I write this week from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where the waves are crashing heavily and Hurricane Earl is brewing off the coast. We expect it to hit in a couple of hours. 

I’ve spoken on the phone and g-chatted today with several colleagues and friends, and every one has reacted to the news of my location with a little bit of concern. My boss Jake reacted with that same concern at first. After I told him that everything is fine, and we don’t think it’s going to be a direct hit, he paused and reflected a bit, and then he said, “That must be kind of cool. Is it cool?”…I smiled and responded to him in the positive: “Yes, it’s really cool.” 

It’s fun to be in the midst of something undefined and viscerally challenging. I often think of the things that Jake and I do NOT share from our time in the military. He stayed in a few years longer than I did; he was a Force Recon Marine, while I was “in the rear with the gear” as a logistics officer; he deployed into combat zones multiple times and I never did. 

I tend to forget the things that we share from our time in the service together though. We both like the wind in our faces (literally), we like a challenge, and when it comes down to it, we like undefined circumstances. We like the unknown and making decisions in unknown environments. 

The last couple of weeks have yielded, for me, many discussions about the ‘unknown’ at Nuru. I frequently mention here on this blog that there’s a LOT happening at Nuru in general, and specifically here on the research team. 

I’ve also mentioned, in different terms, that the concept of continuous innovation is tough to swallow for some of us. Continuous innovation’s most challenging aspect, in my mind, is that it means being open to making mistakes and admitting when that happens. It means being open to admitting it, being able to learn from it, and moving on! It also means being capable of giving feedback to your colleagues. It ALSO means being capable of receiving feedback from your colleagues and outside resources. All are difficult challenges. 

The challenge lies in the fact that we here at Nuru are constantly creating something, and that that something must work efficiently…like a well-oiled machine. Whenever one acts as a creator, an innovator, one feels ownership of the fruits of one’s work! However, in the world of Nuru, an NGO that is working as an entity to try to achieve a specific and difficult goal, the fruits of one’s work must be malleable and subject to harsh criticism. This is a challenge! We combine creativity with team-oriented innovation, in other words, iteration. Personal ownership has to go out the window sometimes for the benefit of THE GREATER GOOD. 

Ah that greater good. 

So, anyway, Jake and I share a love for the unknown, I think. We share a sense of adventure. Thus, Nuru is a great ride for us. I hope Earl isn’t too much of one for me this week. 

August is over! My three favorite months of the year have come to an end. I can’t help but feel a little melancholy during this time of year, just because of the little chill that makes its way into the Ohio air and memories of my childhood and saying goodbye to the childhood friends I enjoyed the most.

It just so happens that it’s a bit of a melancholy time for me in my current profession as well! First of all, there are just some general struggles that Nuru is experiencing right now. I won’t get into any specifics, but it is just a hard moment in our organizational history. I am a firm believer that we are learning lessons at this very moment, and that this is a trial out of which we will come stronger and better in the long run. Since we are IN the struggle, though, it’s pretty tough to self-reflect. 

Another cause of my melancholy is the reality that our two hard-working interns, Lindsay and Nathalie, are bidding us official goodbyes within the next week! They have both worked very hard this summer and helped us out immensely. Our research team has benefited in innumerable ways by having two extra brains on the task of keeping Nuru on the cutting edge and objectively measuring poverty levels in communities. 

Lindsay has been working a lot with me on management of our volunteer team. It’s been just great to have someone around to help me think about how to manage these generous folks effectively. She’s come up with some great ideas and done great work. In addition, she’s helped me kick-start something that you all will see soon – an extensive writing piece on all the M&E work we have done so far here at Nuru. It will be featured here on the website, so look out for it in coming months. 

Nathalie has made great strides in managing our PIN’s evolution into phase two of  existence, as you can read about in last week’s post. Her free-thinking creative and open mind have been exactly what we needed this summer for this great new tool we are developing. Her work in the field will be continued by Jennifer Lee.

The good news about Nathalie and Lindsay is that they have both expressed an interest in continuing to help out! I will be happy if  they can. Very happy. 

In other news, the metrics overhaul is moving along! We now have lists of draft indicators for three of our five program areas: Education, Water and Sanitation, and Community Economic Development. Agriculture and Healthcare are still in the works. The fall will bring vetting, further definition, and further research related to all of the metrics we have picked. I will give some more detail on all of this work in the coming weeks. It is all very exciting!

David has written in the past about how the use of mobile phones has revolutionized the way our staff is able to communicate and quickly document information about the community. They've been inputing responses from interviews at local water sources, (How far do people travel for water? Are their families getting sick?), information about the size of farms and the type of seed being planted, and even data points tracking child malnutrition. Armed with a mobile phone and a GPS, one of our staff members, Julius Nyamohanga, has been visiting every household in Nuru's project area conducting a proper census. Given that current maps are largely incorrect and government census data are largely inflated, we are using this information with the awesome power of Google Earth to create the first accurate map of this region. For anyone out there who has ever found their own house on a satellite map and reveled at their place in the broader world, think about what it means for someone who has never before left their village let alone seen a proper picture of what it looks like. You can imagine the smiles on the faces of our field staff when they got their first glimpse.

However, what happens when you start to look at not only one of these data points but at several in conjunction? What is the effect of higher agricultural yields on children's attendance in schools? How does the prevalence of latrines affect the community's perception of the cleanliness of its water sources? Knowing where people live, can we better understand the spread of contagious disease and, perhaps equally importantly, contagious behavior? We believe that by leveraging the dynamic nature of data collection through mobile phones, we're well on our way to answering these questions and many like them. Being truly informed about the ebbs and flows of community life puts us in a much better position to respond to real needs, not imagined ones. The cool thing I've realized through this work, is that we're not in it alone.

In the last few weeks, I've had a set of very inspiring conversations with the broader ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) community about existing projects in this space. I wanted to really understand how other organizations are using mobile phones to benefit their projects and to learn from their successes and failures. Assuming solid funding for research projects and years of experience, I expected to take my place at the table as a humble sponge soaking in as much knowledge as I could. Though I've undoubtedly learned a lot from others' experiences, I was delighted to find a vibrant community of individuals facing the exact same problems as ours - dealing with dead spots in network coverage, making the most of inexpensive equipment, and still struggling with the social dynamics of mobile phone based interviewing. Many of these projects are focused in specific areas such as Health (mostly) and Agriculture. Sharing Nuru's work on the PIN inspired a good deal of excitement around our holistic approach of not only measuring progress in one program area, but truly trying to understand the relationships across them. I realized I had felt this type of energy before. It's very reminiscent of the Silicon Valley's .com boom where everything is new, exciting, and possible. Truly leveraging the power of internet-enabled mobile phones in development work is a new frontier and one full of unprecedented opportunities. It's great to realize that we're part of a network of people inspired to forge its future together.

I wanted to thank Aliya Walji from the MoTeCH project, Neal Lesh from CommCare, and Sarah Bird from IRD for their insights along the way.  Here's a bit more about the amazing work they're doing:

MoTeCH

A part of the Grameen Foundation's AppLab initiative, the MoTeCH project uses mobile phones to increase the quantity and quality of antenatal and neonatal care in rural Ghana.

CommCare

Created by DigiMagi, CommCare is an application designed to strengthen and monitor community health programs that runs on mobile phones.

Interactive Research & Development

IRD is a non-profit research and service organization committed to saving lives through improvements in  global  health.  They  seek  to  create  opportunities  for  scientists  and  entrepreneurs  that maximize  the  impact of health interventions in low-income communities.

Every two weeks I have a conference call with a group of friends to discuss a new and creative design of an ideal political economy in today’s day and age. There are four of us: one in New York, one in San Francisco, one in Atlanta, and myself in Columbus. We give ourselves some homework between each call so that we’re able to come armed with a few thoughts on a topic of our choosing. It’s totally fascinating each time we talk, as is the build-up to the conversation, which includes some writing by each of us on the topic at hand. 

So far we’ve done about 6 book reports and had focused discussions on spirituality, education, tax structure, and monetary policy. Next discussion is on energy. 

As with everything else in my life, I find that my experiences with Nuru deeply inform every contribution I make to these discussions. It doesn’t hurt that Matt Stillman is one of our team-mates in the discussion. He knows a ton and can talk and talk about the end of extreme poverty from a policy perspective, which is a pretty important perspective. 

