On Monday I showed up at Kenyatta University, Northeast of Nairobi, found a group of graduate students hanging under a tree and started teaching them Neuroscience. On that day, the Biochem Masters students were scheduled to have three 3-hour long lectures at 9am, 12noon, and 2pm (straight through). Normally this means they would have no lunch break, but luckily all three professors had something come up that took priority over teaching. In fact, the hole day was one long lunch break, until I came along. I spent an hour playing the go-between with several professors and I was able to clear up that no-lunch-break problem, and carve out time for my own class on Mondays at 4pm.

Since this was already the third week of the semester I couldn’t fathom waiting another week to start lectures. So I just jumped in without any notes. In retrospect, I don’t think any good professor should bring notes to his or her first lecture. We should learn how to improvise and listen to our new students.

“So this is who I am and these are the subjects that I could teach,” I began. And we went over topics. I learned what other classes they were taking. And we agreed upon a grading structure (which seemed to be important).

“Okay, what percent do you want for the final exam?”
“70%.”
“Perfect. And 30% will come from quizzes and other class assignments.” They wanted more detail. “Okay. There are 11 weeks left. So there will be 5 quizzes (what you call continuous assessments) and 1 unannounced test.”
“Unannounced? Why?”
“Because I want you keeping up with all the material, every week, not on quiz weeks.”

Next up, some real questions with my 9 new students:
“What do you want to do with your master’s degree once you pass out?”
No idea. Eventually it was the safe stuff: teach at a university, stay in academics, or do research at a university. (Really? I thought. If Universities only exist to train people to work at themselves, it feels rather incestuous. With prodding, one person finally conceded to the possibly of doing research at a company.)
“Do you know someone personally who is a scientist?”
“Yes of course!” They know the people at the university.
“I mean people outside of school?”
Nobody knew a scientist, or had ever met a biochemist.
“Next question: Is there a scientist that inspires you? Someone that you admire?”
[silence]
“I’m trying to figure out what motivates you to be in this field! Either you have an idea of what you want to do, or you’ve met someone that inspires you, or…”
“Newton.” One man offered.
“Newton. Sure he’s a good example. And do you know why Newton was so important to science?”
“Because of Newton’s Laws.”
“That’s true. But there is more to it than just his accomplishments. It is what it meant to the world he inhabited. You see, Newton probably wasn’t any smarter, er, maybe he was just a little bit smarter than the rest of us, but he was much more curious about the world. He was detemined to find better answers. He was dedicated to learning everything he could in pursuit of a better answer. That drive and curiosity made Newton a giant.”

This segued into a surprise lecture on the philosophy of empirical science…

“You see,” I contined, “Before Newton, people were happy to attribute to God all the things they saw and couldn’t understand. Newton believed that the natural world should be governed by rules. It was that idea which was his greatest contribution. Once he believed nature should follow predictable laws, he sought to define them, and elevated the way experiments were used to confirm these rules.”

Then I drew this:

“Newton, by finding these laws, was suddenly able to explain the orbits of the planets, and how light – something you can’t even see directly – can bend and merge with other light to create colors and patterns in his Optics book. All of these things came at a price. People who previously attributed these things to God suddenly saw Newton take a bite out of the realm of God’s power over the world and felt threatened:

And ever since, scientists have piece by piece explained more of the world. This threatens those who were comfortable with God being the explanation for everything that God was invoked to explain when they were taught about the world as a child. Now I personally feel there is a whole lot left for God out there, but you can see why science and religion are often described as being at odds with each other.

What I hope to share with you about the complexity of the real world should reveal stunning order – and beauty. I hope to inspire you to appreciate the world as a whole, God included. If you are curious, you can be Newton. If you are curious, you will probably enjoy a future full of new discoveries.

In that discussion I also ended up talking about three other influential people: Thomas Kuhn, Carl Popper, and Richard Feynman. They had heard of none of these, but then again these are all 20th century people. Apparently science education doesn’t have time for modern science.

Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) was influential because – in a nutshell – he argues that real science doesn’t progress as people are left to believe. The textbook myth is that scientists are given two sets of evidence in support of Theory A and B, and the group supports the one with the best evidence. Kuhn points out that this doesn’t happen; older scientists cling to the old theory as evidence slowly mounts against it, like a frog in water on hotplate, unable to sense a slow change in temperature as it boils. It falls upon the next generation of scientists, who weren’t raised on the old theory, to reject it in favor of a new one. Scientific theories expire when the people who cling to them expire.

Promising thought? Probably not. But if you want to change the world through advocacy, it’s good to know what you’re up against.

Karl Popper said a theory needs to be falsifiable to be viable. So there are a lot of theories out there – like Sigmund Freud’s theory of the mind – which simply don’t make any testable predictions. These don’t belong in science.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Physicist who was a great communicator. His piece, “Juding Books by their covers” – about his stint on a commission to choose California textbooks reveals much about the Kuhn-style world we live in. Textbooks are not vetted for their factual accuracy, their clarity, or even their ability to inspire people to think like a scientist. They are chosen as part of a business that cares about selling books and making money.

“I am teacing this class because I believe I can inspire you to appreciate this wonderful world, and I can help you think like a scientist. What you do after is up to you, but I hope you’ll think about how important you could be in helping Governments and Leaders make smarter choices, based on evidence, grounded in scientific thinking,” I told them.

And then we had to switch classrooms. But the students were engaged, since I was okay calling it a day but they insisted on reconvening.

We got onto another topic from the talk about advocating to government. “What makes someone an expert?” I asked. “I mean, what do consultants do?”
“Consultants look at problems and prescribe solutions.” Someone offered. This didn’t jibe with my beliefs. So I offered an alterative view. I explained our experiment using the storytelling project in 2010 and asking 68 experts to predict what the people would talk about most often from a set of 12 choices. Only one of the 68 got the right answer. I had the 9 of them try to make the same prediction, given the same choices. “What will Kenyans talk about in this story project?”

The most common answer was jobs/economic opportunities. This was not the most-discussed topic.

“So experts have knowledge, but only about certain things. A consultant has to be about to use the scientific method to gather evidence about all the pieces of the problem.”

I had them map out the steps in the experiment we’d done with the prediction game:

1. Define the problem
2. Formulate a hypothothesis (possible solution)
3. Run an experiment to test the hypothesis
4. Analyze results
5. Redesign a better experiment. (Repeat as is usually necessary to find the best solution.)
6. Disseminate / Publish results

In class we’d defined the problem and made predictions – which is like a hypothesis. Then I had told them the results of the experiment, and whether they were right. For step four (redesign – the step textbooks often omit) we actually had a fruitful discussion.

“So we asked this question on paper to thousands of people. What do you think would have changed if we had instead collected Kenyan Facebook status updates and mined them to the answer?”

“People would be more educated.”
“And richer, because they have internet on their phone.” [For the record, all of my students had a smart phone in class, but none of them could buy a textbook in Kenya for this subject. This is a Paradigm Shift in what “educational resources” should be essential in the classroom!]
“Yet the paper one would get more swahili speakers too.”
I said, “But we would also be getting tens of thousands of people instead of a few with Facebook. Isn’t that better?”
“But they are also younger on Facebook.”
We started getting into random sampling problems. These are serious topics for a classroom, and their insights are not trivial – and yet it all began with “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

In the final hour I got into actual neuroscience and explained the structure and organization of the brian from the macro down to individual synapses.

I will give it a much more thorough working over next week, and include actual youtube videos on my computer.

After, we took a group photo. A student uploaded it to our Neuroscience 506 Facebook group and people tagged themselves. I invited my neuroscience PhD friends to join so it would be an “Ask a neuroscientist” forum to replace the text book. I posted linked to online readings. This is better than a text book. Students have joined an online learning community co-populated with mentors in the field.

Post script

I’m starting my next lecture with this image:

This first mention of the brain in history comes from Africa. It is time that neuroscience became a part of Africa again.

2 minutes ago · Like

A recent FastCompany article (http://www.fastcompany.com/1810674/culture-eats-strategy-for-lunch) highlighted how an outstanding environment inside a company makes it more successful than great strategic planning. The same applies to GlobalGiving and the many partner organizations we support. Here’s a recent Facebook conversation:

From Dread to Excitement

Colleen’s project: Provide Equine Therapies For 100 Children In Need

I believe GlobalGiving has made fundraising fun for many organizations. Our next goal should be to aid organizations in creating the kind of internal culture that fosters innovation, creativity, a hunger for changing lives, an openness to failure, curiosity about the world, a willingness to work for what matters and never to settle for merely what one can find funding for, and a daringness to experiment.

If we knew the answers to the world’s problems, then the world would be progressing towards utopia, but it is not. And, as Mari Kuraishi says, “since there is never enough money for everybody and everything, we need to help more organizations do what matters most, even if some of them take risks that don’t pay off in the end.”

The extraordinary culture inside GlobalGiving is why I – as a Neuroscientist – still work there and not in a research lab. It’s why Kevin – one of our superstar programmers – works there instead of for Google. It’s why every year dozens of college students intern with us for free (or at least for far less money than they deserve): We believe in what we do; we believe we’re going somewhere; and that what we do matters in the world. 

Some day I hope to bring that culture into a research lab at a University. I’d start by painting the walls bright colors instead of white, and putting up posters of the giants of science who’ve been there. I’d ask people not just what they want to do, but for whom in the world will that make a difference? If it was cancer, then I’d bring cancer patients by the lab to meet the scientists, make friends, and invite them to offer each other hope and inspiration. We need each other.

I’d find ways to crowd-source the problem of analysis of some problems, and the task of keeping up with the mountain of new research findings published daily. Cancer patients would love to be able to contribute to their own cures, and where there’s a “good culture,” there’s a way. We need each other. Sadly, too many scientists have been too busy to notice that the world is a giant untapped innovation machine waiting for us to plug into it.

POP QUIZ!

Given a survey with two parts: (1) a space for people to tell you exactly what they mean in a story, and (2) a set of answers codified through multiple-choice questions, which one do you trust if the answers conflict?

Written your answer down yet? Good.

Here are some examples to spur your thinking on which one you should trust.

#1 World Food Program drought and famine relief effort in Kenya

(click title to read all stories)

The open ended question was, “Talk about a time when a person or organization tried to help someone or change something in your community.”

Of the people who chose WFP, and talked about a NEED, that was not met, because the wrong people / nobody benefitted and it was a bad idea, there were 5 “failure” stories:

(Please note: This plot was generated using SenseMaker(R) by Cognitive Edge. And there were over 100 generally positive stories about WFP, also shown in the plot but not circled.)

These are those five stories:

I’ve added emphasis to the parts relevant to whether they really are about success or failure.

Hunger is brought about by lack of food. Most of the parts of Northern Kenya have been worse hit by hunger in the recent past. Some parts of North eastern have been worse.There have been several reports of loss of lives due to higher and even cattle succumb to the situation. The United Nations through the World Food Organization have been on the  front line helping the affected people through food donations and other important commodities like water.Due to several cases of loss of lives and death of domestic animals, there is need to be met so that the issue can be solved fully. More organizations need to come in so that they may help tackle the hunger crisis.

Poverty in Kenya is a major issue and a normal thing to most of the citizens of Kenya living in rural areas. This is is because there are no major income generating activities that can make people rich.In Ugenya constituency most people a re living below the poverty line.There are people who only depend on others for their daily meals while others struggle to earn from hard work but  what they get is just too little for them to keep t hem going. Most of them depend on agriculture  yet the land i s not that productive. There is a program run by World food organization that provides to the people drought resistant crops but this not a major boost since there is no proper irrigation. Residents therefore always appeal for help from the government but what they get is too little.

World food program has helped many schools in kibera by providing food and shelter it has also helped in educating by providing books and also uniform. This organization was formed in the year 2009 may on the fifth day it has also improved high standard of people living in kibera. simply because people living in kibera do not have enough money to provide for their children for food. That is why world food program has brought free food to schools so that pupils could not be hungry when they are learning, Because food is important in our lives.

World Food Organisation which has been helping many children in the world, This days the children get food in the support of WFP. Those because people who are poor normally get their daily bread because they are being supported with this organisation. In every month W.F.P. Normally bring food to squaters who live in Rongai because they know that those squaters doesn’t have food and if they tell the Government they do nothing. That’s why World Food Programme Organisation intended to help them. That is why most of us thank the W.F.P for the support.

Joash was a man working with World Food Program Organization. He used to transfer food within Kibera schools pupils within kibera most of them their parents were as poor as a church mouse. So that pupils like  coming to school so that they may get food for the day. Others used to carry food taking to their parents. Joash managed to transfer food to their parts of Kenya. He used  to transfer food eastern part of Kenya.That is where he found  many pupils suffering from Marasmus.

I’d say that 4 of 5 of these speakly highly of WFP’s work, or of their employees. And in the one negative case, the storyteller explains exactly why WFP’s efforts haven’t succeeded. But if one was to just count these data points as evidence of failure without reading the stories, one might get the impression that failure was entirely WFP’s fault, which is was not.

In case you were wondering, here are other major relief / drought organizations mentioned:

Red Cross Kenya

Kenyan Government

#2 Education or school stories and Carolina for Kibera

Same analysis, different set of stories.

And the three most “negative” stories about Carolina for Kibera related to education:

I was a pupil in standard seven, i was doing well in my studies but not really, because most of the time i was being sent home to bring school fees. One day carolina came for kibera, came to our school they were a sponsor who was sponsoring children and thats why they came to our school.They were choosing the best pupil from class six upto seven in our school,and was among them who got the sponsorship.they were paying two thousand shillings for two terms but this year they increased three thousand for three terms.And now i am doing well because i am concentrating in my and i always thank the sponsorship for being kind to slum children and they helped many children apart from me.

Binti Pamoja is a sub organization that is under Carolina for Kibera. It mainly deals with girls as the name suggests; these are girls between the  age if ten to twenty five. It is a sub organization that has helped girls especially in kibera slum to realize their talents and also help their parents by offering scholarship to girls for secondary and collleges. The Binti pamoja sub-organization was established in order to help girls who did not know much about their status of life, this is because manyof the girls in klibera face many challenges in life like poverty. Girls now know what they want to achieve and remain focussed as they try and pursue their goals. This sub organization has really helped many girls in Kibera and they are able to cope with the situation around them and the girl child. rights are being proteced so no stigma and discrimination. This helping the young ladied have high self esteem and conqure the ups and downs of their lives with strength and self defense.

Two years ago I was with cousin called Isha Rose.we were going to Carolina to learn some activities like dancing,singing and narrating poems.As days went on, my cousin grew she sat for her national examination she passed and she taken to boarding where they paid for her the whole school fees with the organisation called (C F K)and thus she is now contuining with her studies at Ngara high school she is in formnfour (form 4) I give thanks to CAROLINA FOR KIBERA for helping my cousin in paying the fees.

World Vision

Negative World Vision story:

I was registered in World vision to be sponsored but i got nothing from world vision. Anyway they gave me some books and some scholastic materials for using but they done that when i was in primary two, when i reached primary three, i was discriminated from getting sponsorship and i started looking for any where or anybody else to process my education. Ihave reached senior six this year when world vision stopped even helping it’s people.

Conclusions

All three of the Carolina for Kibera stories were positive, though they are marked as negative in the combination of multiple choice questions. The one negative education story about World vision was clearly a complaint about the organization failing to continue it’s program.

(1) I interpret the inconsistency here as a lesson that checking boxes on survey questions is not sufficient to clearly codify some things, such as the author’s intent, tone, and what they would like to see change. I trust narratives to be more reliable sources of information even where multiple multiple choice questions indicate otherwise. If a person says through multiple choice questions, “This is about a NEED, and the WRONG PEOPLE benefited, and it was a BAD IDEA, I still want to read the story associated with these answers to be sure that they we are clear about what part of the story was a failure.

(2) You can’t codify everything, but you can explain everything. Narrative is fuzzy but powerful. Multiple choices questions are rigid and sometimes misleading.

Who is talked about?

Purple dots: GlobalGiving projects & reports. Other dots: stories about organizations color-coded by type.

Success Stories

HIV stories, HIV treatment, and GlobalGiving projects overlay

Who-Where visualizer map

Gephi Map of everything talked about

From over 30,000 stories gathered in 2011. Words must have been used in a phrase at least 150 times to appear. So every phrase is significant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Republican_caucuses,_2012

I couldn’t help noticing that the tie between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney falls cleanly along the low/high population density divide. Nationally, Democrats dominate areas of the country with high population density (cities), and Republicans win rural areas.

You might think of Ron Paul as appealing to people in the suburbs, but that’s less clear.

I wonder how this affects the presidential contest.

Mobile Accord was nice enough to share results of 12,750 text messages they collected in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2010 using their new GeoPoll application. Here are some visual snapshots of what they found:

What were the root causes of the conflict in DRC? (1073 responses)

(Responses gratuites: Quelles ont ete selon vous les causes profondes du conflit en RDC?)

Alternate visualization, using Gephi to map connected phrases from these texts:

Click on the overall map to browse. Here’s a zoom in on the heart of the answers: POWER

Variations on power was common in many answers: Tribalism and power, politicians fighting for power, a lack of power for the people, lust for power, competition for power, poor sharing of power, pursuit of power.

What are important changes your region requires? (1462 responses)

(Reponses gratuites: Quels seraient les changements les plus importants qui pourraient rendre votre region plus sure?)

Mapping the essential phrases:

The 1462 responses could spell out national priorities for the Government of DRC and the international community:  Infrastructure, job creation, employment, security, health, education, and a mentality of changing behavior. Wordle emphasizes building roads and providing electricity.

What role should the international community play?

(Qu’est-ce que la communaute internationale pourrait faire de plus pour soutenir la paix et la securite en RDC? Est-ce que sa presence aide ou fait du mal, et comment?)

Nothing clear emerges to this question, other than maintaining a presence to support peace.

You can click to explore further.

What should the top priorities be?

(Quelles sont les priorites pour ameliorer la vie dans votre region – par exemple, la securite, les infrastructures, l’education, la sante, l’emploi?)

This response mirrors the important changes question: Employment, Health, Education, Infrastructure, and Security.

What should happen to the perpetrators of violence? (936 responses)

(Responses gratuites: Que pensez-vous qu’il faudrait faire aux auteurs de violences en RDC?)

The answer seems painfully clear: The perpetrators of violence must be punished under international law to bring justice…

Why do young people turn to crime?

(Reponses gratuites: Pourquoi certains jeunes se tournent-ils vers une vie de crime ou de violence?)

And the word map of these texts shows a similar focus: Lack of education, lack of work lead to violence and poverty.

If it was safe to live and work in your area, how would life be different today?

(Reponses gratuites: S’il etait plus sur de vivre et de travailler dans votre region, comment votre vie serait differente aujourd’hui?)

This question did not really work. Most responses included the question rephrased as an answer.  One answer said, “Compared to that of today? The answer is: Life is.“

That may be more revealing than the rest. Do people imagine what life would have been like if circumstances were different in Eastern Congo? Perhaps not.

And there’s a conservative version of the story on Carl Rove’s website as well:

Both are giving you a short term perspective of a long term problem. For the record, Carl Rove’s version is more misleading because of several plotting tricks:

• Arbitrary timeframe (if February 2009 is the starting point, then why is Obama judged to be 651,020 jobs in the hole on inauguration day? What’s the “zero time point” here?
• Arbitrary endpoint (Rove was posting this report monthly and suddenly stopped in December 2010. Why is that? Coincidentally, the next month starts the flip from negative to positive on Obama’s chart.

Side by side: Carl Rove chose the perfect time to start and stop reporting

The Missing Perspective

Looking back ten years helps me to see that job growth in 2011 wasn’t that different from most of the 2000s. But it doesn’t explain why unemployment remains high. I needed more context.

If the 2008-2010 recession was caused by banks, take a look at the banking industry. This chart took me a while to compile from several small charts because nobody looks at long term trends in banks.

From 2004 to 2010, the banking industry made a healthy profit. Even when the bottom was falling out of the housing market in 2008, requiring a record infusion of cash from the bank’s holding companies, shown here,

The banking industry did not collapse like it did in the past.

Going into the distant past, bank failures were much more common:

Why aren’t banks collapsing like they should?

Banking is not real capitalism. For contrast, airlines are a typical industry that follows a business (and regulation) cycle. Shown below are net profits for the airline industry from 1989 to 2009:

US Airline profits, 1989 to 2009

(I call the version that banks enjoy “crapitalism” – because the net effect of “stability” is less prosperity, more corruption, and ineffective governance.)

The long-term view of banks is totally different from the airline industry. Below you can see that profits and growth came to banks every year from 1904 to 2008 (1997-2004 is missing data).  I had to squeeze and scale lots of bank reports to show this, so sorry for the tiny text.

Going as far back as 1904, banks as an industry have made money every year even through depressions and booms. It would take the entire economy to collapse* in order to banks to feel it. (* so in the 4th quarter of 2008 looks like the economy collapsed, only the government flushed trillions of dollars into the chasm to seal it up.)

In the past (1870-1930), greed still managed to make a lot of banks fail, even though loans are a pretty safe way to make profits.

There’s another reason why banks do well during hard times. Governments borrow money and give it to banks, and this accounts for more and more of their assets.

Here you can see that over the last decade Japanese banks have loaned to the US government (by buying government bonds), and this is now most of their wealth:

And also over the long term, “banks” have become investment machines and less of what they do involves loaning money:

This is what bankers mean when they talk about innovation and “financial instruments”: Little of what they do with money is about loans, which is also why few banks needed to collapse simply because the economy did in 2008. This resilience is also evidence that the government is doing everything possible to prevent banks from experiencing what every other industry knows as bona fide “capitalism.”

(Note: The only other industries that have consistent profits and growth every year are US health care and the oil industry.)

Loan losses are huge, but banks can now make record profits simply by moving money around. In 2010, the largest US banks earned a profit every day of every quarter by taking US bailout money and returning it to the same government in the form of government bonds (US debt).

All of this sums up into a simple picture that I posted last week.

Real wealth versus fake wealth created by the global banking and finance system:

There is tremendous untapped capacity in unlikely places – Sudanese villages, public sector institutions in Kenya, and countless other developing world communities.

In Sierra Leone:

“Only 1,000 people used HIV/AIDS Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) services over two years. Then, over 100 days, a small local team increased use of VCT services by 17,500.”

In fact, VAP in Kenya did that a few months ago. They had a “get tested” soccer tournament.  While they only got 1-2 thousand tested, it was a cheap, fast, and effective.

I like their idea:

“We can set a policy that out of each dollar spent on projects and programs, 10 cents are spent on unleashing this local performance capacity reserve. This would apply equally to “hard” infrastructure projects and to “soft” training or capacity-building projects. We contend that this step alone would improve these programs’ and projects’ impact by at least a factor of 10, or even 100.”

