In 2010 I visited Mozambique for the first time in 15 years.  I was on a monitoring visit and had also arranged to meet with possible new partners. Not speaking Portuguese I found working Mozambique pretty tough.  I had a very different feeling to that I have in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda where I feel that, by and large, I understand what is going on around me.  This is partly because I speak fluent Swahili and partly because I have visited so many many times I feel ‘at home’ rather than ‘at sea’.  I feel I can communicate and come close to understanding situations, problems and solutions.  I feel that in this space ideas and plans and even transformation are possible.

In Mozambique I felt different.  I felt isolated and I felt that my experience was almost entirely ‘translated’ for me by my very kind a courteous hosts.

Two things served to emphasis this.  On a visit to a market we had stopped to ‘take a soda’ when a well-dressed man approached us offering his business card.

Arnaldo Nyanala Director describes himself on his card as ‘Sworn Translator of Portuguese/English Vice-Verse.  My first investigative question to Arnaldo, ‘Do you speak English’?’ was met with the interesting reply, ‘No, I only write’!  No I only write!

I particularly liked the more in depth explanation on the back of his card:

‘We do all document translations, simultaneous interpretations, touristy guides for Males, and Females during all hours in Mozambican territory, profissional work and confidential’

As this wasn’t enough to persuade me just how much language matters something much more important got lost in translation as I prepared to leave Mozambique.  Upstairs in the airport tapping away at my report on this very laptop I inquired of one of the airport staff whether it was time to board Kenya Airways, the reply, ‘not yet’ assured me that I still had time to waste – ten minutes later, to my dismay, after a tip-off from a member of the public I discover, aghast that my bags had been removed from the flight and it was about to take off without me, the ‘lost passenger’ who had checked in 2 hours previously but whom they had apparently been unable to find upstairs.  Many hours later, after a frosty standoff with a man from Kenya Airways who accused me of lying and falling asleep before eventually conceding some responsibility for the unfortunate mis-hap, I found myself once again by the ocean, eating seafood and reflecting that, sometimes life imposes a timely pause.

Pause and think about it.  How much is lost in translation? How sure are you that you know are communicating effectively with your partners?  How possible might it be to effect transformational change in an absence of shared understanding?  How much do language barriers impede your work?  Is there ways you could help salvage what might be lost in translation and improve the way you communicate with those with whom you work?

When I first worked in development for LCI in the 1990s much of my administrator role involved faxing important documents to 5 training and development offices around the world.  Communication was often slow and difficult.  It sometimes took me hours to send a fax.  There is no doubt that in those days communication hampered attempts to involve people ‘on the ground’ in decisions affecting their lives.

We forget sometimes how much had changed.  It has changed beyond belief.  Now, if I choose to be connected, I get daily real time updates from people all over the world via email, web alerts and social media.  Though sometimes we may feel swamped by all this communication, there is no doubt that now, we can communicate in ways that change our ‘business’ entirely.

At the same time, recent research by Huyse (2011) with 11 Belgian INGOs shows that though they most ‘appreciated the usefulness’ of learning, reflection, feedback and visits they planned more ‘future investment’ in technology; intranets, extranets and virtual platforms, than in the learning they valued.

I wonder why?  They thought reflection was more useful but nevertheless they planned to invest in technology.  Is it easier to raise funds to invest in technology?  Is there something useful about looking and feeling ‘up-to-date’?  Why don’t we invest more in reflection?  I wonder in fact whether we fear reflection because it might mean we have to question our own worth?  We might have to ask ourselves why, in an ‘age’ of rapid and regular communication do INGOs need to exist at all?

It seems to me that its increasingly feasible for donors to ‘cut out’ INGOs and communicate directly with local NGOs working in the countries and on the issues which they want to support.  So what are INGOs for?  I think we need to reflect more honestly are the value that we might be able to add?  Are we really able to build more equitable approaches to partnership for example?  Can we develop ways in which to do that?  Can we advocate for and with local NGOs on the issues that matter to them?

As far as I’m concerned making our Partnerships Matter should be a key part of the value we add.  Our Partnerships could and should be a living demonstration of how to build fairer connections in an ever more connected but still desperately unfair world.  But to make them that we must be willing to reflect more honestly and to face the places where we our relationships aren’t working well.  And we need to make Partnerships that work more effectively a key criteria when measuring the effectiveness of our work.