Today’s discussion about monetary policy had me thinking, as usual, about the folks in Kuria whom Nuru works for. We were discussing the nature of wealth and how what wealth is is different from what currency is. It was kind of blowing my mind on both ends. 

See, wealth, as Matt was defining it, is access to resources. It’s not currency. It’s much easier to understand if you think of the folks in Kuria. A couple of years ago, essentially no amount of paper money, for the average farmer in Kuria, would have given him or her access to high yields of maize. This is because the community members lacked the training and access to the resources of good seeds and fertilizer. So, wealth is access. By increasing the access in the community, it has increased its own wealth. 

On the other end, what is currency? Well, currency is paper money, or at least it was few decades ago. Before that it was coins, but now, in developed countries, it’s pretty much a list of numbers on a screen. I, as a citizen in a developed country, rarely see any of the currency that is supposedly in my possession. I see numbers on a screen. Mifos and M-Pesa and the work of our CED and Agriculture programs are helping to facilitate this evolution from paper money to numbers on a screen for the folks in Kuria. 

When transactions are easy, secure, automatic, and technologically advanced, more exchanges can occur, markets can grow, access to resources can grow, and well, so can wealth! Exciting. 

Oh, here’s a great video on M-Pesa and it’s growing influence in Kenya (h/t: Stephanie Jayne (ha! That’s my first use of “h/t” , I feel like a real blogger)): CGAP

Alright, my blog post is essentially one big long side-note today. Next week, I’ll update you on what’s happening on the Research Team! You’ll get two weeks worth of news. 

In December of 2008 and December of 2009, our CEO did a deliberate and good job of reminding us that the end of the year is just a spot on the time/space continuum, it’s not really the end of any particular task or piece of work, nor does it actually signify any accomplishment we have or have not made. It’s just a moment. After the revelry of the New Year celebration, we all must get back to whatever tasks we have at hand, all of which are continuations of tasks in which we had been engaging in the prior year. 

Despite that, this year the Research Team is faced with a couple of huge tasks that are due, you guessed it, at the end of this year. Now, because it is August and therefore one full month into the second half of 2010, we are starting to feel the heat of our looming deadlines! 

One task that I just today wrapped my head around once again, after months of being on a way back–burner, is that of trying to publish a write-up of the work we have done related to Monitoring and Evaluation since I joined Nuru as the Research Director. Lindsay, our fearless State-side intern, is coming to Columbus (where I am located) next week to help us move this task from the back to a front burner. 

To that end, I sent her a document that I wrote in November of last year about where we were on this at that point, as well as a research project that Aerie (one of our staff members) had written around that time about HOW to get published. We’re going to look at those two documents, talk about what has happened with M&E here at Nuru since they were produced and what is happening now, then come up with a plan for publication! 

It’s interesting to think about this in this day and age, though. I think my mother is the one who originally suggested that we try to “get published”. The thing is, I’m published every week here! Publishing is easy. The hard parts are publishing within the context of a respected and less obtainable (not that www.nuruinternational.org is not a respected venue, I hope you understand) and coherently telling a story or making a point in the form of an old-fashioned article. Here, you get weekly updates about everything that’s happening from ant invasions to metrics meetings to process productions. Each week is a new topic, and sometimes topics do not relate. It’s just a quick and casual snapshot into the general life of a Nuru team. An article must have a point. This is the challenge Lindsay and I will take on next week. 

To elaborate on a point I made above about our looming deadlines, I feel I must remind you (and myself!) what they are: the metrics overhaul is due at the end of the year, our Community Health Worker (CHW) research is due in November, we need to find a new technology solution for all of our metrics systems, and as mentioned, this publication problem must be solved by the end of the year. Two of our interns are only with us until the end of August, so time is ticking!

Thanks for reading and until next week!

Jake, our founder and CEO, has returned to the States for a six-month rotation on this side of the Atlantic. We domestic staffers are very pleased that this is the case. It’s nice to have his strategic direction at our disposal a little more readily than it is when he’s in Kenya. 

Of course, this is entirely selfish of me to say.  The work that happens in Kenya is Nuru’s bread and butter, and we domestic staffers are all working in support of that field work. If any staffers at Nuru get Jake’s full attention, it should be the field staff. 

It’s nice to have him back here though. 

A couple of days ago, Stephanie (who, as a reminder, is in charge of our M&E system and thus this year’s overhaul and the development of Metrics 2.0), Jake, and I had a powwow about our Metrics system. It was a very cool discussion. 

This is a very interesting time in Nuru’s history, as we have been at our field location for almost two years now. We have experienced some great successes out in the field that you can read all about throughout this website, and we have experienced some significant setbacks that you can also read all about throughout this website. 

Because we believe in self-assessment, iteration, and learning from our mistakes, many aspects of the work we do at Nuru are in “re-set” mode for much of this year. A couple of the program areas have put some work in the last several months on determining a new umbrella model under which to operate and make decisions in the field, we are going through a revamp of our entire Nuru organizational structure right now, and as mentioned above, we are doing a metrics overhaul here on the research team. 

A challenge inherent in all this re-setting, revamping, overhauling, and iteration is the fact that we are still an operational organization! We are still trying to get things done while discussing whether the way we’re doing things is the right way. That is tough. 

The reason Stephanie and I needed to have the above-mentioned powwow with Jake is that a lot of discussion and work on Metrics has happened in the field with the field staff under Jake’s guidance in recent months. The field staff, in working to determine their umbrella models, has had to narrow down and make a few choices on what major Metrics they wanted to “move the needle” on in their work. At the same time, we are trying to deliberately and effectively create a new Metrics system based on good solid thorough research. This takes time! So, the three of us needed to talk to make sure that one part of the staff was not moving swiftly in a direction different from that of another part of the staff! 

We allayed our concerns on that front, and got on the same page. No one is running in differing Metrics directions. Even more exciting, we came up with some new ideas collectively about what the Metrics system should look like! More on that for you later. Do hold your breath. Until next week!

Our interns have begun their work with us! We will benefit so much from a new set of eyes and ears and two new brains on our research team. Big stuff. 

Nathalie arrived in Kuria over the weekend. She has been very busy doing turnover with David on all activities related to the PIN as well as all activities that our research liaison engages in. The PIN we’ve talked about a bunch here on this blog, so check out the background in some of our back posts. 

Research liaison duties have not been touched here. They entail basically two major activities. One is the collection of weekly audio updates from our field staff. These are really exciting. As of right now, they are internal tools for Nuru domestic staff to catch up on what’s happening in the field. It might be interesting in the long run if we made these updates public. Any thoughts?  They’re just three-to-five minute interviews where field staff tell us what they’re program has been up to. The second research liaison duty is the facilitation of research requests from field staff to the research team. As we’ve mentioned before, the research team consists of an amazing team of fifteen volunteers who research topics of interest to Nuru staff. These requests often come from field staff. Our field liaison helps with this process. 

Speaking of the process, Lindsay has been hard at work analyzing our process since she’s been with us. She’s already taken a red pen to all of the shared documents that I use to manage these volunteers, and her latest effort is the design of a survey for our volunteers. She’s trying to see what the volunteers hope to get out of their Nuru work, and whether we are meeting expectations! This will be an exciting thing to figure out. The process of managing these generous folks since I’ve been here has challenged me. They give so much to us here at Nuru, but it’s tough to really capitalize on their capabilities, and it’s tough to give them the feedback they really deserve. Lindsay will be able to help us out with this.  

In other news, Stephanie is still working hard on our big Metrics overhaul. We had an excellent discussion today about the decisions that are currently being made by our field staff about what areas to focus on in measurement of poverty in the communities where we work. As always, there are no simple answers, and there is truly no universal standard. There is a lot of talk of the need for a universal standard, and a few organizations have taken a stab at creating one, but behind closed doors, practitioners criticize these standards. We’ve heard the criticism. 

Stephanie had a discussion with one particular practitioner outside of Nuru yesterday and got some interesting food for thought from this discussion. Some questions that I personally have because of the discussion Stephanie and I had: 

Is consumption really the only thing that needs to be measured? 

Is it really consumption, or might it be income level? 