However I don’t think whether the money went to “hard”, “soft” or “capacity building” was what caused the 100-fold increase in people tested. Instead, I think these were the important factors:

• Local org.
• Local org decided VCT testing was it’s own priority.
• Local org used local people in smart, cost-effective ways (including local volunteers)
• Local org did not wait for outside help, outside directions, or outside financing
• Local org provided a FUN incentive to get tested.

Fun and Local

The authors overlooked the power of fun in their commentary. Without fun, people are generally unwilling to waste time doing things, even if those things are in their own best interest – like getting tested.

I’ve also written previously that funding for fun, local projects needs put more of the resources in the hands of local people, not governments, agencies, or even local authorities. Currently, the bigger the project budget, the smaller the percentage of money reaching local people.

A Better Project Budget Breakdown:

That 10 percent should go towards local organizations with fun ideas, and used to build systems that help mobilize local people. Organizations with a clear goal in mind who have had any previous social impact in their community – such as getting 2,000 people tested – should be allowed to tap this money.

I think GlobalGiving does this. Our due diligence process identifies competent organizations with a demonstrated social impact (even if small). We teach them how to mobilize people, donors, and articulate a clear vision for themselves. We’re building a SMS feedback loop system to allow these organizations to better keep in touch with their communities. And we try to to make it fun.

I hope that FUN gets written in as one of our core values. NaNoWriMo already has FUN as it’s #1 core value – and look at what a difference they make in the world of writing!

I think these other suggestions from the article were good:

• More coaching, less managing by outsiders.
• A space where local orgs can build a sense of ownership, commitment and confidence, and identity.

Enouce and Nancy of VAP running their VCT tournament

Value of all the real stuff on Earth

Earth: $62 trillion is combined estimated value of world economy per year. Most of this wealth comes in the form of paper stuff – investments – rather than in tangible stuff – like raw materials, houses, cars, etc.

I heard that the combined value of real and paper assets is $55 trillion (on top of this GDP), but nobody really throws around hard numbers. And all those assets have no fixed value under capitalism. It depends on how much somebody else is willing to pay for them.

US economy: $14.6 trillion (about a quarter of the world’s assets)

Virtual Assets on Earth

$100 trillion = world insurance policies (CDOs, derivatives, credit default swaps, etc) on those assets. Two Earths are shown because the second one exists on paper in the form of promises and obligations that might have to paid out in the future.

When Real and Virtual Earths meet: Financial Chaos

If, let’s say, some region of the world became financially unstable and people started calling in bets, loans, and insurance claims on those assets, what happens?

1. Institutions start creating wealth out of thin air in order to balance what is impossible to balance. Today we learned that the US Government secretly loaned $7.7 trillion dollars to US banks at the “discount window” in 2010-2011 which it never had.
2. The real value of stuff becomes unpredictable. Generally the value of real stuff owned by people who owe money to others will fall dramatically, as there is suddenly a huge supply of real stuff that needs to be converted into money, and very few buyers willing to trade their money for “illiquid” assets. Those without debt are suddenly rich and powerful, as whatever money they have has huge buying power from those who owe. (Hello China, Saudi Arabia, Dubai…)

Well, we can scratch #1 off our checklist, because it just happened…

$7.7 trillion added in fake wealth in 2010

Oil

Oil runs the global economy. So it’s worth pointing out that by the time we recover from this crisis brought on by the Greedanistas who wrecked the world’s economy to make money for themselves, we have an even bigger problem to deal with.

~1,300,000,000,000 (1.3 trillion) barrels of oil left (2010)

~37,000,000,000 (0.037 trillion) barrels of oil get consumed in a year (2010)

divide supply by demand and you get 36 years of oil left, assuming population and consumption remained stable, which of course they are not.

Most estimates place peak oil at 2016. Meaning that global supply will decrease every year after that, while global demand increases. On a positive side note, there probably isn’t enough oil on the planet to irreversibly destroy the atmosphere with pollution (maybe rising 5 degrees?), but it will require moving about 20% of the world’s people away from coasts (a billion or two).

What we can do for fix these problems:

• Vote. Become politically aware. Recognize the problems as real and inevitable and elect leaders who also realize that we must act to minimize the fallout. If both candidates are wrong, vote for a third candidate. Politicians have a way of listening after the lose elections.
• Invest in new technologies that replace the need for oil. (Either we get busy doing it today, or we can get busy doing it after the global economy grinds to a halt – it’s our choice.)
• Support institutions that act like democracy but are not lobbyist-friendly. Not all of these programs require a dysfunctional government to fix. Investing in new technology could be done by citizen investors. Changing consumption behavior is a social problem as well.
• Disincentivize: Support higher oil prices! Either we artificially penalize those who are using fuels now, or lack of supply with raise them for us in another 5 years.
• Pray: It helps. Never been proven to hurt, so long as we also act to solve the problems while we do it.

Disclaimer:

Many of these numbers are estimates, but none of them are an order of magnitude off the mark. If I say we have 36 years of fuel left, you can be sure we have between 20 and 60 years. If you don’t like my numbers, get your own and post them below.

Nanowrimo was an elaborate ploy

If you are still reading this, then you mostly likely have not given up. Awesome! Possibly, you have already reached 50,000. Probably, you are very close.

I don’t have any sage advice at this stage of Nanowrimo, because you don’t need any. You now realize this is all an elaborate ploy to help you set aside one part of each day to pursue a creative passion that won’t leave you alone. The book in your head tugs at your sleeve like a hungry child, begging to be fed sheets of paper, ink, and battery power from your laptop. All that nanowrimo did was say “it’s okay” to give that child what it needs, and finally put your life in balance, and set your career as a writer in motion.

I haven’t hit the “long strides” of my novel yet, nor have I fallen hopelessly behind. I’m simply plugging along, writing nearly 1667 words each day. It’s work, and I do it, because to do otherwise would be to lock away the part of my brain that constantly imagines stories that have never been told.

I’m barely going to reach 50,000 this year. And I’m a four-time veteran of Nanowrimo!

Writing vs Playing Guitar

The lesson is that even after 5 years, writing isn’t something that suddenly gets easy. For me, it’s the opposite of playing a guitar. After playing a little guitar every day for 20 years, I can pick it up, strum all sorts of chords, play notes at will, and usually carry any song with a minimal of guidance from the Internet.

But after 20 years of playing every day, I might look like a virtuoso to someone who isn’t good at the mechanics, and yet in my head I’m just a beginner. Yesterday I worked for over an hour to craft just 10 lines of lyrics, and have their cadence match the rhythm of the chords I was playing. I failed. But you know what? You sleep on it, wake up, and try again the next day.

When I think about it this way, nanowrimo is EXACTLY like playing a guitar. You can learn to write a scene, a dialogue, or paint a beautiful description of a bank heist – but after five years I still struggle with strings of scenes that build a narrative, and sequences of dialogues that create humor, and that description of a bank heist that cleverly tricks the reader into missing that red herring in a mystery.

So you see, the end is not near. Sure, the goal of 50,000 words is right around the corner, but your writing and your storycraft must continue to develop. You just wrote an awesome part of a novel, and there are some incredible scenes in there that deserve to be read by millions of people. But it will only happen if you continue writing on Dec 1st, and again on Dec 2nd, and a little more on the day after…

Every little bit counts. Did you not just notice that for the last month it only took 3-4 pages of writing a day to get somewhere? If 1667 words a day was grueling, why not try to write 1000? Even 500 a day is doing a million times more than you were. This is coming from someone who for the last 5 years has written 88% of all his writing in November. I hope I will have the discipline to take my own advice.

Lastly, here is the poem that I tried to craft into a song:

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth
“You owe me”
Look what happens with
A love like that
It lights the whole sky
—Hafiz

I’d like to think that good writing can do the same thing for those writers willing to embrace their story with all their being.

I think we all need a reality check on how “unlimited” this corporate money is in politics. After you educate yourself, you’ll realize that it doesn’t take much wealth from the bottom 99% to match the total amount of corporate wealth being poured into politics each year.

Total Corporate Contributions

Source: followthemoney.org

Corporate influence by sector, for every candidate

This PULSE interactive tool from from followthemoney.org really breaks down every politician in the USA and in which corporations are currently lining their pockets:

So the above plot (for North Carolina, 2008), local candidates won office with as little as $5000 raised. The most spent (Senator Marc Basnight) was $1,6 million. And there’s a DEM who raised $750,000 and still lost.

When mouse over each dot, it displays the candidate’s name, how much they raised, and from where:

So this democrat got over 20% of his total contributions from the Finance, Insurance & Real Estate industry. Unless you are a total idiot, you can easily tell this senator will not be supporting any tough economic reform bills on the home mortgage industry or reforming healthcare to redirect the cash flow away from insurance companies which drain the US economy of 16% of GDP each year. (One in every 7 dollars in the economy isn’t a real “product” – it’s just money directed to insurance companies).

These are the old school style of donations directly to candidates. I am still looking for SuperPac totals to date, but haven’t found them. Here is the best estimate I could find:

SuperPac fundraising totals

• $1.3 billion in 2010 (http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/on_moneyball_and_super_pacs/) $135 million of this is from totally anonymous donors. Clearly FEC has not make SuperPac totals easy to find.

Citizen Inaction

Here is the context that has been missing. Corporations never “took away” our voice; we the citizens were not using that voice to begin with.

• No Public support for public financing: The percentage of tax payers checking the box to give $3 to federal campaign funding has steadily decreased since 1960. In 2006 only 8 percent checked to give $3.
• The citizen campaign contribution limit is $2500 per candidate per election. It would only take 3,000,000 (3 million) people giving $1000 to match all the corporate money ($3 billion) in the 2010 election. That is 1% of the people in the USA, or 2.7% of all households.

These two facts point to a national “do-nothing” psyche in America. We won’t give $3 to the pot, but complain when others are willing to give money to their candidates. We should be grooming and financing our own candidates more – the numbers show that it doesn’t take that much money to win.

Question to ask yourself: How much of your money would you give up in order to remove corporate donations from politics for good? $3? $30? $300? per year? The economics would enable this without changing any laws, if we bid high enough to support public financing.

• Voter turnout: Has ranged from 40% to 55% and is the lowest in democratically governed world.
• Only 38% of high school dropouts vote, compared with 84% of post-grad and 66% of those who have ever attended any college.

Not only are most people unwilling to actively support a candidate, they won’t even vote. People who complain that both candidates are wrong have not done anything to put forward better candidates.

Summary

Instead of complaining that there is too much money in politics, it’s time to flip that and say there are too few people in politics. We put forward too few candidates, mobilize too few voters, have the least educated voting public, and the result is the same results year after year. If the Occupy Movement wants to have a lasting impact, they need to tackle each of these areas as well:

• Educating high school drop outs on their rights and obligations as citizens.
• Convincing “real people” to run for local and state elections, where party politics do not dominate.
• Getting more first time voters to vote, regardless of how awful the candidates are. There’s nothing wrong with “wasting your vote on a 3rd candidate” if you really wanted to protest the mainstream. In fact, that would scare the heck out of the main parties if the idea went viral.
• Setting up socially conscious investment funds that donate 5% of all profits towards a neutral “third party candidates” matching fund modeled on the public financing system. The problem with public financing isn’t the concept, it’s the volume of the match. The public could easily augment the system, thereby achieving the goal of getting Candidates to opt out of the corporate financing game.

Many community driven development (CDD) projects have been found to be only mildly pro-poor in their funding allocations.

That paper (The Regressive Demands of Demand-Driven Development ) goes on to examine one explanation – that people must first ask for money in order to get it. And in Tanzania at least, the asking process is complicated and poorly publicized so that most of those who need it don’t receive it. Instead, those with the skills in writing proper proposals and navigating bureaucracy get it.

When I was in Peace Corps The Gambia, circa 2000, one village (Njau, North Bank CRD Region) got all the aid money because the Chief sent his son to school to become an expert proposal writer. And so the only paved stretch of the 100 km road was the 15 km right around Njau. They also had a bridge built for themselves and started a sort of revolving fund for women with government grants. All of this came as a result of knowing the rules of the funding game.

Paper highlights

• $32 billion from World Bank to CDD “participatory development” projects, 1999-2007.
• Getting word out to the general population that this money is available is a real problem. “The majority of poorer, vulnerable, and marginalized households were not even aware of the program” designed to target them.
• Complicated process: The typical case (Tanzania’s Social Action fund, or TASAF) was a 6 step process involving at least 3 governing / decision-making bodies. The only World Bank control was to set up a funding formula per region based on population, region-size, and “poverty headcount ratio” – whatever that is – to ensure each region got funding.
• Local ownership? This pot-o-money (through NVF, TASAF) typically accounts for 80% of the project budgets, and is never less than 50%. So this means that all projects are primarily funded by an outside source – hard to claim that any locals really have risked their own resources in these ventures. In contrast, Peace Corps runs a “small projects assistance SPA” grant system with a $500 cap and a required minimum 25% community contribution (usually want to see a 50-50 match). These projects are fast, nimble, and community owned because half of the resources are coming from the local people themselves.
• Regressive grant winning: Within Tanzania, the richest districts submitted three times more grant proposals than the poorest districts, and were more often awarded them (15% vs 12% acceptance rate).

My comments

• Forget project proposals
• Having done background checks on over 300 local NGOs for GlobalGiving myself, I don’t think that project proposals are very effective way of finding out which local organizations are going to best use grant money. (AKA “weak correlation between good proposals and good community work”) Instead, I think broad, informal community feedback mechanisms will yield a set of trusted local organizations whose work will better reflect community priorities. How detailed does a proposal need to be to “feed the hungry”, “dig a well”, “pay for school”?
• Flat feedback mechanisms
• Let’s kill this idea of “upward” or “downward” accountability once and for all. There is only one kind of accountability in the 21st century: public disclosure to everybody. Whether you’re a village mom or a world bank analyst, you deserve feedback. And equally as important, the way that information about funds, projects, and results gets delivered to the people needs to match with how they usually access info: SMS, newspapers, radio, face-to-face meetings, and television. What DOES NOT COUNT as feedback  (for 2011-2012) is publishing a PDF on the Internet, or some format that isn’t mobile-friendly.
• More bowl-shaped funding funnels
• This is a budget schematic of the typical internationally funded development project managed by a US 501(c)3 NGO:

The 17% is the calculated average from thousands of IRS Form 990s from US-based NGOs in 2010. The other percentages are a composite drawn from looking at the budgets of hundreds of NGOs (i.e. my best guess). The fraction spent on M&E is the hardest to estimate of all categories, because it is usually not even listed in the budget as it’s own line item, meaning the cost was very small and usually closer to 0% than to 10%.  Note how local staff are not a major fraction of the budget, and untrained, non-university-educated locals are negligible. In some cases, the majority of services and equipment come from outside the country – so the total local dollar impact might be 15-25% of every dollar. For international aid organizations, this amount is even less (I’ve read 92% of foreign aid money gets rerouted back to the host country through budgets like these).

An official aid organization’s budget might look like this:

Most of the staff, services, equipment, M&E, and consultants reside outside the target community. With ODA the word “local” means host government agency officials. It’s hard to determine how much of each aid dollar actually gets spent on truly local services, equipment, or through local organizations (meaning those founded and operated by people living in the same community where they work).

To me it looks like a beer funnel:

Which is crazy, because you get more bang for your buck if you flip this around and spend most of your dollars in the community itself. Of course to do this you would need a much more robust reputation system so that you knew who to trust with that money. Such is system is possible, and would allow us to change the funding structure of ODA to reflect the spirit of “participatory feedback” finally.

The ideal organization budget is more bowl-shaped:

I dream of a world where at least 50 cents of every aid dollar not only remains in the country for which is was intended (buy local, shop local, hire local), but is spent on priorities chosen by the community itself through a direct-democracy process (not local leaders or national government representatives). For this to happen, we need to vastly grow the bottom of the bowl – local people who are volunteering or hired on an ad-hoc basis as part of projects. The GlobalGiving Storytelling Project does this. We’ve enabled over 3000 Kenyans and Ugandans to play a small role as story scribes in 2011.

Where the World Bank community driven development (CDD) projects paper finds a complicated funding allocation process and a lack of community awareness are leading to the poorest communities getting less, we provide a workable alternative to project proposals.

The Solution:

Combine real-time community feedback with community outreach and awareness of the fund. If the whole community has a say, and people are making decisions about what happens within 1km of their home, more of them will choose wisely.

I think the CDD / NSF / TASAF / participatory feedback idea is compelling – but needs to trust “whole” community feedback more. It also needs to involve more “local” community based organizations – those having a mostly volunteer staff of 10 people or less and a yearly budget of just a few thousand dollars. These people are mostly tuned in to their communities, and prepared to devote time and resources to the problems.

Read the paper yourself:

Or read the World Bank Blog’s discussion of this paper

I’m outlining a new college course to teach at Kenyatta University that incorporates everything missing from my own science education (BS, PhD). These are the emerging topics that I believe will form the foundation of scientific fields in the next decade to come:

Complexity Syllabus (still a work in progress)

• Visualizations: Fractals in nature
• Fractal cities in Africa (TED talk)
• Fractal computer game landscapes
• Fractal intelligence?
• Visualizing complex information: InformationIsBeautiful.net examples
• Fractals as a mathematical concept
• Nonlinear statistics
• Vs. Hypothesis testing
• Assuming normal distribution – how to verify assumption?
• Looking at sample diversity through meta analysis instead
• Rigorous experimental error analysis (physical chemistry calculations)
• Useful in thinking about what part of the problem is creating the uncertainty
• Emergence
• How nobody knows the answer, but collectively everyone does the answer
• And human Crowd-sourcing
• Social networks
• Chaos, Complexity, and hidden order as emergence phenomenon
• Neural networks and insurance actuarial modeling
• Prediction models (reliable guesses at future outcomes)
• Prediction markets (intrade) vs. Opinion polling
• Facebook as a one-question marketing survey concept
• Predicting future epidemics using the friends paradox to map social networks (TED).
• An actuary predicts financial impact of risk and uncertainty
• Actuaries (using neural networks) already include global warming / climate change in prediction – i.e. the debate is over
• Iterative systems
• Fractals as an iterative math function
• Recursive logic (Douglas Hoffstadler)
• Self-replicating sentences
• Recursive clustering algorithm for self-sorting information
• System Dynamics and causal-loop diagrams of complex processes
• The basis of intelligence
• The “Turing test” game
• Neural Networks and insurance companies
• Self-referential systems and mathematical recursion (why human intelligence cannot be programmed by a computer yet.)
• Computers vs human intelligence (serial vs parallel processing)
• Feedback loop systems
• In learning (predicting medical outcomes & diagnosis)
• In the brain (how neurons use multiple feedback loops to self-regulate activity)
• In international development
• Behavioral Economics
• Examples from Dan Ariely – predicting political economy
• Examples: Curbing smoking (the New York City Model)
• Perverse incentives and collapse of the housing market (The Big Short, Too Big to Fail)
• Game Theory
• Decade of the Game, follows upon the Decade of Social Media and Decade of the Brain. Will allow groups to solve problems that were previously unsolvable
• Think about Incentives
• Crowd sourcing
• GlobalGiving network
• World Bank Development Marketplace
• YELP, EBAY
• Predictions from a moving reference frame
• Competition to solve social problems
• Innocentive
• GlobalGiving Open Challenge

Synopsis

Briefly, these topics will provide scientists with an understanding of how to deal with real-world non-linear systems, and mechanisms for generating more accurate predictions of future outcomes. Both skills will prepare the next generation of great thinkers to tackle the world’s problems outside of the laboratory. These non-linear methods are drawn from chaos theory, complexity theory, game theory, and behavioral economics, and I will teach by illustrating several examples of each in a real-world setting. Prediction methods include several forms of emergence, fractal math, prediction games, neural networks, and iterative learning systems (feedback loops). Where possible, I will try to demonstrate the interface between each of these concepts and the conventional material in a scientific textbook. We do our students a disservice when we present science and a static and self-contained set of ideas (as most textbooks are written) – and I aim to highlight what we don’t fully understand in the course of teaching one of the core sciences.

Teaching Goals:

Students will acquire some body of knowledge within Biology or Chemistry, but also experience methods first hand that they will one day use to extend that knowledge, innovate as entrepreneurs, and generally solve the world’s problems in some rational systematic way.

My Teaching Philosophy:

Good instruction begins with breaking down the walls between the classroom and daily life. Students would attend regular lectures, but also work in groups to identify and attempt to solve problems in the real world that relate to classroom concepts. One of every 2-3 lectures would be devoted to the “special topics” in this complexity syllabus. I will use real-time SMS polling during lectures to enable student feedback to be aggregated and visualized on the screen during lectures. This interactive, technology-aided approach should keep them engaged, and allow us to practice some of the techniques of crowd-sourcing, emergence, and prediction games that I am teaching.

Within each subject, my goal is to:

1. Define the problem
2. Provide the best scientific understanding or principle currently available to explain it
3. Illustrate how the principle relates to an existing real-world problem
4. Emphasize how the researchers’ thinking and assumptions evolved during the process of developing more refined theories.
5. Foster debate and predictions about future scientific discoveries in this area.

Employers and Entrepreneurs value these capacities above all others:

1. Capacity to learn and adapt to new situations
2. Capacity to apply knowledge in practice
3. Capacity for analysis and synthesis

Where does this fit in science overall?

Current Science courses split the natural world into subdisciplines based mostly on how each approaches research:

• Phsyics – the study of forces in nature
• Biology – the study of life
• Medicine
• Chemistry – the study of molecules
• BioChemistry / Molecular Biology – study of molecules unique to life

There are many subdivisions within these three sciences, but they employ similar methods to one of these three core sciences. These concepts overlap with each of the core sciences and with some math courses. There is no logical place for it to fit, but it reflects aspects of nature that are not covered in these areas.

was to collect thousands of stories from people in the area and then give them to local organizations, so that they could learn what was happening (…or not happening). After collecting 25 thousand stories, we’re faced with a new challenge – how to visualize and summarize the overall picture, and how to deliver this information to the right people, with the right frequency, in a way that transforms how organizations operate.

Community Feedback Sessions

Where: In Kenya, we’ve held local NGO meetings in Kakamega, Bungoma, and now Kisumu. Next up: Kibera and Kampala, Uganda.

Kisumu Stories Map: Any story mentioning Kisumu was used, and they come from many places across Kenya. Also shown: Whether story was about an NGO, Government, an Individual, or something else.

Click to explore in BatchGeo

In Kisumu Collins from the Upendo Development Group organized a meeting that 9 men from 8 local organizations attended. (Where were the women? “busy” I was told. We will try to partner with a women’s organization next time.)

First I illustrated the picture of Kisumu overall…

Above: An experimental visualization showing what gets talked about in stories. You can parse the data by who (which NGO) or where (which town). Kisumu is shown.

Next I tried alternate ways to drill down through the over 900 stories from Kisumu…

Every word from all 900 Kisumu stories interconnected to adjacent words

And then I showed a more filtered word phrases map that one could better interpret…

The above version only includes words that have been used at least 5 times, along with adjacent words also used at least 5 times. By now it should be clear that major clusters are people, school, help, Kisumu, children, food, water, and education.

