Is Toms Shoes Founder Learning?

Critics of TOMS shoes say the group’s solution of donating shoes to the poor for every pair it sells in the West does little to address the root causes of poverty. At its worst, this practice damages local businesses in poor countries. The online conversations by academics, bloggers (including myself) and NGO workers have continued for years with little response from TOMS.

Now founder Blake Mycoskie wants to talk about the criticisms. He addresses the issues head-on in a long article in Fast Company. He says that he did not want to engage in the discussion online because the medium doesn’t lend itself to real debate and he doubted his detractors wanted a genuine dialogue.

“How can we make ourselves feel better?” asks Scott Gilmore, the executive director of the not-for-profit Peace Dividend Trust . “This is the power of self-congratulatory smugness, of saying, ‘I’m better than you because I’m helping somebody.’ But the people who lose out are ironically the ones they say they’re trying to help.”

“I’ve learned that the keys to poverty alleviation are education and jobs. And we now have the resources to put investment behind this,” Mycoskie told Fast Company. “Maybe five years from now, we’ll be able to say it’s really good for business. But the motivator now is, How can we have more impact? At the end of the day, if we can create jobs and do one-for-one, that’s the holy grail.”

He says he’s taking the idea of job creation seriously, starting with a factory in Ethiopia and plans to expand to India, Kenya and Haiti. Not only that, TOMS is testing whether its shoe drops have an actual impact.

Continue reading on Humanosphere...

Community Chooses Energy over Polio Vaccines in Pakistan

Two more polio vaccine workers were shot dead in northwest Pakistan on Sunday. It is the latest attack on polio eradication efforts in Pakistan that extends back to a series of attacks at the end of 2012. The BBC cites 17 polio vaccine worker deaths in the past few months.

Polio is down, but not out in Pakistan. 35 cases of polio were recorded in Pakistan last year. Vaccines play a key role in eradicating polio. The lack of security in Pakistan and uncertain safety for vaccine workers means an estimated 240,000 children have missed polio vaccines, says the UN.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari issued a statement condemning the killings on Monday. He reiterated the government’s commitment to vaccinating children against polio.

“While condemning the death of the two polio volunteers, the president said that such cowardly and inhuman acts of the militants and extremists can not deter the strong resolve of government to eradicate polio from the country,” said Zardari in a statement.

The weekend saw attacks on a bus and a hospital in Quetta. Dialog is possible with groups that are willing to talk, but Zardari administration is taking a hard-line stance against extremists, said Interior Minister Chaudry Nisar to CNN.

Continue reading on Humanosphere...

Google Hangout Discusses Poverty Porn

A discussion on poverty porn hosted by Kurante just ended. Kurante hosted the coversation on Google+ featuring Ethan Zuckerman, Charlie Beckett, Linda Raftree, Teddy Ruge and Lina Srivastava. With Lindsay Poirier serving as moderator. Watch the video below for the conversation (warning it cuts off at the end due to time) and the accompanying conversation on Twitter.

Politics and design thinking: more in common than you think

By Dave Algoso

Last week, USIP’s Andrew Blum wrote a great piece (on Tom Murphy’s A View From The Cave) about the limitations of design thinking when it comes to politics. Blum makes the solid point that design thinking works best when a certain amount of consensus exists around the problem that’s being addressed. For political issues, which are all about contested power and disagreements over values, such consensus is elusive.

Design thinking has found its entry points into political issues with narrow targeting. Blum’s example is the Atrocity Prevention Challenge. It focuses on information-gathering as a way to prevent violence, while essentially ignoring (or making unstated assumptions about) how the gathered information actually translates to violence prevention. The narrow targeting is necessary to apply design methods, but it constrains the overall impact that can be made.

However, I think there’s hope. Design thinking can take many forms. Like any discipline, it includes a range of methods and frameworks that can be applied to a variety of problems. Because politics itself lies at the intersection of so many aspects of human activity, political analysis must pull from a wide variety of disciplines. Design thinking has the potential to contribute to that.

There are several natural overlaps between design thinking and political analysis. I see these overlaps in my day job at Reboot, where we apply principles from design (as well as other fields) to inherently political issues like governance, accountability, and institutional development.

Chief among these overlaps is a human-centered approach. Design calls them “users”, while political terms vary based on where you’re sitting — “targets” or “constituents” perhaps. Regardless, both fields recognize individuals as the primary decision-making unit. If you want to design a better smartphone, you need to truly understand how users will interface with it throughout their day. Likewise, if you want to sway political decision-makers, you need to understand the various pressures and incentives competing for their attention and action.Empathy is critical in both cases.

