Nuru International

A New Foundation Team; A New Perspective

Gabrielle Blocher — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:50:12 +0000

I am in Palo Alto this week and last to meet with Jake and the rest of the Senior Leadership Team and to work with FT8, the newest group of folks who are heading to Kenya to work at the project site. This group consists of all new people, which is a first for us (other than FT1 way back in 2008). Everyone is a new-hire heading to the field for the first time and becoming part of the larger Nuru team for the first time.

I think it is a great dynamic because almost all relationships are brand new ones (there is one married couple…so that one is not so new). The way the team shapes up and ends up working together will be organic and there will not be one or two members of the team to whom the rest of the members turn to figure out answers to questions about Nuru and its ropes.

Aerie and his team have been working on evolving the nature of the makeup of the teams, and I think that this one will be pretty great. There is a dedicated team leader and there are fellows for each of our current programs.

I need to get used to the fact that M&E is no longer the new kid on the block in the field, and has not been for a long time. A couple of years ago, I made the case for having someone from M&E on each foundation team, and it was frankly an easy sell. Since then, we have always hired someone or gotten a current team member to go on each rotation. Also since then, we have hired our wonderful Kenyan staff, which makes us unbelievably more productive in the field.

The M&E fellow on this next rotation will be Kelly Gannon. Kelly has already been working with Nuru for the last two months or so. She knows her way around our organization. She knows the things we are struggling with and the things we have under control, and later today Jamie and I will have a conversation with her about what we hope to be her main areas of focus when she does this 13-month rotation. Nuru overall, and the M&E program in particular, is in a very good position at this point to really improve upon our work.

We have gathered baseline data for all of the impact programs, and our contractors, Derek Yankoff and Troy Hickerson, are hard at work developing a database to house all of the baseline and impact data that we are gathering for all programs. We have nailed down some draft indicators for our new Leadership program, and we will put them to use in the field soon.

Today when Jamie and I meet with Kelly to discuss her goals, we’ll talk about what to do next. She will focus on continuing to develop our Kenyan staff and hire new people if necessary, She will also focus on continuing to gather data when necessary, but most importantly, she will be working on analyzing the data we already have with the field staff. She will play a very important role in a very transitional and growth-filled time for Nuru. We are so excited about this new team!

Posted from Palo Alto, California, United States.

Nuru Healthcare Mock Homevisits

Janine Brown — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:59:50 +0000

The past few weeks have been some busy ones with many discoveries and preparations for reinstating homevisits and scaling to two new divisions later this year.

I’ve been working hard with Matt Lee and Lindsay Cope to make the necessary changes and additions to our programs, which we will blog about in in more detail in our next entry. For now I would like to walk you through the recent vetting of our Field Officers.

Realizing gaps in the local leadership of our program has been a hard truth to swallow and subsequently unveil to Nuru as a whole. We recognize the potential implications of letting people go and shifting roles around, and are doing our best to be sensitive and creative with our solutions. We also know that if we don’t make these important changes our program will not be executed properly or be sustainable.

We currently have 11 Field Officers. Given that we are only planning to visit the families of our 450 active Nuru Farmers in Isibania Division, we only need 5-6 Field Officers in that division. Our goal is to maintain the highest standard for the communities we serve by filling these positions with the best officers from the team.

For the last month, we have been assessing our FOs on many different categories of performance, such as: program knowledge, health and behavior knowledge, interpersonal skills, counseling technique, feedback style, and organizational skills. A weighted rubric for all the activities in the vetting process was created, and we used it to grade and calculate scores for performance comparison. This was then used choose the 6 most qualified individuals, and the other five will be able to apply for other new positions in Nuru that might be a better fit.

Our staff celebrated the extended Easter weekend, and on Tuesday we resumed with the final formal process of vetting homevisit capabilities. We organized mock homevisits using the traditional house located on the grounds of the RTC, and asked 11 non-Healthcare Nuru employees to study homevisit scenarios and serve as a mock community member. Unaware of the scenario, each FO was given 1 hour to assess the home and tailor their communication to the individual situation.

Assessing a home involves observing and asking the appropriate questions in an effective way to identify what health problems their children are experiencing, what their current practices are, and where they stand on the ‘Stage of Change’ scale for particular behaviors.

As they assess the home, they are meant to tailor their health messages based on the household’s specific situation, taking into account barriers they face when considering adopting or maintaining good health behaviors. If one of our commodities, such as WaterGuard or mosquito nets, would enable the family to adopt the behavior the FO identifies is needed, then the Field Officer should also pitch the product accordingly.

For example, our Field Officer, James, visits Boke, whose 2-year-old, Rioba, is suffering from diarrhea. James should ask a series of questions to try and identify how serious the case is and what the next steps for treatment should entail. James should also try to identify the potential causes of diarrhea and counsel Boke on how to prevent it in the future. Hopefully, James would ask the right questions, and find that Boke always boils her water, but he sees that their drinking water is in an uncovered container that allows for recontamination after boiling. She might mention she ran out of soap last week and hasn’t had a chance to purchase a new bar for the handwashing station.

James would identify that Boke is practicing some of the steps for healthy behaviors that prevent diarrhea, but there are some gaps in her routine. Therefore, he may remind her of the potential for recontamination and suggest she use a lid for her container (which James sees she already owns). Then he might suggest she only use a specific cup to dip to keep the water as clean as possible. He has to be sensitive to incremental change, as to not overwhelm her on his first visits. Eventually, he could propose, she consider purchasing a container with a spigot. He would let her know he has soap to purchase at that time, and also give Boke his mobile number so if she is unable to make it to the market he can go to her.

He would congratulate her on the efforts she’s already taking to keep her children, husband and herself healthy, and assure her that maintaining good health will keep expenses down so she can save to qualify for the loan she mentioned she would like to take from Nuru to start her own shop.

Now snap back to the vetting process–

The Field Managers evaluated the Field Officers performance in the mock homevisit. Unfortunately, we found that most of the FOs were more driven by the commodity sale than by assessing the household to identify the current situation. They often began by introducing several commodities and telling the community member why the needed to use them.

We have a long way to go, but the good news is we are able to see who has the basic interpersonal skills to do the job. Also, we have been developing a participatory curriculum that will equip our Field Officers with the adequate practice and tools to guide this homevisit process more effectively. We have also found a dynamic candidate for a Training Manager whom we have extended an offer to.

The Training Manager will be fully devoted to further developing the initial curriculum for FOs, organizing and facilitating trainings, and creating refresher and new short courses based on needs and challenges faced in the field.

Next week we will welcome Advocate Creative, our media consultants, and Lindsay Cope, the Healthcare Senior Program Manager into the field. More news to come soon about our new Training Manager!

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

Introducing Elias of the Nuru WatSan Program

Matt Lee — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:50:07 +0000

I thought it would cool to share some more stories about the awesome staff that we are honored to work alongside here in Kenya. Today, I’d like to share the story of Elias, our program leader. I asked him how Nuru has changed his life, and here was his answer.

I was born in a poor family, the third child out of 11. I never dreamed that one day I would have the opportunities that Nuru has given me.

My life was full of problems, and my father died before I completed my education. People laughed that I would not be able to continue with my education. However, my mother struggled in difficulties so that I could finish school at a secondary level. Unfortunately, I did not stay with my mother for long after that, as she died of lung cancer. At that time, I had gotten married and my wife Mary had a child, Venant, who was one month old. I saw that the world was bigger and that I had no future in my life.

One day I was walking into town and I passed through Nyameteburo when I saw good shambas (farms) of maize. I wanted to know who had brought this good method of planting maize. I was told that there was a muzungu (westerner) called Nuru who had brought this method. I was also told that the muzungu was employing people to work in his organization. From that day what I went home, I dreamed that I would be employed by the muzungu so that my work would be to help my people live a better life.

Then one day, I heard that Nuru was hiring in my area. So, I rushed to the chief’s office to see if it was true. In fact, it was true, so I submitted an application. I was called for an interview, and three days later, on September 8^th2009 at 10pm, I received a message to come to the Nuru offices the next day. When I arrived, Chairman Philip Mohochi told me that I was to start working for the Water and Sanitation Program. Since then, Nuru has positively changed my life by equipping me with skills and knowledge. It is through Nuru that I, my family, and community now have enough food for our families. We have also learned behaviors that keep our families healthy such as using a mosquito net and boiling water, while the CED program has taught us to save our money in order to spend it wisely.

However, I am not fully happy with our progress because my community still has not all accepted to change. I will be happy when Nuru’s goal of ending extreme poverty will be achieved!

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

Updates from the Nuru Education International Team

Jessica Hansen — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 21:19:17 +0000

We have had a fantastic first term in the school year here in Isibania. We received a lot of praise and accolades from local school heads and the Education Ministry, but the praise that has meant the most has come from the students themselves. It is incredible to enter a classroom and have the children jump to their feet, clap and cheer. It is even more incredible that when a lesson ends, the children beg our team to stay, to read more, to teach them more. So many of these are children who truly love to learn, but are simply not afforded enough opportunity to do so, so when they see that opportunity come by, they show their appreciation and don’t take it for granted.