The difference between the bubbles and the word phrases is that the phrases of more universal categories that relate to many other sub-categories. Also – the Gephi software automatically organizes topics into clusters, which I have colored in manually for clarity.

A more common tool, the Wordle, gives similar information, but I feel it has less depth:

Both the wordle and the bubbles map miss the words education, because that is one word amplified by appearing frequently in connection with just a few other words in stories: secondary, primary, and free.

I then asked those present what specific topics they wanted to know more about. They answered:

• Youth Development
• Food Security, especially related to Fishing around Lake Victoria
• Child abuse and protection
• Disability

For “youth development” I opened up the online search engine and searched for that phrase. 17 results our of nearly 25,000.

“These are stories from ordinary community members,” I reminded them. “And they don’t write stories using the phrases you use in your grant proposals. What does ‘youth development’ actually mean?” I asked.

Black stares.

“You know, in English?”

Still, nobody could provide an intuitive answer.

“So why I don’t I search for ‘sports’ instead? Because every youth development organization I’ve met in kenya is using sports for social change.’

Now we had 218 stories about ‘sports’ and 548 stories with the word ‘sport’. If I wanted to go further, a more advanced search would include stories with any of these words and also football, tennis, rugby.

Since I was using the basic tools, here are a comparison of “sports” stories to those about “youth development”:

Youth Development (17)

Sports (218)

“What I see are two different perspectives in these stories. The word “sports” doesn’t even appear anywhere in the “youth development” stories.” I noted. Now that could either mean these stories are not about sports at all, or that those who are talking in these “youth development” stories are not speaking the same language.

So I dug deeper and later read every story. It turns out they’re not about sports but about various organizations that have the phrase “Youth Development” in their names:

• UYDEL (Uganda Youth Development Link)
• Youth Development Fund
• Youth Development Programme from Barclays Bank (offers loans)
• Youth Development Month Fund (National Youth Council)
• MYSA (Mathare Youth Development Organization)
• DISTRICT AGRICULTURE TRAINING AND INFORMATION CENTER
• NKOBAZAMBOGO
• Kenya Red Cross Society (youth development group)

Here is one of the few of these stories that really described in any detail an actual youth doing some specific action:

One chilly morning, which was the 3rd day of August 2008. I looked at the ‘mtaro’ in front of our house with a lot of frustrations since it was our duty as a group to clean it. The duty was tiresome and boring.I went and founds my group bad started performing our duties as usuall.we had insufficient equipment of cleaning.Just in time ,there arrived two gentlemen .They were carring cleaning materials such as spades ,rakes and other materials .We looked the people in dis-belief  as they introduced themselves.They were from an organization called Mathare Youth Development Association (M.Y.S.A). They promised to give us more and more equipments  due to hard work .They also love us chicks and mash We appreciated their hospitality and thanks them in expanding our organization.

So the lesson is that if you search for “NGOese” jargon phrases like Youth Development, you’re probably going to get stories about organizations with those names. But if you want stories about various activities that can bring about “youth development” you need to put yourselves in the shoes of a storyteller.

Let’s look again at the wordle of all 548 ‘sport’ stories. What emerges?

Sport (548)

I noticed that transport, road, and government, only appear in this largest (548 story) set. School, activities, community, and time are common in “sports” and “sport” stories. Money and youth are in all three groups.

I wished I had a tool that could show the evolution of these wordles or word maps as we compare stories containing slightly different phrases.

My interpretation is “sports” vs. “youth development” is that the latter has a total lack of focus on youth activities, communities, and schools. Whereas “sports” is centered in a social or education setting, “youth development” focuses on jobs, work, and money.

Food Security and fishing around Lake Victoria

I started by searching for phrase “Food Security” and comparing it with a word I’d expect those most affected by a lack of food security to use in their own stories: “hungry.”

Food Security (67)

Hungry (115)

Hunger (204) – not shown

There is a clear difference between the jargon “food security” stories and the plain spoken “hungry” stories. “Food security” appears to be all about crops, farmers, water, maize, seeds, agriculture, harvest, production. I would be hard-pressed to find a more focused collection of words about agriculture and production. The NGOs mentioned in “food security” stories are:

• ACTIONA AGAINST HUNGER
• Agricultural board of Kenya
• Uganda National farmers Association
• Shallow Wells International Movement
• NAADS
• World Vision
• Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI)
• Ssenyange Project

And for hungry stories:

• World Food Program
• Feed the Children
• Unicef
• Amref
• Sadili Oval
• Good Green Pastures
• No one helping — 75 of 120 stories
• Individual person –14 of 120 stories

(And all of these International NGOs account for only 18 of the 120 stories)

Stories about being hungry often mention children, schools, pupils, and Nairobi. No Agriculture topics at all. It would seem that real food security is an urban problem that starts with people have food and the money to buy it, or at least kids getting a square meal in school each day. This is a poverty-based “food security” rather than an agricultural-solutions one. And anyone dealing with this issue should be reading both kinds of stories to search for an understanding why a country with plentiful harvests has such a high rate of hungry people in Nairobi.

Once again, having a side-by-side comparison tool for this would help me, and I assume it would also help organizations that want to understand divergent patterns hidden in groups of stories. I guess I’ll get to work building it.

Examples of “hungry” stories:

In kibera many people are poor. The state of poverty is seen from the mode of dressing of the young boys and girls who put on tuttered clothes that are very old and dirty.some of these young children even lack what to eat and hence more into rich people dust bins to atleast scarage something that is edible to them to eat and even carry some home for their parents who are also tired and hungry to eat.

One evening as i was going home i found a lady at the bus stop who was also waiting for the bus.The lady asked me to help her if i had changed money.I gave her 10 thousand changed money.Close to her i heard her stomach gremble as if she was very hungry i thoughtfully checked in my bag and gave her a doughnut she thanked me and asked me how i knew she was very hungry.The bus came and we entered she bargained but the conductor refused to hear  saying she had to pay ten thousand i called her and added five thousand to her,she hugged & thanked me.From that time i got lessons that people have problems and they need help,from then i started helping people.

Fishing around Lake Victoria and Food Security

In spite of collecting all around the lake, only 47 stories mentioned “fishing” and virtually none also mentioned “food security” / “hunger” / “hungry”.

Judging by the lack of stories, I conclude we have not penetrated fishing communities around the lake.

Child abuse and protection

Found 228 stories with one of these phrases: “child abuse” “child protection” “child right” or “child labor.” For this data set, I wasn’t sure what the plain language version would be, so I analyzed all of these stories in patterns about who is talking about what from which kind of perspective using SenseMaker(R) from Cognitive-Edge.

All stories shown: Success vs Failure stories, Solution vs Problem or Need stories

Blue dots are stories from women, Red dots are stories from men.

When you slice this data into smaller pieces, looking at the AGE of the storyteller, you realize that most stories from young people (under 17) are from women, while most stories from 31-45 year olds are from men:

Under 17: Girls

Stories from people ages 31-45 are mostly men:

Another important question our scribes ask storytellers after they’ve written their story down is “what role did you play in this story?” Were you an actor, who helped make it happen? Or did you observe it happening? Or maybe you were affected by what happened. Again here, we see a striking pattern in child protection stories that should make local organizations sit up and re-think their issue engagement strategies:

Most child abuse / child labor / child protection stories from young people (under 17) are from girls who are actively involved in stopping it.

So I’ve parsed our 189 stories into just stories from people aged 0 to 16 (45 of 189), then into actors (29 of 189), and the combination leaves stories from all girls. It should also be alarming that one third of all stories from “actors” in child abuse stories are from youth and children.

So important lessons for organizations (my interpretation):

1. Women are doing much more about child abuse than men.
2. Young women are doing more than anybody else.
3. Negative stories related to child abuse do not come out until after a scribe has been collecting stories for a while (see below).

Meta: How the number of stories a scribe has collected affects positive / negative aspect of story:

To gather these 25,000 stories, we work with over 3000 young people, whom we call scribes. We are always adding more. The only way you can manage a giant workforce with just 3 people is to use technology like SMS and meta analysis methods to see patterns in the stories.

As shown above, while both new and old scribes are getting “child abuse” stories, “failure” stories on this subject only came from scribes who’ve collected at least 100. This doesn’t mean we should work not with new scribes, but that we need to recognize some sensitive issues are very hard to gather data about. If it has taken 9 months of continuous listening to achieve this, imagine how much harder it would be if you did a one-time evaluation and left no feedback mechanism in place.

What can an organization learn this way?

These stories can be used to a help local organization learn about three things:

1. Themselves (stories specifically naming that organization)
2. Their community (studying all stories tied to a location)
3. Some complex social problem they address (studying a concept)

The third thing is what I’ve done in this report. You can call it “conceptual evaluation” and I believe it is probably the most powerful use of large story collections. Stories from anywhere nationwide can provide valid insights.

We’re starting to see enough stories from a few towns to gauge community needs and priorities (thing #2). Stories about oneself would require a larger community-wide storytelling effort over a longer time to really work (perhaps 1 million stories across East Africa over 3 years). So far we’ve stories about over 1000 NGOs in Kenya and Uganda, but less than 50 have enough stories about them to really help an organization understand others’ impressions of itself.

Next post: Disability, Runaways, Step parents, and more.

This work has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and you can fund itself by giving to the Pulling for the Underdog Fund:

Hero Rats!

In early November I visited Apopo, an organization that trains local people to handle and train rats to address important social problems. Currently they have over 250 indigenous giants rats sniffing land mines and detecting tuberculosis.

I plan to turn my hours of video into a 5 minute rat-torial to the tune of Perry Grip’s eponymous song:

For now, I’ll just show a few nice photos:

And Apopo helped us train 30 students at a local school to be Storytelling Scribes.

It fits with my suspicion that innovative organizations are willing to try new things even when there doesn’t appear to an immediate benefit to them. Apopo’s work takes place in Mozambique, Thailand, and in Dar Es Salaam (for tuberculosis detection). None of the local stories will be about them, but they are willing to support GlobalGiving as our first storytelling partner organization in Tanzania.

One of our activities was for writers to sculpt their “internal editors”:

My internal editor is the creature with bug eyes, claws for hands, and a big mouth with a red forked tongue shooting out of it.

Next we molded our muses out of clay:

My muse is a tall beautiful big breasted maiden, since the main character in my 2011 novel is a 17 male runaway who has a definite love interest.

Another one of the writers thinks of the sea as her muse.

Two other writers considered a mushroom or a blue person with a thinking cap as their muses.

Lastly, someone’s dragon-like creature as a muse.

Join the Africa::Kenya Nanowrimo group

Just war?

But right now people driven by sense of justified righteousness. Being right doesn’t mean you win, or that things resolve peacefully. Thirty years from now, will people look back at this defining moment as one of glory or folly? America couldn’t win a war in Somalia, just like it cannot win in Afghanistan in short of 20 years. Even worse, something I noticed today from an old talk by Erik Hersman points out that Kenya is probably the victim of a much more complex set of issues than any Kenyans realize:

Why this is more than just about war:

Kenya is multi-ethnic. North-Eastern Kenya is lawless and hardly Kenyan. Do you think this is a smart place to launch attacks against Somali rebels? Over time, who is going to have the home-turf advantage?

And if you think these actions are not politically motivated, look at the regional divisions from the 2007 election:

Four years ago, many Kenyans were rebel-roused into ethnic clashes by political leaders who wanted to win an election. Let’s hope that this time the people have wised up to emotional manipulation by leaders. The only way we resolve this problem with Al-Shabab is fixing the lawlessness of North-Eastern Kenya, especially the chaos around Dadaab – the world’s largest refugee camp. It will also take community people diffusing tensions themselves.

Alternative strategy to open conflict?

Need to see what diffusing tension looks like in practice? Watch this 7 minute video about Fatuma Adan (Horn of Africa Development Initiative) and her way to resolving this problem. (Video is from Writing-And-Healing blog):

http://www.telegraph21.com//video/soldiers-of-peace

As the blogger from Writing and Healing says…

Watching this video, I am moved to tears—especially seeing how she navigated when conflict arose among the young men playing soccer…. Ms. Adan is changing everything for her village by leading these young people…. this new story offers a tangible, creative way toward peace.

1. Story redundancy,
2. Categorize story focus,
3. Analyze clusters,
4. Look how the order that stories have been coming in to the blog over the last 2 weeks affects the themes discussed by 1-percenters.

Story Redundancy

Each point on the plot represents the position of one story. From left to right below, stories with a lot of unique words (not found in any of the other stories) can be separated. From top to bottom, stories are positioned based on how much of the text matches words related to one of 11 larger topics (ranging from basic needs to the freedom to pursue one’s dreams):

The “most unique” purple story turned out to be in French. So duh, of course it is a unique outlier. Taking the orange stories together, here is what you find in their opening words:

Compare that with the red group of stories which are the most redundant:

Eureka! It works! Notice that every one of these stories from the redundant group is about family. More specifically these are about how birthright, inheritance, trust-funds, and other mechanisms designed to secure wealth as it passes from one generation to the next. Other words that come to mind are dynasty, lineage, and legacy. So while not all of the 97 stories are about this, the largest subgroup appears to highlight the root cause behind why the rich keep getting richer: once wealth accumulates within a family at a sustainable level, it doesn’t leave.

Another fuzzier method I tried was to associate about 70 frequently used words from the gephi-word-map in my previous analysis with 11 categories:

Story Focus (as a needs hierarchy)

1. Basic needs
2. Family
3. Knowledge or Education
4. Root causes of the problem
5. Respect, Justice, or Dignity
6. Self-esteem or Opportunity
7. Creativity and Free expression

(Note: some categories did not match any stories and were rolled up into these others. In the future, one of my side hobbies is developing lexicons like this to translate any story into a hierarchy for analysis. )

Stories could be assigned to one or two of these categories and then placed on the overall chart:

Each horizontal band of color corresponds to one of the focus areas. The largest group of stories fell into the Root Causes category (29 of 97):

Or the Gephi version:

It would appear that the root causes of our problems have something to due with wealth in families. I’d interpret the rest of these phrases as what people want to do about it: We want to live in a world… where people can follow their dreams [if / and?] the richest 1% give back to the rest. This is partly speculation, but I have read all the stories, and from my memory the “worked hard” phrase was always about how storytellers or their parents /families got rich to begin with.

Story order

I also analyzed the order in which these 97 stories were submitted, but no interesting patterns have emerged yet. If I did this again in a month with 500 stories, you might find a topic drift as people tell stories partly to respond to the media narratives that misrepresent them. Stay tuned.

Cluster analysis

When we have thousands of stories, I can run a self-similarity organizing program to partition stories into groups that will have a similar topic, much like the redundant group I mentioned above. The difference is that when you repeat this analysis many times over, the definition or unique character of each cluster of stories within the whole can change over cycles and display some “strange attractor” behavior. I’m seeing whether this teaches you anything interesting using the 25,000 stories collected about communities in East Africa.

Final note on SenseMaker(R)

Normally the SenseMaker(R) software is used to analyze stories that have an associated signification-framework. This time I am only using the text of stories from a website and the order in which they were posted-  nothing else! This might surprise people who spend a lot of time using long surveys to collect data – that you can learn something without structure in the raw data. Text is often overlooked as a form of information because people think it is purely qualitative. But if there are good programs out there to organize the stories into information, you can use learn from it.

Read part one: 1-percent stories meta analyzed.

Of course these stories only come from a vocal fraction of 1-percenters. They reflect those who’ve became rich and are concerned that their stories are not very common in America anymore. I’d love for the other silent 1%-percenters to explain to the world their stories, and justify why Greed is Good. No, scratch that: Why Greed is God. For me there has always been two kinds of salary: Enough, and not enough. It appears from the stories on http://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com/that others share my belief.

What the 1% are saying in their stories on the whole:

I scraped the first 98 stories and looked at most common phrases in them.

I have color coded these phrases:

• GREEN = circumstances surrounded each person’s story. Such as trust-funds, inheriting money, being debt free, being born into wealth, working hard,  and going to college without needing a student loan.
• (not appearing in the green but a major theme I noticed: people talking about their parents’ and grandparents’ hard work, giving them the freedom to never have to work in their life.)
•  RED = what the 1% who stand with the 99% are asking for: (1) Raise my taxes (2) Giving back, (3) wealth redistribution, (4) standing with the 99%.
• (I noticed a theme with most inherited / trust-fund stories: “I love my family.” appears a lot. Because what they are saying must be breaking some taboo that the rich don’t ever complain about being given a handout from their elders. The underlying message from the parents and moneyed elites is, “I give you this money because I love you. If you don’t want it, then you don’t want my love. Money = acceptance.” There were even a few explicit stories of people who got lots of money from parents who were too busy to love and share time with them. It is sad.
• BLUE = Why this issue matters, fundamentally. This isn’t about money. This is about Following your dreams, about the American Dream, and an issue of Justice and Dignity for all people.
• YELLOW = political issues that intersect. The stock market, lack of universal healthcare, cost of schools (and specifically the power of going to a private college to shape your life and wealth eventually), capital gains tax is too low, and lastly – a system that was built to serve and protect the rich.
• (part of the yellow category is a specific phrase that appeared most often: The “I want to live in…” phrase.

The “I want to live…” (motif) in 1% narratives:

• I want to live in a country where it doesn’t take luck to make it.
• I want to live in a world where everyone has the kind of access to care that I have had.
• I want to live in a world where we all have enough.
• I want to live in a world where the people I love don’t have to choose between food & healthcare.
• I want to live in a world where we all have enough.
• I want to live in a world where everyone has access to quality health care- housing- education- and food.
• I want to live in a world where we all have enough. I have more than enough. Tax me!

Most common words in the 1-percenter stories:

Unlike the phrase analyzer, wordles allow certain single words to stand out, such as parents, insurance, tax system, education, love, and never. If you read these stories and the summaries here, you might realize that the fear of “not having enough” in the world largely centers around lack of universal healthcare.  Even those who do have enough – in the richest 1% – talk about the fear that some day they might not have safety, security, and the comfort that they have had up to now. Fear keeps people apart and yet we appear to fear the same things even after they are not longer a realistic threat to our lives.

Who are the richest 1% by statistics?

The richest 1% in America earned at least $380,354 in 2010.

The average Wall Street salary was estimated at $340,000 for 2009, the year of our financial meltdown.

Of people on Earth as a whole, the median yearly salary is $850. If all of the earth’s wealth was divided equally, everyone’s yearly salary would be about $7,000.

According to this calculator, any person earning over $39,000 a year is in the richest 1% worldwide. (but this source estimates those earning $41,000 are only in the top 3%)

What does it mean to be rich?

Having enough to eat, feeling secure and safe, and ultimately being able to pursue meaningful work in your life. By my standards, most of us in America are much richer than most of the people on Earth. When will we realize that blessings are not to be hoarded?

In a nutshell, the attitude of (some of) the richest 1% that I find most despicable -  and the source of our country’s problems – is the belief that earning it makes it yours and yours alone. Others, like me, live mindfully because all we have is a blessing, and whether we earned it or not, it is cruel to hoard one’s blessings.

Here’s my story…

Note: Analysis was done with python, networkx, gephi, and wordle. The data files with all stories are here for  download:

westandwiththe99percent (text file with 1 story per line)

one-percenters-2011-10-22-50-rename-to-gexf

Overall, this story speaks to me the most:

I never wanted for anything when I was young- except for love. My parents decided that traveling around the world was more interesting than staying home with me. To make up for their negligence the gave me an allowance on top of everything being paid for me.

I dropped out of high school. I’ve never worked a day in my life. I never went to college. But I make more money on my “allowance” than a lot of Americans make working every day- all day. I make more than most poor make working two jobs a day as they struggle to keep their families from starving – being evicted – and to keep themselves warm in winter.

I got bored and I fell in with a bad crowd that most people would think is a good – but spoiled – crowd. Then I fell in with a very good crowd – that was terrible crowd of criminals. Through them I have seen more struggling- suffering- overcoming- and truimphing than I would ever thought possible. These people are doing what they can to just survive. The amount of love I’ve found here is at times overwhelming. I’m blessed. Every time I get another deposit in my bank account part of me feels guilty. We all deserve a chance to be happy.

I am the 1%- I stand with the 99%.|

I’ve added yet more analysis of the sub-groups within these 1% stories on the next post.

In April, 2011 GlobalGiving and the Kenyan NGO council organized meetings with over 200 local organizations in Kakamega, Busia, Vihiga, and Bungoma. Today we met with nearly 100 organizations in Kakamega to share lessons from 2448 stories collected in their city. We’re trying to learn the best way to complete feedback loops, so that local organizations do something with the information we are collecting about their communities.

The community feedback session

These sessions are the focus for the next phase of our Storytelling project. After 45 minutes of introductions, speeches, and announcements (NGO council is a typical bureaucratic network), we got started on data dissemination.

I started with NGO mapping, because in the last 6 months another international organization had conducted a “NGO mapping” exercise and managed to get 35 local organizations to submit information about who they were and where they worked (incidentally the same type of stuff we ask in our Due Diligence (see checklist) but without the possibility of getting funding). Some NGOs had complained that they were excluded from the mapping.

Here are several ways we’ve mapped local organizations:

First – asking NGOs who they say they work with, and combining answers

This map (in two parts) was compiled from nearly 100 NGO self-reports of who they work with in Kakamega back in April:

“What do you think about these maps? What have you done with this information?” I asked.

Responses:

• I’m not on the map.
• Most of us are not on the map.
• I want to see where these organizations work on a geo map.
• I want to know what other organizations are doing, so I can work with them.

It’s surprising that the same network of NGOs asked about itself 6 months apart can change so much. It was true that none of the NGOs that appeared in the center of these maps were present, or relevant to this group. But that’s the reality. It’s not the map’s fault – it is the nature of a NGO network that players are changing faster than the data we use to support their efforts.

Note that only USAID, EUROPEAN UNION, and RED CROSS appear on this map from among all the international NGOs. These local organizations are largely ignored.

I asked the Geo-map oriented person what specific action a geo-map would enable him to do. He didn’t have an answer.

Reply to “who’s doing what?”: I pointed out that if you see an organization and know it works with AIDS, like NACC, then you can infer that connected organizations have a similar mission. This can guide you in the specific action of  reaching out to them to work together on projects.

Story-derived community maps

I next presented the community NGO map for Kakamega, which we generated from connections among scribes collecting all of our 2448 stories:

And the filtered version (organizations with multiple connections):

Quickly the network seems to reduce down to a very small number of organizations. The filter criteria is that at least two scribes collected stories about an organization. So either we are working with too few scribes for the 2449 stories, or organizations are not coordinating much (because storytellers in one place don’t talk about the same organizations as storytellers in some other place).