Another area of overlap lies in multi-disciplinary understandings of context. Understanding how a user might interact with a product or service requires a mix of disciplines — psychology, linguistics, aesthetics, anthropology, and even biology, depending on what’s being designed. Political analysis requires an understanding of similar disciplines, with an even heavier reliance on economics, governance, conflict, rhetoric, and often ethnography. Both require analytical processes to capture insights from across multiple disciplines, synthesis to understand how they relate, and horizontal thinking to consider unexpected outcomes.

Finally, the iterative and adaptive nature of both fields is obvious. You see this built into design with practices like prototyping, and you hear it in phrases like “fail fast.” In political action, adaptation is equally critical. Think about pilot-tests for new initiatives, trial balloonsfloated to gauge support, or the recently coined “problem-driven iterative adaption” approach.

Abstracting a level: the link between these two fields is that both grapple with complexity in a pragmatic way. When they’re at their best — avoiding the lofty idealism of political rhetoric or the techno-utopianism of designers — both fields find ways to act and create progress in a confusing world. They both avoid the detached analysis-paralysis of academia and the temptation to build grand theories from simplistic assumptions (I’m looking at you, rational-choice theory). Politics and design both live in the messy middle.

These similarities suggest that the methods of one could be useful to the other. Design thinking can supplement political thinking on problems such as public service delivery or institutional governance. Blum is right that design thinking, as it’s currently applied to narrowly circumscribed topics, does a disservice to political issues. But I think we can broaden the scope a little bit.

This originally appeared on Dave's Blog Find What Works.

Controversy over Obama's Africa Trip Cost

It costs a lot for President Obama to travel. He requires plenty of support and security for good reason. The President will make his way back to sub-Saharan Africa to visit Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania later this month. Given the logistical and security challenges in the countries, it is going to cost even more, reports the Washington Post.

Military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bulletproof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts, giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace, so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.

The trip in total will cost in the range of $60 million to $100 million. The cost will be a tad cheaper after a planned safari in Mikumi National park that required additional Secret Service agents was canceled.

“After I read that story in the paper, I thought to myself: ‘It’s mind-boggling to think of taking a trip like this when we’re having to make the cuts in federal spending that we’re now having to make,’” said former head of the White House Travel Office Billy Dale to conservative outlet Newsmax.

Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes defended criticisms of the trip saying that Africa is an important region for the US.

continue reading on Humanosphere...

Keeps Getting Worse in Syria as Refugees Increase and Money Runs Out

At its current pace, there will be 3.65 million Syrian refugees by the end of the year. That means an estimated 2 million people will flee from the violence in Syria to a neighboring country in the span of six months.

Another 4.25 million Syrians are displaced within the country and the UN estimates that 6.8 million Syrians need humanitarian assistance. That is more than one out of every four Syrians.

A request for $1.41 billion for the first half of the year received only 70% (corrected) of the funding. Despite the shortfall, 2.4 million people have been reached by feeding programs, one million children have been vaccinated against polio and measles and safe drinking water has been provided for 9 million people.

The continued fighting, increased displacements and worsening situation add up to a greater humanitarian need. An appeal for an additional $4.4 billion for the rest of the year reflects the challenges ahead.

“After more than two years of brutal conflict, almost a third of Syrians need urgent humanitarian help and protection, but the needs are growing more quickly than we can meet them,” said Emergency Relief Coordinator, Valerie Amos. “Today we launched the biggest humanitarian appeal ever and we are asking our donors to continue to give generously.”

Continue reading on Humanosphere →

Design Thinking and the Politics of Atrocity Prevention

By Andrew Blum, Vice President, Program Management and Evaluation. United States Institute of Peace. Views expressed are my own, not that of my organization.

I have followed the Atrocity Prevention Challenge for awhile. So when I heard on Twitter that the challenge moved into the “evaluation” phase I spent some time reading through the ideas of the 17 organizations chosen as finalists. The winners of the Challenge were announced on June 5. 

I came away underwhelmed. Of course there were some good ideas, but nothing I saw had the potential to be transformative.

So what happened? After all, the Challenge was organized by a veritable super group of organizations: Humanity United, USAID, and OpenIDEO. Humanity United and USAID have done very good work on conflict management and atrocity prevention, and IDEO is a leader in the design field. 

The answer I think lies in the structure of the challenge, which is organized under the top-line question: How might we gather information from hard-to-access areas to prevent mass violence against civilians?

The little two-letter word in that question is doing an awful lot of work, and signals the core premise of the Challenge, that if we get the gathering of information correct, then atrocities will be prevented. This is a mistake we’ve been making for a long time. The mostly implicit idea behind the “first generation” of early warning/early response initiatives was that if we build really good predictive models of conflict (and maybe include enough advanced statistical techniques) those predictions would be compelling enough to create a response. 