The students are now taking exams and we are working hard to use what we have learned through working with them over the past few months, identifying the key problem areas and the teaching techniques each group responds to best, so that we can deliver the best program possible after they return from their first short recess of the year. We are developing a comprehensive program manual which compiles our most effective lessons and teaching techniques. We are also developing new and innovative ways to monitor important details of each class’s progress. It is a really exciting time of development for our program!

Beyond all that, we are also gearing up for our first scale to a new area. Even though it is months away, we are already planning to expand our program to a new remote rural area called Mabera, which is in desperate need of quality education interventions. But before we are ready to scale to this new area, we are striving to perfect the incredible model we already have in place, as well as to adjust to major changes which have just been enacted in the Kenyan school year calendar . Previously, the school year in Kenya ran in a pretty steady cycle of three months of school followed by one month of break, which was then repeated twice more. Now, the Ministry has approved a proposal to have short breaks in April and August and then one substantial break in November and December each year. This changes our entire program schedule, but we are ready and excited to adapt our program to the changing times and needs of the students we serve.

In addition, we received a large and wonderful donation of books from the Kenyan National Library and Book Aid International, that has allowed us to continue to build our children’s library and has provided more excellent resources for us to use in our outreach program to schools. Only a week before we received the news, we were brainstorming and researching how to possibly acquire more books with limited time and funds to try to find them. It was a perfect case study in the idea of ‘ask and ye shall receive’, and the day the books arrived to our office, it was like Christmas all over again.

So, as you can tell, things with the Education team are in a great place and we anticipate more interesting and excellent development to update you on in the coming months. Just know that when the kids jump up and cheer, part of that cheering is dedicated to you, for all your interest and support in Nuru, in the Education program, and in supporting literacy development here in rural Kenya!

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

Nuru International Healthcare Commodities

Naruth Phadungchai — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:23:34 +0000

Commodities has two goals: to generate income for Nuru Kenya, and to support the work of the Health Program. The latter is more important than the former. The reason for this is the way in which our Health Program is structured, with the focus on teaching people to practice healthy behaviors. Commodities helps to make this happen by selling products that go hand-in-hand with the messaging.

For example, our Health team teaches people about the dangers of malaria and how to prevent getting infected. The team then sell mosquito nets. Similarly, our staff also teaches people about the dangers of water-borne diseases, then sell soaps and water purification products. By providing information, and then the products that will help people to become healthier, we believe that we can encourage and assist families to reduce incidences of illness, and even death.

This approach borrows from a methodology called variously as Targeted Health Communication, Tailored Health Communication, and Tailored Informational Intervention, all of which research has shown can be effective (though always) in helping people to change their health behaviors.

The products themselves are low-cost. Here is the list of some of the products, their uses, and unit prices (in US dollars) that we offer:

Soap Hand-washing $0.06

Moringa powder Nutritional supplement $0.90

WaterGuard Water purification $0.25

Mosquito net Malaria prevention $1.22

Sanitary pads Female hygiene $0.12

Our current sales strategy is to have Health and WatSan staff sell the products during their home-visits. This strategy aligns well with the objectives of these two programs. Financially, the strategy has a low operating cost, since salaries are already paid by the programs, and marketing is done via the health or water-sanitation messaging given by the sales teams.

These two financial factors are important, since Commodities is a low-volume, low-revenue business, particularly given that the rural population in the district where we work is about 70,000 people total. Although we are expanding annually to eventually cover the entire district, the fact remains that where we are the rural population size is relatively low compared to other parts of Kenya.

Finally, there has been some discussion about the future direction of Commodities – whether we should focus on selling only health and watsan-related products, or should we sell any type of household items that can generate more income for the organization. At the moment, we believe we should stick only to products that will aid our health and water-sanitation programs to reach their objectives.

That is all for this blog. In the next blog, I am thinking to talk more about the challenges of having a holistic social-enterprise, and what steps we are taking to try to reach financial sustainability. If you recall from the first blog, Nuru aims to eventually self-fund all its programs and other costs. That is not an easy thing to do.

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

Creating Organization Structure for Sustainable Program Implementation

Matt Lineal — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:08:21 +0000

Nuru International focuses on developing the key leadership skills and critical thinking capacity of its leaders to build organizational sustainability. The ability of Nuru Kenya to support and reinvent itself is fundamental to adapt and scale operations. The challenge is to remain consistent, true, and focused on the program goal in each area. For agriculture, this has recently meant changing the organizational structure to meet the demands of thousands of farmers, while keeping true to the goal of increasing their maize crop yields in a sustainable and scalable way.

Nuru staffs itself from the ground up to the top leadership with local Kenyan staff. International staff works to support Kenyan staff, with the emphasis on a gradual shift towards independence from international support. The end goal is a financially and organizationally sustainable and scalable NGO – Nuru Kenya. The vehicle driving towards this goal, in today’s example, is the leadership’s program lessons on roles and responsibilities.

The Agriculture Program staff, which I serve as counterpart, have taken full advantage of their recent leadership lessons to together create a plan to better serve farmers. We have worked together to draw out some problems and inefficiencies. We have created new roles within the program to better achieve the goal of increasing crop yields for extremely poor farmers. For example, when faced with an over-burdened upper leadership, the staff has suggested splitting up roles so that certain staff can focus on the field while others perform critical office and support functions. Together, local and international staff created a staff structure, as well as the particulars of roles and responsibilities for the new positions that we set forth.

This approach differs radically from other organizations. Many organizations have complex program models where highly educated, highly paid foreign staffers coordinate all the particulars of operations, leaving local staff to implement small and simple tasks. Other organizations attempt to impose a model upon local staff, which works well until a challenge arises and local staff has no authority or knowledge to adapt to that challenge. Still other programs are very simple and remain quite small with little aspiration to grow, and thus achieve some measure of sustainability without scalability.

Nuru has the aim of achieving both sustainability and scalability, which are often incongruous and seldom achieved in tandem anywhere in the development world. Nuru pursues this challenge through a hybrid model that combines the best of what many other NGOs are doing. Local staff is involved in the grassroots operations, but also in the highest leadership positions. Capable international staffers provide support to local staff, but exit criteria are clear and progress towards those criteria is steady. Local staff and international staff work together intimately, yet international staff work on rotations to avoid dependence on any particular individual. Local staff is paid salaries at Kenyan wage rates, and international fellows support the Kenyans on a volunteer basis. Nuru is full of such contrasts that ultimately define what makes the model different.

Despite all the contrasts, in working methods, models and cultures, the principle of co-creation, or working together, guides our work and builds up our local staff’s ability to scale operations and confront challenges. Co-creating a new organizational structure means that Nuru Agriculture will be able to achieve its goal this year, and has helped build capacity so that years from now local staff can aptly solve the bigger problems independently. Ultimately, the critical thinking and leadership skills of local staff are instrumental for them to achieve their goal of ending extreme poverty in their communities in a sustainable and scalable way.

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

Post by Rogonga Augustine: MPAT: A Participatory Approach In Building Self-Sustained Communities

Gabrielle Blocher — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:34:08 +0000

The abbreviation MPAT means Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool, developed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which is a UN specialized agency dedicated in rural poverty reduction. I was very excited when my former program manager, Jamie Frederick in 2011 informed me one beautiful morning that we would be using the tool to assess the many aspects of poverty in Nyamaranya and Ngisiru sub-locations.

My excitement was triggered, upon realizing that the tool is standardized and yet flexible to fit most rural contexts and would support monitoring and evaluation by being implemented at project start-up (for a baseline assessment of poverty metrics, for a mid-term review and finally for a project completion). In addition, the tool adopts participatory approaches that I arguably consider to be the best option for attaining a thorough understanding of poverty characteristics in an area, including the principal underlying causes at multiple scales.

This year’s MPAT survey that our team has been conducting has a different objective: to determine what members of the community consider being an enabling environment that is conducive enough for them to pursue their daily needs and wants. Using the tool, we strive to capture those domains that are arguably fundamental to human well-being and, by extension, to poverty reduction. For example, food & nutrition security, domestic water supply, housing clothing & energy, healthcare, education, farm and non-farm assets, sanitation & hygiene, exposure & resilience to shocks and gender & social equality.

Information on the above components will be very helpful in forming an exit criterion for the western staff. Furthermore, it will enhance programs targeting and prioritization efforts at a local level, as far as our interventions are concerned. This will of course, create peace of mind to project managers on whether an enabling environment is in place to allow rural residents to pursue their livelihood goals in a sustainable way; while at the same time, allowing for the scalability of Nuru to vulnerable communities.

For us, coming together is a beginning. Keeping together progress. Working together success.

Posted from Isibania, Mara, Kenya.

How is Ending Poverty Like Building an Airplane?

Gabrielle Blocher — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:39:53 +0000

I spent a couple of days this week creating a deck that draws upon a lot of the knowledge I gained from working at Booz Allen Hamilton and Booz & Company from 2005 through 2008. During that time I was lucky enough to work with a few program management experts like Eric Kronenberg. I learned about creating a schedule by determining tasks and activities, assigning resources to them, and creating dependencies. I learned about cost accounting and budgeting, the critical path, crashing, forward and backward passes, and also risk assessment.

