Translator: Helena Bowen Reviewer: Denise RQ
Two sentences offered to me in 1987
through the heat and blowing sands of Northern Kenya still guide me today.
I was working on a water project in the Chalbi Desert,
and girls and moms, they're loading up their camels with water,
and they're about to head home.
I look across the desert, and I don't even know where home is.
They're getting kind of agitated, they're tired of talking to me,
and they're starting to move on because they have a long journey ahead,
and they're going to do it again, and again, and again, and again.
So I sit there, and I turn to the program manager of this initiative,
and I say, "Dilly, what am I going to make of all of this?"
and his answer surprised me.
He said, "Ned, always be willing to look back
and ask hard questions about the work that you've done
because you're intervening in peoples' lives
and that carries enormous responsibility."
27 years later, and I'm still working in water and sanitation.
But when people ask me, "What do you do?"
I always say, "I monitor."
Monitoring is essential for international development.
You set a big goal, an audacious goal, you imagine what the end looks like,
and then try to figure out
what are the markers along the way that will tell us, "Are we getting there?"
Then you track those, you track those tirelessly, fearlessly,
so you can see what you're doing well,
and adjust and address the inevitable problems that will emerge.
Now, we spent trillions of dollars every year in aid and philanthropy,
trying to solve big problems around the world.
But few actually look back and see if it is even working.
We're constantly rushing
to the next village, to the next church, to the next school.
We've got so much to do,
but no one pauses and says, like Dilly, "Wait a minute, is this even working?"
This is the challenge.
We live in a philanthropic world, where we've confused inputs with outcomes.
We're confusing overhead with results.
I am truly inspired by people
who decide to donate mosquito nets to families in Zanzibar,
but the question is has malaria gone down?
If not, what do you need to do to change that to get malaria down?
I love that you can donate a well to a community in Zambia,
but the question is is water still flowing five years later?
A friend of mine just helped a woman in India get a loan, and she paid it back.
That's great.
Is she out of poverty?
Those are the real questions.
The organizations that go on that journey towards those outcomes
are the ones that are truly changing the world.
Rotarians and others decided years ago to do something outrageous:
they were going to eradicate polio from the globe.
People scoffed, they said, "This isn't possible."
But they worked, they kept their eyes on that goal,
they didn't count how many drops they were putting in kids' mouths.
They were looking at "is polio truly eradicated from this village?"
Then lots of villages, more villages, then a district, then lots of districts,
then a country, then a continent.
They've constantly changed and adjusted,
because sometimes it works, and sometimes things don't go as planned.
So they've shifted.
That was the playbook of smallpox.
Smallpox is gone.
Smaller organizations do amazing things as well.
There's this great organization called One Acre Fund.
They work in East Africa
increasing the income and productivity of small-scale farmers.
They are fanatical monitors of progress.
They can see what services they are providing work,
and what things aren't working, and they adjust.
They're so in-tune with the agricultural sector in Kenya
that they predicted a maize virus that was coming.
They helped farmers diversify their crops.
Those farmers today are thriving,
while others are watching their maize stalks wilt.
Water for People is a fundamentally different organization today
than it was even five years ago, because we constantly ask hard questions,
we constantly say, "What can we do better?", and we adjust.
When non-profits talk to you about monitoring,
they will tell you why they don't do it.
They will say that donors don't really like bad news.
That's not my experience.
Donors actually want to change things for the better.
They want to do big things,
and they will go on a journey if they think you're progressing,
and if they think that you're addressing problems as they emerge.
Some will say, "Well, they won't pay for it."
If you have staff, petrol, and a car, you can monitor.
If you have a cell phone, you can call someone and see if water is still flowing.
Technology has enabled us to get real time data efficiently and cheaply,
so this excuse doesn't carry any water.
C'mon you got to give me that one.
(Laughter)
So, a lot will tell you, "Well, we haven't really worked out our indicators.
We're thinking about it."
Hey, I'll tell you what, call me back when you've figured it out.
Some will say, and this is shocking, but some will say,
"The nuances of results are too hard for the public to truly understand."
You should tell them to get their hands out of your pockets
and stop saying that $25 will save a life.
We can do better, we can ask hard questions.
Organizations that do move and improve all the time.
But I've also learned that if you collect data
and hold it to yourself, make it an inside thing, it doesn't really work.
You miss the beauty and the transformative power of data.
I was in Namaqualand, a beautiful part of South Africa,
wildflowers bloom in the spring.
People don't go there for any other reason,
but over the hills and off the road
are some of the most beautiful people I've ever met, amazing people.
We were working on a program there,
and we were constantly feeding back data, we were asking hard questions,
we were holding these meetings, we put numbers on blackboards,
lots of percentages, and we were kind of acting like teachers frankly,
saying, "So what do you think about that?"
It was a teacher-student relationship; it really wasn't good.
But this guy came to every meeting.
His name was Clemmy.
He never said a word, until one day while we were talking he stood up.
He was an older man, he balanced himself on his cane.
The whole place quieted.
He looked at the ceiling, and he said,
"I actually have no idea what you're talking about.
You keep coming here and throwing numbers at me,
and I don't understand them.
I'm embarrassed to say I'm illiterate;
my friends and others know that, but I think I can be part of the solution.
I think I have a role to play.
If we can just make the numbers clear, I can do something.
So Clemmy was absolutely right.
It was a hard lesson
not only in transparency but in cultural sensitivity.
Clemmy figured out how to visualize the data
in ways that everyone would understand.
He put them on these huge billboards at the front of his community
and changed the results all the time.
What it did is it drew people in.
People came, they offered insight and were helping
because the data was open.
Now that's kind of a cute example that in the world of big data
and aid transparency, they might scoff at this.
But actually, what's happening in aid data right now,
and in the whole transparency debate
is actually not shedding light, it's causing confusion.
What's happening now is we have what I call data puke.
You sit there, and you're like,
"Okay, I'm going to give you everything, blargh!"
I'm going to vomit everything onto a map or onto a platform,
and go, "Woo! We're transparent, you can see everything!"
And you can actually see nothing.
The point of transparency is to elicit action, to ask hard questions,
to see if there's overlap, if there's duplication,
if there's corruption.
I can't weed my way through this.
It fails the Clemmy test!
The Clemmy test would say is it actionable?
Do I understand it?
Can people across cultures understand this?
If it can't, it's just vomit.
It's not good enough.
At the end of the day,
I've worked for many organizations that embrace monitoring.
These organizations are dynamic, they're exciting,
they're places where things are happening,
and people come, problem-solvers come.
I've also worked in agencies that resist monitoring.
They say, "It's too hard, I don't want to do it,
I've got to protect the brand."
These are lifeless organizations that do not save,
that do not challenge the status quo, and do not transform society.
Because Dilly, in the end, was right.
We're intervening in peoples' lives, and that carries enormous responsibility.
The least we can do is be open and honest about it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)