It didn't happen. 

Merchants have joined the peace networks. Disputes at the market can be swiftly defused. [credit: USAID/Sudan]

It’s hard not to see the innovative information-gathering and visualization tools of current efforts as just the latest effort to make the presentations of information compelling enough on its own to create a response.

We should know better by now. So again, what happened? 

I would argue that part of problem is the limits of “design thinking” in its current form. This approach, championed by IDEO, began in the world of things, and the world of software - in the design of shopping carts and user interfaces. More recently it has more adopted by non-profits and “social innovators”. Design thinking is not one thing, but at its core is the idea of re-engineering things and processes in an on-going, iterated way in order to solve problems that impact people (design thinking is often called human-centered design). In the Art of Innovation, for instance, Tom Kelley, one of IDEO’s founders, talks about keeping a “bug list”.

A list of things in the world that we may take for granted, but that don’t work right, or that create problems and extra effort expended. At the top of my list right now is the fact that parallel parkers in DC can cause traffic to back up for minutes at a time. So the design question is, could we re-engineer the parallel parking system (streets, cars, spaces) to solve this “bug”?

Design thinking excels when there is some consensus on the problem at hand. People don’t like to be stuck in traffic as the result of parallel parkers. If the goal is clear, design thinkers are really good at working on identifying new pathways to get there, and finding creative ways of removing hurdles along those pathways. But what if there is a lack of consensus on the problem? 

What if there were two different groups in DC. One of whom hated sitting in traffic, one of whom saw sitting in traffic as fundamental to their identify? In other words, what if the problem was political. 

Without going too far into the thickets of political philosophy, I think we can agree that political problems are those defined by issues of identity, power, and legitimate authority, and how they interact. How do we organize ourselves into formal and informal political communities with a common identity? How do we grant legitimate authority? How is power gathered and wielded to confront illegitimate authority?

Students visiting the temple at Naqa to teach the them about their common identity and culture [credit: USAID/Sudan]

Atrocity prevention from the local to the international level is an intensely and inherently political process. Those working on atrocity prevention must find creative ways to confront illegitimate authority, disrupt the configuration of identities that contribute to violence, and craft new means to provide legitimate authority for those with the power to prevent atrocities. 

What the Challenge did is identify a narrow slice of the atrocity prevention challenge, the gathering of information, that is highly-amenable to a design thinking approach. What if we have information in one place that we want to get to another place? What are the systems and processes we would need to engineer to move that information? Admittedly, the information itself is politically-loaded, but within this frame, the groups who don’t want the information to get out become simply a bug to engineer solutions around.

To be concrete, I want to compare the atrocity prevention problem, as identified by the Challenge, with a different project that both Humanity United and my organization, the United States Institute of Peace, have supported in Sudan. A UK-based organization, Peace Direct, helped establish the Collaborative for Peace in Sudan, which among other things, is working to create peace zones in South Kordofan. These are communities that refuse to participate in the war in South Kordofan and whose members work with all sides of the conflict to maintain peace in their area. 

These efforts are similar to the long-running “peace communities” effort in Colombia. Think about the nature of these efforts. The peace committees in South Kordofan are constantly confronting dangerous sources of power, finding new means to establish authority within the areas they work, working to craft new identity groupings that mitigate instead of exacerbate violence and so on. 

Collaborative for Peace in Sudan peace building seminar

The point here is not that these efforts are local, it is that they are political. Similar political processes need to take place within the UN or the United States Department of Defense before an international response to prevent atrocity can take place.

It’s not good enough to argue that this is simply a division of labor – let’s innovate on how we gather information and let others figure out the messy political realities of the response. This is not a two-step process.

The information gathered has to be gathered, aggregated, communicated, and leveraged with the responses in mind. Returning to the South Kordofan example, it may be the case, for instance, that because much of the politics in the area relies on the interaction between nomads and settled communities, the rainfall pattern is the key piece of information to feed into the process of establishing safe zones. Looked at this way, even the core assumption of the Challenge, that we should be gathering information on atrocities in order to prevent atrocities, is one that may need to be questioned.

I am not privy to how the Challenge was designed. But from the outside looking in, it seems as if the approach, design thinking, helped shape how the problem was defined, instead of vice-versa. 

If documentation of atrocities is our goal, and it’s a worthy goal in its own right, then the approach would fine. If we want to prevent atrocities, however, we have to design solutions that can confront the exceedingly complex politics involved. Perhaps ironically, this would constitute a true innovation in the field.