Hack:
The MaFI-festo: changing the rules of the international development "game" to unleash the power of markets to end poverty

The uber-high level meeting on aid-effectiveness wrote on the development industry’s report card: “Has made scant progress since last Parents’ Evening. Neat and tidy, good at making mediocre work look better than it is. Moderate effort that doesn’t really translate into achievement.”

At the worst of times the development industry is a perfect case example of how to utterly kill innovation.

The development industry convinces everyone that it’s got it figured: it knows how to get results. We have to otherwise the gravy train dries up. We get very good at placing the goal posts of our performance so that we look successful. The gravy train encourages us to do so and it kills our incentives to acknowledge the limitations of our approaches, experiment and learn from success and failure. Sometimes we even get confused by our own simplifications, by the smoke screens and mirrors that we ourselves put up. We don’t recognise the complexity of the contexts we work in, the need to learn as we go, to manage adaptively, and improve iteratively. We neglect the need to collaborate to broaden our perspectives, to build something that is more than the sum of its parts. We also under-estimate the need to deploy the best and the brightest and to invest in their skills and competencies. While the academics' vantage points allow them to see our failings, their distance from what's really going on makes their advice too coarse-grained to be of much use.

It’s not always like this. Far from it. But in my experience the picture I paint above is the rule, and MaFI and the MaFI-festo are an exception. MaFI members are breaking the rules of the game. The purpose of the MaFI-festo is to change the rules of the game. When the issue at stake is the well-being of the world and everyone in it, today and for generations to come, how can this not be the most important management innovation?

As Alexis notes in his comment, international aid has been criticized from all corners regarding its ineffectiveness to spark innovation and subsequently growth and development in developing countries. Many debates have been held on how aid can be made more effective. The high level meetings in Rome, Paris, Accra and now Busan are important in this regard, but - as said - very high level and with only a limited effect on the ground.

With the MaFI-festo, a group of development practitioners have taken up the challenge and developed an initiative to complement the aid effectiveness with a push from the implementation level, with a reality check from the field. The result is a discussion paper that shows the way forward towards more equitable and inclusive growth and development.

As Alexis notes in his comment, international aid has been criticized from all corners regarding its ineffectiveness to spark innovation and subsequently growth and development in developing countries. Many debates have been held on how aid can be made more effective. The high level meetings in Rome, Paris, Accra and now Busan are important in this regard, but - as said - very high level and with only a limited effect on the ground.

With the MaFI-festo, a group of development practitioners have taken up the challenge and developed an initiative to complement the aid effectiveness with a push from the implementation level, with a reality check from the field. The result is a discussion paper that shows the way forward towards more equitable and inclusive growth and development.

Tacit knowledge and the social dimension to knowledge are much too often overlooked in the aid industry. I believe we must strive to create strategies that are fully grounded in local knowledge, which is one of the key strengths of effective local actors, due to their proximity to the grassroots, deep contextual knowledge, community embeddedness, resourcefulness, flexibility, language and cultural capacities, and the ability to operate in a responsive manner to local needs, are those that NGOs and donors often lack. Hence, the inter-dependence between community-based organizations and international organizations should be acknowledged.

The “expertise infusion” development model is indeed being transformed before our eyes. We can no longer be sectorally-focused. We cannot look for accountability only on paper. This requires the time and skill to see what is living in markets, organizations and communities that is authentic, that has potential, accompanied by a deep respect for what is local and indigenous. This also requires a subtlety of practice to give thoughtful and careful support where it is needed, which is indeed difficult within the project cycles that currently dictate our day-to-day work in the aid industry.

The aid agency of the future focuses on building its own skills to accompany and support local change makers, community leaders, and grassroots initiatives, rather than overpower or co-opt them. The aid agency of the future is able to restructure and revise their accountability requirements to focus on the minimum structure and financial controls necessary, rather than asking local implementing "partners" to change. The aid agency of the future is lowering the “glass ceiling” for local groups to participate in decision-making about aid resources, is bucking the paradigm of development without local sovereignty, and is demonstrably serious about downward accountability.

A very similar initiative to yours in the global health sector is MIDEGO, Inc.: http://www.midego.com/ They have a mentorship model for health professionals, also with a focus on M&E, that may be of interest and offer ideas about how to operationalize the manifesto.