I worked with clients who were manufacturing large items for the military. When I say large, I mean really large, like, submarine-size, or airplane-size. Bigger than a breadbasket. These items were very complicated and required significant quantities of tiny and huge acts of labor and tiny and huge pieces of material to all come together to create something that flew, swam, drove, or otherwise propelled itself across distances. Small schedule slips could make or break the whole process. There were teams of people assigned by our clients to manage the schedules, and they coordinated frequently and significantly with each other.

One of the last clients I worked with was a company trying to take on a new project that was in their industry but outside of their expertise. They were very optimistic about the revenue potential of the new project until they got a month and a half behind-schedule, and that equated to going more than 30 million dollars over their budget. They were not practicing sound project management. Our team was there to train them about what that is.

I have been thinking about applying some of the things I learned back then to the way we do scheduling and budgeting here at Nuru since I have been here, but the work we do is very different from the work that my old clients do. Although it is complex work with many moving parts, the output of our work is incremental change across many factors in human beings’ lives rather than tangible large pieces of equipment for which the indicator of success is binary (they either work or do not work). Also, I should note that there already is a good deal of rigor in the way our work is currently managed. All team-members know how to develop schedules and budgets and manage to them.

That being said, there are a few concepts from my old field of work that Aerie and I feel are worth introducing to the field staff in the next Foundation Team training at the start of May. So, I got to build a deck this week that reminded me of my old work. During the training, we’ll talk about critical path, dependencies, resource loading and just one or two other small topics. Nothing too excessive or crazy, and nothing specific to the world of manufacturing.

I am interested to see how these topics are received by our staff. I anticipate that they will like it. Maybe I can eventually convince my old colleagues to use our success with program management as a good example for people who are trying to build airplanes. Who knows?

Posted from Cincinnati, Ohio, United States.

Changes that stick in CED

Rebecca Herrington — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 01:59:24 +0000

Our parents always said the rules were there to protect us, to help us and because they loved us. As we grew up, and some of us even became parents ourselves, we saw the truth behind what our parents always said. We saw the reason for the rules, even if the benefits were long term and we had been looking for short term gratification. The Community Economic Development program at Nuru is a training program. We do not exist to offer credit to those in extreme poverty, however we do offer credit services. Our goal is to equip those struggling in extreme poverty with money management skills that will help them use their limited cash flow more wisely. When a windfall comes, be it harvest or credit, our goal is to provide them with the choice and knowledge to know how to manage the additional cash to their greatest benefit. But when survival and the next meal has been the focus for so long, it can be hard to think about school fees six months from now or even try to predict when the money might run out. Because we focus on behavior change and choice more than the financial services we offer, we have some pretty strict rules for those services. We don’t want our impact to create an increase in entrepreneurs or to be tied to the number of loans we give out. We want to see the people in the communities we work apply the money management skills we offer trainings on. We want to see that people value and benefit from saving before we shift the focus to loans. We want to ensure savings is a foundation, not just a step to receive credit. And that means we need to follow the rules.Our model is new. It is new on the micro-finance development scene, and it is new to us and the communities here in Kenya. It is only human nature when something new comes on the scene to try and test boundaries. The “maybe just this time” or “but this client is different” line of argument has been echoing in our ears since we started. And we have indeed regretted the times we have given in, bent the rules and been swayed to make an exception. But we have learned from those mistakes as a team. I have never been more proud of the Nuru Kenya CED Team than during this last round of loan review and disbursement for our MwaK program.

Over the past three months since our last disbursal, we finalized our preliminary financial sustainability model for the nine year cycle of the model. We have since been having long conversations about how to ensure we are making our desired impact and reaching our financial sustainability goals. We have also been taking a serious look at the programs history and dealing with some of our more difficult loan clients, a lot of whom we had bent the rules for. We realized that sticking to the rules was a major factor in making the change we wanted to see stick. When we received 242 applications this round, we already knew our discussions with our clients about the importance of savings and what it required to qualify for a loan had hit home with some clients. We have more clients but had fewer applicants than we did back in October, I believe because we have been clear in our messaging- ‘if your savings isn’t enough to cover 25% of the loan you’re applying for, you won’t qualify’. We encouraged these clients not to apply, but instead to focus on savings until the next round and seek out additional help from their Field Officer(s).

Next came the big test. I had been having these discussions mostly with my Program Leader, Andrew Chacha, and my Field Managers. We had had a few trainings with our Field Officers and really trying to mentor them on the “whys” behind what we were doing as a program. It was up to the Field Officers to determine who would qualify and if we didn’t follow the rules we hadn’t budgeted any financial room to back it up, it was a sink or swim opportunity for the program. And boy did they swim!

No client was given a loan unless their savings matched the requirement and no one was even allowed to guarantee if their shares didn’t match the guarantor requirement. They conducted thorough home visits. They worked for three long days to work trying to figure out who could qualify for what amount and who showed the best savings history, not just balance. And when the community became a bit rowdy because of the strict rules, the Field Officers arranged extra community meetings with the Field Managers in order to address some the issues and explain in depth the reason CED works the way we do. When some clients refused to take a reduced loan amount, trying to pressure the Field Officers, they re-explained the rules, why the reduced amount had been offered and told the clients that they could apply again next round when they had increased their savings. We disbursed 172 loans this round, but we are proud as a team of each qualification decision we made.

And best of all is the ownership the Kenyan team now displays over the program. They understand the value in why we have the rules and the benefit to our program and the community of the rules. Not only that, but they have taken the opportunity to learn it so well that they are able to explain it to their communities, their neighbors. Team morale is high and confidence in the model runs deep. With such a fantastic team and an impact goal they all believe in, a model based on savings instead of credit, based on trainings above services, actually has a chance to flourish.

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

The Good and Bad News from WatSan

Matt Lee — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:49:45 +0000

Well, we’ve got some bad news…latrine sales have not been as high as we have hoped. Despite the positive feedback we’d gotten from the community about our role plays, this has not translated into a lot of purchases. Although we’re a bit disappointed, we knew from our research that this was going to be a tough nut to crack and we’ve continued to search for ways to improve our marketing strategy. Thus, for the past couple of weeks, we have continued to survey the community using a tool called barrier analysis. This tool, developed by Food for the Hungry, and is used to determine what barriers are keeping community members from certain behaviors. For example, some community members may not use a latrine because they don’t believe that this behavior is effective in preventing diarrhea. We are now compiling the data from our surveys and we hope to bring new insight in order to increase sales.

However, we do have some good news. Handwashing station sales have been promising, with January and February sales totaling almost 200 sold! The handwashing station has been so popular that some people have brought in their old handwashing station which used a metal tap in order to retrofit it with our plastic tap. These metal taps are notorious for becoming leaky after several months of use, even though they cost twice as much as our plastic taps.

It’s also great to see our field officers joke around and have a great time while constructing the handwashing stations. They’ve developed a friendship among them that makes them a fun bunch to hang around. The field officers have also become more and more confident in their own construction skills. Last month, we noticed that several of the handwashing stations we made were faulty. The PVC pipe would not bond to the yellow buckets, and thus the tap would not function properly. The field officers quickly diagnosed the problem as being the fat which remained in those buckets (we reuse old cooking fat containers) not allowing the super glue to bond. After learning that lesson, the field officers only purchased buckets which had been pre-cleaned.

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

Program Metrics Teach Nuru about Job Specialization

Gabrielle Blocher — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:24:49 +0000

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we have gathered a lot of data related to many of our program metrics. The analysis and QC that we were conducting back then and have continued since have gone very well.

At this point we have finished the first round of analysis and QCing for the baseline data for the Education program’s literacy assessment, which, as a reminder, was done with the Uwezo tool. We have baseline literacy levels for boys and girls by grade level at several of the schools where the education program has been conducting interventions. In time, we will conduct a subsequent test of these students to see whether or not we have, to use one of Jake’s old favorite phrases “moved the needle” on literacy.

David and the team in the field are working for the remainder of this month on continued QCing of the data that was collected for the household survey at the end of last year. As you might recall from a previous post about that, that survey was mostly about Healthcare and the Water and Sanitation program (which I have referred to here on this blog as the WatSan program, but should be referred to as the WASH (WAter, Sanitation, and Hygiene) program). So we expect that we will have baseline data for those three programs ready to share by perhaps the end of April if you are interested. I will not be posting actual data on this blog, for the most part, so if you want data from us, let me know then. (gabrielle.blocher@nuruinternational.org)

As for Ag and CED, we already have baseline data for a couple of their program metrics, and are in the process of gathering it for the rest. Those programs are a bit different than the other three, because data has been a huge part of running the work that they do from the beginning, so they have automatically had metric values. The work we are doing with them is around organizing the data and cleaning it so that we have faith in it.

As is the case every day we do this work, we learned a lot of lessons throughout the process of conducting these assessments. One of the lessons was about what we have the Kenyan staffers spending time on. We have a team of five Kenyans who are M&E specialists in the field, as we have mentioned here. These five staff members have been fully occupied with the grueling work of getting around the entire community and conducting these household surveys and Uwezo assessments during the past few months.

Some of them enjoy this kind of work very much and thrive in it, and others thrive much more behind a computer screen or working directly with program managers to strategize about program and metric system design and implementation.

