The reason we weren’t comfortable doing that is that our definition, in the end and through that process, did not make any sense. Extreme poverty, according to that old system, meant a specific number of health centers, a community-wide maternal mortality rate, a community-wide under-five mortality rate, a specific average maize yield, a percentage of farmers who intercrop, and, well, a whole bunch of other specific numbers. We realized, in looking at these numbers, that we were trying to paint a representative and accurate picture of extreme poverty and the end of it with a list of numbers. The list of numbers didn’t serve that purpose well. It was just a list of numbers. Further, we didn’t feel we had either the expertise or the right to define the ideal end-state of our expat-conducted interventions for the community based on what were essentially our program managers’ impressions of an ideal state. 

So, as I’ve written about many times here, we took a giant step sideways (not at all backwards, just sideways; out of the box, in other words), and we overhauled our M&E system throughout 2010. As I’ve mentioned, we came across the MPAT and decided that it would be a great tool for us to use to evaluate the experience of extreme poverty for our community-members, and as I’ve also mentioned, we decided to pursue the development of good program metrics for each of our programs to test the successes or failures of our interventions. 

All that stuff is exciting and going well, but it still leaves the question of Exit Criteria wide open. How should an ideal end-state of the expat-based presence of Nuru look in Kuria?  

On the call last week, we bounced around a few different options for determining the end of expat involvement. 

One option that we are considering is having our program experts define what they believe to be an ideal end-state for the community based on the MPAT’s survey and the ten component scores that come out of it. The problem with this way of establishing exit criteria is that it still means that non-native community members, or non-Kurians/non-Kenyans, are deciding what the ideal state of the community is. Its worth noting that they would be doing so with an infinitely superior tool to the one we put to use during 2009, and also they would be doing so according to not just a list of numbers, but a list of in-depth and meaningful survey responses about the truth of the community-members’ ways of life (according to the MPAT, their well-being and the enabling environment in the community). 

Another option is very similar to the first option, but instead of having the expat program managers or program experts establishing the ideal state of the community based on the MPAT survey and responses to it, community members themselves would take the survey and respond to the survey questions according to what they think is an appropriate status for the Nuru expat team to leave the community. This could work out very well, and would be a means for us to further evolve our model as one that incorporates community input.

A third way to establish exit criteria is by using expert opinions and extensive research to determine an ideal level for each of the program metrics that we are working on establishing this year. These will be numbers similar to the ones we used in 2009. Many of the same problems that we had then remain with this exit criteria method, but the in-depth research and background information could make a big difference. 

Finally, there is a bit of a wild card that I think might be our answer! Here is to hoping! You can read a little blurb here about our Servant Leadership Program. There is much more to come as a new team in this program area has just formed on the ground, the point of the program, is a means to ensure that community leaders are being identified, trained, and tracked to keep Nuru self-sustaining for the long haul. We have yet to develop an M&E system for this program, but we are working on it. Once we have one, THIS might be the system within which we want to establish exit criteria! This might be the way to measure the time that the expat team should leave: when the community is fully empowered to sustain the impact of the interventions we have conducted.

More to come on this, for sure. 

Thanks to Aerie and his idea that a small group of us who now constitute the “international” team should meet and talk to one another once a week about issues of importance to the Nuru International world, I got to engage in a riveting discussion today with four colleagues about exit criteria. It’s a tough topic! 

First, let me just list off the colleagues who were involved in said discussion. There was Janine Brown, our current domestic healthcare program manager (she used to be on the Research Team), Stephanie Jayne, who is on the Research Team, Aerie Changala, our Director of International Operations, and Thomas Hong, our Training Director. 

We talked on Skype! Oh, I should mention that too – multi-participant (like, more than two people) video-chatting is now possible on Skype. That’s pretty exciting for us, since we all either work from home or the house in Kenya, which is, I suppose, home for many of our team members. Anyway, big digression, but a good one….

I write a lot about metrics here on this blog, and it is a very important part of the work we do on the Research Team. Perhaps the most important thing we do. As I’ve written before, we are tasked with developing, managing, honing, and putting to use the means by which we objectively assess the effectiveness of the interventions we are conducting as well as the general state of the current community (Kuria) and future communities where we are working. 

I think there is a strong consensus amongst Nuru stakeholders that that measurement and evaluation is a worthwhile endeavor. It also seems to be a consensus in the current climate of international development and rural poverty work. People seem to agree that objective assessment of NGO work and interventions is a good thing. 

The question we were asking ourselves on today’s call, though, was to what end is this measurement? I think in the short term and in many cases, measurement of effectiveness will serve to help us decide where to re-direct our efforts. If the measurement tools we put to use indicate that some aspects of the healthcare of the community are below a level that we wish them to be, or that they are declining from some established baseline, our M&E tools will help us decide that we need to invest more resources in our healthcare interventions or just improve their efficacy somehow. 