If either of those is the case, should, when we refer to our “holistic” model, we mean that we have two major areas of focus (CED and Ag), and three subordinate focus areas (Water and Sanitation, Healthcare, and Education)? I find these interesting questions!

Until next week!

One of our summer interns, Nathalie, leaves tomorrow for the field. I tell her she is the second ever Research Team field staff member. The hard part will be ensuring that her allegiance remains with the pajama-wearing domestic-staff warriors here in the States and doesn’t waiver towards the international staff. I hope she doesn’t get a case of Stockholm Syndrome. I’ll just have to watch from afar if that happens. 

I kid, I kid. 

But I will be watching her. 

The last thing I discussed with her during our final domestic Skype meeting was the difference between what will eventually constitute the PIN and what will eventually constitute the M&E system. 

As a reminder, the M&E system is a tool that we plan to use to measure poverty levels according to our five target areas. That’s about it in a sentence. We built one a couple of years ago, refined it last year, put it to use last year, and saw that it was very broken and flawed through that process. Many a lesson-learned there. So, there’s a Metrics 1.0, and we’re working on a Metrics 2.0. 

Metrics 2.0 V1 will be ready for use by the end of 2010, according to our current plan. We just made the decision that we’ll not be heading to any additional countries next year, so that takes a bit of stress out of our Metrics revision process. We’ll only use this system in Kenya next year. 

And also as a reminder, the PIN (Poverty Intelligence Network) is a network of data that is being gathered with phones in the field. If you look around this website, you can see a lot of information about our wonderful PIN. It was developed in the springtime, and it’s already being used in some great ways now! Our agriculture program area, for instance, is using it to decide upon order amounts for farmers of fertilizer and seed according to acreage amounts collected and compiled via the phones. 

I like to say that the PIN can be anything related to data. It is any information that Nuru finds of use to gather and compile via phones. 

We think….we are not sure, but we think….that there will end up being some overlap amongst the data that will be in the PIN and the data that will be part of the M&E system. 

An example could possibly be this: we could decide that, according to an agreed-upon and general definition of extreme health poverty, the incidence rate of infant mortality must decrease by a certain percentage in a community over the time that the U.S.-based staff of Nuru does work in the field in order to define the community as one that is no longer living in extreme poverty. The monitoring of that particular metric every year by a third-party evaluation team would constitute the work of M&E System. 

In addition, infant mortality rate, most likely, will be something that is gathered and compiled within the context of our PIN. Nuru staff members will gather this information from members of the communities where we work on a much more regular basis than once a year. More like once a week or once a month. 

So, will there be data overlap? I think so. 

Here are some decisions we have to make: can data gathered in the PIN be used for our M&E system? If so, how can we really call it third-party data? Can we certify it? It becomes longitudinal data then, though, right? Is that appropriate as part of an M&E system as we’ve conceptualized said system? 

Decisions to be made. Not now, though. Over time.

I am finally back home after a little more than two weeks on the road. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but my itinerary went like this: Columbus, D.C., NYC, Long Island, D.C., Columbus, San Francisco, Columbus, all in about two weeks. I know, I know, I used to be a consultant, so I should be able to deal, but I think absence has made the heart have no tolerance, when it comes to this particular way of life for me. I love to travel, but I prefer to go to one place and stay there for more than one night at a time. 

Anyhow, as I have mentioned in the last couple of posts, amazing things learned and exposed to at both conferences. Especially for someone who works at home typically, it’s wonderful to get out into the world and meet people doing things similar to what we’re trying to do at Nuru. There was plenty of encouragement, collaboration, and commiseration, and we learned a lot. 

My favorite meet was this amazing person: Neal Lesh. I doubt he will remember me as I was amongst a big crowd of audience-members who bombarded him after a very frank talk he gave about setting up phone-based data gathering systems, but he exposed us to a Google Group of organizations like us who have set up such systems. Our new intern, Nathalie Collins, will join the group and we’ll start to be able to share war stories with our fellow fighters against extreme poverty. We’re excited about that. 

Which brings me to that: our interns! We’re so excited about them! Stephanie, Karina, Vivian (via Skype), and I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week in the Bay Area training our two new interns in preparation for their summer work with us. I had interviewed both of them via Skype, but this time together constituted my first face-to-face meeting of each of them. It was a great couple of days. We spent one day training on Nuru in general, and one day training on all the activities of the Research Team. It was firehose-type training, but I think they seemed to get a lot out of it based on the questions and comments they both contributed.

Lindsay Ewy comes to us as a 2010 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a dual major in Economics and Finance. She’ll be working from home for us for eight weeks on a variety of things, but her highest priority will be helping me with the whole entire volunteer management process that we have put into place. I am SO looking forward to getting a deep and thorough perspective from her on this process. We sure need help!

Nathalie Collins comes to us as a student of Stanford’s d.school (Institute of Design at Stanford). She’s already been to Kuria with her class at school doing work on a product that it designed for Nuru a few months ago. She’ll work with us this summer on the amazing PIN that David has set up. She’ll head out to Kuria in about a week, turnover with David, and hit the ground running, I am sure. 

It is so fun to see our Research Team growing! It will surely be a fascinating summer for us. 

What do these terms mean to you within the context of what we are trying to do here at Nuru on the Research Team? Not sure? Now, turn to your friend with whom you weekly share the exciting activity of reading our amazing blog posts here and ask her what she thinks those terms mean? You and she have disparate opinions as to the definitions, right? 

Well, Stephanie and I are at our second Research Team “metrics” conference in as many weeks, and we are learning about the differences of opinions throughout our fields of interest, and let me tell you, there are many.

The conference we are attending now is the Global Health Counsel’s Conference on Goals and Metrics.  First of all, it is a wonderful conference. It’s very well-organized and informative, with thousands of participants and hundreds of presenters. Most sessions I have attended follow a simple format: A panel of four or five really smart people is present, and each panelist presents fifteen-minutes-worth of material to an audience. The audience gets chances to ask questions at certain break points during the session and at the end of the session. There is a moderator on hand to crack the whip and keep the presenters on schedule, as well as encourage questions. 

I anticipated before I came that I would feel a tad overwhelmed by the quantity and variety of people and organizations that are focused on improving global health. I am. On the one hand, it is encouraging that so many seem to care. On the other hand, it is sad that as few strides have been made as have. Undoubtedly, throwing a high quantity of thinkers nor a high quantity of dollars at the problem, alone, are not the answers. 

The good news is that I am hearing this concern as a universal one during coffee chats and time amongst my newly-met colleagues. There is growing convergence on the idea that universal approaches to measurement will help our field succeed. 

…I think. As far as I can tell. As a newcomer….

Ok, so I have some doubts. At this point, I have attended about five different “presentations of findings.” Basically, an academic or a representative of an NGO like me stands in front of an audience and tells us about the findings of a massive evaluation that was conducted related to healthcare. Only a few minutes are spent on describing data gathering tools and methods (during which millions of dollars of expenditures are implied), and then really cool findings are presented. 

Infant mortality dropping. Maternal mortality dropping. ART use rising. Cervical cancer testing rising. 

I can’t help but feel our strong Western competitive spirit rumbling beneath the transitions from one speaker to the next. Mine was bigger, mine was better, mine is stronger, faster, smarter, more expensive, more expansive. 

Once again, I am daunted by the idea of a universal measure of effectiveness in development work. Is it really something people want, or do they keep wanting to develop and present their better and better “means of measuring”?

It is a difficult question within the construct of the global economic collapse and today’s flat world. 

Epilogue: A warning: being an introvert at a huge conference may lead to extreme fatigue as well as withdrawal and major introspection, which sometimes leads to doubts. Only doubt can bring about a search for the truth, though! 

It took place in D.C. on the Southwest end of Dupont Circle at the Aspen Institute’s headquarters. There were just a little over one hundred attendees. I’ve said to a couple of people that Nuru was a bit of an odd bird amongst conference attendees because we are neither funders of entrepreneurial ventures (at least not as our main mission) nor entrepreneurial ventures ourselves (again, at least not as our main mission). Most attendees fell solidly into one of those two categories. We, as a non-profit provider of services and partnership opportunities to rural developing communities, were rather unique. 

For this reason, one of my biggest hopes for the conference was fulfilled in a different way than I thought it would be. 