Because of these differences in skills and preferences, David and Rogonga have come up with a proposal to specialize roles on the Kenyan M&E team into three categories: Advising, Data Collection, and Data Entry and Analysis.

They are working hard with the Kenyan team to move people’s titles around, formulate these new roles, and get team member’s into them.

Posted from Cincinnati, Ohio, United States.

Agriculture Input Loans for Rural Livelihood Development

Matt Lineal — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:12:35 +0000

During all of December and January, Nuru Agriculture is distributing loans of agriculture inputs (fertilizer and seed) for maize production to approximately 3,000 smallholder farmers in Kuria, Kenya. Nuru Agriculture provides agricultural loans as one critical element of its complete farmer package, which includes technical trainings, organization of farmers into small work groups, and agriculture extension support.

The loan concept hinges on three elements: 1) the extreme poor have no or very little access to credit, 2) much less at reasonable interest rates, and 3) have a difficult time finding reasonable supplies and prices of inputs at local markets.

1) Nuru’s target audience consists of those subsistence farmers that do not have enough food to eat during certain months of the year (the hunger season). They have no savings and few assets besides land, making access to traditional loan products prohibitive. Nuru Agriculture offers an innovative loan product that specifically targets the extreme poor with a small loan of roughly USD$70. This provides the capitol to spur income generating activities amongst smallholder Kenyan agriculturalists.

2) Moreover, many traditional loan products to farmers are designed for time periods and at interest rates – often more than 30% – that have the farmer losing money over a field season. Various reasons compel high interest rates, including the high risk of loan clients (few assets, savings, and limited income potential), volatile price fluctuations, and in some cases simply motivated by the desire to generate profit. Nuru Agriculture counters the high risk of first time loan clients by training the farmers on loan and farming concepts, employing group loan repayment, and working closely with farmers to establish a strong relationship that ensures their success in the field which helps repay the loan. Nuru counters price fluctuations by purchasing and storing inputs when prices are low at wholesale. Nuru Agriculture considers profit generation as an essential activity for economic sustainability, but balances this with concerns of social welfare and accessibility to loan products.

3) Shortfalls in seed and fertilizer supply, paired with consequent elevated prices due to scarcity of commodities, are yearly occurrences in much of Kenya during the December-January planting season. Nuru Agriculture counters this by buying fertilizers and seeds when prices are low and supplies are high, and then passes on the savings and benefits of a secure supply of inputs to the farmer.

Nuru Agriculture ensures that the main components of its loan program meet the needs of smallholder farmers in financial terms. Considering the agricultural aspects in the input loan package, however, is essential to meet farmer needs for improved seed and fertilizer.

This year Nuru Agriculture is distributing roughly 36 metric tons of improved maize seed and some 360 metric tons of fertilizers.

The maize seed we offer are those cultivars most demanded by farmers in the area, consisting of different drought and disease resistant hybrid varieties developed and certified for use in Kenya. We stock particular varieties as they meet the needs of farmers in each area: water-tolerant, fast-growing varieties to give farmers in flood prone areas a quick turnaround; drought-tolerant, longer-season, higher yielding varieties to benefit those areas with a longer period of consistent rains; and everything else in between. At this time we do not offer genetically modified (GM) seeds, have not developed our own certified seeds, nor do we provide options for open pollinated variety (OPV) seed. We are currently in research and development of other seed sources and types.

Nuru Agriculture provides two types of fertilizers, one appropriate for use at the time of planting and the other used during early crop establishment as a top-dressing. Fertilizer use provides the boost in nutrients that crops need to grow optimally. We are currently researching organic fertilizers to evaluate their feasibility to substantially increase maize output.

Agriculture input loans are one part of the equation proposed by Nuru Agriculture to significantly increase crop yields. Nuru Agriculture recognizes and respects the hard work and perseverance demonstrated by Nuru staff and farmers to work the land together in a sustainable way for rural livelihoods and the environment.

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

Linking Extreme Poverty and Global Terrorism

Jake Harriman — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:51:30 +0000

Click here to read this post in the New York Times.

Jake Harriman, CEO of Nuru International, talking with children in 2010 in Nyametaburo, Isibania, Kenya.

These days, I spend most of my time hiking the rolling hills and valleys of Kuria, a remote district in rural Kenya. I’m on a very different career path now than I was before, as a Marine patrolling streets and alleys in Iraq. In my new work, I travel from shamba to shamba (the Kiswahili word for farm) talking and working with farmers who live in extreme poverty. As we walk through their fields, I often see unwelcome flashes of my past. Peaceful Kurian villages transform into rows of Iraqi huts destroyed by rocket-propelled grenades. While gazing into the eyes of a Kurian farmer who is pleading with me to help her children who haven’t eaten in three days, my vision blurs and I’m looking into the eyes of a screaming Iraqi farmer who just had his family shot to pieces right in front of him. I watch our Kenyan farmers roll out their planting strings to properly space fertilizer and seed, and in my mind’s eye, I look through my scope at untrained, desperate farmers rolling out fuse lines that lead to poorly disguised road-side bombs next to the main supply route south of Baghdad. Two worlds, blurring together as I walk.

Even though the settings are very different, my new work in Kenya is similarly critical to U.S. national security. In fact, thoughts of U.S. national security occupy my mind as much now (or perhaps even more) as during my seven years as an infantry and special operations platoon commander in the Marines. I served four operational tours in Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and areas of southwest Asia alongside some of the bravest individuals I have ever encountered in my life. We fought side by side on the frontlines of the “War on Terror” – a war that has cost so many lives, including many of my closest brothers. But as we fought together in that war, I came face to face with an unnecessary evil that takes more lives each day than are lost in Fallujah, Gaza, Kandahar, Mogadishu, and Jaffna combined, an evil that is directly connected to the proliferation of the terrorism and insurgency that we were fighting: the evil of extreme poverty.

Extreme poverty is the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time and a fundamental contributing factor to 21^st century terrorism and insurgency. I’ve discovered that it is controversial to make this claim, so don’t take my word for it. Brilliant people of our time have also made this connection, and are attempting to shake our generation from its slumber and catalyze global action in the fight against extreme poverty. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “You can never win a war against terror as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate — poverty, disease, ignorance.” Former U.S. Secretary of State General Colin Powell stated, “We can’t just stop with a single terrorist or a single terrorist organization; we have to go and root out the whole system. We have to go after poverty.”

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as consuming $1.25 or less per day. This is an extraordinarily limited definition, and one that I believe prevents us from tackling the problem in a way that creates truly sustainable, catalytic solutions. Focusing on the economics of extreme poverty has too often led to solutions that address immediate material need rather than solutions that are sustainable for the long-term: wells with pumps that break from wear-and-tear within a few years; beautiful classrooms that lie empty because trained teachers are nowhere be found; insecticide-treated mosquito bed nets misused as fishing nets or curtains. Short-term solutions are not only ineffective, they are also counterproductive in the fight against extreme poverty. Material resource and infrastructure-focused solutions created in isolation perpetuate dependency and can actually further widen the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots.”

In fact, extreme poverty is more than the lack of material resources necessary to meet an individual’s basic needs. One critical component of the phenomenon is when an individual lacks the opportunity to make meaningful choices that will sustainably improve her life. The work of Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen emphasizes the need for meaningful choice as the end and the means of development. Choice is powerful and opens the door to hope, opportunity, change, and a better future.

In the West, most of us live in a world of choices. What do we want to eat for lunch? What school do we want to attend? What neighborhood do we want to raise our kids in? But this is not true for a very large portion of the world. Extreme poverty strips a person of her dignity, her opportunities and worst of all, her choice. One out of six people lives in a condition where she cannot make choices to meet the basic needs of her children or give them hope for a better tomorrow. A lack of choice leads to desperation. Desperate situations cause people to commit desperate acts. Most of the time people commit these acts not out of some misplaced hatred for the West, but out of love for their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter at home who are starving to death. It is love that compels a father to say yes to the extremist that shows up at his hut, promising food and education for his children if he will only sacrifice his life by attacking people he knows nothing about, living across the ocean. Think about it. What would you do if your child hadn’t eaten in days,or if your daughter had to walk 5 hours every day to find clean water – only to be raped on the way there? How far would you go in a world where you couldn’t meet the basic needs of those you hold dearest to you?

Jake Harriman on a Marine mission south of Bagdhad, Iraq in 2005.

Terrorist organizations’ community development activities hint at the link between insurgency and extreme poverty. Hamas spends the majority of its resources providing “social, welfare, cultural, and educational activities” for the Palestinian people, and Hezbollah operates schools, hospitals, and agricultural services for poor Shiites in Lebanon. The Taliban build madrassas to offer free education to the poor in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The reality is that terrorists and insurgencies cannot function without the support of the communities in which they operate. Studies show that they earn this support by providing social services for their often impoverished constituency. But the services provided by these organizations come at a great cost to the community – including economic oppression and coercion into violent activities – which perpetuates the cycle of extreme poverty.