But another big reason that we have always thought that we should have a good M&E system is that we thought it would help us objectively assess the moment when it is appropriate for our ex-pat team to leave the community. We thought that we could establish some “ideal” scores for all the metrics we use and have the reaching of those scores mean that we have achieved success in a program area. We thought that we would have a goal of reaching each of those scores in a five-year timeframe, and that would create a clear path for each program and a multi-faceted goal to aim for at the end of that path. 

The problem with doing things that way with our OLD metric system while at the same time stating that our organization’s goal was to end extreme poverty was that we found that we were, piece-meal, defining extreme poverty with our metrics. Frankly, we weren’t comfortable doing that. 

To be continued…

Some parts of the report, however, remind me that rural poverty is a bigger monster than can be killed in just a couple of years. It is the result of huge and complex influences on communities from unfair policies to big businesses and corporate greed to cultural and gender inequities and environmental degradation. All this being said, we are young and we have limited capacity at this point. There is only so much an organization like ours can do in the short time we have existed with limited resources we have at our disposal thus far. I’m proud of what we have accomplished in that short time, though.

In other news, the Evaluation recruiting process is going very well. I am so pleased with the caliber of candidates that have come our way. I have spoken with a number of U.S. and other developed-country nationals who seem to be incredibly eager to use a tool as amazing as the MPAT and work with us in Kenya for our Evaluation. This week, I have begun speaking with a few firms that are based in Nairobi. These folks are equally enthusiastic and qualified, and with resources and extensive expertise already on-hand in Kenya, which is exciting. We would have to spend less money on travel! 

Until next week, thanks for reading…

I am glad I work for Nuru. One of the reasons that I am glad I work for Nuru is that we are a grassroots organization. We spend time with people experiencing extreme poverty and we try to tailor the work we do to their specific needs. We don’t develop solutions from the ivory tower. We don’t come into communities thinking we know the answers. We don’t work from the top down to try to change policies, we work from the bottom up to try to change individual lives. 

That last thing we don’t do, of course, presents a bit of a challenge. Sometimes policies need to be changed in order for people to experience freedom from the shackles of extreme poverty. So, it is important that organizations with goals similar to Nuru’s goals do policy work. The reason I feel that I myself am not necessarily cut out for policy work is that it takes a lot of interpersonal sensitivity, a lot of finesse, a lot of patience, and a real way with words and negotiation. None of these personal attributes are things I feel that I particularly possess. I suppose I can pull them out as skills when I try very hard to, but they are not on the top of my list of natural personal attributes. 

Another thing that policy-based work entails is a lot of discussion about the topic of extreme poverty. This, I actually enjoy and spend a lot of time on. Great portions of my discussions and ruminations about the problem of extreme poverty, though, are always around how specifically to assess and measure it and what to do about it once it has been assessed. Policy discussions and writings often spend more time on defining the topic and problem with a sentence a the end of the discussion stating that “policy makers should…” with a recommendation that can be represented with just a few words but would entail lifetimes of altered realities to make real. 

I am happy that my discussions are often around what we are actually going to do as an organization, as opposed to what we think entities that are very difficult to effect ought to do. 

As I often do, I want to just quickly change the subject and report on a few things. A local volunteer here in Columbus has offered to help me out with my volunteer management process. She is a QC specialist at a local very big and very cool company, and she is viewing my work in volunteer management with a critical eye and coming up with some ideas for how I can improve the process. This is a great thing. 

Another thing to report on: we’re working on standardizing and improving our use of two major tools that we use a lot: Power Point and Microsoft Excel. I have developed a template for power point that we will use as an organization pretty soon, and we are working on narrowing down a few options for good Excel training for a number of our employees. Both great things that harken back to my time as a consultant. Great stuff!

Last week I had the joy and pleasure of taking a little trip away from unendingly snowy Ohio over to the West Coast (Bay Area to be precise) to attend training for Foundation Team 6. 

It was an almost perfect few days. On a personal note, the combination of Nuru being a virtual organization, us doing such unique and intense work, and me having been with Nuru for a little over two years now means that some of my closest friends are my work friends and they live very far away from me. So the trip was a pleasure personally for me because I got to spend some time with a few very important people to me. 

On a professional note, I got to make some new friends (does that make sense?)! I met the team members who will make up Foundation Team 6. They are leaving for Kenya in a couple of weeks to continue and build on the work of their predecessors.  We will be working together a lot this year as the Research Team will continue to do research projects for staff members AND the conduct of Evaluation 2 in May will entail me making another trek to the project site to work side-by-side with them. The Evaluation will involve prep work and after-action work as well.  More on that in a paragraph or two. 

Stephanie and I administered two training sessions for the field staff, which was great. We trained on the structure of the research team,  the process for volunteer research project requests, and the wild and wacky world of Measurement and Evaluation as it currently stands. There was a lot of great interaction, and in the end I feel quite confident that we all understand one-another. 