I asked for comments, and pointed out that at the center of this map is equity bank. “Equity bank is not even an NGO!” I said, “and yet they are being mentioned in 107 stories.” I pulled up the story search engine and showed results for equity bank:

This changed the discussion. Previously several people had noted equity bank and assumed people were talking about microloans and banking. But a quick scan of story titles revealed the school fees was the most common reason for equity bank playing a community role.

School fees

We ended up having a lengthy discussion about the problem of school fees. This remains one of the most common phrases across all stories in Kenya. The Kenyan government promises free universal education and yet nobody appears to be getting it. It is a quintessentially complex topic, because of the horde of actors and possible interventions:

• The government should be doing this but they aren’t.
• The Kenyan government promises 1200 ksh ($12) a semester to cover every student’s needs.
• “Yes but is that enough money? We should find out how much it really costs to pay for uniforms, books, lunch, and other fees.”
• “Education is close to my heart. My organization has started social auditing of local schools to find out how much of the government-allocated money has been given to students.”
• “We need training in social auditing too. We must build our capacity!”

At the mention of training and capacity building, I interjected: “What specific action do you actually want to do? Training and capacity are a means to an end, and that end is what remains unclear.”

• Another said: “Corrupt government officials are the problem. We the civil society should be speaking for the community, and yet when we know this happens, we remain silent.” So another solution could be advocacy.
• But we non-governmental organizations. Our role is not to work within the government.

I pointed out that the storytelling project allows NGOs to advocate using anonymous feedback so that no one can retaliate against them to pointing out what many people in the community are saying.

• Specific actions: One woman stood and mentioned that 12 years ago she moved to Kakamega from the Carribean and started a school. For the last 3 years her school has been #2 in the country, and nobody has supported her in any way. Where is the government? Where are NGO partners? Nowhere.

I applauded her effort for proving with actions that the problem can be solved, and also highlighting the need for more local support. No one had ever visited her school in this room!

• “The problem is money! We need more fundraising capacity.”

“Great! come back at 2pm and we’ll do a whole workshop on online and local fundraising.”

• “When there is a government meeting on important subject, where are we? We need more information about what is happening.”

“Great! We have an SMS-feedback system that you can use. You already have ten working groups to address HIV, the environment, education, etc., so you can use SMS to inform the group and work together day-to-day. I will train your local coordinator to manage the system.”

Sadly, we ran out of time to get into much more detail. And while the subject of school fees was not why people came, it was one of the 3 topics that best illustrated the complexity in the problem and the diversity in approaches to solving it:

Approaches

• Fundraising
• More local coordination (SMS news groups for NGOs)
• Social Auditing (follow the money flowing from government and CDF)
• Advocacy
• Networking
• Programmatic change

I added that last specific action, though no NGO thought of it as I had hoped. The reality is that these NGOs are willing to do most anything except fulfill what our vision of their core role in the community ought to be: design and implement programs that address the unmet needs directly. Other than the woman who moved here and started a great school 12 years ago, there did not seem to be a lot of talk about what commitments NGOs have to doing something that fills the gaping holes left by incomplete and mis-targetted government interventions.

The overall picture

Who is saying what about whom in Kakamega (from the who-what-where visualizer):

Or alternatively, the interconnected word-phases map for Kakamega looks like this:

Words and phrases in all Kakamega stories - Click to enlarge

And the Kakamega story wordle looks like this:

Larger aid world context

Today this was the hot story on the “interwebs”:

I share this because this GlobalGiving Storytelling Project was named as one of two examples of this happening:

Aid and development bloggers and NGO’s staff members know if their projects are or aren’t working… Some creative examples of this [honest approach] have already happened, such as Villages in Action, where residents of a Ugandan village gave their input about the MDGs (and guess what, none of them had even heard of it); or Global Giving’s Storyteller project, which collects stories from community members and analyzes them.

So I pose this question – does the above dialogue from our community feedback session seem to fit with the narrative?

No.

None of the players in this meeting wants development aid to end. You can argue that they should want it to end, because of the culture of dependency it creates, but I’m afraid they are asking for something else: to be more involved. In fact, they’ve really never been involved.

In my usual survey of who is actually getting connected to funding, 93 out of 93 organizations have been writing proposals, 13 of them got funding through a proposal once, and only 2 our of 93 received funding for at least 3 consecutive years from the same funding source. Everywhere I go, the 95-15-3 percent rule describes the local community network of NGOs (95% writing, 15% getting, and 3% “married” to funding).

The reason “Villages in Action” reveals nobody ever heard of the MDGs and their impacts is because they were never involved.

How do we ensure that doesn’t happen next time?

1. Storytelling
2. Community (NGO) feedback sessions
3. Direct feedback through SMS

On number 3, we just got our SMS feedback tools running and started messaging storytellers this week. We (1) let local NGOs know they can send announcements about meetings and events to this system for dissemination and (2) invited hundreds of storytellers in Nairobi to plant a tree. NGO partner Sadili Oval had 8000 seedlings they wanted to give away and needed a way to reach out to the community. Viola! More trees planted, fewer trees killed (for paper), and a tree of knowledge finally spreading back to those who have been ignored for too long by the system.

Next up: thanking each of our 6000+ storytellers, sending them stories via SMS, and giving scribes personalized feedback on their performance.

(Note: This page best viewed while listening to Fleet Foxes…)

From Adbusters Magazine

And now for some other viewpoints…

And the borg are from a conservative website…

More found at http://writeitonthewalls.tumblr.com/page/3

Tagged: occupy, occupy italy, occupy tokyo, occupy wallstreet, occupyDC, protest signs ]]> http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/occupy-wallstreet-protest-signs/feed/ 0 Duane Leonards http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/change-begins-with-a-bumper-sticker-2-year-update/ http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/change-begins-with-a-bumper-sticker-2-year-update/#comments Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:46:06 +0000 Marc Maxson http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/?p=2063 ]]> In 2009, one of my first evaluation jobs at GlobalGiving was to figure out what was going on with a partner organization based in Kisumu, Kenya that we’d been getting local complaints about. You can read the story on the GG blog and download the case study here.

Technology-Aided "Real-Time" Feedback Loops in International Philanthropy

I wanted to give an update on the story.

This case study followed one Kenyan organization that struggled to provide promised services to the athletes’ satisfaction. I didn’t know at the time that a bumper sticker would start a chain reaction that would get people in the community involved with giving the organization greater direction. This dialogue between the organization and the people it aimed to serve took many turns and ultimately caused the founder to leave the city and a new organization under the leadership of the youth athletes themselves to emerge.

At the time we didn’t know if this new organization, the Manyatta Youth Resource Center would ultimately succeed, or whether the old organization, Sacrena, would re-emerge as a stronger organization, more responsive to the community. You can’t predict when or how social change will take place. All you can do is keep listening, and passing messages back and forth (even anonymously if needed). That’s what we’re trying to do now on a global scale with the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project, which we started from the lessons of this case study: provide feedback loops between all people and every organization in every community so that we all hear each other.

One thing that we tried to make clear in the paper is that while we believed this is the right way to resolve conflicts and shed light on the community’s opinions about a questionable organization, it does not guarantee that the organization, the beneficiaries, or the project (youth sports in this case) survives. Two years later, the beneficiaries-turned-project-leaders are struggling to keep their spinoff organization alive, with no funding and lacking the capacity to win a permanent spot on globalgiving (but they recently got a little something from One World Futbol).

In spite of their lack of funding (it was clearly easier for the previous, corrupt NGO to raise money), I believe the people themselves are better for the struggle. The process gave a dozen young people the zeal to believe that they don’t need to depend on corrupt leaders* for anything, and will thus be better leaders of organizations in the future.

* (I assume the one leader from that corrupt organization will find this and complain to me for the umpteenth time about libel. Save your breath! We gave the community plenty of chances to speak for themselves, and couldn’t find any local faction that wanted us to work with your organization by the end of it, especially after an alternative “mentor” organization emerged so that you were deemed redundant and obstructionist.)

Speak of the mentor:

I just got a call today from Collins (of the AMANI NA UPENDO DEVELOPMENT group ) who will organize a storytelling feedback meeting in Kisumu for these guys and all the other NGOs we know of. Hopefully this meeting will again inspire them to work on getting some funding to keep alive in 2012.

So to recap:

• It is still a difficult process to scale a community dialogue about the questionable organization
• This feedback process only teaches people to believe in themselves and in democracy; it doesn’t guarantee programmatic continuity.

So how do we measure the impact of this kind of an outcome?

Rule of Thumb for Personal Essays:

Tell the story only you can tell. If somebody else could have written your essay for you, it’s not personal enough. If you want to grab hold of the fella who has to read tons of these essays, the price is that you MUST reveal something personal.

My personal essay (complete rough draft)

Who am I? Why grant me a Fulbright? What have I done or what do I know that makes me uniquely qualified?

My story begins in Peace Corps. But here is the prelude. My parents were both Peace Corps volunteers in their twenties…. ah, too boring.

Ever since I can remember, I have been provided with the oppotunity to experience other cultures. I lived for four years in Paris, France when I was in grade school. My parents were both Peace Corps volunteers who had travelled around the world and shared their experiences with me. In fact, they travelled so extensively that our house was always decorated like a museum of lost artifacts from Europe, Asia, and South America mixed together like a salad.

My interest in international development began when I joined the Peace Corps. Previously, all my experiences were in developed countries. Unlike many of my colleagues, I didn’t join Peace Corps to save the world or make a difference; I joined because I could tell from my parents’ stories that it would be a good way to take a break between College and Graduate School. I was going to become a chemist, a professor, and teach.

However, while in the The Gambia with Peace Corps I was exposed to the standard of living enjoyed by over half of the Earth’s people. My students were living on a dollar a day; other teachers with whom I worked were earning less than five dollars a day despite being considered professional educators. Considering I was assigned to teach science at the most prestigious high school in the whole country, this was a real shock.

Not even my parent’s stories of working in the Phillipines could prepare me for my personal experience. In Gambia people smuggle sugar, a basic nutrient, into senegal because the Senegalese tax sugar as a luxury! Crossing a river is an ordeal. My urban students had never left the city. This is the world into which I was thrust by Peace Corps, and this is also the world I grew to call my home.

Despite the basic lifestyle, Gambia turned out to host a rich culture. People didn’t eat a variety of food, but what they did eat was always tasty and probably better for me than the junk available in America. They didn’t live in a world of entertainment, but they did laugh a lot. Despite the ups and downs of daily life, people were pretty content. I learned to speak wolof, a local language, and to cook local food. I dressed in local garb and found it to be more comfortable and sensible than western clothes. All said, I think I assimilated quite well.

At the same time, I was still perceived as a westerner and was thus a representative for Western culture and values. My virtues were held as western virtues – while my flaws were considered emblematic of the problems in the developed world. While under the microscope, I learned to conduct myself as the role model I wish more political figures strived to be here and abroad. And in the process, I learned how to be a leader, an independent worker, a project designer, and friend to people who speak a language I don’t understand.

My original role in the Gambia was that of high school science teacher. However, it wasn’t long before I realized my capacity for change was greater if I took up the cause of promoting computer literacy in the schools. By my second year, I was coordinating computer labs and training the new computer staffs at 4 schools in my area. In addition, I built a network of computer teachers accross the whole country and organized an IT Consortium that met regularly, organized the first Gambian Computer Curriculum Development Workshop that brought together computer teachers nationwide, and wrote a book for Peace Corps on how to effectively design technology projects in West Africa such that they remain operational even after you are gone. But the project that had the most potential of all was a little month-long effort to create the first IT demographics in the Gambia. In 2000, my team of volunteers surveyed every school and health center in the Gambia with a computer. We quantified hardware and personnel resources at these locations and determined what skills and computers were available in areas. This information was used at Peace Corps’ IT Workshop for Africa in 2000, and broadly disseminated to agencies thereafter. However, I think the time is ripe to conduct an updated survey that will be far reaching and have a greater impact on the approaches the governments and organizations take to IT in the future.

Although I had intended to become a university professor, I now realize that I feel passionate about improving education in developing countries. Through my experience I realized that science education in West Africa isn’t providing students with skills to get jobs locally. However, it doesn’t need to be this way. Knowledge of science is not an end but rather a means: In doing science, one develops the critical thinking, problem solving, and group planning skills that all students need to be leaders, regardless of the careers they choose. With these goals in mind, I have set out to begin the process that will bring computers to schools and with it – better science education.

Computers are quickly spreading all over Africa. By now, my previous snapshot (from 2000 in Gambia) may not represent the current state of computers. A current survey could be compared to this previous one to determine how IT is changing in West Africa. Several years ago, the World Bank (World Links for Development) spend a great deal of money to promote computer literacy in developing countries, thus preparing them to compete in the future economy. However, measurements of this program (and the growth of computer literacy in rural areas in general) have been lacking. Somebody needs to find out what African teens have been using computers and the Internet to do. Have they discovered new ways to make a living? Is there a better kind of computer education? In short, what has the impact of computers and the Internet been in rural schools across West Africa?

===== (end of essay) =====

It’s not my best writing, but it was good enough to win a grant. Write something personal and make sure you can answer these three questions in the affirmative once you’re done:

1. Is it good?
2. Is it honest?
3. Does it speak to me?

If you can score a YES on 3 for 3, your essay is worth the sheet of paper you’re printing it on.

[Background]

International aid organizations like the USAID, DFID, and the World Bank use performance indicators to measure the impact of their programs. Quality of life is one example:

Quality of Life Index is a composite of 9 other factors, which are composites of 47 other measurements

OECD’s interactive version is much better, but still based on the same approach of counting and averaging a bunch of stuff:

Better, because YOU define what's important and it recalculates.

Counting things and more things and putting them all together can give false impressions, because sometimes the numbers don’t reflect the context. A number might mean something else if you adjusted for the situations in which these numbers appear. And yet we make big decisions, allocating millions of dollars every day on the basis of these imperfect indicators.

Total Quarterback Rating (QBR)

This is why the QBR is way better. Whereas the old QB rating reflected the skill of the quarterback (answering: “how good is this player?“), the new QBR reflects the player’s contribution to the team’s overall success (answering: “how essential was this player to winning the game?“). It’s the difference between quantifying outputs and quantifying outcomes.

In order to reflect outcomes, and not outputs, the QBR breaks down each of the player’s actions and gives them a positive or negative score, adjusted by a “clutch play” factor. The “clutch play” factor is the brilliant part, because situational context now determines the score. If your team is tied and the quarterback throws a pass for a touchdown to give the team a lead, that action has more value than the identical action taken when you team is already ahead by 14 points. If the pass is 40 yards and the receiver runs for 10, then the quarterback is awarded more points than if he dumps the ball off for 5 yards and the receiver advances it 45 yards himself.

Situational variables affect the rating and give a realistic view of the quarterback’s contribution to the outcome (winning or losing). Given all the data (captured on 4 cameras), it would be crazy if we could not mathematically define the quarterback’s Impact in a game.

“Clutch” moves by smart NGOs

If we desire it, international development indicators could just as easily incorporate “clutch factors” too! A women’s giving circle that risks all to start an agro-business during a drought and succeeds should be given a much higher performance and outcomes rating than a large business that invests 5% of it’s profits in a risky venture. A local NGO with minimal budget run by volunteers that manages to “solve” a tricky problem like getting loitering kids back into school should be awarded much higher performance points for a clutch move, given their lack of capacity to intervene. Governments that test multiple interventions to improve education and disseminate findings about the one that succeeds should have a better credit rating than a government that fails to invest and experiment – because honestly, much more of the taxpayers’ money is likely to be wasted complacent leadership. Recognition for “Clutch play” and “Clutch moves” by NGOs is lacking in international development, as is the concept that situations affect the appearance of success.

People still resist conclusions about outcomes

I’m shocked at all the fan negativity about Total QBR, but perhaps that’s precisely because it challenges our comfortable notion that a “good try” is as good as actually winning the game. To illustrate, here are some quarterbacks compared in the new and old rating systems: (2011 rating source) (2011 QBR source) (full season 2011 QBR statistics)

QBR statistics From Week 3:

[Note: the Change column refers to the first quarterback named in a row (i.e. Ryan Fitzpatrick = +4)]

If you run down the list, you’ll notice that highly rated QBR quarterbacks are on teams with a better record. Four weeks ago nobody would have consider Ryan Fitzpatrick (a 7th round draft pick and the only Harvard Graduate to start as a quarterback in the NFL in decades!) to be a superstar, but each week Fitzpatrick has carried his team from 14, 17, and 20 points down back to victory in the 4th quarter. He is the poster child for a clutch player.

Likewise, Josh Freeman of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers doesn’t put up numbers but consistently wins close games (leading the NFL in 4th quarter come-backs last year). [Update: By the end of the season, both of these trends had reversed, and their QBRs were down to 18th and 23rd place for Fitzpatrick and Freeman respectively.]

However, the QBR isn’t useful for Fantasy Football, where you can start awesome players who rack up monster stats on teams that often lose games. The quarterback on my current fantasy team is a perfect case in point: Mark Sanchez is the most overrated QB in the NFL (13 spots higher based on his stats, compared with his contribution to winning games for the Jets), and yet he makes perfect sense to start in a Fantasy League because the rules never penalize players for losing games. Fantasy Football is all about individual outputs, not outcomes. So I can win in the fake world by focusing on intermediate factors that don’t matter to winning the game.

There is an obvious real-world analogy here with certain aid agencies that focus on outputs instead of striving to measure outcomes: They are merely playing “fantasy football” in international development, and not necessary winning games. What’s the solution? Devise indicators that adopt complexity-based thinking and adjust parameters situationally, until the indicators are really incorporating as many factors as are needed to understand the real world.

I admit this is hard, but not impossible. It simply requires another system to know which models are improvements over the older ideas. Head-to-head competition between models has been used in both molecular Neuron modeling and nuclear retaliation protocols, and certain models actually DO perform better than all the rest. (Sadly, the best model for neuron interactions only predicts a quarter of the real neuron behavior, and the best nuclear retaliation game theory still destroys the world) – so not every problem can be fully modeled (or fully “indexed”).

2011 Complete Season QBR ratings

Every person who takes a salary to tell governments and organizations how they ought to best allocate scarce resources to make this world a better place needs to sign up for fantasy football. It will teach one humility, and open one’s mind to the possibility that the world is not as predictable as any group of experts is.

Given any group of “Experts” on any subject, you will find they usually reach a consensus opinion with greater frequency than nature does. (Example: “If you can flip a coin, can you be an expert?” on HuffPost)

Top 5 reasons aid experts should play fantasy football:

1. The winner will not be the player with the most knowledge, nor will it be the one who spends the most time deliberating among choices. These things help, but the complexity of the real world will always play a much bigger role in the outcome than people expect.
2. The winner will not be the one with the best players. The corollary to this rule is the Madden Curse. Literally, every year since 2000, EA’s Madden Football has picked the best player by expert consensus to put on the game cover. And each year that player has ended up with a career altering injury or similar misfortune, making them an all-around fantasy football liability.
3. The winner will not be the player who is chasing last week’s superstar. From week to week, there are always obscure semi-superstar standout players who excel. And each week, one of the fantasy league’s players invariably picks these guys up and starts them, only to be disappointed. By week three, this player has dropped last week’s flavor on favor of the next player. Chasing trends in fantasy football is just like chasing trends in the stock market; it if worked, we’d be rich.
4. The winner will make at least one significant gutsy call against the trend. There has never been a week without upsets, nor a season where the best teams in August met in the January Super Bowl. In the last 2 seasons these were my risky moves, and my rationale:

• Grabbed Deion Branch – the week he moved from Seattle back to the Patriots, I predicted he would go from a non-factor to a #2 receiver. (Correct!)
• Grabbed Cam Newton – after week 1, we was still untested and therefor free. I thought I was done for the year because I had Peyton Manning (who suddenly was seriously injured the day after my draft and gone for months), but now I had nothing to lose by picking up Cam Newton. Since then Cam has become the #2 overall passing quarterback in 2011 over Week 1 and 2. (Not sure if starting him will win my league, but guessing it will)
• Grabbed Greg Olsen – he was a great player in a Mike Martz Bears offense that did not use Tight Ends. By moving to Carolina (opposite Jeremy Shockey) in an offense that features the Tight End, I predict we will be an all-pro tight end.
• Grabbed Cadillac Williams (Week 2)- he was suddenly the #1 running back because a real star was injured. Not sure if he will be huge, but he was value left behind by a changing game environment.

1. (#5): The winner will recognize the constantly changing game environment, and use this to his advantage. More than anything else, Fantasy Football is a prediction game set against a complex and dynamic game environment. The situations that form the basis for previous assumptions change, and therefore the predictions must also change.

Breaking down the parallels with international aid work:

Expertise isn’t everything (reason #1):

Knowledge is power, but power is not work. Knowledge is only part of the equation that yields success. To assume that one can “deliberate” his way into a kind of wisdom that is only found through repeated experimentation (and a bit of failure) is folly. What I embrace is “successful failure” – where risky moves are structured around systems that will definitively yield better knowledge for the next round. To guess and not learn is the worst form of incompetence. In contrast, doing something and not knowing whether it will work, but knowing that the experiment will yield such knowledge, is the closest form of “do-gooding” we have to actual science.

Capacity isn’t everything (reason #2):

Replace “best players” with “best funded organizations” or “most valuable experts” in the Fantasy Football analogy and you have a very important life lesson: It ain’t what you got, it’s how you use it! If organizational capacity was all that mattered, then impact would flow mostly from the biggest organizations with the most resources, and governments would be having the biggest positive impact of all. More lives are changed by some good people and good ideas that spread beyond what money can do. Likewise, some of this year’s Fantasy Leaders will be people you’ve never heard of (yet).

Thoughtfulness is everything (reason #3):

“Buzz chasing” and working from a rigid worldview might seem like opposite problems, but both are forms of the same problem. In both cases organizations are making decisions (either to embrace or reject something new) through a lack of thoughtfulness. Thoughtful organizations are curious organizations that continued to push, never settling, determined to improve things when the reasons to act are there. I had a clear reason for each of my fantasy changes – and typically a change in the game environment warranted the decision.

Yet thoughtfulness can be overdone in development. Log frames attempt to reduce thoughtfulness to a series of logical syllogisms when we operate in a complex non-logical world. Hence log frames become a replacement for real thoughtfulness, a crutch no better than listening to ESPN Fantasy experts tell you which moves to make.

Consistency of action should go hand in hand with thoughtfulness, and yet consistency is absent most of the time in funding agencies! Case in point: During fundraising workshops for GlobalGiving, I ask for a show of hands of orgs who have (a) written grant proposals, (b) been awarded a grant, and (c) received grant funding for at least 3 consecutive years from the same funding organization. The results are 90%, 15%, and 5% for (a), (b), and (c) respectively. So nearly everyone is asking for money, a few are getting it, and nobody is being given much time to change the world.

Even in Fantasy Football, coaches give players a larger portion of their short careers to prove themselves than NGOs are given by grantmakers.

By the numbers: The average NFL contract is 3 years. The average NFL career is 8. Two thirds of players ultimately succeed within the first 4 years of a career. So nearly all players have a chance to reach their potential, if they remain healthy.

