I talk in this podcast about a rapid testing and experimentation process we used to help design a strategy.
In this podcast, I provide details about the process I led at Living Water for developing a Theory of Change and the lessons learned along the way.
You can read Living Water’s Theory of Change here.
Using Facebook’s ‘Move Fast’ Approach at an International NGO
Facebook’s motto used to be “move fast and break things.” But during a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg updated it to something slightly more refined: “Move fast with a stable infrastructure.”
At any given point in time, Facebook engineers are testing thousands of different versions of the platform on users and measuring those versions’ performances against Facebook’s key metrics. If a new idea works, they scale it. If it doesn’t, they add it to the company’s list of lessons learned. “The strategy of Facebook is to learn as quickly as possible what our community wants us to do,” Zuckerberg said.
The Little Prince
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, in The Little Prince
Why Infrastructure Isn’t Boring
Road accidents are becoming one of the leading causes of death in developing countries. This thought was going through my mind as I sat on the passenger side of a Land Cruiser making its way up and down narrow, winding roads through the mountains of Nepal. In front of me, more than 50 people were crammed into the back of a big truck serving as a local bus for a 3-4 hour treck down the mountain to the main city. Teenagers were hanging off the side… perhaps to show off, or perhaps to be able to quickly jump off. All too often a truck like this will lose its brakes and go tumbling over the cliff.
I’ve spent a lot of time on bad roads in different countries, but this trip to Nepal made me appreciate their role in development in a less abstract, boring way. That’s probably because I came to Nepal after spending several weeks in Germany with the world’s best highways. I could travel 80 miles (or more!) in an hour. This might include going through mountains in tunnels or over rivers on bridges. In Nepal, it took seven hours to travel 55 miles. The mountains and rivers weren’t any different than those in southern Germany; the roads are simply worse.
Article in Field Exchange on Haiti Agriculture Project
I worked on this article with Dr. Jason Streubel and Grace Heymsfield from Convoy of Hope. In it, we talk about how an agricultural extension project in Haiti contributed to increased local food security. It also added value to COH’s school feeding program by increasing locally available food.
These spider graphs on the NCAA March Madness mobile app are pretty awesome.
The number of child mortalities continues to decrease across the world.
Source: Our World in Data