As we develop Metrics 2.0, I am trying to think ahead about what our new technology solution will be for creating forms to compile data, housing data, and extracting reports so we can look at the data we have in ways that are useful to us. We’ve mentioned this issue a couple of times on this blog and on other blogs around the Nuru block here. Nuru is always trying to figure out good technology solutions for everything. Therefore, I was looking forward, at the conference, to learning about technology solutions that other organizations like ours use for these purposes. 

Because there weren’t too many other organizations like ours at the conference in the first place, I wasn’t able to find out what these other orgs are doing. I was able to, however, take a closer look at one of the technology solutions we have been batting around here at Nuru a lot: Pulse. And I came to a preliminary conclusion based on my time at the conference: Pulse was built for the two types of organizations I mentioned comprised the majority of conference attendees: funders of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. Because we want to use our own Metrics system, and because we are a holistic “service provider” rather than a specialist in either of those listed categories, I think we are not going to be using Pulse!

Also, I spoke with one of the representatives from the IT company that developed Pulse, and I described the monster evaluation Excel model that I built back in January, and mentioned that I “never want to do that again”. Unfortunately, his response indicated that Pulse would not prevent me from ever having to build a model like that again. In essence, Pulse does not do the math that that model did. I would like to find a solution for Nuru that does the math. 

Fascinating post for many of you, I am sure (David), so I would love to know what you all think about my preliminary conclusion. Do you think Pulse could be the right solution for us? Why? 

My husband is a huge fan of This American Life. He listens to podcasts of it every week. I love it too….contained and informative stories about things happening in this country (and sometimes other countries…not really sure about that name for the show, frankly….I digress). There’s always some humor in the stories, there’s always some sadness, and there’s definitely always something new to be learned. 

Last week’s episode, called “Island Time” just happened to be about Haiti and the relief efforts happening there now as a result of the earthquake, as well as the relief efforts that have occurred there over the last 50 years. Did you know that there are currently 10,000 NGOs working in that country, and the country has consistently gotten poorer over the last fifty years (these facts all according to the show itself)? 

It seems mindboggling to think of those statistics, but Act 1 of the show tells a wonderful story of a farmer who is trying to grow and sell mangos on her small plot of land. The story told by the show about this woman and a really cool-sounding entrepreneur named Mango Man turns out to be one of the best and most coherent descriptions of a couple of the grand concepts that we here at Nuru bump into all the time in the work we’re trying to do: 

1. Complexity – no intervention is truly simple. Every one has far-reaching implications that one can’t comprehend just by looking at a mango tree.

2. Purpose – what we are trying to really do in the communities we travel to must be defined. In defining that thing we are doing, we will inherently establish a reason for us to leave at some point – once that thing is done. 

In deference to the show, I’ll now say: listen to it. I can’t do it justice in this blog, and it’s truly an amazing and thorough depiction. 

Next week we here on the Research Team will submit to a couple of members of our field staff an early draft of two small lists of “Dashboard Metrics” related to Water and Sanitation and Education. These two lists will consist of our recommendation at this point as to the BEST indicators of poverty and movement out of it in a community. They are things that, when measured and tracked, really show a change in the lives of the people in the community. 

I know, I know, we’ve been working on these for a while, and it’s our purpose in life, but I would say that the difference between these Dashboard metrics and really anything we worked with last year is that each indicator in the Dashboard will have a list of sub-indicators that are the things that must be measured in order to determine a movement in the Dashboard.  For instance, a Dashboard metric might end up being “Adult Literacy”. In order to show a movement in adult literacy, measures of different portions of the adult population might need to be done and a score then comprised of that composite. 

The purpose of our submittal of this draft list of Dashboard Metrics to the field staff is to help with Nuru’s addressing those two grand concepts I mentioned from the TAL episode. 

1. Our model is holistic because of the complexity of the issue of extreme poverty. We knew that leaving out any one of the five target areas we decided to address in or work would put the communities where we work in danger of not experiencing a sustainable exit from extreme poverty. 

2. The list of possible interventions related to each of our five areas is a very long one, though. Our field staff will use our draft Dashboard to start to make some revised program plans. By using research and well-thought-out goals, our programs will proceed with a sense of purpose that will enable the reaching of our goal of sustainability and a five-year exit!

Thanks for reading and until next week….

Hello! Yesterday the three of our four GSPP (Goldman School of Public Policy) students who are here in the States presented the results of their semester long poverty-indicator projects. The presentations were quite fascinating for many reasons, one among them being the varying ways that each of the students approached the problem before them. Stephanie, our Senior Research Officer, has written about these students here on this blog. I agree with her, the diversity of approaches is fascinating! 

Now, though, Stephanie has a real challenge. Based on projects done four very different ways, our own research about what other organizations in this field do to measure poverty, a couple of standardized systems such as MPAT (also discussed in her previous post) and IRIS, experience and logic, we must create or decide upon the best possible holistic and coherent system to measure poverty according to our five target areas. 

It’s possible that we might decide that the way one of our four students did his work is the best way, so therefore we need to duplicate the project he did for the remaining target areas! Or we might decide that one of the standardized tools that exist is the best answer, and using the knowledge we’ve gained from the students’ work, we can tailor the standard tool for our needs. Or we might decide upon something different altogether. 

This moment in our history brings me back to my first days with Nuru almost a year and a half ago. It was my first foray into the non-profit world, having been a Marine officer and a management consultant in previous professional lives. I was very excited with the idea of applying what I knew from trying to make businesses efficient to an organization with the mission of ending extreme poverty. 

As a faithful capitalist, I was intrigued by the sad truth that non-profits aren’t blessed with the same simple equation-based measures of effectiveness that for-profits have: more profit = good job/less profit = bad job. 

We wanted to try to create a standardized tool that measures poverty for communities as simply as a financial statement measures profits for a company.  So that we, and all the other organizations out there trying to end poverty can communicate simply to stakeholders: more poverty = bad job/less poverty = good job! 

The work these students have done brings us much closer to the development of this tool. Part of the process they and we have engaged in, though, is a look around the industry, and we have discovered other attempts at developing this standardized tool, which is exciting. It remains though, that most organizations measure their impact their own way. 

Thus, my question: if a glance around the industry does not show any single tool being used by more than one organization, does it mean there isn’t a standard? 

Speaking of standards, Nicole has asked us to do a very interesting Research Project. When we go into new countries and communities, our program managers sure have a lot to worry about. They have countless questions to ask, hours of listening to do, millions of potential solutions to sift through, and billions of decisions to make. To that end, Claire and Veronica, a couple of our volunteers, are researching ways in which other organizations that do Water and Sanitation interventions make decisions when they arrive at new communities. They are looking for Decision Trees! Again, my consulting memories come flooding back to mind. This Needs Assessment process is something all organizations like Nuru engage in in some manner when they arrive at new communities. We are sure some other organizations have developed great tools to this end, and we want to know about them! Again, is there a standard? Would we know if there were? 

In this field video update learn how Nuru uses common Nokia 1680c cell phones, Opera Mini, and Google apps to facilitate real-time data collection in the field from Nuru's Kenyan staff.

The Epic of the Nuru Phone: I hear the slow but quickening click-click of cell phone buttons. I see eyes squinting at tiny screens. I smell the fresh plastic wrapping new electronics. I hear the beep of email alerts. I see the data streaming in from the field before my eyes. I feel the rubberized keypad through thumbs rubbed raw. All of this is more than I could have hoped for three months ago.

Nuru employees, whose hands from a lifetime of farming are still rough and calloused, with chipped fingernails and dirt-dyed palms, have just leapfrogged the PC. They are sending email, checking news, and listening to MP3s. They are reading the Bible, recording the radio, and devouring Wikipedia kilobyte by kilobyte. They are passing through 256-bit encryption to access organization data and to submit reports and surveys. They are sending photos to supervisors to line up with survey data. They are using their 9MB non-expandable phones as thin clients, sending personal photos to 7GB searchable Gmail accounts. And all of this is being done in real time from the field, miles from electricity or land lines.