While in combat, my eyes were opened to this connection. I realized that I personally could make greater gains in the war against terrorism and insurgency by joining the fight against extreme poverty. I left my job as a Marine with a vision to help create a world where people living in extreme poverty could have the choice to determine their future. My journey took me to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where I hoped to gain the tools necessary to build an organization that could effectively combat extreme poverty. It was there that I founded Nuru International, a social venture committed to ending extreme poverty in remote, rural areas. Nuru equips people with knowledge and tools that enable them to make meaningful choices to improve the lives of their families. Nuru now works with thousands of farmers in Kenya, empowering them to create sustainable and scalable solutions to lift their families out of extreme poverty – not for one year or five years, but permanently. From these new frontlines, I have seen how access to opportunities can restore an individual’s dignity and set the wheels of change in motion to transform communities. There is hope. As long as we continue to create environments where choice can flourish, I believe that we will see an end to extreme poverty in our lifetimes. A revolution has begun; a revolution to awaken and mobilize a generation to win the war against extreme poverty once and for all. In the end, we will find that a world free of extreme poverty will also be a much safer, more stable world for all global citizens. Nuru was the path I took when I was awakened to the link between lack of choice and global insecurity. What will your path be?

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

How Do You Design a Study when Everything Changes (Part 2)

Gabrielle Blocher — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:43:58 +0000

The M&E team had a pow-wow with the Education team last night. We discussed a couple of the issues I mentioned in my last post, and how we should most appropriately react to them. We have a couple of ideas, but none of them are set in stone.

One simple thing we might do the next time we test the literacy levels of the children in the community is ask them how long they have been enrolled at their current school. If we do this, we will likely have to provide a couple of options for the surveyed children to choose from just to make analysis easier. If a child has been in the school a significant number of months, consistently, then we will have to decide to assume that they have been exposed to our interventions consistently. These are the children we want to test.

One problem with this approach is the awkwardness of asking that question of children. Will it make them uncomfortable or feel like we are being exclusive in whom we want to test and/or do not want to test? Another problem is whether or not they will understand or know the answer to the question. We deal with self-reported recall data all the time here at Nuru, and, though we have gotten pretty
used to it in terms of data gathering, it is questionably reliable sometimes. We are talking about asking little children to remember some length of time. There will be some error.

Another concern we have about this test is just the timing of it. The longest time ago that we have baseline literacy rates that we are confident with is November of 2011. So that means, at this point, taking into account breaks from school when no interventions are happening, only two solid months of measurable interventions have occurred.

This run-time issue is, to me, the biggest issue we need to deal with before we decide when to test the literacy levels of these children. We need to determine whether we truly believe that our interventions should have affected literacy levels at such time as we decide to test next or should not have. If we believe they should have, we will test, if we believe they should not have, we will have to consider utility
of testing the children weighed against the impact on the schools and their ability to learn.

That is what we are working on now: a more solid perspective on how quickly we expect our interventions to affect literacy levels than what we have now. We hope to have that soon, and once we do, we will determine when to test again and how to do so.

Posted from Cincinnati, Ohio, United States.

Micro Credit Loan Repayment Round 1

Rebecca Herrington — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:52:45 +0000

We have been focusing on co-creation over the last two rotations. Co-creation was always a core part of what we wanted in the development of the Nuru model, but we have become more intentional in seeking to ensure that is truly how we are acting and developing our program models. Msingi wa KAPESA (MwaK), CED’s basic savings and credit program, was as intentional as it gets. When it came time to develop the loan service, from amounts to regulations to progress and transition to other services offered, the Kenyan staff took the reins in the designing process. We had long discussion over what our desired impact was, our values, our goal and the specific population we wished to offer credit choices to. After a discussion on how to set up a proposal and what needed to be included in the design of the service, I left the field for a month to go back to the US and train with FT7 and take some time before returning for my second rotation. When I came back, CED had a new service. The Kenyan staff had really taken to heart their community needs, both realized and unrealized, and developed a potentially sustainable, scalable program that would directly push for our desired impact. It was an amazing season for CED as last October we disbursed 213 loans to farmers in extreme poverty in three of our sub-locations under the new MwaK Loan Program.

This February 2^nd and 3^rd was the first moment of truth. The repayment rate wasn’t going to magically tell us we had reached our desired impact, but it was the first indicator of whether or not we had designed an accessible service that not only offered financial services, but put more emphasis on training money management and how to utilize financial services. On February 2^nd there were only 11 clients with remaining balances, meaning 202 clients finished paying off their loans early. On the afternoon of February 3^rd, we remained with two clients, each having one late payment and giving us an in arrears rate of .32%. As of February 11^th, the two remaining clients cleared their balances giving the CED MwaK loan program a 100% repayment rate for the first round.

We know as we scale 100% is shooting for the moon, but it will continually be our aim. I met with the Kenyan staff last week to analyze and discuss the success of this first round and how we wanted to move forward, below are some of their reasons for our success:

The amount of the first loan was small and based on savings. If people asked for too much, we were able to go back to them, show them their savings history and offer them a smaller loan. These small loans, matched with client capacity, made it easier for them to payback. The team said that by starting so small, the clients are eager to get to larger tiers and are therefore committed to going through the steps we have set before them. Because we are strict with the rules we have set forth, they know they have to adhere to them otherwise they won’t be able to reach the larger loan amounts.

We explained the program well, including; services, regulations, requirements, roles and responsibilities, from the very beginning. We also maintained consistent messaging throughout the communities we were working in and those sharing the message, from Program Leader to Field Officer, were able to give an explanation if asked. Another part of this is the role of guarantor(s) and group. From the beginning we emphasized that loans would be given not only based off personal savings, but group savings. We also took extra pains to clarify the role and responsibility of a guarantor, should the client fall through on payments. The Kenyan team said that this emphasis encouraged the group to work together more closely and for guarantors to take an active role with their respective loan client in encouraging him/her to pay and checking in with them on the status of their loan.

Client supervision was consistent. In the past, a lot of the responsibility to check in with clients was placed on the group representative, or Field Officers would check in with a client a few days after a problem arose. Because all clients attend a training meeting once a month for MwaK and we have pushed dealing with clients promptly and on a one on one basis, this first round of MwaK the clients received a lot of hands on attention and follow-up throughout the savings, loan application, and loan repayment periods. The client was given an updated balance after every payment directly from their Field Officer. The team believes that knowing exactly how much they owed, encouraged them to come up with as much as possible to pay off the loan, not just enough to make the next payment or enough to guess at what they should bring next meeting.

The CED team also made MwaK a competition between areas. We were always sharing attendance scores, average savings per month, etc. between our Field Officers at the meetings; encouraging them to have the highest monthly savings or the highest attendance. The team believes this competition encouraged them to continually strive to do better, not just meet a requirement or follow the status quo. We are brainstorming how we can keep this up and incorporate this friendly competitive attitude into the model as we scale.

Finally, one of the biggest revelations we had as a team about the MwaK loan program is about the timeframe. The way we set it up, the loan application season is only available for two weeks every 3.5 months. Once a loan cycle is completed we automatically issue applications, give two weeks for them to be filled out and returned, process them for two weeks and then disburse the next round of loans. If you miss the window, you have to wait until the next cycle to apply. In our old model, the loan worked on a continuous basis. You could apply anytime and be approved if you met the qualifications. If it took you a month to turn in your next application after you finished the loan, then it made no impact on whether or not you could receive a loan. Because the MwaK clients want to progress through the program, they are eager to reach the next tier. To do so, they have to make sure they pay off on time and two weeks is a rather small window. They know that if they are even a week late, we are already considering other loans to be disbursed and that theirs will fall to the bottom of the pile. It will be interesting to observe through future rounds if the mere timing of when loans are offered, really is a contributing factor to our repayment rate and clients commitment to advancing in the savings and credit program.

We have made a commitment to continue to analyze, compare, look back and look forward after every MwaK round of loans. We know that part of our continued success is dependent on us sticking to the model and the rules and requirements we have set up. We look forward to even future bumps in the road as we know they will only help us refine the model and get that much closer to making the lasting impact we desire. I look forward to telling you about the Mwak Loan Round 2 Review Process and sharing our discoveries, bumps, and successes with you.

Posted from Nyanza, Kenya.

How do you Design a Study when Everything Changes? (Part 1)

Gabrielle Blocher — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:26:56 +0000

Last week I gave you a quick update on what we have been doing related to Program Metrics.

I would like to brag about how we have been analyzing the data we have already gathered. David and Rogonga have been doing some hard-core analysis of all of the data we gathered for Healthcare and Watsan in December, and they will have some values to share with us in about a month. They have done all the analysis and formula-building at this point, and what is left is just some data cleaning. It takes time because they have to reconcile hard copy surveys with what was entered into our data entry sheet. Jamie, as well, has been conducting complex analysis, in her case of the already extant and built-by-Jennifer Ag model. Last Friday she built a nested-if function that contained seven sub-functions. Those of you who love the puzzle-solving that working with Excel allows you to do will appreciate how fun that was for her. (I’m not kidding, it was fun! She told me.) I myself have gotten to do some excel modeling with the literacy-data we have gathered using the Uwezo tool. These values as well will be reportable once the data has been cleaned a bit.

We actually HAVE data. That is the great news. We are in very good shape, and we will have some to actually report to all of you in the near future.