If the typical intervention to solve a complex social problem requires 10 years to succeed, then 95% of grants out there are investing in less than a quarter of a solution.

Risk aversion is killing development (reason #4):

Organizations are afraid of taking risks, because they don’t look for ways to structure those risks into learning. Microloans are no longer risky because somebody came up with a way to structure these risks.  So what risks are people not taking? Organizations rarely trust communities they serve enough to give them real control of the projects, like giving them funds to spend as they choose. Governments could test direct democracy, using SMS to let voters determine tax rates and budgets for agencies, but they don’t. Game theory will one day prevent “gaming” of these direct democracy methods, but we’ve got decades of denial to trudge through before governments admit they have a problem here. NGOs rarely give worthy individuals “do some good” grants with no strings attached. We accept the reality that 80% of small businesses fail in a capitalist economy, but fear that 50% of our interventions to alleviate poverty might fail. (Yet if every failed business owner walks away with a lot more knowledge on how to succeed, capitalism isn’t really failing 80% of the time in the long run. However, communities are rarely given this same power to fail (or succeed) that business owners are given. That’s risk aversion in the extreme, and exactly why the conservative approach creates a systemic failure in the long run).

And while I’m on this point, Randomized Controlled Trials in development are not risky. They’re extremely conservative. That’s why the FDA relies on them exclusively to determine what’s healthy for the public. But drug companies DON’T rely on RCTs – they use rapid drug screening of thousands of candidates and miss some miracle drugs, but cheaply and quickly find just as many strong candidate drugs to test by more conservative means. Local NGOs are like the “drug companies” of development, and must take risks to solve problems that are eating at the fabric of society. If science was as conservative as international development (and the NSF/NIH grantmaking process in particular), we would have 19^th century medicine, no internet, no space flight, and a million other things that are built on risky investments in unproven scientific ideas. Luckily they’re not. I’d predict that NIH grant committees would decimate World Bank economists in a head-to-head fantasy football match-up. (Side note: both agencies have about the same size budget, but no one question’s the NIH’s massive contribution to health and quality of life.)

In Fantasy Football, the draft equalizes each fantasy player’s resources, and the only way to win is to take risks. Are NGOs so resource-rich that they do not need to take similar risks in order to derive at a “game changing” solution or innovation?

Complex Environment (reason #5):

Those organizations that are trying to work off predictions and models of the future too often fail to understand the complex environment in which those solutions will play out. Bill Belicheck’s offense under Tom Brady’s control is a model of near-perfection. And yet should one or two key players get injured, or a freak mistake cause a fumble, turnover, and touchdown, any team could beat them – even Kansas City – in 2011. How much more complex and deserving of a flexible prediction model do you think real-world poverty alleviation programs must be to work?

I, for one, want to find out. That’s why I’m trying to figure out what a “flexible prediction model” looks like – using 20,000 stories from East Africa as a starting point.

Game on!

Previous post in my NFL series: Race, races, NFL: how demographics kill stereotypes

Mpira Mtaani

Mpira Mtaani

Mpire Mtaani is a youth sports & development organization based in Kibera and supported by Vision Africa, World Vision, and others. Mentioned in 55 stories.

Carolina for Kibera

Carolina for kibera mentioned in 211 stories

The Carolina for Kibera stories don’t give you as good of an idea about what they do, but they get mentioned a lot and work in Kibera, obviously. Binti Pamoja is the name of one of their programs. They apparently pay school fees, help people, and get thanked a lot. (filter threshold was 8 phrase mentions instead of 2 for Mpira Mtaani – took out a lot of the extra words)

Red Cross

Red Cross mentioned in 450 stories

Red Cross apparently helps internally displaced people, provides basic needs, addressed post election violence, and gives food, clothing, and shelter. They also talk about raising donations for the drought.

UNHCR and World Health Organization

UNHCR and World Health (organization) mentioned in 84 stories

UNHCR is not connected to anything, whereas World Health Organization is. I couldn’t search for “WHO” since that is used in thousands of irrelevant stories. It’s clear that providing Mosquito nets, malaria drugs, provided free of charge, and dealing with drug abuse are among the activities carried out. They also deal with dieases and family planning, and saving peoples’ lives.

World Vision

World Vision mentioned in 603 stories, mostly from Masaka Uganda

World Vision appears to do everything. They help young children, support orphans & widows, “especially people,” and they build toilets and houses (off the center of the map). They are also mentioned with “old people”, and they provide school fees and uniforms:

Stories that mention step mothers and step fathers

So let’s say somebody gives you 100 stories about your work and you’re too busy to read them. How about a picture that shows how all the words in those stories connect to each other? Would that help you assimilate this knowledge, borg style?

Using the free python library networkx and free Gephi software visualization software, I can now build a network map of all word associations in a group of stories (selected using keyword searching). The spherical map is equivalent to this network map of words that appear next to each other in hundreds of stories that mention step parents:

The reason I chose to search for stories that include one of these phrases (step mother, step father, parent) is that RETRAK has observed that many kids appear to run away from familes and live on the streets of Kampala when one parent dies and the surviving parent remarries.

What this map reveals is that the number one theme associated with parents is school. School fees, going to school, street children, child labor, death of a parent, single parent, and paying for school all appear on this map, and RETRAK has yet to submit a single story from their population of Kampala street kids!

So I looked at 7000+ stories mentioning “school”,”fee”,”student”, or “education”. It gets a bit noisy, so I present the full picture and then some heavily filtered ones, only showing the most common phrases:

Student Education school fee stories (7000+, word pairs used at least 25 times)

All words appearing before or after "school" from 7000+ stories

School fees education student (7000+ stories, phrases used at least 50 times)

School Fees

I continue to use “school fees” as my test phrase because it appears very frequently in stories but is not usually the major focus of organizations. In fact, the government of Kenya promises free universal education. But apparently school continue to find alternative ways to charge students, through books, uniforms, and lunch fees that keep many poor kids away. 7000 stories don’t lie! School fees remains a major problem, and overlaps with those word maps of step parents, street children, and lack of opportunity.

Other story theme derived from mapping word associations

Kenya Drought, “no water” stories

89 Stories about the drought (phrases used at least twice)

Famine (31 stories)

"Famine" is not central to stories

Famine is not a central part of narratives – only used in 31 stories, and most are about food and getting help

FGM, Female Genital Mutilation, Circumcision

FGM stories - surprised to see aids and human rights are equally connected issues

Now this map surprised me the most. First, finding stories about FGM in the collection of 20,000+ is quite difficult because people use so many code words to talk around the issue. This map reveals some shocking overlapping issues. “Reproductive health” is the NGO phrase (and a deeper look at the story patterns should reveal stories with these phrases come from “actors” in changing the practice) But HIV/AIDS is also an important issue here. And the Kisii community in particular is very closely associated with FGM, but not “female genital circumcision.”

It’s your turn!

Not bad for an hour of analysis. Ready to try it yourself? email me (you’ll find my email on the GlobalGiving About US page) and I’ll help you. – Marc Maxson

But first, some stories from Kenya to show the mentality whose solution the NFL illustrates.

Recently I’ve had a string of conversations with Kenyan friends. Invariably we talk about politics, tribalism, propaganda, and stereotyping. A friend snapped this photo, which attempts to positively stereotype 10 of the 39 ethnic groups in Kenya:

Privately, I’ve heard people share (and use) a very different set of negative tribal stereotypes:

“Kikuyus love money.”

“Luos are polygamous.” “Luos are whores.” (Obama’s Luo father had 3 wives)

“Kamba women are good in bed.”

And so it goes… (here are a dozen more I shudder to reprint!) The group least pigeon-holed by stereotypes are the Luhyas, which dominate the total population at 14 percent. (My theory on why to follow)

A stereotype

A stereotype exists because the statement applies to a plurality of people in the group. If it didn’t ring true at least half the time, people would abandon them. People cling to them as guides on how to approach strangers. It would be harder and riskier to approach every stranger with trust and openness, because some of them might take advantage of you. But it is in the clinging to stereotypes that people are often systematically deprived of opportunities they richly deserve.

Exceptional friends

Every time a stereotype about race or tribe comes up, somebody is bound to exhibit his or her intellectual prowess by citing a friend from the maligned group who is doesn’t fit. This is a fallacy, for in order for such a person to come into your mind as exceptional, you had to have at some point in the past considered this person exceptional, rather than typical of their group, class, or caste.

I believe stereotypes about Luhyas are rare in Kenya because they are too numerous – the average person has so many real relationships with Luhyas that there is no need for this “exceptionalism” thinking – nor would one’s anecdotes convince others. There are simply too many relationships with too diverse a sample of people for stereotypes to be on any value.

Rigid reference frames

I’ve met too many people from all walks of life who spend their time putting strangers in boxes and categories, rather than engage them in thoughtful conversation aimed at picking out the unique characteristics and talents of each new person. (Personal note: my stereotypes have much more to do with economic class than anything else, but they remain there. Rich people can be victims of stereotypes too!) More than anything else I’ve seen in Kenya – it is this universal tendency for people of all tribes to view other people through lenses that cannot easily be replaced by their own dynamic day-to-day experiences – that affects national politics.

Killing a stereotype

Two examples come to mind that illustrate my current theory on how society abandons a negative stereotype that causes millions of people to be the victims of descrimination. First, the rise of black (or African American) coaches in the NFL:

Orange line: coaches | Purple line: total NFL teams

Although 75% of players are black, no NFL head coach was instated until 1989. Since then the percentage has steadily risen to 22% (7 out of 32) today. That obvious change in slope at 2003 can be attributed to the Rooney Rule, which requires every team to at least interview one minority candidate before hiring a head coach. Oddly, conservatives say that simply giving minorities a voice is no different from “affirmative action” – when in fact the latter is a quota system for hiring, not for interviewing.

An excellent Sports Illustrated article quotes sociologist Janice Madden (no relation), who showed that prior to the Rooney Rule, black coaches vastly outperformed white coaches. Since then they’ve been no different from whites. This, for the same reason that Princeton ending limits on the number of Jews accepted has reduced test scores among Jewish Princeton graduates, illustrates that the playing field is finally level: You no longer need to be a hall of fame caliber coach in order to be considered for the job, if you are black. (Incidentally, the first 3 black NFL head coaches are all likely to enter the hall of fame.)

But this plot is not about affirmative action or the Rooney Rule. This is about demographics. I could show you the identical plot for black NFL assistant coaches, position coaches, and head office administrators, simply shifted earlier on the timeline. With or without the Rooney Rule, the number of black coaches would have risen (though not as quickly) because the number of blacks in the room making decisions and in the pool of candidates had already risen each year.

There was a time when blacks did not hold any coaching positions, period. After a generation of seeing black faces on the side lines and lecturing players while they broke down tape, the novelty, the exceptionalism, and the stereotypes vanished. Not because people “unlearned” them, but because those with them died off or retired. Thomas Kuhn argues that this is also the nature of Scientific Revolutions – superior evidence does not cause a shift, merely a demographic shift in the number of scientists holding their rigid, older views.

Old ideas die with those who cling to them.

-Thomas Kuhn (parapharsed)

So what this means for people like me who are more interested in the prediction of (rather than manipulation) a trend, is that we need to study the demographics of an attitude in order to understand the effects of behavioral changes that happened a generation earlier.

Presidential candidates

Minority (US) presidential candidates are following that same trend that NFL coaches show in the plot above, only we’re stuck back in 1989 and our plot only changes every 4 years. But what strikes me is who was talking about Obama and Clinton as “minority candidates” in the first place: conservatives and news media. These groups still use labels to simplify their thinking and their communication. They embody “rigid reference frame” thinking in my view, and really need a refresher course – which comes in the form of playing fantasy football (explained in my next post). Aid experts who actually went to school in order to be “experts” also badly need to play fantasy football to learn how to optimize predictions in a complex, stochastic environment much like the real work of international development…

But I digress. The lesson here is who was not talking about Obama or Clinton as “minority candidates”: young people.  Demographics is again at work. To think of a person running for office as a “black candidate” or “woman candidate” or “[label] candidate” is to fit the form of a person who has grown up using stereotypes and categorization techniques as a static reference frame. In the Facebook Era, where you can friend and unfriend people instantly, dynamic reference frames are part of life, part of my experience, and form a basic understanding of reality that transcends static stereotypes.

Don’t worry if you disagree, that’s just your static world reference frame speaking. No worries

In my conversations with Kenyans, I don’t talk about American friends, or Kenyan friends, or Kikuyu friends; I talk about friends – as in people – who are more like themselves than any group or category one can place them in. I can’t even fully identify as American, since I’ve lived 8 of my 34 years abroad. I still have stereotypes, but they are about class, and until someone can explain why we all share the same misconception about wealth and power in the world, I’ll cling to them, sadly.

Ref: Here’s that universal misconception about modern wealth and power explained:

We found there’s a huge agreement between people across the political spectrum in terms of what the distribution of wealth should be. And yet we all vastly underestimate how much wealth the richest people actually control.

-Dan Ariely (paraphrased)

Stereotypes or “cultural sensitivity”: How do we deal with it in daily life?

Yesterday I argued with a developer friend for a solid hour on the street about working with other Kenyan developers. I complained that if I approach somebody with a task, a deadline, and a set of requirements, I expect them to be professional and evaluate the job and either give me a YES or a NO on whether they can do the work. “NO! is the most beautiful word!” I was shouting at him after a half hour of circular debate. “NO! comes from knowing your limitations, and focusing your work on your core competencies.”

I’d had a string of negative experiences with local developers (other than this guy) who say YES to everything and can’t seem to turn down any work, even if that work is beyond their capabilities, or contains impossible requirements.

I include “Impossible requirements” partly out of ignorance and partly as a test of competence. I gave this friend a task with 3 levels of goals to be aimed for, each harder than the next. I would accept and pay for any of the 3 results accordingly. Where he passed, others failed, usually aiming for the impossible and never even achieving the first, almost trivial goal. (My neuroscience research professors used this same technique on me in the lab, and I believe it extracts excellence from competent people.)

Back to stereotypes, my respected friend argued that I should recognize the culture of Kenya and work with people and their ingrained habits. Saying yes when one should say no is a way of life here. And if they cannot say no, then I should deal with it, he said. In fact, he explained I was being disrespectful by giving people a task they were sure to fail.

“I’m trying to help them be successful. Without learning about the power of ‘No’ I could never be successful,” I said.

I wonder if one man’s “cultural insensitivity” is another man’s “rigid thinking.” I’m not about to abandon my strongly held beliefs about the power of “No” and the benefits of frequent “failure.” When this ThingsYouForget came out, serveral people sent it to me, because it reminded them of me:

Killing stereotype-based thinking is a generational thing. It’s tied to your sense of self, and requires massive mental surgery to dismantle. It’s better to look at what we can do with young people to give them other kinds of thinking, and then follow demographic shifts in attitudes to detect when those old ideas have died.

Goals for Story-based evaluations

1. Make data digestible:

• Generate a library of people’s lived experiences (not hard, and we’ve done this)
• …that facilitate decision making… (really hard, not done)
• and evidence-based policy. (hard – out of our control, so not done)
• Generate rolling baselines to continually update evidence base (moderately hard, half-way done)
• Visualize shifting patterns (not hard, and we’ve largely done this)
• …of impact (hard – what’s impact?, can’t tell if we have yet)
• …as perceived by different perspectives, (moderate, successful)
• …including beneficiaries. (moderate, successful)
• Ground feedback (moderately hard, needed visual tools and SMS loops)
• …to donors… (easy – but does it get used?, half done)
• …in a useful framework… (hard and complex, quarter done)
• …that allows groups of beneficiaries to be heard. (moderately hard, half done)

2. Measure the actions taken:

• Seek surprise:  allow people to recognize trends that do not conform to their own pre-existing worldviews (moderately easy to reveal unexpected info, we’re somewhat successful)
•  Enable cross-silo and cross-organizational thinking – moving away from a narrow understanding of attribution of efforts  (medium difficulty, making progress as more organizations are at least thinking about “pluging into” a common back end story processing system)
• Track actions taken and the specific lessons that prompted it, via a peer to peer knowledge management system (hard – unless analysis and interpretation happens on the web and thus can be tracked, not started yet)

I was thinking about this today because we are about to start texting information back to all the storytellers and scribes in communities, as well as systematically delivering sets of stories back to all the NGOs we know about. It will be interesting to see how my perception changes in 3 months.

By the way – you’ll find dozens of posts with many additions that will be incorporated into the next ‘Real Book‘ here: http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/storytelling/

This week I’m setting an SMS gateway for the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project. This would allow us to deliver feedback to the 6000+ storytellers in Kenya and Uganda, hopefully supplying them with useful information about HIV testing, meetings, sports events, etc. I’d even like to set up a “search stories by SMS” feature where you text in a question and it delivers back a story that best matches your text message.

In the other direction, this same technology allows us to add an “ask the storyteller a question” feature to each of the public stories, and we can then relay that message to the author and post a reply. All in due time.

Of course we can only share these tools with people who checked the box on the paper form “[ ] It’s okay to contact me by SMS.”

Here is where it gets interesting. A person’s openness to receiving messages is very different from one town to the next:

Question: Can we contact you later by SMS?

Trust

I am going to assume that people who don’t want to be contacted have a lower trust of outsiders. If you are reading this and live in America – where marketers flood your email, phone, and television with unwanted advertisements, you would attribute the reason check the  “do not disturb” box to general annoyance, but here – we haven’t been flooded yet. Not even in Nairobi. I only get phone spam from SafariCom.

Of the three locations (among the top 20 biggest places) with the largest percentage of people opting out, 2 are in Nairobi and one is the epicenter of the 2007 post election violence (Eldoret). I think this supports my theory the the ratio of opt-ins to opt-outs is correlated with trust. If if you looked at this as purely a function of urbanness, Kampalans prefer getting SMS feedback three times as much as Nairobians.

People are quite a bit more open to being contacted in Western Kenya (Kakamega, Busia, Kitale)  than in Central Kenya (Nakuru, Eldoret, Kisii). Ugandans fall somewhere in between. Although previously I showed that people in Uganda are much more reluctant to provide negative feedback than Kenyans.

Related Trust post about Uganda & Kenya: I trust you but…

Story similarity formula =

Each story has a degree of overlap with every other story in a set. I then average all of these scores and assign it to the original story as an overall measure of how “typical” that story is among the set.

Here’s what these average similarity scores look like when plotted for a set of the first 200 stories collected in the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project:

If that s-shaped curve pattern seems familiar to you, it should. Most people plot this kind of data as a frequency histogram (how many stories fall into each “bin” of similarity scores?). This reveals that these averaged “similarity scores” are normally distributed:

Above is a plot of story count (Y-axis) versus story similarity score (X-axis). These values are normalized to a scale of 0 to 100 using a standard normalization forumla:

I was very surprised that given any set of stories, the similarity of each story in the set to all other stories in the set follows a normal distribution, meaning that in the most likely case (middle of the bell curve), a story will have a predictable amount of similarity to other stories. Here is the histogram for the first 2000 stories:

And for all Kenya stories (batch of 7584):

And 1857 stories that mention water:

And 3873 stories that mention children:

And 1252 stories that mention school fees or scholarships:

Interpreting distributions

If you look closely you’ll notice that while all of these are normally distributed, some are skewed towards lower scores. This makes sense – as the “set of all stories from Kenya” should have greater diversity than the “set of all stories about school fees.” This means that story sets with skewed distributions will, on average, be a more diverse set of stories (sharing fewer words among them) than another story set with less-right-hand-skew.

Finding the most “typical” and most “interesting” stories

At both ends of the bell curve, you’ll find two very useful types of stories. Those with very high similarity scores are “most typical” of the set as a whole, and might be useful in quickly getting a read on what all of these stories might contain. Here are the top ten “most typical” stories from the 1252 about school fees or scholarships:

• Orphaned Children – In a certain area there were many orphans and there was no one to help them with school fees and other needs. Kibera C.D.F company

• School – I was in a broad need of school feed, but unfortunately one teacher volunteered and helped me to pay the school fees. Sitatunga Individual

• School dropout   -   World Vision helped me and took me bock to school because at first i was not schooling because of school fees and world vision desided to pay for me school fees. and am happy now. Famine World Vision World Vision

• Fees – I thank God for providing me with school fees which I was sent by donors from various institutions. Sitatunga Individual

• EDUCATION – Budukiro project has helped my children to go back to school through paying for them school fees,giving them books,uniform and now our children are at school. And the problem of school fees is solvent. Katwe Budukiro project

• Education support – UWESO has been their to help orphans by giving them materials and school fees. It has given support to orphans hence improving their lives mentally. Kijabwemi UWESO Uweso

• School support – World Vision gives children things like books pens to use at school also they pay school fees to some of the children hence fullfilling one of the children right that is the right to education. Kakunyu World Vision World Vision

• School  – We had  been helped by the organization to pay our school fees.This comes across through sports.The support has quite helped parents and their children. singereti Individual

• Education facilities –        Hope alive is an that helps children in education facilities like scholastic scholastic materials and also school fees for the children in our community hence improving education and reducing illiteracy in the community. kijabweni Hope alive

• School fees support  –     Pator walugembe has improved on the education of the children in our community. He pay school fees for 25 pupils in our community this has prevented children who go on streets from our community. kiseka Individual Individual

You’ll immediately notice that all of these stories are indeed about what we were expecting to find. They are also very short (a side-effect of the imperfect algorithm I used to assign similarity scores).