There is a new document in the research section of the site.  It’s a piece of research commissioned by BOND about different approaches to partnership in the International Development sector.  It tells us much about how the 22 ‘agencies’ consulted view, manage and assess their partnerships.  Because of resource constraints it tells us little about what those ‘partner’ agencies actually think.  I sympathise with BOND, who commissioned the report.  I’m sure resrources were tight and all their own remit is to be the network for INGOs here and so it’s the agencies based in the UK who are their direct concern.  Yet I can’t help feeling uneasy about any attempt to analyse partnership which doesn’t look at what partners actually think.  I’ll go further, I’m uneasy about any attempt to understand the effectiveness of development which doesn’t ask partners what they think.  In my mind I sometimes draw comparisons with the corporate sector.  An INGO who works with partners but doesn’t ask them what they think is a bit like, it seems to me, a company that produces a product but doesn’t ask the customers what they think of it.  But the analogy stops there.  Because in the corporate sector not asking a customer what they thought would most likely be commercial suicide at worst – and very lucky at best.  In addition customers who didn;t like the product would simply vote with their feet!  But in international development its possible to exist for years without ever really asking the partners we work with what they think.  I’m not suggesting that this is what all INGOs do but I do think its a position which is possible.  Its possible because the partners, our ‘customers’, are not usually providing the funds.  And so if we have an effective fundraising outfit we can continue to obtain resources even if the partners, whose work we support are unhappy with the support they receive.  This situation makes me sad and it makes me angry.  Sad because it means that our partners opinions, thoughts and feelings can be ignored. Angry because when this happens we are listening to ourselves and those who fund us instead of the people, whose work, we purport to support.  It should never be this way and that’s why I really supported the Keystone Accountability Partner Survey, which was also part-funded by BOND in which for the first time 25 ‘northern’ NGOS got a third party (Keystone) to ask their partners what they thought and compared the finding.  You can find the report in the research section now too.  The major findings of the study were that using partner surveys in this way produced data which INGOS found helpful and also which was comparable.  The authors felt that the collection of this sort of data collected anonymously which could be both structured and comparative should become ‘a new standard for reporting the performance of NGOs that work in partnership with southern organisations.  The standard could create a powerful new basis for funding decisions, so that funds are better directed towards those NGOs that are seen as working most effectively by their southern partners’.  They also found that ‘Respondents want northern NGOs’ help to become strong, independent and influential organisations.  They contrast this with being contracted to implement northern NGOs projects and priorities.’  Food for thought for us all!

So much, it seems to me, of the potential for disagreement, conflict and confusion in partnerships relates to funding.  Local partners that have been independently established and created by an individual and group of people will naturally usually some idea or plan about what they were established to do.  Perhaps an organisation was envisioned by someone with a clear idea of a situation or policy which they wanted to change?  Perhaps it was created to meet a need felt by a group, individual or community?
Enter an international NGO which wants to support the partner.  Because International NGOs have their own visions, missions, goals and criteria the development of a partnership is always a negotiation.  Too often, in my experience, that negotiation starts with an explanation of the strategies and approaches of the international NGO.  When a conversation starts in this way local NGOs necesserily ‘adapt’ their plans to ‘meet the needs of the INGO’.  Those needs might be working in a specific way or with a specific issue.  They often mean adapting the original priorities of the local NGO.

Sometimes this can feel to the INGO like a ‘win’.  Sometimes this does mean that a local NGO is working on an important issue they wouldn’t have tackled or in a way that they wouldn’t have thought of.  This may reap benefits.  However it may also mean that the local NGO faces some difficult choices.  Does it divert all it’s energies to doing what the INGO wants?  Or should it continue to do what it originally planned for and seek to manage the expectations of the INGO?  Often it may try to do both.  And feel exhausted trying.