In this virtual world, my little trip to the coast is proof to me of the profound effect of a face-to-face meeting. Worth 1,000,000 words. 

…and for a tad more on the big Evaluation. Well, I was quite concerned that we were going to have a hard time finding Evaluators. That concern has been eradicated and replaced by concern about how we are going to choose from amongst the many qualified applicants I have been talking with over the last few days. In addition, there are about twelve organizations that Stephanie and I are contacting over the next couple of days to look for interest from. So, I believe this big push that we have conducted to try to find someone seems to have at least yielded a great number of interested parties. The next step, again, is picking someone and/or some organization. It is an exciting opportunity for anyone or any organization to be the first ever to implement the MPAT in Africa, so I shouldn’t be surprised that there is such interest. 

I am so grateful that we believe in objective assessment of the poverty levels in the communities where we work!

A little trick of our trade – we write blog posts in advance of when they are posted. I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s the truth. I typically write a post one week prior to when it is actually put up here on this site. 

So the truth that I am revealing here is that THIS is really the first post that I am writing after the holiday break. I have been away from you for a month. 

The last post updated you on a lot of the happenings here on this team…and not too much has changed! Janine is working for Aerie on the international team, which is personally sad for me because I love working with Janine, but it makes a lot of sense for our organization and even the Research Team. Through much of 2011, she will be able to work directly with Aerie and Lindsay Cope (all in the same country) to further refine our Healthcare Program during its R&D phase this year. 

It makes sense for the Research Team because I can get back into some of the details of our M&E system. To that end, I will be managing the Evaluation that will be occurring this spring in Kuria. This will be tough task, but an exciting one. As I mentioned in a previous post or two, the most urgent aspect of this work is finding a couple of third-party evaluators to implement the MPAT. Our search to this end has begun.

I spoke to one great candidate from Ohio State early this week, and a professor there has connected me with a few other people from my local academic community. I am only sad that I haven’t tapped into this huge community any earlier! I am optimistic that these connections will yield some great collaboration in the future. 

As I write, I realize I should be a little more explicit about what kind of person we are looking for and what kind of work we are talking about: we are looking for someone who has conducted a quantitative survey-based evaluation in a developing country. We will employ two people like this to go to Kenya for at least one month this May. The work will actually be quite self-explanatory in my opinion due to the MPAT and its nature. The MPAT is great! 

Please let me know if you would like to see a job description. I will share it with you, and you can share it with anyone you see fit. We need help, and I would love to have these positions filled by the end of this month. 

Today I am off to San Francisco to meet the next Foundation Team who is going to the field. I am excited about this opportunity! These are the folks who are going to be at the project site in Kenya for most of 2011. We will all be working together virtually and even for one month in person during this year. It will be great to meet them and work with them in person for a couple of days. And it’s also nice to leave the snow of Ohio in January. 

Happy New Year!

I want to report on a few different things this week, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to do a good job with transitions, but hey, I’ll try. Let’s just see how it goes: 

First of all, Janine and Lindsay presented their recommendations about the Healthcare program early this week to Jake, Aerie, and Vivian. The recommendations are still very much in draft form, but we are excited with everything they came up with. This is a milestone week for us, as Lindsay and Janine presented on Healthcare, Lindsey Kneuven presented her Education findings, and Nicole presented her findings on the Water and Sanitation model. All of the models will continue to be in an R&D phase for much of next year, but we are excited to have been self-aware enough to take a step back, do some deep research, and really decide what we ought to do. 

Nuru is pursuing a Community Health Worker (CHW) model. We have already begun to employ some CHWs in the field, and you can read a whole lot more about what we’ve been doing so far over on Lindsay Cope’s blog. It is an exciting model that we think can be sustainable and community-run and managed. We are happy about those aspects of it. 

Transition here….well, one’s not coming to mind, so now for something completely different: 

We are using the MPAT! We made the decision finally. It took us a lot longer than we had hoped it would take us to get to the final decision-point, but we are finally there. As a reminder if you don’t feel like clicking on that link, the MPAT is a tool that will help to measure the enabling environment in Kuria, Kenya. In other words, it will help to measure whether the people who live in Kuria are empowered to not be living in extreme poverty, as they are now. We will use it over time to assess the situation in Kenya. I’ve described in other posts a few of the other aspects of our metrics system and what we hope for it to look like, so look back if you want more context. 

Stephanie and I had a conversation today about what using the MPAT really means for us, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions. First of all, we are pretty sure that we are going to need to find some outside help to actually conduct the study. That means we’ll need to start recruiting right away for someone with experience in gathering data in developing countries to go and conduct this evaluation. So. Well, if you know anyone…..There are other issues that we must consider too as we get going on implementing this system! Of course, it is right before the holidays. 