The main thing that we have been spending the other half of our time on here on the team is Study Design. That is what we are calling determining the when, how, and who of the next and all subsequent iterations of data gathering for each Program Metric. Some things to take into account here are

How long it might take for an activity to actually affect a metric value
How much gathering the data related to the metric value will impact the community
How long it will take and how difficult it will be to gather the data
Whether any extenuating circumstances might affect the value of the metric within the timeframe that we have chosen for assessment

All of these points are important, and my team spent a little bit of time discussing this last point in some detail today.

Studying a community and how it changes and its members change is not like a perfect experiment that you might have learned how to run in High School science classes. There is no way to create a completely immutable environment when the subjects of your experiment are human. A couple of extenuating issues that have come into play with us so far are huge fluctuations in market maize prices, droughts (of course), Somali refugees coming into our communities, government mandates about school-closings and subsequent re-distributions of student populations, government rules about Community Health Workers, and many other things.

So the question we were faced with today was, how should we design our studies such that we are able to measure the impact of our interventions when we know that wildly varying extenuating circumstances are going to come into play for all potential subjects of our study, both comparison groups and standard groups?

Because this post is already a bit long (and because I don’t know the best answer to our question just yet), I’ll get back to you in two weeks with a follow-on post.

To be continued…

Posted from Cincinnati, Ohio, United States.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Gabrielle Blocher — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:27:56 +0000

I wanted to give an update on our program metrics in this blog post as it has been a hot issue on our team lately. I had a call with one of our biggest donors this week about this topic, David is hard at work in the field on all sorts of Program Metric-related activities, and Jamie is spending as much time as she can on the issue when she is not consumed by her work on developing Nuru’s approach to Needs Assessments. (I just go ahead and capitalize these things….they are important).

As a reminder, Program Metrics are the means by which we hope to assess the effectiveness of our specific interventions. We spent a great deal of 2011 putting each of our programs into Logic Models so that we could, with logic, assess the entire list of activities that each program is engaged in, what we expect to be outputs to measure whether the activities are occurring, and then ultimately what we expect the outcomes of the activities to be. The outcomes are changes in behaviors or conditions that indicate the success of a program.

An example: in CED, savings clubs exist. We expect the participants in our savings clubs to attend the savings club meetings. So an activity would be the holding of a training session, the output of that activity would be a certain number of attendees at the session. An outcome of the session, we would hope, would be a high and increasing percentage of savings club members savings club members saving so regularly that they qualify for a Nuru loan, ultimately. The measure of this outcome is one of our program metrics. We believe that assessing this will help us determine whether having these trainings in the first place is making an impact on our community.

We talk a lot about making an impact, and anecdotally/qualitatively, it is clear that we are having an impact. Having a conversation with a Nuru farmer will tell anyone that. The analysis of our impact with numbers, though, is still not ready for wide dissemination. That’s one of the bad/ugly things from the title of this blog post.

The good news, though, is that while the numbers are not ready to share, they do actually exist for, I am so happy to say, ALL the programs other than leadership. (Leadership is still very much in its infancy, though, so it would make no sense for us to have any numbers to share. The program is still iterating on differing models.)

We gathered baseline data for Watsan and Healthcare with the big survey we conducted at the end of last year. We have already begun analyzing that data, and it will be ready to share in approximately one month. We will have baseline scores, therefore, for these two important programs and all of their metrics.

We have begun to and are still in the process of gathering baseline data for our Education program. We can analyze it within the next few weeks. We are using a tool called Uwezo to assess child literacy. David and Rogonga have just returned from a meeting with the Kenyan country director for Uwezo in Nairobi, and it was very fruitful. We are so pleased to have access to such a great tool.

For CED and Agriculture, we have been gathering data for a long time and it exists in two large excel models. We have a crack team of IT professionals working on turning those models into a tool that everyone at Nuru can use – an online database. We tried this once before and it didn’t work, really, so I am nervous, but these folks really know what they are doing.

So, again, the good news is we have numbers. The not-so-good, we can’t tell you what they are yet.

Soon, my friends, soon.

Posted from Palo Alto, California, United States.

Change is in the Air

Jessica Hansen — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:53:04 +0000

The end of 2011 brought a lot of new changes to the Education program. We doubled the number of students attending our Learning Resource Center, we launched a mobile version of the Learning Resource Center, and we piloted a new student progress tracking system. In 2012, the Education program has launched its first Mobile Library program at a school called PAG, where reading levels are high, in which books are brought to schools and children are assisted in finding the meanings for unknown words and quizzed on comprehension. As the year wound down, the Kenyan government also announced a number of changes in relation to its revamping of the national Education Act. In part, this included potential changes to both the examination and school year calendars. It also included the recent and continuing closing of what are known as ‘bush schools’. The term can encompass a range of descriptions, but here locally, it most often describes a school that is opened without any official approval or sanctioning, is often run by someone with no background in education, lacks any trained teachers, and is usually run out of someone’s home, charging fees for attendance. As the bush schools have closed in the area, parents have been going from school to school in the district to try to try to enroll their children in public schools. The public schools have allowed many in but have also had to turn others away once they reach capacity.

Nuru’s Education program focuses specifically on children public schools and out of school youth, and as these children from the bush schools are highly likely to become one or the other, this change has already significantly impacted our program and is likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Many school heads have notified us that they anticipate classes that currently have 30 to 40 students will end up having around 100 students each once the ‘bush school’ students are admitted. The higher the student to teacher ratio, the less chance that the students will receive the attention and support they need to improve their literacy levels. The same applies to the number of students our small team of nine facilitator’s will be able to effectively reach, so the changes have given us pause to figure out how to best adapt to the changing needs of the community.

In the midst of all the changes, there is one thing that has remained fairly constant: the eagerness of the students to learn. One of our facilitator’s named Sabora was out at a school called Nyasese delivering our outreach programs last week. Nyasese is quite remote with a small enrollment, and has one of the lowest literacy levels of all the schools we work with. Toward the end of the day, he reached Class 6 (relatively the equivalent of sixth grade) and in the middle of a lesson in which the students had been struggling, he focused in on the long ‘e’ sound that a double ‘e’ or an ‘ea’ can make, including words like deep, feet, seed, meet, neat, beat, read, and eat. Somehow they got that part of the lesson instantly. Sabora asked them who had been teaching them about these vowel sounds since they understood them so well, and they replied that in fact Sabora had some time last year. They told him even the smallest details of the lesson he had given, recited the examples, and even recounted jokes he had told to help them remember. Sabora was overjoyed. He immediately shared this with the Education team. Our teaching methods are effective, the students are learning, and the knowledge is helping them to develop their literacy skills. Needless to say, as we continue to hear stories like this from the schools we began working with last year, we are endlessly gratified to take part in creating this positive change alongside the children of this community.

Posted from Suba Kuria, Nyanza, Kenya.

A New Year, A New Approach

Janine Brown — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:21:31 +0000

Happy New Year everyone! When I arrived in September 2011, the Healthcare Program staff were functioning as trainers and supervisors for a cadre of government recognized Community Health Workers. As our team observed, we saw this approach was ineffective for reasons including; CHWs unmotivated to perform basic job duties (including home visiting and attending trainings), and the government Community Unit strategy limiting our activities and making monitoring and supervision difficult. In hopes to resolve some of the misunderstandings and communication issues with the government, in November 2011 Nuru Healthcare fully transitioned all CHW interactions back to the designated Ministry of Health (MOH) supervisors, called Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs).

Nuru intends to uphold a strong relationship with the MOH as we will continue to work alongside CHWs and CHEWs to see health changes happen in the communities we both serve. Nuru will continue to communicate with the CHEWs to collaborate when possible, support MOH initiatives like Malezi Bora, and continue to make referrals to government medical facilities. In an effort to create sustainability, the Nuru Healthcare Program Leader is learning how to write progress reports to be given to MOH concerning the monthly happenings of the Nuru Healthcare Program.

The Nuru Healthcare Program still has the same behavior change foci in our community:

Full immunization of children under 1
Children under 1 and pregnant mothers sleeping under an insecticide treated net
Drink clean water
Wash hands with soap
Breastfeed immediately and exclusively for the first 6 months
Adequate complimentary feeding and Vitamin A supplement for children under 5
Attend 4 antenatal care visits and have safe delivery
Treat danger signs quickly

Although Nuru Healthcare will no longer train or supervise CHWs, we will train our Healthcare Field Officers to perform a more effective role that fits into Nuru’s holistic approach. Field Officers will deliver prevention trainings and related responsibilities to help achieve our goal of reducing mortality rates of children under 5 years old in a sustainable and scalable way. Healthcare Field Officers will serve Nuru farmers with homevisits, and the community at large with group trainings at venues including churches, school health clubs, village elder meetings, and other gatherings. Along with communicating clear and correct messages about disease prevention, the Field Officers (FOs) will also give tailored interpersonal behavior change coaching to help Nuru members overcome barriers to change, and make accessible the commodities procured by Nuru Income Generating Activities (Waterguard, Moringa Leaf, soap, sanitary napkins, and solar lamps).

The FOs have been learning skills to help them perform their new role, and interacting with the other Nuru programs to strengthen our holistic approach. This past month they collaborated with the Nuru Agriculture Field Officers to identify the location of all Nuru members’ households to help plan an efficient home visiting strategy. They have also been learning how to translate their monthly targets, like visiting 70 households, into weekly plans. They are also preparing lessons for training the school health clubs, which they attend with our Nuru Education program staff. They are learning more from Nuru Water and Sanitation program about their products and community training strategies in order to identify our cross over and possible integration points between our programs.

