Overconsumption in rich countries and grinding poverty in much of the world are a threat to social stability and environmental sustainability. Britain’s Royal Society spent the past two years studying this, and their report (download the report here) is well worth a look.

Key recommendations include:

1. The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today.
2. The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels.
3. Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally.
4. Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues.

If you can’t face the full report, the BBC summary is nice!

Some of us working in aid are brand new to the country or community we are trying to serve. Some of us have grown up here our whole lives, but are new to the organization we work for or the donor who is funding our project. Some of us focus too much on what to report and not what is actually happening. Some of us lean towards routine and fear taking the risks to break the mold. Some of us don’t know how to find the funding for a brilliant idea. We are all missing pieces of the puzzle to crack the poverty nut. It’s hard. But even worse, our knowledge gaps and poor planning can damage communities we are trying to assist. Some aid projects are just bad ideas: misplaced, poorly planned, unscrupulous, even manipulative. Here are seven of the worst as identified by the Matador network – an “independent media network and nexus of travel culture worldwide”.

Well thank you Captain Obvious, but the interesting issue is what INGOs will do with the questions of: Whether to follow the poor into middle income countries, or follow Collier’s advice and stick to the Bottom Billion in the world’s poorest countries. Western donors appear more political in their donations to middle income countries (thanks Cap!) and donor publics more difficult to convince, but the moral imperative to work with the poor and marginalized demands a principled examination of this issue.

Konjan forsees a re-thinking of the idea of civil-society as we understand it, and a need to form alliances with domestic advocacy groups in emerging countries to work out a genuinely collaborative understanding of governance that does not feel like an imposed western model.

Take a look here.

http://philanthropy.com/article/A-Nobel-Victory-for/130037/

They are the poster child of Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia, along with UNDP. The idea is to take Sach’s theories of poverty traps (if you need to brush up on this stuff it’s all in ‘The End of Poverty’ by Sachs), and design a series of pilot interventions that demonstrate, empirically, that an integrated approach to rural development with consistent adequate funding over time can achieve the goal of lifting communities out of the poverty trap (and meet the Millennium Development Goals while we’re at it).

There are 13 of the sites, in 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, plus a bunch of similar type projects all over the place. They started as a five year project in 2006 and just got renewed for another five. So – where are we as far as empirical proof of poverty reduction is concerned? Well, it’s, erm, a mixed bag, and sort of depends on how you look at it…

ODI did one of the earliest reviews of it in 2008 (read the full pdf here) – a little early to really show impact on poverty reduction, they do claim crop productivity increases (although only alongside additional agriculture inputs, so there isn’t really a lot of income increase). There does seem to be some malaria reduction, and that’s good, although it’s not entirely clear how cost effective this public health program is compared to traditional ones, since the whole thing is a big integrated package.

ODI signs out with some rumblings about sustainability of gains and issues of scaling up, but they are basically optimistic. Not so the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities group, who claim that their Ekwendini project villages that use sustainable agricultural techniques and crop diversification achieve better agricultural gains with far less cost.

Fast forward to this week, when we get the first independent evaluation of the MVPs, by Kenyan economist Bernadette Wanjala of Tillburg University. She looked at 236 families in the project and 175 control families in the same districts (read more here). She was hoping to find that the MVP project (which spends the equivalent of 100% of local per capita income per year on each beneficiary) would be able to show some empirical increase in recipient income. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find any evidence for it.

How can that possibly be? Well, let’s dig in a little more. She did find a 70% increase in agricultural productivity, which did tend to increase agricultural income in those families (at a substantial input cost). The problem was that those families that spent more time farming seem to be spending less time doing other profitable activities, and their income in those other areas fell, canceling out benefits.

The MVP group claims that ‘incomes are rising’, and that the project is ‘enormously successful’, but unfortunately doesn’t publish their data on incomes.

So where does this leave us? The MVPs are a bold attempt to test theories of change on a village level, and five years on we’re still arguing about what the data mean. It’s encouraging to see donors and academics entering this field of research, and perhaps not surprising that the answer is “it’s complicated – we need more research”.

The Rapid Results methodology invites groups to take a complex project from identification to achieved goals in 60-120 days.  While the approach is applicable to diverse groups, the authors focus on the public sector since, despite plenty of capacity in government agencies, systemic barriers too often prevent their potential to become results.  They convincingly argue that the Rapid Results methodology can help create “energy, momentum and confidence” for agencies to tackle issues such as increasing use of family planning services that have been illusive or stalled, sometimes for years.

Rapid Results shares a number of similarities with the Community Mobilization approach used by organizations such as Mercy Corps, which gives localized groups a way to identify needs, then prioritize, plan, implement and maintain projects.  Both approaches aim to increase ownership, commitment and leverage local knowledge of what motivates people for change.  Some differences are that while community mobilization intends to be multi-staged in which community members work together to build process skills through increasingly complex projects, Rapid Results starts with an intentionally ambitious goal and manufactured timeframe that a designated leader is accountable for and is supported by coaches trained in the methodology.

An exciting potential application of Rapid Results is refocusing an agency or other group after a set-back in order to rebuild confidence and legitimacy with constituents.  There is more to learn, as the authors readily admit, about scaling-up and sustaining Rapid Results initiatives, but some cases of replication and policy integration are cited from Madagascar and Eritrea.  So, not a magic solution, but Rapid Results is another important approach to have in your program design and implementation toolbox.

Read more about the Rapid Results Institute at http://www.rapidresults.org.