Finally, again, no transition, Jake and I have been having a lot of conversations about my role and what the Research Team should really be focused on in the last couple of weeks. It’s hard for me to get my head out of the weeds and have these conversations with him at this moment in time, frankly. I think it’s just a mental thing…I can’t think about not doing all the things I spend like the vast majority of my time doing. But anyway, we’re wondering if perhaps the volunteer research team should disperse to the programs. I think that might be an interesting idea. It is time-consuming to manage the volunteers logistically, and the volunteers seem to really enjoy getting directly involved in the work we’re trying to do here at Nuru, rather than just talking to me about general things. Let me know what you think about this!

Oh, it’s nervous times here at Nuru, I must say. Good times, but nervous times. 

Janine Brown and Lindsay Cope are getting ready to present their recommendations to Jake, Vivian, and Aerie about the size, shape, look, feel, intent, and meaning of our overhauled Healthcare program. They are recommending some exciting stuff, but a lot of what they’re recommending will entail follow-on work. They have to just temper the expectations they set next week in terms of what they present, because they don’t want the recipients of their presentation to feel like they are presenting the final answer. They’re presenting an iteration of some portions of the final answer. It’s good, though. We love to iterate here at Nuru…we love to iterate.

Over the sea at the project site, the team on the ground (of which Lindsay Cope is a part), is getting ready to return here to the States for a holiday break next week. They all have a lot to do before they get on those planes to come back here, and Jennifer Lee, our research liaison in the field now, is trying to facilitate some parts of their work. She has compiled a comprehensive document to help them track all of the data they have gathered and are gathering in the field. 

We hope that this document will act as a tool to ensure that data gathering efforts are not duplicated over time unnecessarily, and to help team members figure out how to use data. We are working now on nailing down ALL uses of the tool so that we can revise it as necessary and as the team needs. 

The funding situation seems to be pretty good, so though that’s a thing about which we’re often nervous around here, but we are not this month. It’s kind of funny. We have a great matching funds campaign going on during the month of December. Donations are being matched by funders, so every dollar we get in December becomes two of them. 

And finally and most significant for our Research Team, the big long process that we have undergone this year of a re-design of our metrics system is coming to something of an end. We seem to have gotten close to nailing down the universal system we want to use, and we are working closely with all of our program experts to solidify our program metrics.  This has been a very exciting process. 

As with much else of the work we do here, though, our iterative processes will make the final product of this metrics 2.0 work a little different from what we might have anticipated a year ago. Because we are redesigning three of our five program areas right now, a decision about how to measure the impact of each of these areas is pretty challenging to make. Some might argue that making it at all is a tad premature! So, therefore, we are developing and will have ready to present draft indicators for a few of our program areas in the near term, but as with the Healthcare program recommendations – they are not set in stone. They are draft. 

More next week and thanks for reading!

It has been a few weeks since I updated you here! Sorry for the delay. A lot has happened here at Nuru in the interim! 

We had a week-long strategy meeting for all senior directors at Nuru in Southern California. We each had the assignment of reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins in preparation for the meeting. Going into the discussions of the week with that book as part of the back-story of our narrative brought some very interesting energy into the dicussions. 

I am not an avid reader of the types of books that are typically advertised in seat-back-pocket-in-front of you magazines, but I found this book very readable and interesting. I also found its lessons, warnings, and advice highly appropriate for us at this moment in our history. It is very appropriate for us to be trying to determine who should and should not be a part of our organization, what we can be the best in the world at, what the brutal facts of our success and failures so far are, and what types of things we should think about NOT doing any more. 

So, all of us directors spent a lot of very intense discussion-time talking about these things. We talked a lot about the nature of change and what it should mean to us. We talked about empowerment. We talked about the fact that not giving handouts and doing no more than creating an “enabling environment” for the members of the communities where we work should make it OK for us to observe these folks choosing not to use whatever tools the interventions we conduct put at their disposal. Isn’t that interesting? In other words, if we give community members training on how to do hand washing and why they should wash their hands, and point out the availability of the tools necessary for them to wash their hands in their own compounds, and they choose, after that, to not wash their hands,  might we still be able to call our work success,  because we have created an enabling environment? 

Should it be our goal to not have people in extreme poverty OR should it be our goal to give the opportunity to not live in extreme poverty? 

There’s a big difference, and the measurement of that big difference is a challenge. I am grateful that the MPAT takes this big difference into account. 

Many other exciting things going on here on the team. Janine has completed her first draft of her CHW program recommendation, and it is going through an editing process. Stephanie is working with all field staff, stateside and abroad, on the development of logic models to generate our program metrics. The field staff is enjoying this work a lot, I believe, and it is a great way to assess and focus our efforts across the board. 