They skill based learning is slow going. It’s heart breaking to see the long-term effects of a highly inefficient education system and largely supports only rote memorization. The staff lack simple planning and monitoring skills, and training them well and with appropriate practice materials is a difficult task. If any of you readers have suggestions of possible skill based training that might help develop our staff, I would love your response.

We are looking forward to a successful and healthy New Year. Hoping the same for you all.

Posted from Suba Kuria, Nyanza, Kenya.

Migration Monarch Butterflies and the MPAT

Jamie Frederick — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:48:45 +0000

Returning from Kenya in November last year, I’m back in the US working to provide insight and strategy on Monitoring & Evaluation systems in Kenya and soon to be Ethiopia.

Living in sunny Santa Barbara, I have the luxury of being able to visit the Ellwood Monarch Butterfly Preserve which is the overwintering site of thousands of monarch butterflies. The butterflies, up to about 50,000 this year in count, come here each winter from November until March or so. Without their migration, the butterflies wouldn’t be able to survive. It is through coordination, teamwork, tireless efforts and a magical innate drive that allows them to be able to survive.

Together, both our Kenyan and US-based staff have a similar coordination, teamwork, tireless effort and a magical innate drive that allow us to keep our work moving forward together. We rely on each other to bounce ideas off of, to research certain topics, to stay abreast of trends in the field and to know the day-to-day issues that are going on with all staff. We aren’t flawless, of course. We have our flitters and flutters, like the butterflies, but we stick together.

Nuru has a daunting task to migrate to a new country this year – Ethiopia. Currently, with Chelsea Barabas from the leadership program and other US-based staff in the US, we are working to prepare a Needs Assessment strategy so that we can start off listening and being with the community with which we intend to work. We will begin with a Situational Analysis, a comprehensive review of the local situation using existing data to gain a better understanding of how to design and conduct the needs assessment. Then we hope to work with local leaders to carry out the remainder of both qualitative and quantitative data collection. We also hope to conduct a baseline survey with the Multi-dimensional Poverty Assessment Tool (MPAT) to get a general sense of the level of poverty in the area. The MPAT can also serve as part of the Needs Assessment as well, as it will provide insight on various dimensions of poverty including Food & Nutrition Security; Domestic Water Supply; Health & Healthcare; Sanitation & Hygiene; Housing, Clothing & Energy, Education; Farm Assets; Non-Farm Assets; Exposure & Resilience to Shocks; and Gender & Social Equity.

Although our work may not seem as magical as thousands of butterflies clustered on a eucalyptus tree, like the butterflies our work never ends and we forge on to make great things happen.

Posted from Santa Barbara, California, United States.

The Nuru Dairy Cows

Naruth Phadungchai — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:22:21 +0000

In late 2011, we purchased 8 dairy cows from a breeding farm in western Kenya: 4 Ayrshire, 3 Holstein-Friesian, and 1 Friesian-Ayrshire. Ayrshires are medium-sized cows suitable to all kinds of management systems. By contrast, Holstein-Friesians are top milk producers, capable of yielding an average of more than 7,600 liters of milk per year. Friesian-Ayrshires are a mixed breed that combines the high milk production of Friesians with the ruggedness of Ayrshires. The mean average age of these cows is 3 years, giving them about 7 more years of useful milk production.

The management system we are using is called zero-grazing (also known as cut-and-carry). In this system, the cows are fed mainly Napier grass which we produce ourselves, supplemented by daily meals and mineral concentrates. We also graze the cows each day on our land, mainly to provide them with some exercise. The advantages of zero-grazing are:

It reduces the risk of pests, infestations, and diseases, since there is no mixing with other livestock that maybe contaminated. This is especially important for us since many livestock owners in our area do not treat their animals against major pests such as ticks, which are vectors for diseases that can greatly reduce milk production or even kill the infected animal.
It allows us to produce a large quantity of fodder on our available land. We have 9 acres dedicated solely to the production of Napier grass. Each acre is sufficient to feed all the cows for about 2 weeks, and can produce grass every 3 to 4 months.
There are, of course, disadvantages also to the cut-and-carry system. These are, typically:
It requires a lot of labor to cut and carry the fodder. However, labor is inexpensive in Kenya, as is transport of the fodder from the fields to the cow shed. Thus in terms of finances this is not a major issue for us.
It requires housing for the cows. Again, in Kenya construction costs are low, so for us this is also not a major issue.

The reason we decided to have a dairy business is that there is high demand for milk in our area. Due to low local production levels (mainly because the local breeds do not produce much milk), much of the fresh milk is imported from Tanzania, which is just across the border from us. This milk is often watered down. Despite this, the milk available for purchase each day often runs out by mid-morning. Packaged milk or powdered milk are an option, but they are much more expensive and hence out of reach for most families. This creates a huge business opportunity for us, since we can supply fresh milk that is not watered down.

At the moment 3 of our 8 cows have calved and thus are producing milk. We are currently assessing the volume of milk production of these cows, so as to determine what changes to our management system and/or the cows themselves we will need to make in order to maximize our milk production.

That’s it for this blog. Next time I’ll go into some details about our healthcare commodities business.

Kwaheri.

Posted from Suba Kuria, Nyanza, Kenya.

Back in the Swing and Getting Ready for Ethiopia

Gabrielle Blocher — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:00:52 +0000

However informative training is, it always leaves me (and I think all my Nuru colleagues) feeling like we sure do have a lot of work to do.

I am down in Southern California after three days up in the Bay Area where I attended a training session organized by Lindsay Cope and attended by a group of eight Nuru people. Thomas Hong, Matt Lee, myself, Jamie Frederick, Jake, Lindsay Cope, Chelsea Barabas, and Radhika Warrier were all trained for three days by Bonnie Kittle on Qualitative Research, Barrier Analysis, Focus Group Discussions, Key Informant Interviews, and a few other topics. Those are big topics to cover in such a short time, but Bonnie rolled with it and covered them all. She has been doing development work all over the world since the early seventies, so for every scenario we discussed, Bonnie had a first-hand example or story to share with us. That part of our training was incredibly helpful. It not only helped us further understand the concepts she was presenting, but made us feel like we could actually accomplish the complex tasks we were learning about. Bonnie gave us confidence.

We told her a lot about our model and what, indeed, we are trying to do. She recommended some ways to change the model and she pointed out a few ways that we will eventually have to change if we start getting some restricted funding. Overall, it was a very good three days. We have a lot of tools to go forward with.

The next big step is to decide exactly how to use those tools this year when we head to Ethiopia (pending a final round of funding that we are hoping for this month). The logistics of our travel to Ethiopia include Jake leaving in the spring to spend a few months there working with some of the people who will likely be our local staff and coordinating with government officials, some anthropologists we know in the area, and a few other stakeholders who are local including some NGOs we will likely partner with. His work during that time will be Situational Analysis. The M&E team will need to provide him with some specific requests for information. He’ll decide with whom to talk and where to research for that information.

The next thing that will happen is that Chelsea and Jamie will join Jake in Ethiopia in the summer to conduct M&E and Leadership work. The only things that we know for sure at this point are that the M&E work will include the conduct of a census and the baseline MPAT in the communities where we plan to work and that the Leadership work will include some recruiting. We need to decide which of the vital Needs Assessment activities that Bonnie taught us about this week will be conducted during that time and who will conduct them. We also need to decide whether we consider the MPAT part of a Needs Assessment. I just talked to Jamie about this today, and as the person who managed our last MPAT in Kenya, she expressed some concern about whether it can potentially serve that purpose. She and I will have to talk about this a lot over the next few weeks and develop a perspective on this matter.

The end-users, of course, of what we are able to gather in the context of whatever work we end up calling our Needs Assessment work, are the program advisors and program managers. Their input into whatever we come up with will be vital and will determine the final nature of our needs assessment.

Posted from Palo Alto, California, United States.

Growing Up

Jake Harriman — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:20:02 +0000

On New Year’s Eve this year, I found myself on the beach in San Clemente watching yet another beautiful sunset in SoCal – man I love this place! While I sat there, I tracked the final hours of the 2011 Holiday Campaign with my phone. As donations continued to trickle in and it became evident that we would indeed hit our goal, I breathed a sigh of relief and settled back against the nice “chair” rock I had found down at the beach out from Linda Lane. And I began thinking about just how far Nuru had come in 2011…wow! What a year!

2011 completed a critical phase of growth for the organization – our R&D phase. In 2011, we conducted R&D with almost every part of the organization: Leadership Program, all five program areas, M&E system, HR strategy, our fundraising model, and even our decision-making process. We made great strides in each area of the organization as we researched best practices and tested various prototypes to tighten our model up and build a more efficient organization. Here’s a summary of exciting outcomes of this year’s R&D:

Leadership Program: The Leadership Program has become the foundation that will enable true sustainability of the Nuru model. Our Leadership Program went from research in theory and best practices in leadership capacity building to practical process and curriculum prototypes that we were able to begin testing in Kenya. The Leadership Program will enable local community leaders to scale Nuru’s work long after the Western staff exit the project. It has been inspiring to watch the growth of Frances , John and Paul, for a closer look at the project read Paul’s latest blog.