In February, I boarded this crazy train. At the time, I worked for Nuru International as the Healthcare Program Manager. Nuru is an NGO that fights extreme poverty holistically by training local leaders and acting like a general contractor of other organizations; we had 5 programs, 60-some employees trying to serve and monitor 5000 people in rural Kenya. We had been doing this (poorly) with paper, pencils and a lot of time in Excel. Being holistic, we had data on loans, health, education, farms, water quality, GIS and so on, and so on. All of this was on paper, typed into different Excel documents on different computers, and most of this data was never seen again.

It was in this environment that I convinced our ex-Spec Ops Marine CEO to let me have $5000 of Nuru’s money and three months of time away from the Healthcare program to address our data needs. I’d heard about people doing this with Droids, Palms, iPhones and laptops. But I had never seen a robust data system with cheap phones, and that’s the budget I had. I had a laptop taste on a cell phone budget.

I’m a nerd, but the last time I had the opportunity to make a syntax error was high school; I couldn’t program my way into a solution, I needed to find something already made. I had looked at some very good tech that used the SMS protocol, FrontlineSMS, calculated that we were too poor even for SMS. $0.03 a pop adds up when you’re doing massive and persistent data collection. Nuru projects need to pay for themselves within five years, at which point the Kenyan staff takes it over from the Western; we need to be very careful when adding a monthly cost that will never go away.

I discovered the answer to the software question was a most definitive Google. Google Forms did what I needed it to do: it could send data to the cloud, easily and cheaply. And plus, with Google Apps, it had a secure login. And mail. And docs. And sites. And, I mean after all, it’s Google! And, another added benefit, it’s free for NGO’s. Yup. Free. And thanks to Safaricom, the local cell provider, there was GPRS internet just about everywhere, even very rural Kuria (wouldn’t it be nice if maybe Verizon, Sprint or AT&T could do that in the US?)

I looked around for the cheapest possible phone that had a decent web browser (i.e. came with/could install Opera Mini) and found the Nokia 1680: GPRS, VGA camera, Java, and a whopping 9MB of onboard memory. And best of all, it undercut smart phones by about an order of magnitude (coming in at just under $40, after some wheeling and dealing in Nairobi). But after spending the moolah, I discovered the Great Tragedy. The data cable is unsupported by Nokia. I could not clone them; I would have to configure them manually. And so I entered the horse-latitudes of my project. I sat in my room, typing in URLs and email login info into phone after phone after phone while listening to “The Brothers Karamazov” on MP3 to pass the time. And pass it did, for I almost finished the book. 

The final part of this tale is the grand task of transforming a nice idea to a working idea. Training. Training people who, before we came, had never even used phones before. Farmers. And let me tell you what, it was a wonderful and terrible thing.

Everyone in the US knows something about computers. Even your grandparents. But I had to start from scratch. What is data? How do you weigh it? How do I check on my M-B’s (I failed to teach them the slang pronunciation ‘megs’)? Where is Google (the double ‘O’ doesn’t quite get pronounced here)? To give you an example, the following is a direct quotation during a training: “Press select. No that’s down. Press select. No that’s down. This one is select. Press select. No that’s down.”

Despite the infuriating pace, I have seen wonders. There is nothing quite like somebody’s smile after they receive the first email of their life. I was a magician, showing them arcane secrets of “The Internet,” and seeing looks of reverent awe. I listened to the complaints of those who finished their 40MB data plan by nothing more than reading inconceivable amounts of Wikipedia on a 128-pixel screen. They don’t have libraries or bookstores here and the poor, it seems, are hungry for more than food.

Today I played helpdesk. I announced to the staff that I’d be there all day for training and troubleshooting. But I was alone most of the day. The phones were working. Employees were around the office, but they were now teaching each other better than I could (my Swahili sucks). Sixty rural Kenyan farmers, most of whom have never touched a computer or owned a phone, are doing with $40 candy-bar Nokias what most Americans can’t do with an Android. 

One of my students I’ll call Gati sent me the following email today: “May God bless nuru to continue forever.” She went from struggling to feed her family last year to sending me a casual, upbeat email from her hut on her phone today. Without even meaning to, Nokia, Google, Safaricom and Opera by means of Nuru have worked together to create opportunities for people like Gati to pull themselves out of extreme poverty.

I have an image of Mel Gibson (whose statue I saw in Edinburgh a few years back in honor of William Wallace…is that an example of art imitating art imitating art imitating life?) holding back his troops as they chomp at the bits for battle when I think of where things are with the Research Team right now. It’s an immensely, almost unbearably, exciting time, but because of what we’re about to do rather than what we’re doing. 

An exciting candidate, Nathalie Collins, just accepted an internship offer from us for work in Kuria this summer. She is an IT guru with both NGO and for-profit experience who will take the reigns from David on his work on the Poverty Intelligence Network  (PIN) this summer as he goes back to work as our Healthcare program manager. This is exciting because the PIN is such an awesome tool that will truly bring our data management activities to a different level, but it needs the right leadership and advocacy on the ground in order to do that.  

In the next two weeks, we shall have our four final reports from our GSPP students on poverty indicators.  These reports, along with some external research we have conducted on what other organizations are doing in this realm, will form the foundation of the work we do this summer to develop Metrics 2.0. This revised metrics system will keep us on the cutting edge of poverty eradication. 

Stephanie and I have two metrics-related conferences in our plans for June. One is the Aspen Network of Development Entrepeneurs Metrics and Evaluation Conference and another is the Global Health Council’s annual conference, which this year happens to be about Global Health and Metrics. Both of these will be fantastic opportunities for us to meet people trying to tackle the same problems we’re trying to tackle, learn about tools of our trade, and come up with some ideas for potential partnerships and implementation plans. 

Finally, we’re working to come up with a database solution for our soon to be real M&E system. We’ve gotten some great proposals from vendors who are ready to build something from scratch for us, and we’ve also discovered some really cool potential off-the-shelf solutions, as you readers of this blog already know from last week’s post. We are very excited at the opportunity to develop a good solution that can integrate with all of our other crazy activities happening in cyber space. 

Until next week, thank you for reading!

In the course of his research, one of the GSPP students “discovered” the Multi-Dimensional Poverty Assessment Tool (MPAT). The MPAT was released on March 23, 2010 and developed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development in Rome.  Clearly, it is a very new innovation in the poverty measurement space, and it sure seems like it has been thoroughly researched and field-tested.

I am currently in the midst (though sadly not yet the middle) of reading the 103 page user guide and the 211 page MPAT book.  Though I am not yet finished with this bed-time reading, I am excited about the possibility it may hold for us.  And this is why…

So, here’s how Nuru has been describing what we are trying to develop in terms of a shared measurement system / standard measuring stick for the entire international development industry, across culture, countries, and organizations:

To facilitate rigorous accountability and transparency, Nuru is pioneering a new holistic metric system, the Poverty Index, which can be used universally in the fight against extreme poverty.  The purpose is two-fold: 

1) To create accountability across organizations and efficiency in the development industry by having clear results that highlight what is working and what is not.

2) To keep a constant focus on the goal of leaving within 5 years by implementing regular assessment of each Metric and quickly altering course, when necessary.  

And here’s how the MPAT User Guide describes the purposes of the MPAT:

“MPAT is designed to be universal enough to be relevant to most rural contexts around the world, yet specific enough to provide project managers and others with a detailed overview of key dimensions relevant to rural poverty reduction efforts. MPAT provides an assessment, an overview, of ten dimensions central to rural livelihoods (see Figure 1), highlighting where additional support or interventions are likely to be most needed” (p 7).

“As such, MPAT strives to capture those domains that are, arguably, fundamental to human well-being and, by extension, to poverty reduction in a 21st century rural context. This is done by using survey questions that are broad enough to be applicable in most rural contexts, but precise enough to act as quality proxy measures for the components they represent” (p 8).

“Standardization means that the same tool is used the same way each time; this in turn means that if MPAT is used in the same project multiple times, then the indicators/results can be compared to each other. The same holds true if MPAT is used in different countries – this is part of MPAT’s value: the ability to make comparisons across space and time. Indeed, a reliable, standardized assessment tool can support project monitoring and evaluation, by being implemented at project start-up (for a baseline assessment), for a mid-term review and finally for a project completion assessment” (p 9).

So, does the MPAT actually measure what Nuru wants to measure?

Nuru focuses on 5 primary target areas that each encompasses multiple sub-components:  Agriculture, Health, Education, Water/Sanitation, and Community Economic Development.