And perhaps the MOST exciting thing for us – we’ve begun to interview a few candidates for our research fellow position in the field! We are sending a researcher to Kenya for much of 2011 to help us out with our field work. We haven’t hired yet, so let me know if you want to submit your resume. 

In the clip, Rosling lambasts one section of a recent U.N. report that categorizes a few rather questionable countries (Qatar?, South Korea?, Singapore?) as developing. It’s interesting, because I think his point is basically one of optimism. He’s a data guy, and he’s a development guy, and he gets fired up when people say there’s no hope for places like sub-saharan Africa! The moving bubble graph he shows will tell you that there is indeed hope. 

…and it just so happens to depict an indicator that we are considering using here at Nuru, Under-five Mortality Rate. It’s a doozy, and one that hits home for a lot of people as a great indicator of a community’s move from extreme poverty out of it, or in the terms of the Rosling video, a country’s move from developing to developed. 

We don’t know yet whether we are going to use this indicator! As Rosling points out in the start of the video, the surveys that are necessary to gather the data that goes into this metric are costly and difficult. We don’t have an extensive budget here at Nuru! 

No segue here, I have to report on a few other things. Sorry for the lack of elegance….

Janine is nearing the end of her work related to our forthcoming CHW model! She has researched nine organizations in the healthcare development industry, and she’s working together with Lindsay Cope to decide on recommendations as to all aspects of the model that we will employ.  I will go ahead and report, though, that Janine is feeling a tad daunted by making this recommendation. We always iterate here at Nuru. We always iterate. SO, whenever a recommendation as to a course of action is made, the recommender has to be prepared for perhaps many iterations of the course of action.  It is OK, though. Being willing to iterate is part of being humble, open to feedback, and willing to know when things are going wrong. 

Janine has had tremendous help from one of our most amazing volunteers, Adam Terese. Adam is such a help to Nuru, and has been for a while. He is amazing. We have many other amazing volunteers here at Nuru on the research team. These folks are so generous. We have two people working with Lindsey Kneuven to develop a new education model, two working with Chelsea Barabas to develop a leadership curriculum, two working with Lindsay Cope on healthcare projects, and several other volunteers generously giving their time to do one-off projects on a variety of topics for us! Pretty amazing. 

Until next week…

Nuru International (Nuru) is a social enterprise founded with the mission of ending extreme poverty. “We work to, equip the poor in remote, rural areas to end extreme poverty in their communities within five years.”  We cultivate holistic empowerment in order to build sustainable, scalable solutions based on design thinking in five program areas: agriculture; health; water and sanitation; community economic development; and education. 

Now you’re thinking, “That sounds great, but what does it mean?” It means that we’re about the entire community – we don’t just focus on improving access to healthcare or disbursing microloans, we do it all because everything is intertwined, everything matters. Only by addressing all of the problems associated with extreme poverty can we facilitate a community’s movement out of it.  

At Nuru, when using the word “we” we’re not just referring to U.S. Foundation Team members working in the community – “we” also includes the community leaders with whom we work. Since our goal includes exiting a community within five years, it is vital that the community have strong leadership to continue its progress forward. For that reason, we maintain a small presence of only four or five U.S. members in the field at any time – the rest are community members selected, and paid, by Nuru.  These community members are mentored in service leadership so that U.S. members can stay behind the scenes, but the local leaders have access to our expertise.  

The being said, we recognized that we can’t know everything.  That’s why we work as a general contractor of poverty solutions in our communities.  Partnering with organizations that have a greater depth of knowledge in specific program areas allows us to skip some of the trial-and-error interventions and go right to the ones that work.  Some examples include: working with CAWST to provide training resources; using the agriculture training expertise of One Acre Fund; working with Majitech to dig wells; and working with MIFOS to track our micro-loans.

Together with the local community, other organizations, and the Developed World, we implement solutions to the problems of the extreme poor.  

When we arrive at a community, our first task is to work with the members to define the community’s goals within the context of an exit from extreme poverty. These goals are the driving force of all decisions made.  In defining these goals, we inherently establish a reason for us to leave once they have been accomplished.  

Our purpose is ending extreme poverty, but what makes this goal more difficult is the measurement of success: how do you know when you’ve alleviated extreme poverty?  We’ve decided to measure success as the rate of change in the community.  However, deciding which factors to measure is challenging with so many studies and evaluation resources available.  For us, measuring a select number of area-specific metrics allows us to make the best program decisions and effect the greatest change in poverty levels in the communities in which we work.  

The rest of this post is an outline of our experiences using our Metrics 1.0 system, what we learned from our first evaluation process; and how we’re going to move forward to create a better, more action-based Metrics 2.0 system.

Shades of Gray

Kuria, Kenya

Have you ever been in Africa in December?  I have. I remember exotic animals, smiling faces, overfilled trucks, buses, and bicycles, and intense thunderstorms.