And now… the ten “least typical” stories from this set of 1252 stories about school fees or scholarships:

• Scholarship in sports – Many of our young youths in Kianda have benefitted from football sports, which has been sponsored by the white people in Isack sports ground. This has helped the talented youths to utilize their time properly.  Due to this our community has started growing up dums in the village coz their ris an organization their us came to support youth those dont have jobs and now theirs secutrity is seffety. KIBERA makina Organization Unnamed Organization
• Provision of scholarships –      The need to improve the level of education have spacked several people to acquire sponsorships from several difference places within and outside the  contry.    However there are other organisations tha are currently offering scholarships to deserving citizens within the country.   In siaya district, the Jamo Kenyatta Foundation was fetching needy students to award them scholarships for futhering their studies.    this is a great boost and has promoted competition not only among schools but also among students who want to be the best and with the  award.There should be more of the same kind.  Jomo Kenyatta Foundation Jomo Kenyatta Foundation
• EFFECTIVE SUPPORT – It is a good thing that organizations live up to their own meaning just like Access has done.For children from the less fortunate backgrounds to access their dreams and hope for their future it was just so needful that ACCESS comes in handy for them to access their hope.  Effectively ACCESS had accessed funding to needy students through scholarships that have not brought a regret to them in return. They have enhanced determination among students who work really hard when they qualify for their awards. municipality ACCES
• NAKATO THE TWIN – Nakato the twin is a radio presenter who fights for the needy people and those who have family problems. She collects funds from the listeners after a story on air concerning a person. She has managed to secure scholarships and bursaries from within and outside the country fro the orphaned and disadvantaged children. Through her efforts, over 800 children in Uganda are staying in different schools. NTINDA INDIVIDUAL Individual
• DAZZLING ART – Kaafiri Kariuki,a talented man has used his talent to inform the society about a lot of things.He has encouraged most of the people throug his dancing pen and dazzling art.Many people,especially tourist who are making their moves and visits in Kenya.He has also taught young men how to draw and paint and indeed the people have made a good move and able to economically support themselves.Many of the people have gotten scholarship overseas  and earn a good living. Kawangware Kaafiri Kariuki Kaafiri Kariuki
• PROMOTING TALENTS VIA EDUCATION – Kampala International University in a a bid to promote education, it offerd two scholarships for every district in Uganda.Male and female students are selected by LC5chairman of every distric. It also offers scholarships to students who have a back ground record of being excellent in sports. It also enables those with 1st class and 2rd upper degrees to up grade their education   MASAKA TOWN KAMPALA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
• Empowering Uganda People  – Kulika Chair table trust is a united kingdom based organisation operating in Uganda. It has done great role in providing education scholarships and grants to Ugandan students and also helps on the ground sustainable agriculture trainings to farmers in Uganda in order to improve their out put per acre or piece of land Namarwe Kulika Chairtable trust
• FIGTING ILLETRACY – Samona Products LTD This organisation owned my Salongo Samona which is popular and famous has done much in the masses of the whole Uganda by supporting very many shows as it supported the Enkuka of CBS Fm in 2010,it helps much in fighting illetracy by offering scholarship to children and equpping them with scholastic materials like bed sheets,books,pens,extra.It hav also made the young musicians to of set their goals and reach at the climax of their aims by inputing income so as to buy equipments like computers and produce songs Mengo SAMONA PRODUCTS LIMITED
• Reform – I have a friend called Tony waigaijo, who has been a carjacker for many years.He came to community transformers having been fed up with what he does.He believed that the only way that he could be able to transform was through our initiatives and the programmes that community transformers under take.\without wasting time our director NICK omondi readily welcomed and called upon him to volunteer.He has been part of us for quite sometime until he benefited from a scholarship from community transformers and presently he is working with an NGO. MATHARE  Community Transformers
• COMPUTER LESSONS  – Craft silicon foundation is an organisation that helps the less fortunate by teaching them computer packages for free. their classes are mobile since they are built in a big bus that moves from one area to another especially in the slums and rural area.It also offers scholarships to students who are qualified for IT courses  LOKICHOGIO craft silicon foundation

I personally find the leftovers in the gutter to be far more interesting. Each of these “least typical” stories touches on school fees or scholarships tangentially, and the focus is on something else, such as computer education, illiteracy, sports, reforming a criminal friend, or empowerment. If you are looking for a method that can best reveal what you were not expecting to find, this approach provides an effective filter.

Relationship to Shannon Information Theory

In the Shannon Information Theory sense of the word, information is the opposite of redundancy. James Gleick writes:

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy. (The Information, p219)

By uncertainty, Gleick (paraphrasing Claude Shannon) means that a message with a lot of information will contain a lot of words that you did not expect and could not have predicted. Thus another way you could describe these “similarity scores” is that they measure how much of the story is redundant with other stories in the set. Voila! It makes sense that those stories with the least similarity to the rest might contain the more surprising and potentially revealing information. However, they are only surprising if you know what the normal story is like – and so you need to read some of the most “typical” stories first for context.

If this approach works, you can get a pretty good idea of what these 1252 stories contain simply from reading the right 20 stories (ten “most typical” and ten “least typical”). Another way to guide your search is to convert these scores into a filter that can be used with Cognitive-Edge’s SenseMaker(R) as a scale of “REDUNDANCY vs UNIQUENESS”:

Story similarity as a filter in SenseMaker(R):

Now you can combine a measure of story redundancy with other information the storyteller provided, to find the stories that might help you learn the most:

This is what the story similarity bell curve looks like when converted to a scale in SenseMaker(R) (using 1252 stories about school fees or scholarships):

And this is what the data looks like when combined with answers to “This story describes a Good Idea that succeeded, or a Good Idea that failed, or a Bad idea (using a triad)”:

I’ve color coded the quartiles of these redundancy / uniqueness scores so you can see where the most typical stories cluster, and where the most unique stories cluster.

And when you start to slice the data by age group, you can see that 31-45 year olds are more likely to tell somewhat unique stories:

Younger age groups are more likely to tell “typical” stories, with a lot of the same words other people use. Older people are even less likely to share stories about bad ideas or good ideas that failed (not shown).

This “story similarity” scale can be combined with another derived scale of whether the story was about success or failure:

I hope this illustrates the power of combining natural language processing with “signification frameworks” to point information searchers to exactly what they are looking for.

As the drought in the horn of Africa continues to endanger the lives of millions, I decided to search our collection of 20,000 stories for relevant ones. 360 stories mention “drought”,”famine”, or “somali”.

Who is named, and how often?

1. Government (50)
2. Red Cross, Red Cross Organization (43)
3. WFP, wfp, World Food Programme (21)
4. NAADS (7)
5. World Vision (5)
6. SWIM (5)
7. Individual (13)
8. None (135)

Drought stories of success or failure?

(These images are generated using SenseMaker(R) from Cognitive-Edge.com)

All OrgsRed Cross

Government

WFPWorld Food ProgramOur story forms do not contain any organization names. So when a person choosese to tell a story about “World Food Program” the pattern is different from when they talk about WFP, though it is the same organization. Only difference is the person’s familiarity with the organization. Also note that WFP are recent stories about drought, whereas World Food Program maps stories that talk about incidents from 1-2 years ago.

Stories about Government drought relief events happening in last 3 months:

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POVERTY ERADICATION ~ 482876
================

The government of Kenya tries by all means to do away with any element of poverty. They look for means and ways that brings in poverty but can be controlled. They have at the moment offered relief food to places where there are cases of poverty. To farmers who may fail to do the farming due to lack of farm inputs, the government has offered them at a fairable low prices to enable all farmers to purchase it. Many farmers who have been complaining of the increase price of fertilizer over the years, the government has seen into it that its lowered. To those in sparingly dry areas they have been urged to plant many trees and mostly plant drought resistance crops, ,any of such areas the government has brought in irrigation. The government again has brought in some cash via some established projects to help widows and orphans to avoid poverty.

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FARMERS TO BE GIVEN FREE TRADITIONAL SEEDS ~ 487212
================

Farmers in kenya are demanding traditional seeds to be planted instead of those being used currently.This is after the Agricultural ministry has discovered a variety of these traditional seeds and released them to farmers.Some ot these seeds include sweet potatoes,cassava,pigeon,peas,beans,cow peas sorghum finget millets and maize.This has happened in areas recieving inadequate rainfall or those expected to recieve low rainfall.the agricultural ministry will distribute these seeds in twenty one counties free of charge so as to reduce the rate of death of people through famine.This will also help people living in areas that dont recieve rainfall oftenly to have a way of getting food.The agricultural ministry also says that this will help them to reduce the amount of money the government uses to give these people food.

================
Drought  in our country ~ 486830
================

some areas in some parts of this country,water has been the problem,and we in our village.This has been a problem to many of our people in this area.but the minister of water has come up with a solution of water people are now getting water not from far places as it was no one other time but our minister is loving helped by our governement at of this country.

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DROUGHT AS A NATURAL DISASTER. ~ 497896
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Drought in most parts of the country is a natural disasator to the government. It has been found that most of the people in northern part of the country are dieng because of drought which leads to inadrquate food for them. The government together with the ministry of planning should find a better solution to this problem.

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turkana water project ~ 497065
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Residents of turkana can now got water thus making majority of them smile water is life to many in the society thus they say this is hope for the future claiming that the project will them even start farming programs through irrigation programs thus this will help the cycle of drought

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DROUGHT 21 ~ 482877
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Due to drought people have ended up planting more trees to conserve the environment so to keep animals(livestock)safe and to preserve food plus vegetation.

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The drought season ~ 503089
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Due to the drought  season members of organization tried to help the villages toghether with putting thanks&dams.

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THE DROUGHT SEASON ~ 482875
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The drought striken area decided to intiate a programme through the help of the government via planting trees and prevention of tree cutting.

Quick snapshot of themes

107 “Famine” stories: Read excel file of 107 famine stories here

330 “drought” stories: Read excel file of 330 drought stories here

GlobalGiving just passed the $50 million dollar mark, in terms of passing money along to 1500 community organizations in over 120 countries. This was possible because Dennis and Mari left a comfortable job at the world bank in 1999 and pursued a dream, despite the obstacles. Donna Callejon’s recent post tells more of their story, copied here:

Why did they persevere?  Ten days ago Dennis wrote a very poignant blog post, made moreso by his mom’s passing just a day later.  The post gives some insight into what motivates him.  Mari  has different, but equally inspiring, motivations as described in this Wharton Blog from earlier this year.

Donna continues:

One of the first things they suggested I do was to read their business plan.  So I did.  It had, like legions of business plans before it, the classic hockey stick growth curve.  In our case, the unit being donation volume.  According to this plan, we would be at $40 million in annual donation volume, and “pay our own freight” by about 2005.  Um, we didn’t quite make that.  Many slightly less sloped hockey sticks followed.  When things didn’t take off like a rocket ship we tried new things, always led by our two fearless (and in this case that word really applies) leaders.  We tried plan b, plan c, and plan d, always with our eyes on the prize of working to make it possible for great organizations around the world to access funds and for donors of all shapes and sizes to support the causes that inspired them.

Dennis (just a tiny excerpt):

Someone asked me the other day if I believed in aid.  ”You have been so critical of the aid system,” he said. “Why don’t you just do something else?” I replied:

In the 1970s, a combination of factors left a ten year-old boy living on and off below the poverty line, with four siblings at home and a single mother.  His mother stayed at home to take care of his pre-school age sister, because child care would have cost more than any salary she could make; she did not have a college degree and had few marketable skills.  The small city he lived in had few economic opportunities; it once had been prosperous, but its main industry (textiles)  had moved away, and the city was down at the heels and felt grim.  The boy delivered newspapers and scooped ice cream to make a little money, but it was not enough to make a fundamental difference to his circumstances.

Fortunately, there was a school lunch program… When the boy’s youngest sister was able to go to school, the boy’s mother enrolled in a government-funded job training program…. A private school thirty miles away offered him a full scholarship, including room and board…. When he decided to go to graduate school, that school offered him a generous scholarship funded by a private donor…. He spent the next 25 years in international development, (hopefully) doing some good in the world.

That boy received a lot of aid along the way.  Some of it was public aid, and some of it was private aid, some in the form of loans, but most in the way of grants. That boy was me.  And that success story is why I remain optimistic about aid, despite its many failures and disappointments.  I think that if we try hard, think critically, and work together, we can make aid as effective for millions of others as it was for me.

He tells the full story in a TEDxYSE video:

Mari:

Kuraishi’s career trajectory started with a trip to the Berlin wall she took as a high school senior. The visit fascinated Kuraishi in part because while tourists on the western side of the wall gawked at those on the eastern side, the East Berliners themselves never seemed to even look over the wall to the west. “People in East Berlin had trained themselves not to look over the wall,” Kuraishi said. “When I saw that I was like, ‘Wow, I have to get to the bottom of this.’”

… One of her dreams is that technology will eventually enable real-time requests for aid and equally speedy assists from donors — for example, near instantaneous help for a child in India needing $5 to cover the cost of his school lunch for a week. “I think that could transform the way you think about philanthropy. You could think ‘Oh I could give up my latte for three days and fund this kid’s school lunch….’ We will find ways to make philanthropy and other social engagement much more … satisfying than we have before.”

Jennifer Lentfer of How-matters.org recently interviewed me about why I do what I do.

Jennifer: Like me, you also interact with many grassroots organizations who have to exhibit a “funders be damned” attitude and carry on without external funding. In your opinion, why do local leaders do this?

Marc: These people are invested in the project. It isn’t a job; it is a cause. And often they believe that their project will have a greater impact than whatever some funder wants done. It happens at the local level, with VAP in Kenya when a head teacher writes her cell phone number on the board for girls to call 24-7, or with More Than Me in Sierra Leone, whose founder travels the world from couch to couch like a vagabond raising money to keep girls in school. It also happened at my organization, when Mari and Dennis had the vision to start up GlobalGiving.

And many other people like Mari and Dennis continue to inspire me. Like Fatuma of HODI – who because of her own struggle to wait beyond adolescence to get married, is striving to help 12 year old girls grow up unmarried in northern Kenya, Marsabit.

The only way you could illustrate them all would be a mosaic of fearless leaders and their causes:

Dadaab project description:

Dadaab Refugee Camp in the Northeastern province of Kenya is in the middle of a number of crisis. Drought, famine, and violence have brought a huge number of Somalis and other refugees into the camp. The youth are being actively recruited as Islamic militants and many have few options but to join. We have devised a solution. We will be empowering the youth for positive change and give them opportunities for education and self employment through our DadaabNet project.

$25 provides one ICT course to a Dadaab Refugee Youth and teaches him social enterprise for social change.

“Relevant” Stories form Kenya’s community storytelling project:

What do you think? Is the program working? One heretical thing the algorithm does is bypass the obvious approach of matching stories that name an organization with organizations of that name. I plan to add that in next, but wanted to see whether the language matches – meaning these stories are mathematically the most relevant one by content, even if they are about a different organization.

I do think matching organizations by matching names is helpful, but that process appears to be much harder in practice. Caroline for Kibera has 27 different aliases, due to misspellings, and people knowing them by the names of their projects instead of as C4K (yet another alias for Carolina for Kibera).

About an hour later each morning, the nearly debilitating back pain disappeared.

After 3 days of this, I realized the pain wasn’t in my muscles, but might have been underneath – in my kidneys. “And what do kidneys do?” I asked myself. They filter water. So on a hunch I guzzled a 2-liter bottle of water at 5am. Within 30 minutes, the pain was gone.

The next day it came back, so I guzzled 2-liters of water again. And the pain was gone.

That night I drank a full 2 liters of water just before bed. Instead of needing to get up and take a leak, I slept soundly all night. So it appears I was dehydrated.

Water is the miracle drug. How sad it is that we often resort to medication when a real medical problem can be washed away. Drugs always create two problems for every one they solve. I wish we and our doctors were more willing to try the obvious stuff – like drinking water, eating real food, and getting exercise – before turning back the pill bottle.

Kibera

This is a slum in Nairobi with about 150,000 people (although certain NGOs have inflated this population estimate to 750,000). Many NGOs work here, but the core NGOs are shown below. (394 organizations)

Kisumu

A bigger city than Kibera slum, but with relatively fewer NGOs. (135 organizations)

Nairobi

This city has too many NGOs in it to generate a useful map. (514 organizations)

Alt version, with sub-clusters colored:

Masaka

A part of Uganda with a plethora of scribes and NGOs. The yellow cluster appears to be large international NGOs, and the blue cluster are local NGOs. The medical NGOs like Kitovu Mobile and Uganda Cares form the bridge between these two.

Kakamega

Note the center of this “NGO community map” is not an NGO at all, but a bank. (60 organizations)

Kakamega (with meta-labels included)

In the above maps, I have removed stories that are attributed to broad categories instead of NGOs. When you include these labels as connectors, the community maps become much more complex. In fact, there are two distinct clusters here. The yellow one links back to WEWASAFO, the organization that is coordinating story collection in Kakamega. The green cluster is a distinct group.

Rakai

A map very similar to Masaka (57 organizations)

Lessons

These maps, like the hand-drawn versions I created previously, should help people at organizations do this stuff:

1. Identify potential collaborators in the same community.
2. Learn whether people associate one organization with another, indirectly, based on working with the same people.
3. Provide leads for cross-organization evaluations. If you serve the same people as another organization, you should be sharing data.

Perhaps these community maps alone are not useful yet. I am looking forward to mixing in other story data, such as the percent of success vs failure stories told about that organization, or quality (measured in diversity of sources) of data about that organization in the storytelling collection.

The beauty and inspiration in this sermon is why I go to church generally, and why I attend All Souls Church UU in particular whenever I can.

A thin place is a Welsh phrase for a place that speaks to you from “beyond.” However your mind happens to define or perceive the beyond that surrounds us, a thin place stretches our ability for words to explain.

Indeed they require no explanation. Their power is felt, and through the experience, we – the listeners – are transformed.

Rev Susan says:

“You can look for thin places, but you won’t find them. They have to find you.”

She goes on to give examples from her life of people and places that carried thin spaces into her presence and transformed her: Feeling the presence of old souls in a Welsh countryside, walking through the portal of no return on Gore Island in Senegal, communing with civil rights leaders, asserting her way into an all-male ministry conference, which led to her becoming a minister in a church that denied women the opportunity to preach, and finally sitting alongside another in hospice, holding her hand, listening to the other woman promise to meet Susan again, even if it happens on the other side. “… now go have an amazing lunch,” the dying woman finished.

I too have felt myself in thin places. Once I was traveling on a road through an old forest, climbing up an Appalachian mountain, and I rounded the rend and felt an overwhelming need to stop the car.

I parked it on the shoulder and climbed down the ravine where I found a bubbling brook surrounded by tall pines holding up the mist above like pillars. No one spoke to me, but I simply felt the presence. It was a presence that said nothing, asked nothing, claimed nothing, and expected nothing. All it did was reassure me that God was here, and because it was here, in the now, God was fully real. And because I felt total confidence that God no longer had to be real because now he simply was real, my life needed to take some clear directions that could otherwise be postponed until death at an older age loomed larger.

I’m not saying I was transformed. I continued doing the same things I’d planned, but now if I happened to face obstacles I could confidently feel that this whole path for my life was not in vain.

Yesterday I wrote on Facebook that evolution – unlike people and governments – doesn’t require anyone to believe in it. Evolution will work on us whether or not we recognize it, define it, or use it to predict the interconnectedness among disease-causing bacteria to save lives. God – in my thin place – is the same. The kind of language I felt wasn’t asking me to believe in God or in anything; it was making itself known, and I was asking myself what that means for my life path. This thin place found me and forced me to stop the car in the middle of nowhere. And if you are a good listener on the level beyond words and reason, your thin place will find you too. What you ask yourself with your “reason hat” after you are there is up to you.

I suspect that many people find a thin place and dismiss what they feel. But when someone embraces this experience – and the possibilities that the “something” beyond this basic day-to-day life allow, they are transformed and the people around them feel this transformation, even if those people have failed to listen in their own thin place.

I’ve met a few people this year that inspire me in ways that must have meant they experienced their thin places. Fatuma – a 32 year old woman who runs HODI in the arid northern Kenyan town of Marsabit – strikes me as compelled to do what no earthly reason or circumstance could alone inspire. It’s not because she’s already changed the world that I feel her inspiration dripping off onto me when we meet; it’s that she has something inside her that comes through in how she works. She was the oldest woman in her town to get married, and she fights to help young girls grow up before they get married. Many girls marry at 12 and have kids before 16, just as told in the Girl Effect Video.

I don’t know what from Fatuma’s life inspired and compelled her to give girls the opportunity marry older, but she has “it” in her words and actions. I want to spend a whole week there filming whatever happens, and maybe I’ll document and inspire others through her.

There are others whom I’ve never met – like Uli (AKA “the heroine of flight 847), a stewardess who stopped hijackers from killing Jews on a plane for no reason other than “I just didn’t want to feel powerless.” And perhaps others still that I have met and haven’t just recognized in this way.

I do the work I do in East Africa because I believe this body of community stories might become a thin space for others: A large body of information that as people search and read, becomes wisdom and insight. I simply cannot believe that a body of stories about life this large could not eventually allow deeper meaning to emerge. I believe that the totality of all peoples’ stories worldwide would, when merged together, yield a useful picture each of us can use to answer the question, “what is the meaning of life?” It will not spit out a direct answer like 42, but it may manifest itself (with better visualization) as a sensory environment that allows each listener to ask himself the questions that will put him or her on the right life path – just as my thin space did for me.

They collected over 250 stories in the last 3 months in Nyahururu, Liakipia, Raikipia, Nyeri, and rural areas around Mt. Kenya. In spite of how we explicitly trained the scribes (who are supposed to collect 2 stories about two different community efforts), this wordle of stories reveals that most are about SWIM, and water:

The pattern of these narratives (provided in file below) is also lacking in diversity. They are formulaic and repetitive, narrowly describing how SWIM has come in and helped them provide water.

I met the SWIM staff today along with some people who work for a local TV station. The TV guy had to go out and get his own narratives about how lives had changed as a result of the wells because SWIM’s own narratives lacked any of that type of information. This underscores why it is so important to get people to speak to more open ended questions, despite their personal preference to retell a sort of “standard” narrative along the lines of “Organization X helps us. We love Organization X.” These messages are counterproductive, and in this specific case, cause time and money to be wasted trying to gather extra narratives to produce a television documentary.

Here is a wordle of all 1500+ stories from across Kenya and Uganda that mention the word WATER:

The diversity of other topics intersecting with water is much greater, and potentially more informative. These 1500+ stories were generally collected by people who did not have a close relationship with just one, solitary NGO such as SWIM that focuses on only one type of community development. The image speaks for itself.

Broadly speaking, I wonder if NGOs that attempt to collect narrative “qualitative” data as part of their monitoring and evaluation invariably end up with a bland data set typical of the SWIM stories above, rather than the diverse set of WATER stories that our GlobalGiving system delivers. If so, then of course M&E experts are likely to disparage qualitative data methods. This example provides evidence that qualitative data is not inherently less useful, but narratives are less useful when the people collecting them influence what gets talked about.

Download and read the stories:

SWIM stories (or stories mentioning Liakipia, Raikipia, or Nyahururu)

Vision by commitee

I harbor this notion that if you could take a giant, complicated 160 page pile of committee-approved text and filter out all the jargon, what you would be left with would be far more illuminating on what the leaders really know and don’t know.

Here I’ve applied this idea to two big fat documents that are supposed to be guiding the thinking and spending of billions (or trillions) of dollars:

1. The Millennium Development Goals progress report of 2010 (revision #14, 80 pages long) and the
2.  Kenyan Vision 2030 Statement (complete version, 160 pages).

Using python to strip out all the text from these PDFs (pyPdf module), I then compared the text in these against thousands of community stories from across Kenya and Uganda. I assume that if people don’t use a word in common speech, then that word is jargon and can be excluded from the overall picture of the text.

Here is what you see:

MDG 2010 report jargon:

Kenya Vision 2030 report jargon:

In both above examples, I built sets of words from the report and generated wordles that only contain words unique to the report, and not found across thousands of community stories in Kenya and Uganda. Some of these “words” are junk, artifacts of the converted PDF headers, but much of it is jargon.

The other half of this parsed data is the set of words that are emphasized in community stories and largely absent from government reports:

Stories, excluding MDG words:

Stories, excluding Vision 2030 words:

What are the patterns?

