere partnerships between participants. We have people living in big cities (without access to communities) in Australia, Spain, Canada, the US, Brazil, and Panama, partnering on projects with on-the-ground field staff (with access to communities) in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Kenya, Columbia, Peru, and Venezuela.

Course participants include postgraduate students, staff from large INGOs, staff from small in-country NGOs, people considering career changes, and African business owners with a social conscience.

The importance of developing a community-based needs assessment
Have you ever been to a village and seen the remnants of a development project that has been abandoned? Sometimes this is due to well-meaning NGOs initiating a project that the community never had a sense of ownership in. Consequently, it is important to make sure that a community has ownership so that they will maintain the project long after the NGO is gone – and one of the best ways to do this is to ask the community what they need.

Here are some reasons why
1. Community members may have a greater depth of knowledge about their problems than we do, and so will be better able to identify important and underlying causes for the challenges they face.
2. If they are engaged in the process of needs identification, and feel their voices have been heard, then they will have a sense of ownership; this leads to long-term project sustainability. Ownership can be thought of as the community’s demand for the products and services that your organization will provide.
3. Working with the community to address their needs will develop trust on their part in working with your organization in future projects or activities.

How to get started with the process
One needs to begin by developing rapport with a community; a good approach is an initial meeting with village leaders or village elders and asking their help in gaining access to community members. Training and Services

Communities are very diverse so we need to be sure we are working with a representative example of members. It is also important that individuals feel safe in voicing their thoughts and feelings. This may mean holding separate meetings for men and for women or for teenagers and for their parents.

The Ten Seed Technique: A Quick Overview
There are several simple techniques for facilitating a participatory needs assessments, but my favorite is called the Ten Seed Technique developed by Ravi Jayakaran of World Vision China.

Gather together small groups of between 10 and 20 people. To start off a discussion for a community-wide needs assessment, ask the group to imagine all the problems and needs that are faced by the community as a whole. Active participation can be enabled by encouraging all of the members of the group to voice their concerns.

Each individual community need, as it is identified by a community member, is drawn graphically on a sheet of paper. Draw simple pictures. For example, if housing is a problem, draw a child’s illustration of a house. The technique is a very visual one that allows the literate and illiterate to participate as equal partners and contribute meaningfully to the discussion.

When the group is done voicing their concerns, each workshop participant is given 10 seeds as voting tokens to be used in prioritizing the needs with a 10-Seed vote. Villagers vote in privacy and place seeds on the illustrations of the identified needs they feel are the most important. They are free to spread their seeds across several needs – or to place all 10 on a single need that is most important to them.

Once all of the individuals have voted, the participants are asked to discuss the results. The collective tokens will show a prioritization of the needs identified by the community — by which needs have the greatest number of seeds.

As students in our Online Course finished this first assignment I began receiving photographs of the voting process from all over the world—and the lists of priorities that their communities developed. I’ve posted a Ten Seed How-To Card with photos that you can download.

From needs assessments sent to me by course members, I was able to see that there are many common problems worldwide including:

income generation, clean water, access to education, poor sanitation, gender equality, migration, lack of vocational skills, chronic diarrhea and malnutrition in small children, lack of roads to villages, marginalization, shelter, food shortages, illiteracy, environmental degradation, drought, lack of irrigation for agriculture, and overpopulation.

It is with a community’s prioritized list that you can begin designing a sustainable, impact-oriented project. And that is the topic of the March newsletter. See you then.

Sincerely,

Tim Magee