What I also remember are the challenges associated with implementing a third-party, 188-metric evaluation.  

As discussed above, we want to know that our work is moving the community in the right direction – that our interventions are having a positive impact.  We decided that the best way to do this was to collect lots of information. We would then analyze the information to redirect our interventions or stay the course on them, depending on the results of our analysis. To these ends, we created a Metrics 1.0 system that consisted on 188 different metrics.

Throughout the first half of 2009, our staff members collected data related to each of these metrics. The Research Team and the field staff worked together to establish baseline values, exit criteria, priority levels, and expected progressions for each Metric, and the list of Metrics was refined. Some were added, some were taken away, and some were tabled for future use at other locations. 

December arrived and we wanted to be sure that the information we gathered to determine progress was accurate and we weren’t “tooting our own horn”. So, we enlisted two third-party evaluators to create the survey tools, interview forms, and observation tools. These independent evaluators led the data collection process for Evaluation 1 in Kuria.

What we found out is that more data is not necessarily better than less data.  More data leads to a more complex shade of gray. Our findings, because of the complexity of the questions that we asked of community members, were inconclusive in many cases. In some cases, the data we gathered could have been analyzed to tell completely conflicting stories. Where that was the case, we could not assess the current state of a given Metric.  Of the data that was collected through the evaluation, less than half of it was usable in determining the amount of change in the community poverty level. However, 100% of the information offered insights into what was happening in Kuria, even if it didn’t fit neatly into the assessment of an area.  

The most important thing we learned is that we desired information that pointed to an intervention that needed to happen.  A lot of the data was interesting, but didn’t tell us what we could do to improve the poverty level in the community – we wanted something more, something concrete, something on which community leaders could base their program decisions. 

Keep On Keepin’ On

Sweat, Smiles, and Flow Charts

An important part of our culture includes acknowledging when things don’t work, and then finding a better solution.  When you’ve put a lot of time and effort into something, letting it go becomes difficult and you tend to go through a type of withdrawal, or stages of grieving.  On the Research Team, we’ve successfully passed the “acknowledgement phase” and are fully in the “better solution phase” for our next metrics system.  

We reflected on all of that data that had been gathered during the first evaluation, and realized that it could be grouped into two main categories: Poverty Data and Program Data.

Poverty Data is information that can show changes in the poverty level of the community.  This data tracks our progress towards our purpose of ending extreme poverty. Poverty Metrics are designed to be used in any community, irrespective of country or culture.  They are meant as our universal standard for poverty assessment.  Poverty metrics can be assessed by third-party evaluators as an objective measurement of the effects of our interventions.  

Some Poverty data will be used to generate what we’re calling a Dashboard.  The Dashboard is made up of significant Metrics from each target area, allowing us a quick look at changes in the state of the communities where we’re working. 

Program Data is used to generate Program Metrics. Program Metrics are very important tools that we will be using in our field programs to measure effectiveness.  The Program Metrics will be outcome metrics that we measure to assess the interventions that we are implementing in each of the five areas. Program information is meant to be collected by our staff in-between third-party evaluations.

Below is a graphic depicting the data we expect to gather, the metrics it will generate, and the way we will use the data: 

Graphic 1: Nuru Metrics System 2.0

Independent of the Poverty Data and Program Data categories exists the Poverty Intelligence Network, or PIN.  The PIN is meant as an all-encompassing data collection tool, along the lines of a total community database.  For example, we could collect information directly related to a Poverty metric, a Program dataset, or information that is independent of either.  Data collected through the PIN is meant to aid field staff in the decision-making and action process.

So, we are well on our way to incorporating the hard lessons we learned from last year’s implementation of Metrics 1.0 into the development of Metrics 2.0. We have enlisted the help of many outside experts, made a few decisions about how we will proceed and what the system will look like, and developed a plan for verification and implementation of the system. By early 2011, we will be ready to rock with Metrics 2.0! If we’ve done things right, the bad parts of Metrics 1.0 will not be part of this new system. The bad parts of Metrics 2.0 will be new and different bad parts, but we will not be afraid to iterate again. Thanks for reading!

As always, the amazing Duncan Green communicates more brilliantly and with a few other outside references about the topics we are thinking about here in a recent blog post: What Should Aid Focus on, Poor People or Poor Countries? In the post, he is reviewing a paper that reports that three-quarters of the world’s poor live in middle-income countries. So fascinating.

My blog post from last week was about the heated internal discussions a number of us have been having about how to establish exit criteria with our new Metrics system in the communities where we work. Green’s blog post made me think about our difficulties there as well as our criteria for picking new communities to go to in the long run. 

Our model is to conduct interventions that are sustainable and scalable. That means we will enter rural extremely impoverished communities that have an expressed need for the work we do, and then our model will scale out of the initial seed community and be, again, sustainable and scalable kind of to infinity! 