• MDG report emphasizes comparative statistics at a continent-to-content level. Each world region is compared with each other, and the trends visualized in a lot of graphs.
• MDG report avoids assigning root causes to global problems, and de-emphasizes prescribing what should be done in each case, unless there is strong global consensus. (The few “safe” examples include saying that biodiversity is a growing problem, and global climate change is a problem caused by humans.) Poverty is a problem, but the report doesn’t provide any insights to what to do, where, how much, and why.
• Vision 2030 really emphasizes the role of women, even though women is a major theme in both stories and the Kenyan report. Much of the rest of the extracted words are government, specific jargon: inequalities, subsector, disparities, per capita, interventions, elasticity, evaluation, flagship, etc.
• Stories emphasize the role of people and how individuals either help or were helped by others. The word organization/organisation is something absent from Vision 2030, but common to stories about help. Community is also absent from big reports, but present to some extent in stories.

This is a follow-up on a previous attempt at wordle-izing MDGs and development jargon. The big improvement with this method is that word set comparisons are now adjusted for different in overall length of documents automatically when the program runs. So true frequencies are compared here, not just the raw word usage counts.

I’m pleased to be invited as a guest blogger! I actually don’t know many of the other insightful bloggers here, which is a shame since there are so many interesting ideas. I stay holed up in East Africa running the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project and doing whatever it takes to turn >13,000 stories into meaningful community information for the hundreds of local NGOs we serve. Being in the communities (but not involved in story collection) allows me to see whether the process is going awry.

The most valuable piece of information for GlobalGiving (as a non-implementing, non-funding facilitator for community organizations) is not what is said in the community stories about an organization, but how the organization reacts when given a set of relevant information about itself. It helps us identify community-focused organizations, good listeners, and potential innovators – and generally break through the self-report bias that prevents international development from having a larger impact in the world (or in public policy). While we haven’t built a tool to track how NGOs react to and use this information yet, we have done a lot to track the flow of information from one party to the next – which helps us measure the reliability of the information. Here are some examples of tracking this flow of information.

Scribes: The person asking another in his/her community to share a story influences the story

We reached out to all our local partner organizations and asked them to to recommend a dozen or so young people (ideally: women just after high school but before finishing college), whom we trained as scribes. After many dozens, we now have over 1000 scribes in Kenya and Uganda, each asking their friends and neighbors to share two stories about a “time when a person or organization tried to help someone or change something in your community.”

A few of these scribes wanted particular organizations talked about. That’s why we now have over 400 stories about World Vision – entirely from one region in Uganda. We know they work everywhere, but people rarely want to talk about elsewhere. Luckily, most scribes are not choosing the organizations, but instead are working for the $0.10 we reimburse them for completed story.

Sometimes people in one country avoid saying that people in neighboring countries are willing to say. Over thousands of stories, we find that Ugandans just don’t call anything a bad idea:

Kenyans are on the right, Ugandans on the left.

So we were lucky in that (a) we didn’t test this survey only in Uganda and (b) we offered people the choice of a softer answer: “good idea that failed.”

Scribes that tell their own stories like talking about success

We allow every person to share exactly two stories, including the scribes we train. Looking again at stories from Uganda, stories a scribe collects from another person (blue, left) offer a much more diverse viewpoint than stories the scribe writes himself (red, right):

Either this pattern means that Ugandan scribes like staying positive more than their friends, or a lot of the people whom we recruited have a vested interest in telling certain positive stories about an organization.

The person copying paper into web forms influences

Minimal Tech: We found that the best way to ensure we involve the broadest cross section of society as possible was to distribute paper forms and not use SMS, smart phones, computers, smart pens, tape recorders, or any other kind of technology. This means even people without a phone participate, yet many of these people still have a friend or relative with a phone – which can be used for tracking them. However, with a team of 15 transcribers, some interpret the corners of triads differently from others:

Individual transcribers are color-coded. The orange person and the purple person see the “edge” of the triangle differently. We reduced this indexing bias by giving each indexer performance feedback: this picture. But it is much harder to detect and correct a similar variation among the authors of the stories, who may interpret the triads differently.

Tracking who understood how to answer a triad question

SenseMaker(R) often relies on questionnaires that use triangles with three answers at the points:

This allows the user to choose any answer, even if it falls in the gray areas between two or three choices. Not everybody likes thinking in shades of gray. (I suspect Former President George W. Bush would stick to the corners on any traid-question based survey.)

Since our story form includes four triads, I can assume that any person who fills out all four questions by sticking to the corner may not have seen triads as a question that allows one to answer in shades of gray. If it can be defined logically, you can tag it in SenseMaker(R).

If that assumption not conservative enough for you, you could look at all the stories from a scribe, and every answer falls in the corners, I would tag that whole batch of stories as “scribe didn’t understand triads.”

Add it up

Combining each of these story meta-data should allow anyone to filter 13,000 stories down to the 1300 that reflect broad community opinions. These are what we want:

• Stories come from many people
• Stories come from many places
• Scribe and storyteller understood the questions
• Scribe and storytellers provided mobile phone numbers as identification
• Scribe collected stories about many NGOs (my threshold for “ok” is that no one NGO is talked about in more than a quarter of the stories.)
• Storyteller followed the “2-stories per person” rule

Two rape prevention programs stand out from this overall group: Mrembo program and Sita Kimya (which I discussed previously).

The word clouds of these stories reveal two very different perspectives. First, Mrembo:

mrembo stories.doc

And second, Sita Kimya (a USAID funded effort to change behavior in men around their treatment of women in the Nairobi slum of Kibera):

sita kimya 23

Differences:

• Whose stories? The stories about Mrembo program are told almost exclusively by young girls under 16; Nearly all the stories about Sita Kimya are told by men, ages 16-30.
• Where? Kamukunji for Mrembo, Kibera for Sita Kimya
• [GIRL] Mrembo girls talk about sexual help from a first person perspective. Notice how the word girl/girls doesn’t appear in their tag cloud, whereas it dominates both the other groups.
• [HIV/AIDS] Mrembo stories emphasize the relationship between risky sexual behavior (like hanging out with boys on soccer fields, according to some stories) and AIDS. HIV/AIDS is hardly mentioned in Sita Kimya, relative to frequency of being mentioned in the overall rape stories set.
• GOOD NEWS: Both the Sita Kimya and Mrembo stories are drawn from their target audiences: Young sexually-active men and younger pre-sexually-active girls, respectively.
• Mrembo girls choose “Inspiring” or “Important” to describe their stories, and rarely “Horrible” or “Not memorable.” Sita Kimya guys choose all of these labels about equally.
• Mrembo girls are almost all “actors” or “affected by” the events in their stories. Nearly all the guys are “observers” in these stories, but not “actors” or “affected by.”
• Both groups considered their story more related to a specific organization, over family, friends, or a community.
• Mrembo girls mostly talked about a recent event from last 6 months, whereas Sita Kimya guys talked about more distant events ( no stories from the last 3 months)

• Both groups share stories that reflect success and failure, but Mrembo girls are a bit more likely to think of their story as somewhere in between:
• Lastly, the English translations of both Kiswahili words do not appear in stories: “Stop” or “Silent” for stopping rape: Sita Kimya means “we will not be silent!” or “Beautiful” for Mrembo means “beautiful” [girls].

These groups of stories were analyzed using SenseMaker(R) from Cognitive-Edge.Com

[Addendum: Download: Links to 87 Stories about mrembo on GlobalGiving]

Looking at wordle subtraction:

This version is a composite of 87 stories about mrembo, about twice the number used before:

And here are an astounding 258 stories about Sita Kimya, funded by USAID:

I figured out how to subtract one wordle from the other, to really sharpen the contrast and the overlap between these two story collections.

Words from Mrembo stories, with Sita Kimya words subtracted out:

Words from Sita Kimya stories, with Mrembo words subtracted out:

Words that they both share:

Words that appear in either group, but not both:

[Also known as the symmetric difference of two sets] This one is the most difficult to interpret:

Note that I removed the words Sita Kimya, Mrembo, people, cases from the above set, since they were obviously dominating.

Conclusions

• Mrembo program emphasizes teaching girls about HIV/AIDS, early marriage, and avoiding bad situations so that one avoids rape. Stories are about what the girls in the program learned.
• Sita Kimya stories emphasize rape cases involving girls from a man’s point of view. Schools, community, and organization appear to be a common part of the stories. Seemingly esoteric topics like books, water, and life also get mentioned.
• Most astounding: When Sita Kimya men talk about rape, the idea of early marriage and HIV/AIDS is absent.

Every person has a limited number of close friends, and a large number of acquiantences

No matter who you are, you don’t have very many close, personal, intimate, trusted friends. The average number is actually ZERO, but this illustration assumes you have five. Fifty years ago surveys found that the average American had three close friends, so these circles are getting smaller on the red (personal, trusted) side and bigger on the green (networking list, acquaintance) side.

Growing any organization requires asking A LOT of people for money. Most people will say no – about 88% of friends and 96% of impersonal contacts. The way that you contact people naturally maps to how important that person is in your life. As shown above, sending out a bulk-email from your address book isn’t going to bring in very many donations, compared with sharing a coffee or tea time together. Even a personal SMS is more intimate than a Facebook ask.

Trust is a central part of asking people for money. And the reaction people have to your asking tells you how much they trust and care about you or your cause, if you didn’t already know. As the above image shows, people can block you, befriend you, chat with you, or best of all – take your message and pass it on to others. Such “endorsing” behavior happens at the confidant stage – the inner circle – only.

So what is a person to do if they want to join GlobalGiving through an open challenge?

The goal is to raise at least $4,000 from at least 50 donors in one month. To accomplish this goal, you must realize two things:

1. You or your network of staff, friends, and supporters must talk to literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of new people.
2. You cannot accomplish this goal alone. It requires a community effort (whatever you define as your community).

These requirements are by design. I think it requires inviting between 400 and 4000 people to give, depending on your level of trust with each potential supporter. If you had 400 people with whom you had built up years of trust and friendship, this would be easy. But most people begin new relationships during the challenge; they will require 4000. On balance, I put the magic number at 1600 – the number of people you must contact (about 100 close friends and 1500 new friends).

None of us have 100 close friends. We each have from 3 to 12. So it will typically take 100/12 = 8 fully active friend-mobilizers to engage 100 close friends, not including the 1500 new friends you need. How do you get to the 1500 new friends?

Each of the close friends must invite their friends. This is why so many donations appear to come through social media, such as facebook, twitter, or email. That is just an illusion. They really come from and through the dozen close friends that are leading this concerted effort to mobilize new supporters.

Note that 50 donations/1600 asked = 0.03, or 3 percent. Generosity is uncommon. Only about 3 percent of this whole group will give. But 18% of people with whom you have spent at least a year explaining the importance of your work will give – so consider “relationship building” a long-term investment of your time and energy.

I’ve also shared a flash movie about HOW you do this and why it builds trust for the organiztaion here:

Make like a tree: How to grow your organization from the grassroots

Why does GlobalGiving require this?

GlobalGiving is a trust and reputation building system for non-profits worldwide. We vet every organization and guarantee every donation. In addition to doing background checks on who is running the org, what they claim to be doing, and measuring their social footprint, we need to know that they have a community of supporters – somewhere, anywhere. This challenge proves to the world that they do have a community. However, it is a big challenge for small organizations whose supporters don’t have credit cards – those organizations typically have to talk to more than 4000 people, because many people who would have given cannot give. Instead these people must endorse, advocate, and encourage other friends to give.

The end result does must more for the organization. At the end, organizations understand online fundraising, have a demonstrated global reputation as good as any US organization — a level playing field of trust, and now have the means to continue engaging a much larger group of supporters — increased capacity.

Organizations:

1. Become experts at online fundraising
2. Build a better reputation
3. Increase their organization capacity

Real Demonstrable Capacity Building

Capacity building is the latest buzzword in international development. I did background checks on 30 of the 300 new organizations going into the August 2011 open challenge and found that 90% of them put resources into “capacity building” such as staff training, attending workshops, or hosting “stakeholder meetings.” A third actually spend more time and money on these sit-around-and-talk activities than they spend on serving the poor, teaching kids, or healing the sick! I think it all adds up to a pile of wasted time if they aren’t tested on what they supposedly learned.

Organizations must do something with this training. Having to raise $4,000 from 50 different people in one month is like getting an “A+” in NGO capacity. We are here to blur the lines between training and reality.

GlobalGiving is that test of whether non-profits understand how to build community trust and mobilize funds. You can’t do one without the other. And this skill should be the core of “capacity building.”

As a bonus we also standardize their constitution, budgets, audits, and internal systems in the process of scrutinizing them during Due Diligence. This enables NGOs to better compete for grants and programmatic funding.

See also:

http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/how-to-grow-your-organization-from-the-grassroots/

http://tools.blog.globalgiving.org/

Thank you SCUL!

We would like to thank State College Ultimate Frisbee for organizing a used-disc collection to support these and other Nairobi ultimate frisbee players. I am taking back 19 discs, thanks for Matt, Commissioner Mike Duffy, and others. Frisbees are not sold locally and very expensive to mail, so the best way is for somebody to bring them in their luggage.

If you would like to donate some frisbees – contact me by posting a comment on this post. Your email will be visible only to me. — Marc

Monicah (above) helps recruit local players and get them organized on the field each Friday.

We managed to involve the manager of the local soccer team (shown above).

These are the best fields in Kawangware slum, Nairobi. On the left you can see their professional soccer team huddling during practice.

I would like to organize and train a team to compete in FEAST, Kenya’s annual beach ultimate tournament hosted around Easter each year in Mombasa.

This is the only pickup option in West Nairobi. The best-attended option is in Gigiri / Parklands at the International School of Kenya, every Sunday at 4pm. Kenya Buzz has a posting on it.

At a glance: Most of these stories are clearly positive. 

Image from Cognitive-Edge's SenseMaker(R) cluster analysis tool.

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CANSER TREATMENT ~ 482875
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In our village there lived a man who got an accident and got cancer in his chic Kitovu mobile started to give him treatment. The man was having a bad smell.Every day Kitovu mobile came to see him.The man was help for five years but in the middle of the sixth year the man died.

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HELPING THE NEEDY CHILDREN ~ 487596
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My children were not schooling because I had no money to take them to school. Kitovu mobile helped and took them to school to acquire knowledge and fit in this competitive world.
Kitovu mobile also provides counseling services to the people with HIV/AIDS and advises the farmers to change from subsistence farming to commercial farming.

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POST PRIMARY TRAINING ~ 487596
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Kitovu Mobile helps to train children in vocational studies like carpentry, tailoring and catering. This skills have helped the youth to earn a living and in future to be important people in the society.

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people with special problem ~ 494084
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Kitovu mobile has helped people with special problem by constructing schools for these people,mobile toilets ans water tanks these people may have diseases,kidnapping children mostly girls,pregnant mothers with blood flow,those people have been helped and making their lives happy,they have a building at Kitovu helping these with special problem only.

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Drugs for HIV ~ 487212
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Kitovu mobile has tried to change the lives of HIV people in our community by providing drugs to the victims and also it has made it clear that HIV/AIDS is not cured but they only have drug that only helps the victim tobe some how.

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Fight against AID/HIV ~ 486830
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Not only pay school fees for the children kitovu mobile has done alot to fight against Aids/HIV and teach our community to leave HIV negatively life and giving conseling and guidance to positively effected persons

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TESTING HIV/AIDS ~ 487596
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Kitovu Mobile
This organisation carries out the work of guiding and counseling to people about sexually transmitted diseases which among them include HIV/AIDS among others.
It gives care to these whop are found to be HIV+ by giving them food, medicine among others.
So the organisation has played a very big role to the people. It has made these people not to lose hope.

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blood testing ~ 493972
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Fre blood testing has encourage the youth and other people to know their status and this has redused the number of HIV victims because who ever is found with the virus is counsled and those without are encouraged to be faithful abstain and condom use this is done by kitovu mobile

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HIV/AIDS Support ~ 482876
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On our village their was a man who was suffering from HIV/AIDS and kitovu mobile tried to help him in many things. they gave him treatment and also counselled him, gave him food and also paid school fees for his children and every afte 2 days they coming to see him but unfortunately the man died.

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Healthy people happy uganda ~ 492557
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Kitovu mobile has put an improvement in the healthy of the people in our community. they have mainly helped HIV/AIDS people through counselling and guidance and also advise the youth to test their blood and also give drugs to the victims.

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prevention of Aids ~ 486830
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I was affected with HIV/AIDS and was doughting that i won’t get okey but i was helped by kitovu mobile which gave me medical treatment and giving me free vaccines, food and now have managed to feel okey because am not feeling the same way before i have realised that i have Aids.

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KITOVU DIOSECE IN FIGHT FOR HIV ~ 487596
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Due to the number of HIV/AIDS cases at Kitovu hospital, Kitovu Diosece thought it wise to form an organisation to adress this

Kitovu Home Mobile care was formed, and its aim was to help the orphans whose parents died of AIDS. This organisation provided free education to those children at all levels

Kitovu Home mobile care also provides ARVs to AIDS patients to reduce on its rapid multiplication.
it also have prevent – mother- to child transmission to save the young generation from this rampage

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blood testing 2 ~ 493972
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Free blood testing has encouraged the youth and other people to know their status and has reduced the number of HIVvictims because who ever is found with the virus is counseld and those without are encouraged to be faithful,abstain and condom use.this is done by kitovu mobile

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provision of school fees ~ 486830
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Kitovu mobile has provided scholastic materials and school fees to children for some good time and this effort has greatly changed the way children are perciving in class.

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HIV testing ~ 482876
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Kitovu mobile has provided testing programe to the people in our community to know their status this has helped the people the people to protect themselves against HIV/AIDS.

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Positively living happy person ~ 487212
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For me i was helped by Kitovu mobile when i was tested and found HIV positive i thought my end had reached,says isaac
But things didnt go as i expected they organisation put me on medication and also made afellow up on me.It also assists my family by giving us the basic needs.Now i am positively living happy man.

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Helping orphans ~ 487212
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Due to increase in orphans in our area,
Kitovu mobile has helped the orphans in our area through taking them to school,giving them Food,clothing them,and build houses to them and now orphans in our area are in good condition well looked after.

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Scholastic materials ~ 492693
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One of the problems in our community is education but Kitovu Mobile has tried to improve and stop this problem by giving scholastic materials to the people in the  community they give.materials like books pens to the children

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Child protection ~ 492557
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Child protection is one of the child rights Kitovu mobile has tried to fight for children rights by giving the children in need food,education health care and shelter hence given them freedom to live in the society happily

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counselling and guidance ~ 486830
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kitovu mobile
This organisation helped me in guiding and counselling which made to be aware of my self esteem and awareness,also they encouraged us to know how to select good friends
So through the experience i got from that seminar i am a good counseller.
I can cousell my friends to do the right things and select good friends.

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calculators to the children ~ 486830
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Kitovu mobile has given many things to the children that are used at school.They gave them things like calculators and books.These simplify the education calculators to simplify math problems.

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Encoraging food security ~ 486830
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Ko
itovu  mobile this organisation waking in greater masaka region it is unde the catholic church it helped to pay school fees to poor children and orphans.It also encorages people to plant more food in order to servive hunger.

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Books and reams of papers ~ 486830
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Kitovu mobile is an organisation that has fought illiteracy in our community.It has tried to stop illiteracy by putting much effort in the education standard of children in the community.It gave scholastic materials like books reams of papers to children and hence improving their education and living standards.

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TEARS SHED FROM AIDS ~ 492693
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Due to the rampage of AIDS, many families have broken. Children are noe heading themselved in a family.

Kitovu home mobile care under it funder sister wolusula emerged quickly to give a ahnd to these people.

This organisation pays school fees to the orphans and gives basic requirements like food and shelter.

Many children have acquired basic education and ahve turned into important people in community.

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Advising the youth ~ 494084
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Kitovu mobile
This organisation has helped in organizing thee youth more especially in sports,encouraging the youth to begin business clubs among themselves.It has also helped in educating helpless and needy children.
Some people have got jobs form the above named organization.Some business clubs for youths are dance and dramma club,football club, these clubs are supported by the organization in Masaka district.

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BENEFITS OF KITOVU PROJECT ~ 487596
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I know the organisation Kitovu Mobile project which helped to improve my standards of living by giving me mattress, a cow which helped me to get school fees after selling milk.
I am happy though it went way because my life was improved

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A MOBILE CLINIC ~ 487596
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Many people in our community are still facing with problems resultinf from HIV and ignorance

Kitovu home mobile care has done so much to help people in lwamaggwa parish out of these problems.

It has a mobile van that fetches sick people from villages to lwamaggwa parish health centre

It has well trained social workers who keep on moving around villages to teach people about good health standards.

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HIV/AIDS help ~ 492557
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Kitovu mobile gives HIV/AIDS victims drugs and treatment. The organisation tries to counsel both the infected people and also the people with out HIV. They have been giving food that has all nutrients to their patients.

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GIVEN FREE TREATMENT ~ 487596
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My grandmother was suffering from cancer, he had no money. He went to hospital fro treatment but it was too much money to be paid in the hospital then he went to Kitovu hospital where he got treatment and medicine on free without paying a single coin. He then survived death and gained back his life and now he is in good condition.

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KITOU MOBILE IN ACTION ~ 482875
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Kitou mobile helped my relative with the basic needs like school fees, books, clothes and others.This same organization has also helped old people who are not having enough income to cater for their needs and those who are infected and affected by Hiv/Aids

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HELPING ORPHANS AND DISABLEDS. ~ 482876
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Makondo Mobile have been helped elderly people orphans and disableds. It provides basic needs to families and also build houses to some families. Makondo mobile has also solved some problems in the community by creating mobiles to people.

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Child protection and health care  ~ 492693
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Kitovu mobile gives healthy protection to the children as it gives the children mosquito nets to them and also give free treatment and drugs to the children hence improving the healthy standards of children.

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Guiding and counselling ~ 493972
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Caritas maddo,this organisation has improved people’s standards through the provision of medical care plus mobile teams with activities of counselling especially HIV/AIDS patients,Physical treatmetn,spiritual guidance and behaviour change on individual.
This comfort they give the patient help them to gain happiness in their life.

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Donating blood to people ~ 482877
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Many people used to die because of lacking blood,but kitovu hospital came in and start donating blood to people who are in need and it has done alot to save people’s life and many people have servived and they are in better and good life.

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Health work shop ~ 482877
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Makondo mobile has brought and taught people about their health in the work shops the hold.The people in our community have know their health and how to live a healthy life.

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GIVING BIRTH ~ 487212
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I was giving birth and i had no money at all.
I went to Kitovu hospital where i got free treatment and i gave birth to good and health child and am happy because i gave birth to a child on free with paying any hospital dues and am happy with my kid in my family.