MPAT includes 10 dimensions:  Food and Nutrition Security, Domestic Water Supply, Health and Healthcare, Sanitation and Hygiene, Housing/Clothing/Energy, Education, Farm Assets, Non-Farm Assets, Exposure and Resilience to Shocks, Gender and Social Equality.

Sounds pretty holistic to me…

Does anyone else see any remarkable similarities?  Might we have found THE ONE? 

Let me be very clear.  Nuru has just begun analyzing all of the poverty measurement system recommendations and our own Poverty Metrics Best Stuff Out There research.  We are nowhere finished.  I do not know if MPAT or a revised MPAT will rise to the top of our recommendations.  But I am intrigued.  

And I am EXTREMELY interested in hearing other people’s perspectives, especially experiences from anyone who has used the MPAT in the field.  PLEASE contact me with any thoughts about the MPAT – the good, the bad, and the ugly!  I wanna know!

Citations for aforementioned resource: 

Cohen, A. (2009). The Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool: 

User’s Guide. Working Paper. The International Fund for Agricultural Development: Rome. 

This week, I’m going to talk about exactly what it is I’ve been doing these past two months. My major goal was to set up a data collection system for Nuru. We had decided that phones were the way to go, but which phones, and what system still needed to be answered.

For the phone search, I went to Kisii, the nearest city (>100,000 people) and I selected a few phones that met my needs. #1 Internet (GPRS) #2 Java (ability to install software) #3 Camera #4 Not a “China Phone” (a brand-less or knock-off phone) #5 Were not way more expensive than other options. I found four phones which met those criteria: Nokia 2330, Nokia 1680, Samsung C-450, Samsung E2120.

I bought four identical SIM cards, and began the testing. The field testing consisted of their ability to connect to the Internet, a subjective test of their user interface, and their ability to connect to the web at all the important locations in our area (and some intentionally low reception spots). I also did an aesthetic survey, showing them to those who would be using them and asking them which they would prefer. I installed the relevant software on them (or tried to; Opera Mini 4.2 for Google Forms, and SMS:Frontline Forms). I then gave points for features above and beyond the 5 listed above (e.g. one had a microSD slot, some had video cameras, etc). I was concerned that my arbitrary weights and criteria would leave me without a conclusion. But I was mistaken, as the Nokia 1680 blew the others out of the water; it was the best in almost every single category.

Having selected a phone, I began to test the platforms and do a cost comparison. The major competitors were Frontline SMS (the leading SMS-based data collection tool) and Google Forms (a web-based data collection tool). The capabilities of Google Forms far exceeded Frontline. The major benefit of Google is that it’s “in the cloud,” that is, it’s stored “on the Internet” and not on any one physical computer. Which means that a computer crash (as happened to me yesterday) wouldn’t destroy any data and that data would be accessible in more than one place. The other factor was operating costs, and with Google Forms, they’d be about one hundred times lower than with Frontline. Data is super cheap, about a dime per MB, and form submission is about 5KB; SMS would cost $0.03 each form.

Then came the process of looking for a place to buy the phones. I went with Philip to Nairobi and looked for a place to buy phones. I went around the city with Philip’s son, Laurent, who knew the city well. After realizing that the Nairobi phone book was a joke (I gave up after 0 of 15 numbers connected to a business in the category I was calling), and that all the retailers in Nairobi were getting their phones from the Safaricom dealer, we went there. The phone retailed at 3000/- (~$40) and they gave us a whole 50/- discount when they heard we were buying 100 pieces. So we kept looking. My friend from Stanford put us in contact with people from the University of Naibori, and they tipped us off to a wholesaler. And they cut us a deal: 2850/= per piece. And since we were new customers, they agreed to ship them for free.

After this, I had to figure out the best configuration for the phones. For network, I decided to start with Safaricom as it had the clear majority of the local business already. I wanted people to keep their phone numbers and not have to change networks on top of all this new phone business. I realized after buying 100 phones, that the browser I installed (Opera 4.2) would crash fairly regularly when it viewed a Sheet. While not a critical operation (our main goal was data input), it would still allow us to do a great deal more if we could view the data that was submitted. So I started scrambling. And eventually found a link to an older version of Opera (2.0) that worked and wouldn’t crash and ran faster on the poor under-powered phones.

While Google Forms can work with any Google account, it works even better with a Google Apps deployment because you can securely record who submits data. Our amazing tech guy Will Kerr registered http://nuru.co.ke for us, and linked Google Apps to it. I created a very basic Google Site to allow for easy navigation of available forms. I then registered accounts for all the staff and started the tedious task of programming phones.

I know there’s probably a way to clone phones using USB, but after hours of trying, I had failed completely; USB is technically unsupported on the phone and I’d have to hack it, even assuming I could find the right cord (which is no easy task). I decided that doing it one by one was the only option. So I used the phones’ email client to access their new @nuru.co.ke addresses, installed Opera, added a bookmark to the Nuru site (thank God for bit.ly!), and for kicks, added the Nuru logo as the phone’s wallpaper. Wash, rinse, repeat… a hundred times. I got really good towards the end. In my personal time trials, my record was 8 minutes, 9 seconds for a complete setup. I eventually realized it was mindless enough work that I could learn about God, ethics and human nature simultaneously by listening to the Brothers Karamazov on MP3 while programming the phones.

Last of all was training. I trained and trained and trained. For most of them, they had never used a computer before this. And now they had to grapple with concepts like “megabytes” and “internet.” It was slow going, but rewarding. My lesson was once interrupted by a spreading wave of fake shutter sounds, as one person figured out the camera and then spread the knowledge like a virus. I’ve heard numerous accounts of people Googling and Wikipediaing late into the night about topics as varied as “rich people,” and “mountains.” These people had never even had access to a public library, and now they have all the world’s knowledge open to them. So training took a very long time with each group. And even after hours and hours of training, people are still uncomfortable with the phones. And this is why I’ll be spending a few more weeks on training when I come back.

In addition to training the Kenyan staff, I started showing the Foundation Team about the phones and about Google Forms. And I experimented with the Forms myself. I found that there is incredible power to be unlocked in Forms, particularly in the ability to link different Google Sheets and display the output in an HTML table (essentially it can pretend like it’s a database). This means that we can have all of our data on our handsets.

So that’s what I did the last two months. It’s been a really incredible experience. Looking back on it, I’m excited about the state of the world. This would have been impossible even last year. Google has invented a system for easily collecting data. Safaricom wanted to make money selling phone internet access. Years ago, Opera made a way to view web pages on a phone. Nokia built a high-quality phone at a low price. And I, with no special experience or programming knowledge, am able to piece together these technologies to make a cheap, real-time data collection system.

What’s so exciting to me is that I’m nothing special; anyone could have done this, and done it cheap. It only cost Nuru the cost of my time to set this thing up, $30 per year to register a domain, and $40 per phone with about $1 per month in data charges. There are no development costs, no programmers to be paid, no server costs. Anywhere there is GPRS internet (which is quickly becoming everywhere), this kind of system could be set up. This blog isn’t patented. So please, rip off this idea! And encourage others to, also!

Nuru’s first ever Third-Party Evaluation is ready for review!

This is a monumental step in our journey towards developing an international poverty metric system to transform the development industry. It is not perfect. It is not ideal. But, it is a wonderfully important first step.

For Nuru to have a Research team within months of starting operations is amazing. To have piloted a Holistic Poverty Metric System and have completed a Third Party Evaluation using that system in Year 1 is visionary (to be clear, I am not saying that I am visionary, but I am saying that the commitment in Nuru’s model to research, accountability, and Measurement & Evaluation is).

It has not been easy, and we have made mistakes. People have been very understanding. We have learned a tremendous amount.  We will take all the lessons from this Evaluation and our metrics work over the past year, and we will strive to improve. We will build upon these lessons to design a Metrics System 2.0, which will move us even closer to the goal of ending extreme poverty. And we invite you to critique, revise and provide feedback. Seriously! The more brains invested in this goal, the better we can serve those living in extreme poverty. Join us in the fight to use data and metrics to help end extreme poverty, to use data to truly transform – we welcome your critique.