The way we have considered, planned, and communicated our future expansion has always been by country. We plan to find countries that are experiencing extreme poverty and THEN find a community within each country that  is rural and extremely impoverished. That is loosely how we have thought about this process. I must give credit to Aerie Changala, our future Director of International Operations, for reminding me many months ago in several discussions that not all poor people are in poor countries. With his influence, we might eventually evolve the way we think about expansion a bit in the future. 

..but going back to the other thing that Green’s post made me think of, as I discussed last week,  the statistics that relate to the delineation between extreme poverty, poverty, and “middle income” are generally presented and talked about at the country level. This is very different from community-level poverty, and the experience of community-level poverty, I believe, is best defined uniquely, in accordance with the nature of said community. 

Not believing me or getting it? Check out Green’s post from 10/6 about Obesity as a Development Issue. Trust me, the experience of poverty can be very different for very different people. 

Please stay-tuned for a big update from me about the history of our M&E process here at Nuru in the near future. In addition, I’ll give you a little update about some of the one-off research projects we’re managing to look into here. 

Until next week, thank you! 

We are engaged in a rather heated discussion here at Nuru about Exit Criteria. Stephanie and I have one perspective about it, and a few of the other people here at the organization have a rather different perspective. 

Whoa, it’s actually a REALLY tough topic. As I write, I realize that I have had versions of this discussion countless times with countless Nuru staff members and stakeholders. The question is, quite simply, how should we define our goals? At first glance, and with a few words, the answer to the question is simple: our goal is the end of extreme poverty. 

The problem comes when you try do define those last four words. 

Sure, the MDG’s have done it, but they’ve done it in a way that’s a little difficult to apply to a small rural community of around 5,000 people, as we are dealing with in Kuria. They have defined the numeric portion of the goals as proportions of populations. Those proportions, in the goals, are applied to the world population generally, and sometimes regions, and on the most micro level, they are applied to countries. So, when the goal is to halve the proportion of people in Kenya living on less than $1 a day, it is really easy to see how that is very different from halving the proportion of people living in one of the poorest regions of that whole country: Kuria. Simple math. (Thank you, Stephanie for the chat on this, as always).

In year 1 of Nuru’s work, we tried to define our exit criteria. We had our big list of 189 metrics, and for each metric, the program manager for a given target area on staff decided what the goal should be. This was problematic for a couple of reasons, but the main one that always strikes me when I think about that first system was that the process that was followed in the establishment of each of these goals was not an integrated one. We basically went down a laundry list of metrics and decided on 189 different goals for 189 different metrics. Once we’d decided upon one metric goal, we said, “ok, that one’s done”, and we moved on to another metric and established a goal for that one. 

It was kind of like asking 189 of your friends to show up with their favorite building material, taking all the materials and throwing them in a pile, and calling that a structure. We had these 189 metrics that each had goals attached to them, and by defining those goals, we had inadvertently and non-thematically established our perspective as to what the end of extreme poverty was. 

So, in the discussions we are now having about how to establish these goals, we are trying to avoid similar pitfalls. We are trying to remind ourselves that the goals we establish related to our list of metrics, whatever that list ends up looking like, will imply, directly, our definition as to what the end of extreme poverty is. 

The answer is a lot and a wide variety of things. Here is a list:

• Our lovely PR Director, Laura Changala, has been guiding me through the completion of a project I started several months ago, revisited this summer with one of my interns, Lindsay Ewy, and have been working on for the last couple of weeks. It is an extra long blog post that we’ll put up here as the story of Nuru’s Measurement and Evaluation process. It’s a tragedy; it’s a comedy; it’s engrossing. It will read like a David Foster Wallace essay. You’ll love it.

• Janine Brown has been hard at work researching Community Health Worker (CHW) models of other organizations so we can decide upon and define our model with precision, thoroughness, and research to back it up! Next week she is heading to a conference with one of the organizations she’s researching to get some curriculum ideas. The week after that, I will head down to Georgia to work with her in-person as she gets into development of her final deliverable

• Stephanie told you last week about the MPAT. We are moving along in the process of our metrics overhaul quite nicely. We’re in discussions internally about whether to incorporate the MPAT into our work with metrics. This decision is still very up in the air based on a lot of things including resources. We’re still on the path, though, to deciding on which program metrics we will work with in each of our target areas. It is exciting work! 

• I had a final meeting today with Nathalie Collins, our Kuria-based intern, on her recommendations to us on our phone-based data gathering system, the Poverty Intelligence Network (PIN). It was great to catch up with her a tad and talk about all the great work she did for us this summer on this wonderful project. We are still very much in a piloting stage of this project, but it is very good and has a lot of potential. We are alongside a lot of other organizations who are just beginning to implement systems like this as well, which is also exciting. 