IGA Group: We created the Income Generating Activities group to push the model more quickly toward financial sustainability. Business models now include agribusiness, dairy project, and commodity sales.

Agriculture Program: The Staffing model was revised to improve the role of Field Officers and reduce staffing cost. The agriculture loan product was revised, to provide a better return and thus increase the financial self-sustainability of the Agriculture Program. This improvement of the agriculture loan has also seen an increase in repayment rates.

Community Economic Development: The focus shifted from financial training for small business owners to financial training and services for farmers with the creation of the Msingi wa KAPESA (Mwak) savings club prototype. Mwak has already dramatically increased household savings rates among Nuru members.

Healthcare Program: 8 targeted behavior changes were defined, curriculum drafted, and new staffing model implemented where Community Health Workers are replaced by Nuru Health Field Officers to increase efficacy of Nuru home visit intervention. Best practices incorporated from externship with partner, Living Goods.

Water and Sanitation: The Watsan (WASH) model moved from focusing on water supply at the community level (wells) to focusing on sanitation and hygiene at the household level to drive down diarrheal rates. The program now creates demand for, markets, and sells WASH products such as latrines, handwashing stations, and clean water storage units that are manufactured by Nuru Watsan staff to the community.

Education: A completely new Education model was designed and prototyped this year. A District Learning/Drop-in Center acts as a hub for outreach programs to the local public schools in the catchment area for the Center. These programs focus on implementing alternative education programs within the existing public schools to increase child literacy to Standard 2 level. Out-of-school children in the community can receive the same education services at the Center itself.

Monitoring and Evaluation: The M&E team created a defined metric system to measure both enabling environment that exists within the community (poverty metrics – MPAT) and to measure the efficacy of the five program areas themselves (program metrics). A baseline MPAT was conducted by The International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) Specialized Agency to the UN and Nuru staff, and baseline data was collected for the program metrics in all five areas as well. Extensive progress was also made in defining clear exit criteria for the project in impact, leadership, and financial self-sufficiency.

HR Strategy: New Fellows program was designed, tested, and revised. The international rotation model was changed to 13 month rotations to make the model more cost-effective and to give teams more time to move the project forward and hit strategic milestones – pushing the model toward Western exit. This change was made possible by the selfless offer by FT7 to extend their rotation by three months.

Development (Fundraising, Communications, Media, and PR): A first draft for Nuru’s branding strategy was created and disseminated to all Nuru staff and Board members. Innovation in social media and donor relationship building increased the efficacy of constituent care practices. The Development team onboarded a new, seasoned leader with a vision for a more diversified funding strategy for Nuru. Thanks to an extremely successful Holiday Campaign, the effective execution of several funding events, and effective donor management, the Development team has had a strong start for fundraising for 2012

Strategic Decision-Making: We created a new strategic decision-making body of six members with 50% representation from Operations and 50% corporate functions representation. The new body (Strategic Leadership Team or SLT) now uses a new decision-making process to make large-scale decisions that impact the whole organization. The process was tested with the Ethiopia expansion decision which resulted in an approval for expansion with a 5-1 vote.

As you can see, Nuru is growing up. We are now entering an exciting new phase in our development – proof of concept. Over the next three years, we will be pushing aggressively forward to achieve final proof of concept of the Nuru model. This monumental milestone will enable us to begin scaling the Nuru model globally to some of the toughest living conditions around the world. Successful completion of proof of concept for the Nuru model includes three key pillars:

We need to replicate the model in a new district. The new district seed project needs to be funded by expansion capital generated by Nuru Kenya, and the project needs to be staffed by Nuru Kenya scaling teams – not westerners.
We need to facilitate a successful exit of western staff and western funding from the Kenya project – leaving behind a completely self-sustaining model (financially and in leadership capacity) that is continuing to scale on its own. This exit can only happen after we successfully hit our exit criteria in impact, leadership, and financial metrics.
We need to start a seed project in another country. This country project will serve as a point of comparison to the Kenya project. The Nuru model is designed to be a global model. We need to ensure that the success we are experiencing in Kenya is not just a Kenya phenomenon.

Because of the last pillar listed here for proof of concept, we are expanding to launch a Nuru seed project in Ethiopia. The site survey has been conducted, the SLT has approved expansion, the Board has approved the expansion pending us hitting our fundraising miles stones by January 31st, and a detailed insert strategy has been created. If we meet our fundraising milestones, in August I will head to Ethiopia to launch the Nuru seed project in the Gamo Gofa Zone of the SNNPR Region.

As with any growth, there are certainly growing pains that we have experienced along the way, but the Nuru team has been incredibly determined and adaptable as they defeated challenge after challenge in this last year. My team inspires me daily, and their tenacity and drive give me so much hope now as I look ahead into 2012. I look forward to keeping you all posted as we enter this new stage of growing up.

Posted from San Clemente, California, United States.

2011 in Review for CED

Rebecca Herrington — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:57:41 +0000

This was a definitive year for the Community Economic Development (CED) Program. The model has progressed tremendously, we are collecting data on our program metrics in order to determine impact and put together a financial model that shows sustainability of the program. The Kenyan staff is increasingly taking ownership of the program, conducting needs analysis and evaluation, and designing targeted solutions for the last few loose ends. I am so proud of the work that has been done by Andrew Chacha (Program Leader), Moses Mabucha (Field Manager), James Magige (Field Manager) and our whole team of Field Officers. Without intensive dedication, many hours bent in discussion and their desire to see real change in there community 2011 would not have been nearly so successful or even possible. So here’s a little holiday recollection of CED’s big moments this year:

We launched Msingi wa KAPESA (Mwak, our basic group savings program) with an accessible minimum deposit, and savings and loan trainings to accompany the services offered as a client grows.
We scaled to three new locations and added 500 clients with our MwaK program during the launch.
We incorporated Mifos Business Intelligence Suite reporting into our operations and utilized it in order to better analyze and communicate program data.
The Kenyan team did research and brainstormed the first draft of our MwaK Loan program.
The MwaK Loan Program was polished and implemented in October with new measures to better ensure direct impact and to bring us back to our “special sauce”, money management trainings.
213 first loans were given out through the MwaK Loan program.
We promoted MwaK when the Agriculture Program did Base Education in November have had spectacular responses that we will be able to evaluate in the new year. For example, Nuru’s Agriculture Program added 13 new farming groups in their location Nyamosense and two weeks later all 13 groups registered at their first MwaK meeting.
We had 100% repayment for the MwaK loan program thus far and look forward to reporting a strong repayment rate for the next round of this program in our first 2012 quarterly report.

I hope those highlights are as encouraging to you as they are to our team on the ground in Kenya and me. And, I hope they remind you that we are not done yet. The CED program has two scaling initiatives planned for 2012, both to four new locations, just for a start. We know 2012 will be an even bigger year for the CED program and look forward to sharing the journey and progress with you in 2012. See you in the New Year!

Posted from Suba Kuria, Nyanza, Kenya.

Using Marketing Feedback to Improve WatSan

Matt Lee — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:23:51 +0000

So the WatSan team has been in full marketing mode for the past several weeks. We’ve been conducting trainings in our villages in which we show our videos on sanitation and hygiene while performing role plays that discuss issues that families face in deciding whether or not to purchase a latrine. We learned a lot about these issues through our focus groups and have tailored our marketing approach accordingly. Judging from the reactions that we’ve gotten from our audience, I think that our staff did a pretty good job with the focus groups. Here’re some of the comments that we’ve gotten from people in our audience.

“Did you send someone to look at our community before making these role plays?” – Apparently, the issues that we discuss in our role plays were so relevant to them, they thought we had sent “spies” in order to see what they were doing. I guess in a way we did send spies…

“We didn’t know that we were on the wrong path (referring to open defecation). Now that we know the importance of latrines, we know what we should do.” – So at one of our meetings, I had one of our Kenyan friends sit in the audience and listen in on what people were saying, and that was what he over-heard (I guess we really do send in spies…). This seems to corroborate with the story of “the chief’s latrine” that we keep hearing. Basically, many farmers dig holes on their compound as “latrines” so that the chiefs in their area won’t fine them for not having a latrine. However, since farmers don’t understand the importance of latrines, they only complied superficially.

“Don’t leave, train us some more!” – This comment really brightened up my team. At one of the communities, the clouds were rolling in and our team decided to dismiss the training so that people could escape the rain. But, they were enjoying the training so much that they refused to let us leave.

Although we are constantly improving our trainings by recording feedback from the audiences, it seems that these trainings are sparking the community to re-think and start discussions about their own sanitation. We hope that these discussions will translate into purchases of our latrine in January when our farmers start to get more income from their harvest. We’ve had some customers so far, as shown in the picture below, but we’re hoping for a lot more in the future.

That’s what we call teamwork here at WatSan.

Also, as a quick update, we’ve sold 110 handwashing stations in the past month, and our field officers continue to crank them out. We’ve even started to get some customers in Tanzania. Here’s a picture of a handwashing station in action at one of our field officer’s house.

Posted from Suba Kuria, Nyanza, Kenya.