Now, let’s get to the good stuff. The Evaluation Package is a series of documents and files (more detail below) that covers a HUGE amount of information and 164 individual metrics. If you are interested in receiving the Nuru Evaluation Package, please request a copy by emailing Nuru’s Research Director, Gaby Blocher.

Components of the 2009 Nuru Evaluation Package:

1. Nuru 2009 Evaluation Final Report with Nuru Commentary: The 68 page Evaluation Report, written by third party-evaluators, includes sections on Data Gathering Methodologies, Evaluation of the Metric System by target area, Comments on selected Metric results, Qualitative Observations on results, and Qualitative Assessment of Gender and Family Structure.  Appendices include recommended modifications to survey tools, summary of quotes from the field, and compilation of Evaluator recommendations mentioned throughout the report.

2. Evaluation 1 Score Model: A large data file in Excel, which includes a) raw data, ?b) two primary household survey instruments, c) data collection sheets for business visits, health facility visits, and home visits, ?d) formulaic calculations and descriptions of how values were derived for all 164 metrics, e) and specific explanations as to why 53% of metrics were not included in Index Score calculations.

3. Metric System and Index Score Description: A one-page summary describing the overall PovertyIndex Score system and our concerns about the possible discrepancy between the intent of the system and the actual results of the system, while in a learning, pilot phase. This document, does however, communicate the results of the Nuru Metric System through the 5 Index Scores values (Health Poverty Index, Agriculture Poverty Index, Education Poverty Index, Health Poverty Index, and CED Poverty Index).

4. Score Definitions and Progressions: This Excel file is the backbone of the Metric System in that it includes baseline values, weight, and score progressions defined for each metric.

5. The Data Collection tools: Household surveys and in-depth interview data collection questions are contained within the Evaluation 1 Score Excel Model. Data collection tools used for the Education sector are in separate files.

Given how much information and data there is to peruse, I will do my best to give you examples of some of the highlights below.

One Important Note:  The findings below are only one small part of the Nuru Metric System and only one component of the Third Party Evaluation.  These values feed into a numeric system that strives to calculate a Poverty Index Score for each of Nuru’s 5 target areas – Water Poverty Index, Education Poverty Index, Agriculture Poverty Index, Health Poverty Index, and Community Economic Development Poverty Index.  In addition to collecting data that result in the values above, the Third Party Evaluators also assessed and critiqued the Nuru Metric System itself.  Highlights of this assessment are captured below as well.

Key Findings from December 2009 Evaluation / Data Collection:
• 63% of Schools have sufficient Water Available Onsite Year-round, up from 0% one year ago.

• 24% of Households Disinfect Drinking Water correctly.  This is up only 4% from baseline and  points us in the direction of needing to invest additional resources and efforts.

• 49% of people wash hands at most or all critical times, up from 5% at baseline.

• 47% of farmers utilize agricultural extension training, up from 0% at baseline.

• 65% of farmers are intercropping, which improves soil health and agricultural yield.  This is up  from less than 25% of farmers at baseline.

• Student/Teacher Ratio in Primary School has increased slightly since baseline (50.6 vs. 50),  requiring further exploration and/or efforts to determine how to improve this situation.

• Overall completion rate of Primary School has risen from 11% to 15%, suggesting that  additional effort is needed.

• 33% of Households are using bednets properly, up from 25% at baseline.  Nuru’s may wish to  use this data to further explore what worked and what did not.

• 64% of population is actively involved in “saving.”  This shows progress and is up from 32% at  Baseline.

• 33% of Businesses are owned by women, down from 42% women-owned businesses at  baseline.  This suggests further work needed in women’s empowerment in business and/or an
 inconsistency between Evaluation 1 and Baseline data collection.

• 53% of the 164 Evaluation 1 Metrics could not be reliably used in calculation of the Index  Scores.  Reasons are varied and are specifically noted in the Evaluation 1 Score Model file as  well as pp 28-38 of the Evaluation Report. This highlights the multitude of lessons we have learned as to how to this better in Evaluation 2 and in Metric System 2.0.

Key Metric System Recommendations from Third Party Evaluators:

The following key gaps exist in the current Metric System:

• Oversimplifies complex realities

• Does not capture qualitative changes in people’s lives

• Misses many gender-specific indicators

An Improved Metric System should:
• Insure that indicators / datapoints are selected strategically to maximize community benefit and  minimize cost of collection

• Include both quantitative rigor and qualitative flexibility in design of the next Metric system

• Integrate gender-sensitive indicators and gender-focused programming in all 5 target areas of  the Nuru model

• Emphasize community participation and local leadership in metrics and evaluation, as has  occurred with local Nuru strategy and programs

• Include revised metrics and indicators. See pp 8-28 of Evaluation Report for further detail.  Examples include:  
- Revise the output metric of “% population trained in water treatment methods” to an outcome metric of “% of population using correct water treatment methods.”  
- Determine a) specific type of malnutrition Nuru wants to measure and b) most reliable method of measuring specified type of malnutrition.
- Define metrics more clearly, such as what is meant by “B21 – Average Days Required to Opena Business.”
- Remove metrics that tend to serve more as useful datapoints than indicators of poverty, such as A5 Price of Fertilizer and A6 Price of Seed.
    
Whew.  So those are the highlights. The Evaluation Package has landed.

Just for Fun - Eval By Numbers:

164 - number of metrics used in Evaluation 1 in Kuria

19 - rainstorms Evaluation Team sought refuge from during data collection

17 - number of villages, according to local chiefs, in the Nuru catchment area

159 - approximate number of boda boda motorcycle rides used to manage data collection across the
 Nuru community

527  - number of households surveyed

14 -  approximate number of Nuru Research Volunteers who tirelessly donated their time to assist  with data entry

34 - Kenyan data collectors trained

16 - Kenyan data collectors / interviewers hired

321 - number of chapattis eaten by the Evaluation Team over the course of data collection

24 - number of days of the Official Evaluation in Kenya (Nov 27-Dec 20)

405 - approximate number of person-days spent on data collection for Evaluation 1

8 - number of schools interviewed

Hot topic: data, The Data Deluge, as The Economist calls it. I can’t link to it because it’s subscription-only, but the February 27th, 2010 edition is pretty interesting. There’s a special report about the unbelievable amount of data that exists in the world today, and what companies, governments, NGOs, and individuals wish to and do actually do with the data.  

We here at Nuru are not yet experiencing a deluge of the yottabyte proportions being referenced in the Economist piece at this moment per se (please read some sarcasm here), but we do have an Excel model that takes about five minutes to open.

That Excel model is the result of one collection of baseline data and one third Party evaluation. 

We’re not conducting an Evaluation this year because of our M&E system overhaul, but next year we plan to conduct two and collect baseline data in two new communities; the year after that we’ll conduct six evaluations and collect baseline data in one new community; and it only gets more extensive from there. 

The data we’ve already collected will never go away according to our plan, so in no time at all, we’ll be experiencing perhaps not a deluge, but at least a steady shower. 

What to do with all this data? We have an online database, but it, like the M&E system itself, has to be overhauled this year to handle what we are trying to do. 

So anyway, let me get to the subject matter point: 

We have a trilogy of data categories here at Nuru. 

The first category is the one I’ve referred to extensively in the first section of this post: the M&E data. It is the data that is collected and used to assess the level of poverty in the communities where we are working. It is used to assess the poverty level at a point in time and the progression out of poverty that occurs over time. 

A pilot version of that M&E system was developed a few years ago and put into use last year. Baseline data was gathered in the early part of 2009, and Evaluation One data was gathered in December of 2009. The system itself is meant to assess progression within the context of that system against the baseline established last year. 

The second category is a subset of the M&E data: the Dashboard. We don’t have a dashboard yet, but we are working on developing one as we do an overhaul of our whole M&E system. It will be a short (4 to 5 indicators) list of the best Metrics we have. It will consist of the most objectively accurate indicators of poverty. I don’t want to hazard a guess as to what the dashboard will look like in the long run because we’re just not sure until the metrics overhaul is complete, but it will be a succinct and informative list. 

The third and final category of data is the PIN (Poverty Intelligence Network). The PIN will consist of data that is collected weekly by Nuru employees in the field across all five target areas. I won’t give away too much information about what the PIN is, as David is in charge of it, has told you a bit about it already and will definitely tell you more. What I will mention is that the PIN will likely consist of a subset of M&E metrics as well as a lot of additional operational data such as attendance records and loan repayment data. 