What we all want, INGOs and local NGOs alike, is sufficient resources to implement our vision.  We want to give our ideas a try.  We want to see what works and improve our effectiveness.  Usually it is a struggle to convince ‘donors’ that what we really need is a free reign so that we can figure out what really works.  Worse still many institutional donors have a policy of match funding.  Here we must not only invent a project that fits their criteria and policies but we must also convince someone else to give us the remainder of the money to do exactly what the first funder wanted us to do.  More often than not significant resources must be invested in seeking such ‘match funding’.  Often organisations who have some unrestricted money find it easier to do the so called ‘matching’ from their own precious funds.
Behind the concept of match funding is the assumption that our work will be better if we are great persuaders able to convince a range of people to support the same thing.  In fact to be successful at this ‘game’ of course we must make ourselves in to great ‘adapters’.  We must fit our work in to the frameworks favoured by funders at any given point in time.  Local NGOs face the same problems.  Resources are avalible to those able to be great adapters.  Yet if my vision is strong and clear and I am committed to my purpose I may not be willing to adapt.

I have been saddened in the past few years to see the demise of both, Healthlink and One World Action which I viewed as examples of organisations where the need for positive partnership principles and practice were recognised and applied. Then sorting through my emails over Christmas I found one from the late Bernie Trude, who was my mentor and who had shared with me a diagram that was created – I think when he worked with Healthlink – about the characteristics of both Strong and Weak Partnership.  I had a bee in my bonnet about partnership before I met Bernie but somehow when I was working with him I developed the confidence to make positive partnership a key element of my own work with AbleChildAfrica.  The chart clearly contrasts Strong Partnerships with values and shared understanding being critical elements with Weak Partnerships where communications are one way and dependency is encouraged.

In the context of these recollections I’ve been thinking this week about why I started Partnership Matters and my vision for it in 2012.  Why does this issue you matter to me and what does it mean for my life and my work?  The saddest thing for me is when development work rather than sharing values with poor and marginalised people recreates a dependence cycle which perpetuates their poverty and marginalization.  I think this diagram which I got from Bernie can help us to start to think more clearly about how to avoid and tackle this.  To think about the ways in which many of the very procedures and processes popular in the sector may, often inadvertently, be reproducing a kind of subservient dependence which perpetuates and replicates everything which is so unfair about the world we live in.  Somewhere deep inside me I know that as long as we continue to find such approaches acceptable we resist the genuine possibility of the creation of a fairer world. In the face of the current cuts and challenges facing the sector and the pressure on resources worldwide it’s increasingly important that we keep on remembering the importance of living our values and making them meaningful as we carry out our work.

When I was the Executive Director of AbleChildAfrica I often used to feel frustrated at the difficulties I faced in articualating our relationship with the partner organisations with whom we worked.  Almost all the donor we applied to for funds required genuine and effective relationships with overseas partner organisations who implemented projects but few, if any, seemed to have a means of monitoring the quality and effectiveness of these relationships.  Indeed many monitored them simply on the answer to a question in their application form which went something like, ‘Please tell us about your overseas partners, how you will work with them and what value you add?’  Time and again our applications for funds were rejected on the grounds that, being a small UK team we ‘did not have the capacity’ to monitor a proposed programme of work.

I knew full well, from my experiences talking to our partners, that more staff in an International NGO (INGO) did not necesserily equate to more effective support and relationships with partners.  I knew too that we had sold and effective working relationships but I found that, in the face of donor requirements and systems, had no means to put this across. Perhaps even more surprisingly donors seemed to rely exclusively on how INGOs described their relationships with partners.  This meant that they appeared to be judging these critical relationships on the opinion of one side of a partnership, a side which was necessarily biased since it relied upon describing something positively in order to obtain funds.  There is clearly no benefit in an INGO being honest about difficulties in a partnership when applying for funding if everything they say is taken at face value by the donor concerned.

In what other industry, I started to ask myself, would the ‘customers opinion’ – in this case the views of partner organisations whom many INGOs support, not be considered by the ‘investor’ – in this case donor agencies who fund INGOs.  Imagine a shareholder who invested in a company without finding out whether any customer was satisfied with the service the business provided or even wanted to receive it?  Development seemed to me to be in a pickle about whose views and opinions mattered.

I couldn’t help feeling a little better when an independent survey by Keystone Accountability carried out last year proved that AbleChildAfrica’s partners valued and appreciated out support.  It was notable too that the organisations scoring highly in the survey, which asked partners about what they thought about the international NGOs they were working with, were also those who did not have DFID support.

The major finding of the report, which for the first time asked representatives of 2000 international NGOs what they really wanted from development partners was that local organisations were not interested in being seen and treated as sub-contractors relying on the whims of INGOs and donors about whom and what to support, instead, that wanted help to ’become independent and influential organisations in their own right‘.