• Lindsay Ewy helped me this summer with the process I use to manage volunteers here on the research team. Now, I am implementing the recommendations she made! The process is improving, slowly but surely, and we are working to better meet all the needs of both our field and domestic staff in terms of research. It is pretty cool! One new thing that has started to happen is that volunteers are getting assigned directly to staff members for longer-term work than our typical two-week turnaround research requests. It is a great way for volunteers to be more intertwined with all the work that happens at Nuru and for the staffers to give more direct guidance to the folks who are helping them out. 

…and then some! Those are the major things I wanted to take the time to report on. We are busy, things are good, and I’m so happy about all the innovation that is occurring in the organization!

Last week, I met with Alasdair Cohen, the lead author of the Multidimensional Poverty Assessment (www.ifad.org/mpat).  I wrote about it a while back, so check that out for a general introduction to the MPAT and Nuru. 

In preparation for the meeting, I re-read the MPAT User Guide (103 pages) and the MPAT Book (211 pages).  I actually find it quite amusing, in a very genuine, down-to-earth way, that the “official” name of the history, process, rationale, and development of this tool is called simply “the MPAT book.”  Maybe too much metrics makes one hard up for humor and amusement, but alas.

Anyway, I walked in to my MPAT meeting with lots of questions about why it seems to be the best kept secret this side of the poverty metrics universe.  Seriously, I have read and re-read all I can find about the MPAT.  I have asked people high and low if they’ve heard of it, what they think about it, and if anyone has any experience with it.  I have come up empty-handed every time – from the Global Health Council conference with over 2,000 international health attendees to a World Bank blog discussing the merits of the also recently released Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).  Just exactly how and why is the MPI getting all sorts of radio play in the international arena, yet virtually no one has even heard of the MPAT.   I even “coerced” a friend and colleague into reading about it, just so I could have someone, with whom I could chat/critique/discuss it.  Thanks Tayo (and thanks for a great follow-up blog about it as well)!  

Again, I digress.  My biggest hang-up about the MPAT was related to what a well-kept secret it seemed to be.  Why is no one talking about it?  Where is all the MPAT buzz?  Is it really not all it’s cracked up to be?  Have my analytical skills been swindled by the MPAT “book”?  

And so, when meeting with the MPAT’s lead author, I was as honest and direct as I could be in asking those questions.  And you know what?  Alasdair answered me with the same honest, direct, and transparent nature as is found all throughout the MPAT tool and process.  It was both refreshing and right in line with what I thought I understood about the MPAT, its purpose, process, and creators.  Everything is open source, nothing is a secret, and everything is extremely well-documented.  It’s a humble tool that acknowledges the complexity of poverty in people’s lives.  It is new and innovative.  It is in the pilot stages and not looking for glory.  

Nuru was/is looking for a “standardized” measuring stick for measuring rural poverty holistically. (There’s more buzzwords in that last sentence than you can even shake a standardized measuring stick at, but I hope you get the idea.)  Anyone else care to join us on this journey?  Anyone care to chat about the MPAT?  I’m all ears…

My husband and I traveled to West Virginia over Labor Day weekend and went to the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine in the southern part of the state called, you guessed it, Beckley. I highly recommend the museum to anyone who has the chance to go. It offers a chance to learn a bit about the past of the U.S., and the history of what some might now call an energy crisis that we are now experiencing. 

When we arrived at the exhibition, we bought a ticket to take a train down into a once-active coal mine. We had about an hour to kill before the next train left the station, so we had the opportunity to look through the museum. It was an impressive and comprehensive monument in honor of the way coal miners and their families worked, lived, and died here in the States a hundred years ago. 

I found myself quickly overcome with emotion. The folks who did the hard labor in coalmines were completely and utterly exploited. They were treated like indentured servants. They were put in a position where they and their family’s lives were at risk on a daily basis and the combination of camp life and its expenditures and their financial compensation was such that they literally had no way out. 

It reminded me of the lives of the people in Kuria…and that the more things change, truly, the more they stay the same. Coal and big coal companies are to West Virginia a hundred years ago what tobacco and big tobacco companies were to Kuria a couple of years ago. The people of Kuria were growing tobacco on their farms in an unsustainable way that was causing their families to be sick and also causing them to lead financially intractable lives. 

It is our strong hope and goal that the work of Nuru has sustainably brought and end to this exploitation. 

Once again, I have reported on a side note this week. 

NEXT week, however, you’ll have a treat, as Stephanie Jayne, our Senior Research Officer will report here on the current state of our Measurement and Evaluation System Overhaul. As you all know, it is our hope that we are able to objectively measure way the lives of the people of Kuria have changed since we arrived there of years ago. Essentially, we want to have a system that can tell us whether the exploitation I’ve mentioned above has truly come to a sustainable end in Kuria. Very difficult to determine, of course. She will fill you in on where we are in that process. 

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!