The only remaining piece of information I must include is this: why did I call this post ‘things as I see them’? I will tell you why: because we have not decided here at Nuru that these three categories are the final answer in terms of categories of data. We might decide that the three categories overlap so much that they should not be considered separately. We might decide that there is a fourth category. 

I just don’t know at the moment where paths will lead us, but you at least know my current perspective, and that is enough for now. Thanks for reading, and trust me, there’s more to come!

Someone sent me this TED talk about happiness this week…..and it got me thinking a little bit about my job. 

One way to describe the Nuru Research Team’s purpose is that we are supposed to ensure that Nuru is doing the right things. We are supposed to ensure that the work that is happening on the ground is cutting edge and innovative, and that the community is experiencing a positive trend away from the state of its existence upon our arrival. 

This positive trend and the state of existence upon our arrival are difficult to define. When we started the work that the research team is doing, we began using a numbers-based (since my time on this job, I’ve become opposed to making a distinction between qualitative and quantitative assessments…what is the difference, really? Aren’t there aspects of both in all assessments? Maybe this is a topic for another post…) system to measure the poverty level of the community in Kenya where we are working. Our foundation team members gathered data to establish the baseline values for the metrics we were tracking, and then last December we brought in third party evaluators to find out how far along the track out of extreme poverty we established the community has moved. 

So, with numbers and with metrics and with a list of aspects of our five target areas, we tried to define extreme poverty. We also tried to define a way to measure progress out of it. The problem is, though, that we did this a little piecemeal, target area by target area. Also, just the nature of the beast: we discovered some problems with our system when we put it to use in the evaluation. 

For these reasons, we’re now doing what Nuru does a lot of: we are iterating. We’re taking a step back from the system and developing a new one that is more coherent and cohesive than system number one. 

Part of what we must decide in the development of this new system, is this: what is the state of existence, out of which we are trying to facilitate the movement of the community? 

Are we trying to make it so that people have more freedom? Our Research Officer, David Carreon, is leaning that way as he works on a paper for us that will be out at the end of the month. He is writing about “liberty poverty” in the paper. 

Are we trying to improve the well-being of the people in the community? Here’s some thinking about the difficulty or perhaps impossibility of measuring such a thing by my favorite non-Nuru blogger, Duncan Green

Or are we trying to make it so that people are happy in Kuria? This one is perhaps the most difficult way to define what we are trying to do. The TED talk I linked to above is by Daniel Kahneman, who is the inventor of behavioral economics. In it, you’ll get a little taste of the difficulty of even defining happiness, much less measuring it. Is happiness jumping out of an airplane or is it remembering that you once jumped out of an airplane? Check out the talk to give it some thought. 

By this fall, we’ll have our new and improved M&E system and between now and then, we’ll make some big decisions about what the path we are on actually is for the people of Kuria.  

You all know that the world is flat. If you don’t, you need to read Thomas Friedman’s book, “The World Is Flat.” Basically he says that cheap communication (i.e. the Internet) has “flattened” the world; barriers of space, geography and culture are becoming irrelevant because of the ease of communication.

So the world is flat. But what does that matter to a Kenyan farmer? To someone making $1 a day, even a $400 computer is far beyond feasibility. And that’s not even considering the lack of electricity and computer knowledge which seem as endemic as malaria.

If you’re a computer nerd (or you know any), you will know they’ve been talking about ‘thin clients’ for about forever. We nerds have long dreamed of getting access to computer horsepower far beyond what we could afford using a “thin,” cheap computer whose only purpose was connecting to a big, powerful one, one where all the real work was done and big data was stored. But computers got so cheap so fast that this never really worked out. Cheap, at least, for the developed world.

However, there are billions for which a computer is completely inaccessible. Even the $1 per hour for computer use is unreasonable. Enter: cell phone. It’s the thin-client that we nerds have been yearning for. And the internet is just now getting mature enough to simultaneously handle the big tasks and to present it to the kinds of processors found on cell phones. So what do we have? We’ll have, within a decade, poor people across the world accessing the fullness of the internet.

Who should care? Everybody. Do you have something to sell? You’ll have a billion customers within a decade who have phones, internet access, and the ability to send money over phone networks (in Kenya, it’s called M-PESA and you use local businesses as ATMs; you can deposit and withdraw money from your phone at almost any shop or stand). Do you want to distribute Bibles? For the cost of a few Bibles, you could give a person access to the Bible in every language and every piece of Christian scholarship ever written. Do you want to communicate your message? There is an entire generation of the poor that will soon discover it can read whatever ideas that interest them, be they democratic, communistic, consumerist, atheistic, Christian, Muslim, patriotic, or racist. A billion potential readers. A billion sets of eyeballs. A billion wallets. A billion hearts. Gutenberg’s printing press gave millions access to the printed word within a century of its invention. The cell phone will reach exceedingly more people in its second decade than the printing press did in a century.

So where does Nuru fit in? How are we positioning ourselves in this revolution? We are planning to accelerate it. We want our people to be on this cutting edge. We have purchased and will soon be issuing internet-enabled cell phones to all our staff within a few weeks. We’ll teach them the basics of how to use the phones to communicate, how to use email, and how to use the internet. And then, we’ll use some of the newly matured internet tools to do Nuru stuff better.

Google Forms provides an incredible platform for collecting data. We can design forms, send out the relevant URL, and then get people to submit data by phone and have it compiled onto a safe, secure, shared server in San Jose . That means that all of our operation can, with a few thousand dollars of phones, become completely digital. No more paper attendance forms. No more written ledgers recording contributions to savings accounts. No more survey sheets. No more lost home visit forms. No more paper. All digital.

But this won’t just let us do what we used to do better. It will let us do what’s never been done before. Do we need to make an announcement to all 60 Nuru staff members? Now we just need to send out an email. What about taking a staff-wide vote on a course of action? It’s as simple as emailing out a Google Form.

I talked before about the Disease Intelligence Network, a system for monitoring and rapidly responding to outbreaks. But now it’s actually possible. We can do continuous surveillance (i.e. taking temperatures), uploading this data to a server as it is collected. The instant certain conditions are met (e.g. fever prevalence >10%), we can have the computer alert the healthcare team of an outbreak of disease.

There is a multitude of other things that we can do but don’t realize we can do. An entire universe of possibilities will open up in three weeks. I just need to keep my head on straight and make sure we master the basics first.

Ha. The title probably got you excited didn’t it? You thought we might be able to report something about our evaluation results from December? Well, we will, not right now though. The results are in, but they’re only in to us. We’re working feverishly to get the results ready for you to look at. 

Last week we received a 42-page report from our evaluators. It’s got good news, it’s got bad news, and frankly, it’s got some news that we’re not sure we understand, nor can explain well to people. We’re working through those last two before we’re ready to share with the world. 

It’s very very exciting though, and I can say that the report is nothing like anything I’ve seen from other organizations like ours. Our evaluators really had a lot to say about Nuru itself, the community where we work, and the metrics system we put into use last year. I must point out that the “Nuru itself” critiques were extra credit within the context of the report, but we gladly take all of the critiques. Our two evaluators are smart and experienced people who most importantly do not work for Nuru, so, they were able to look at us pretty objectively. Truly, I’m very excited to share this report. 

Please look for it on this blog in the next month or so!

In other news, David Carreon, our new Research Officer, is hard at work on the ground in Kenya getting our Poverty Intelligence Network and the tools he needs for this in place. He’ll post some more information on that for us here next week. 

Also, Stephanie (our Senior Research Officer) and I met face-to-face in California last week to go over all kinds of exciting topics, most importantly the evaluators’ report. In addition to the report review, I got to meet our student interns who are working on our M&E system overhaul under Stephanie’s management. Stephanie had told me that they each “think differently” about this system and what it will be, and having a face-to-face conversation with each of them really drove that point home. It’s so exciting to have such brains on this topic. They each think of something different and are working on such a variety of findings. 

Finally, this is my favorite non-Nuru blog: From Poverty to Power. I’ve been waiting for a good segue to mention the blog, but haven’t found one. I just wanted to say that I read it every day, and it is really great. Duncan Green is funny and insightful. He’s British. Which helps. 

Thanks for reading!