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CARPENTLY delights as my job ~ 486830
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carpenry is my delighted job from mobile.This organisation stood for people like orphans and children whose parents could not care for them.There came a chance that i also used hence became a snior wood man who is populary known for making good furniture in the area.

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THE USE OF MOBILE PHONE ~ 487212
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It was really very hard to communicate with someone or somebody.It was really very hard to get intarch.So they introduced the use of mobile phones people are really very happy about it.

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Helping needy people ~ 482876
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Caritas maddo this is an organization whose services are offered to uplift the social economic barriers, socially through provision of basic amenities like it has provided education in full need to the young generation and protection of windows plus orphans rights.Also services are set up towards the improvement of the general health which has led to the development of the country.In this way some families in my village Bujja Kitovu parish 30 families were given education facilities

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Child to child ~ 482876
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Child to child is encouraged in its achivement by UNICEF, largely through local initiative and childrens donations as schools, encourages school children to concern themselves with the health and wellbeing of their younger brothers and sisters and other children in their communities.
This helped to improve the standards of living in young generation hence developing the country, in  my school we collect things like books, pens, pencils, clothes and so many others at st Henry’s college Kitovu, our headmaster send this things to people in war.

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TASO MOBILE CLINICS ~ 482875
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(TASO) The Aids support organization provided HIV medical services and counseling to the people of Bigasa community in mobile clinics. TASO staff came to Bigasa with all the requirements they needed and gave different HIV/AIDS services freely to many people at Bigasa health center compound.

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SANITATION ~ 492557
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Some mobile toilets were put up in Kokuoyo primary school  by some philathropists to help the pupils being that they had only two toilets serving the whole school. 10 toilets were put up and are functional.
The pupils helped in digging in the pits and they also invited some community memebers to help in the digging and were paid for labour. So far the toilets have helped people living near the school as they at times sneek during weekends and help themselves there because many of them have not put up toilets saying it is expensive. so the mobile toilets have been of much help to them.

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Interaction through sports ~ 487212
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Safaricom is one of the leading telecommunication network company in the whole of Africa.it has over a billion subscriber and half of them are enrolled members to its savings branch.
Safaricom was established over five years ago and has managed to be the best and mobile phone subscriber and has managed to be the best and most profitable business firm in east and central Africa
They saw the need of helping the community rather than being a service provider alone and taking away peoples money.So the came to the community and organised and funded sporting tournaments for the youth and it was a very successful idea
Winners were awarded and also the loosers were never left out.It also proved to be an important tool to the company the organisationand started using its services.

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EDUCATION ON WHEELS ~ 487596
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M-Learning is the short form of the word Mobile learning which involves teaching students on the move.
A big empty bus with twenty computers and desks was used to facilitate this process. Studying for Windows packages took only six weeks minimum and the nearest place people could learn basic computer knowledge  was in the town which was very far and prices there were enormous.

M-Learning saw the need to offer computer classes to citizens at a cheaper and more closer place. this is where M-Learning originated. It took time to advertise but sooner they started getting new members who were eager to learn computer. It became a success and is now caters for over 100 students a day because it offers lessons for almost 2 hours a day. It is very cheap and through them I got my computer certificate and now am looking for a job in the city.

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RAKAL PROJECT PROVIDES SERVICES IN MOBILE CLINICS ~ 487596
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Rakal Health Science program has improved the lives of the people of Kyotera Council. Many services where provided provided freely to the people of Rakal Heath Science Program in the mobile clinics.
Counseluing and HIV testing and Sexually transmitterd diseases was offered to many people and this has ghelped them to understand clearly what it means when onehas untreated sexually transmitted diseases.
Some families got the opportunity for counseling and testing where those who were found to be having HIV or STDs.

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EMPORMENT THROUGH LEARNING ~ 486830
================

The Kenya National library service saw that many youths could not access their services due to either lack of libraries in different locations and also due to lack of time.
They came up with the idea of mobile library whereby books were shelved in a normal bus and the seats were placed in a way to create a good study place.Charges to enter the mobile library bus was cheap compared to the amount one would use to travel to the local libraries. The light books and information was stored in the bus and soon its popularity hit the neighbouring towns. It was a very good idea and people started having a leading culture which was very important. The idea caught up and an extra bus was allocated to our region. They also had a programme whereby they could pick us and take us to the main library because the demand was too high and also they took us back home. I thank them for a work well done and the best part is that it is  for free. I haven,t paid a cent to access the library services.

================
Save life ~ 486830
================

I was opareted in the hospital and i used to lose much of my blood in the body i donot have money to buy blood to restore in my body.Here came a woman whom i do not know his name , she found me suffering and donated to me blood.I was saved life and am happy.

================
Medical help ~ 482877
================

World vision helped me in the way that when my child was so sick,they gave me a letter that permited me to kitovu hospital and got treatment my child had  an effect on her stomach and she is living a health life.

================
Medical help 2 ~ 482877
================

World vision helped me in the way that when my child was so sick,they gave me a letter that permited me to kitovu hospital and got treatment my child had  an effect on her stomach and she is living a health life.

================
Tution fee ~ 492693
================

Father  kivumbi has tried to improve the education of the pupils in our community by paying school fees for many of them some scholastic materials that help the pupils at school hence improving the education of children in our community.

================
HELPING THE NEEDY ~ 493972
================

Life initiative project managed to distribute food in form of corn, soya beans and vegetable oil to HIV positive persons benefiting including their families. The project also provided counselling to the clients hence making them feel comfortable in their life. This was done at St. Paul Primary School Kitovu.

================
TO SAVE LIFE ~ 487596
================

TASO is an organisation composed of doctors who help test people whether they are positive or negative to virus. It helps to provide tablets commonly known as ARVs in order to reduce on the speed of the virus.
It also provides some basic needs to the sick people of HIV/AIDS. Not only that, it teaches people the way of preventing HIV/AIDS

================
Helping the needy ~ 492693
================

GOAL based project was started to provide food assistance to families of orphans and needy people were it has worked effectivelly also has managed to councel and provide income generating activities hence developing the country.Therefore peoples ways of living have been and most of them like the family of Miss Nakachwa has benefited,children are healthy and are studying.

================
BLOOD TEST FOR ALL ~ 486830
================

The organisation TASO has helped me in the following ways.for example.At first i went to kitovu hospital for blood test and the result where(HIV+). in this situation i felt asif i was titally dead but the members in the organisation made me cool down and gave me some good counselling.
They advised me to take drugs in time and use of condoms
This has kept me comfortable and i am now advising my fellow people in the village in the same way.

================
DREAMS BECOME REAL ~ 492557
================

One of the most important organisation that helped ugandans acquire what neener dreamt is Rottary internation.
This organisation arranges chance games where the lucky winner may get prizes like:
-Radios
-T-Shirts
-Televisions
-Mobile phones and
-Cars
Many people have become rich through this organisation

================
Help for vulnerable children ~ 492693
================

Betheral healing center has helped many orphanage to go to school and to access basic life needs. Many children who lost parents,children who were neglected by their parents and many children from streets have been helped by this program

================
SAFARICOM LUCK GAME ~ 482877
================

Mobile phones subscribers safaricom and others have changed people’s lives.This has happened by giving several offers and people winning uppto ten milion.This has made those who didn’t have hope to live a better life.Other big organizations should also give such offers.

================
New technology ~ 482875
================

New technology has changed the lives of mwananchi since the introduction of mobile phones, family and friends were having freedom to talking through the phone and even calling rates is cheaper than calling with simu ya jamii. zain Safaricom Yu and Orange help people so much, you can use safaricom to deposit and receive money by Mpesa, you can also find pesa by zap or yu cash.

================
MTN HAS HELPED THE PEOPLE OF UGANDA ~ 492557
================

Besides promotting communication network to all parts of the country. MTN has done much towards the development of uganda.
Mobile Telephone Network has sponsored many programmes of radios like amawulire and sports.
MTN has been in partnership with different organisation in promotting world cup competitions in South Africa 2010.
MTN has extended it services to many parts of the country.

================
REALISING YOUR TALENT. ~ 482877
================

Safaricom mobile providers will always be remembered for their support to sponser the Sakata Ball Challenge that is always held in every province and winners proceeding to the national level.
This initiative has helped most youths discover and develop their talents through games and sports inorder to achieve a living.Through this initiative most of the youth have been recruited to some of the big clubs that are participating in the Kenya Premier League.

================
A DICLINED FINANCIAL INSTITUTION ~ 482875
================

Kacheer Lwamaggywa Twesitule was a saving and credit co-operation which was centered in Kibaati trading center.
Many members had opened up their accounts and they had a reasonable share capital likely to that they had started a mobile money for easy transfer of funds.
Unfortunately this organization closed and peoples money was not refunded and many of them turned back words.

================
Communication ~ 482875
================

Since the introduction of mobile phones people found it easy to communicate with other people family and other relatives. Cell phones have changed many things in our country Kenya.We send money by Mpesa service and deposit. This new technology has changed many things.

================
HIV/AIDS ~ 492557
================

HIV/AIDS has been a problem because it deprives people parents, children are left orphans with no one to take care of them and some turn out to be thieves, commercial sex workers e.t.c. But for the past years CDC had been Collaborating with KEMRI to reduce the risks of contracting HIV/AIDS. They have established programmes to help reduce the risks like mobile VCT’s Role plays has been adapted to help the youths change their behaviour.

================
TASO supports Vulnerable people  ~ 492693
================

(TASO)The Aids Support Organisation supported many people’s lives in Kyanamukaka village by providing them with free health services.People received counselling and testing while while others got treatment for sexually transmitted diseases freely.These services where provided by TASO in mobile clinics

================
Theft ~ 486830
================

At kianda slums, many youths are thieves. They have guns that they are to threatend people with as they rob them there belongings such as money, mobile phones shoes, clthes.This has always created high tension in kianda and also high level of insecurity in the area. Mony people always fear to walk at night in the area since they think that they can be raided by the thieves and evan killed.

================
FREE HIV/AIDS SERVICES ~ 482875
================

(TASO) The AIDS support organization provided free HIV/AIDS services to people of Butenga. TASO made an outreach mobile clinic where people are given counseling, HIV/AIDS medical treatment and blood testing for HIV/AIDS and other diseases.

================
PROSTITUTION ~ 487596
================

The rate of prostitution has been high in Sondu town. This has made so many organisations  like Tuungane Youth Group to come up with teachings so that the youth are not involved in prostitution and therefore avoid diseases like HIV/AIDS, Gonorrheal, Syphilis, unwanted pregnancy and many others.
The NGOs have brought mobile VCTs where  you can know your status and change your ways

================
NURTURE INNOVATION FOR NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ~ 482875
================

The story of Mr.Samuel Mwaura, who uses mobile phone to make tea,should be a wake up call to the government to begin supporting research.
It reminds Kenyans of Mr. Tito Gachamba, the Nyeri man who in the early1970s made a small aeroplane that repotedly took off abit of meters.
The fact that Mwaura and Gachamba used rudimentay materials and home grown know how is proof we have plenty of untapped talent.
The ministry of science and technology should do something about these innovations minds.

================
Community ~ 482877
================

In our communities and other slums people live in very bad environment that affect their lives e.g as they dont have toilets and that why they practice in mobile toilets they dont have a place to face clean water so they are dirty they dont have clafces that why you found them dirty and big problem is used of drugs many  slums duwellors have been engaged in drugs because they are jobless and they dont have places to work.So they find their self engagaes in drugs and stealing for other peoples property the small they have.

================
COMMUNICATION ~ 487212
================

In the area of Kirinyaga people had not known about the use of telephones,mobile phones and fax also E-mail adress.They did not know that these things existed.When they wanted to pass information they could send messengers of use some signs e.g smokes or make some noise by doing this they could communicate.People were used to these signs and whenever they so the smoke or hard some kinds of noise  they knew what was required of them.This went on for a  long time until somebody came up with the modern ways of communication people were educated about the use of modern communication and their lives changed.

================
Communication 2 ~ 487212
================

Communication change the lives of many people since the introduction of cell mobile phones,people can communicate with other people through the phone,sending money by phone and sending on short messaging service when the calling rates is not bad both airtel and safaricom and yu were considering people who do not have enough financial to survive people in kenya,Ruanda Tanzania and other countries speak through the phone and finished not like writing a letter long time ago as a traditional moden of communication.

================
SECURITY ~ 487596
================

In Kibera for the past few years there have been cases of theft around the bus stop during the night. Many residents who came from work same night felt very bad since it was their luck if they pass the place with their mobile phones or there life still.
The corners grew and became more dangerous that  the residents could now not pass that place late at night and many lost their lives and property from that place.
The government built a police post at the place to check the security of the place which help the residents to have their freedom to move.

================
RURAL ELECTRIFICATION ~ 492693
================

Electricity is one of the important forms of energy required in modern homes to simplify work.

Most rural parts of uganda are denied with hydro-electricity

NACO Solar outlet came sraight to enable rural peoplr satisfy their dreams. This was done by introducing solar elctricity to ruual areas.

Nowadays, people have shifted from ‘Tadoda’ to bright ans smoke free lights. mobile phones are charged, Television and DSTVs are now operating far deep in villages.

Finally there is no need fro going to kampala for entertainments due to global village

================
Human Rights ~ 482877
================

Human rights are the rights that a citizen is entitled to violation of these rights by any other person is subject to a fine on imprisonment by a court of law.
In kibera,there seems to be no rights at all to the citizens living there.They got harrased by policemen and their living standards were so poor that they even risk getting infected by several communicable diseases and infections.
The government put in place a human rights mobile office that has been going round to help the citizens/residents of kibera area thuus views to the government.This has not succeeded because whatever the people say are not captured and reported to the relevant authorities in the government.
The residents therefore appeal for more help to know their rights.

================
CONSERVATION ~ 487596
================

This were mobile toilets which were invented by someone and named it eco tiolets. It is just a normal toilet but it is on wheels. It was mainly made to serve purposes of outdoor functions e.g weddings but the owner saw the need of placing some of the toilets in Kibera because of teh scarcity of toilets in the region and some of the people had to use plastic bags of to defecate in forests and bushes which were very unhealthy for the environment.

The company would mount two eco-toilets in a lorry and transport them to kibera at designated points. The waste they collected was later used to produce biogas and either way it was profitable. The idea was good but wasn’t a success because they were not available at night and when they were most needed by residents and teh company never left the eco-toilets for security purposes and therefore with time, it became a failure.

================
JOKE ~ 487596
================

A woman wanted to reach her husband on his phone but discovered that she was out of credit. She instructed her son juniors, to use his own phone to pass across an urgent message to daddy who is at the site.
After junior had called, he got back to mummy to inform her that it was a lady that picked up daddy’s phone the three times he tried reaching dad on the phone (woman!!)
She waited impatiently for her husband to return from the site. Immediately she saw him, she gave him a very hot slap. Whilst the man was trying to ask why? she repeated the slap.
People from the neighbourhood rushed around to know the cause of this. The man asked junior to say what the lady said to him when junior called. “Mteja wa nambari uliopiga hapatikani kwa sasa” meaning “the mobile subscriber can not be reached for now. Please try again later” and the people were amused and nobody could say anything.

================
A DAY TO REMEMBER ~ 486830
================

our community is bad in homes and villages. We don’t have clothes, food, education and homes. People are suffering by many thing and people tried to have peace with other’s people. When the goverment are dowing bad things and they are not happy with them.And many people are stilling money, mobile and they can live people alone.
Children are carrying for their peace and education and other children are sick and suffering for kwashiakor and rickets. Many women are pregnant and they don’t have hospital and houses. They are walking with no sadack or shore and they are walking with no clothe and animals are died like cows, donkey, camels and other animals.
When people don’t have peace with their life they can not have good health. The government are now help them with every thing and giving the children clothes and education now people are very happy because they have giving a new life and now children are going to schools.

================
Rakai health science program provides free HIV/AIDS services. ~ 482877
================

Rakai health science program offered free HIV/AIDS services to people of Kabila subcounty in mobile clinic out reaches.There was free HIV testing to all people who wanted and results were confidential to those who tested.people were tought about HIV/AIDS especially how they can stay safe from the disease.
There was distribution of free condoms to whose who wanted them  and they were first educated how to use them for maximum protection.many people benefited from these free services especially the youth.

================
How youth venture Association develops the youth career. ~ 482877
================

Youth Venture Association was started some 2 years back,it was started majorlly to develop youths’career.
This association has really helped the youth especially those youth who dropped out of school  due to lack of school fees.
This association has helped the youth to become job creators than job seekers where by it experts who teach the youth how to repair computers,radios,televisions sets,computers,mobile phones at cheap fees.
This association has not only developed the youths career but has change the community since the people around once they have problems with their computers,phones,radios they are repaired there at cheap costs.

================
HEALTH ~ 492557
================

I am an employer with the medicines sans and it has really helped me improve my standards of living by giving me an employment. We work at the slums by provide basic health care information and care. We have a small mobile car with a strecher to help carry either disabled or very sick people who cant takr themselves to the hospital.
Our organisation has really helped in providing basic health care to slum dwellers. We admit four people daily in the slums who are very sick and can’t access basic healthcare facilities e.g hospitals.
We are a global organisation and we help in relief situations and our division has been posted to help slum dwellers because we saw that there is a shortage of doctors in the slum.
We will continue to provide this healthcare until everyone has access to better health care.

================
HOSPITAL PROBLEM ~ 486830
================

In my province which is Nyanza,Nyakach constituecy near my village.people were suffering with deadly and very critical diseases with no prevention neither a cure.This was mainly caused by lack of any medical centure around.Hospitals were far away and one had to border atleast vehicles so as to reach the hospital.This was so bad in that when a patient is on a very serious condition for him/her to reah the hospital will take decades.This went even further to reducing the population since some died on the way while others reach at the destination(hospital) and die before even being treated.
Some CDF members symphathised with this situation and offered to build a hospital. thta was 3 years down the line and up to date it is not yet completed and people still suffer but also thanks a bit for the government’s work who provided some mobile hospitals which are now used and atleast thre is a bit of death rates since they try to teach citizens how to prevent some diseases while they also offer some drugs which can help.But their main issue is to educate people of how to prevent diseases and how one can stay in a better environment and course, who dosen’t know that prevention is better than cure.Apart from all these the villagers still hope that the hospital will be completed and have a better medical resource.

The GlobalGiving Storytelling Project asks people in communities all across East Africa to tell a story about a time when a person or organization tried to help someone or change something in your community.

Today I took Zipporah and Moses to visit Horizon Contact Centers, the company that transcribes our thousands of paper stories.

Zip took a taxi from home and dropped off about 5000 more stories:

Horizon team helps unload 5000+ more stories

Moses reads a story from the pile

Each bag is a batch collected from a specific place on a single day.

It’s hard to capture visually how big this data set is. The stacks weigh hundreds of pounds and would completely fill my old VW Golf. Based on the 30% that has been transcribed (~7000 stories), Horizon estimates that we’ve given them between 16 and 20,000 stories. What began for them as a two-person job now requires a staff of 3 full time and 11 part-time transcribers! They work in both day and night shifts, transcribing each story and scanning the originals.

The volume is beginning to be a liability, because the few cents we pay scribes and transcribers is adding up. Amazingly, our team has managed to keep all this data organized.

Considering the hundreds of Africa research projects that aim to collect community feedback, how is it that no one has ever faced the problem of an unquenching flood of information before?

Susan, Moses, Alice, and Marc discuss the volume of stories

I’m sure everyone would like to have this “problem.” The real problem is that we have not yet figured out how to provide the right “slice” of this information to each person, organization, or unique audience that needs it. That will be our focus for the next six months.

Why the flood?

Yesterday Zip, Moses and I spent several hours talking about the first six months of the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project. We agreed that the reason gathering feedback has been easier than we expected is that:

1. We’ve earned the public trust. GlobalGiving is completely transparent and people truly believe our aim is to help everyone be heard. No hidden agendas.
2. We offer just enough of a nudge to make it worth their time to collect stories.

We offer story collectors (or “scribes”) money: 10 Kenyan shillings or 300 Ugandan shillings for each story they collect correctly. This is about 10 to 13 cents. It is a good wage or a poor wage, depending on what side of the tracks you live on. It’s not perfect, and it’s not breaking the bank. A scribe typical earns $3.50 a month for 30 stories. Other evaluators expect community members to give information for free, and fret when that information is fraught with the interviewee’s biases. People generally tell you what they think you want to hear. I think this effect is amplified when you offer them nothing, because now they start working to get something by saying the magic words that will unlock future wealth.

Because GlobalGiving is a neutral party, and we recruit scribes that are somewhat removed from the NGO scene they are seeking to gather stories about, these stories are less biased. In the future I’ll demonstrate some quantitative ways of gauging this reduced level of bias compared to other information.

All of these stories will soon be available online. (It’s a tech problem now – the database is full but the website isn’t built.)

We asked Horizon’s transcribers to tag stories especially worthy of highlighting.

These are 8 stories they tagged:

RESPECTING HUMAN LIFE

She is a woman found in Kasubi-Kampala District found a child on the dustbin. This child was in a critical moment.After reporting herself to police she took the lady to hospital upto now the lady is still helping the child financially to the extent that the lady is paying school fees for this girl-child.

FLOODS

I lived with my family in a slum. We had a grass hatched house. One day it rained so heavily our house was full of water to an extend that a nine month child would drown. But one rich man felt mercy for us and gave a house.

GOD PARENTS

I was an orphan without a mother and a father. I was very lonely in this world. I never got any love of mother and a father. One day a good couple came to the Sanyu babies Home and took me in as their own daughter.

HEALTH CARE

The Village Health Team(VHT) has helped us in such away  that they bring health treatment nearer to the people deep in the villages.
They have decreased the spread of malaria and other preventable diseases.

WORLD VISION IMPROVES ACCESS TO WATER

World vission helped us to establish a bore hole in our village. Water is a problem in our community becouse swamps are far from our homes but this bore hole atleast helps us to have access to clean water although we need more bore holes.

DISCRIMINATION IS NOT GOOD

My parents died when i was four years my relatives mistreated me to the point of dening me a chance to study because am disabled. Iwas treated as a dog ata home. I can God sent me an angel to rescue me, a good freind of my late parents visited us one day and decided to take me with her. Iwas taken to Uganda society for disabled children as i talk now i earn a living through my skills. why not to say that the credit be reserved for this organisation

JOBLESSNESS

KAZI KWA VIJANA is a government initiative to help reduce joblesness among the youths because the unemployment rate in kenya is very high and it was noted that most of the crime was committed due to joblesness of the youth also they blamed joblesness for drug use. It aimed to reach every village in the city and they succeeded in doing so very well.
Work detail included picking rubbish,clearing sewages,planting trees,clearing overgrown bushes and trees. At first we were so syked because we got something to do and we could get paid,since the government disbursed alot of money for the project some leaders became greedy and started to steal some money three weeks under the project it started to cramble and we were not paid efficiently so we had to quit and look for other job opportunities.
KAZI KWA VIJANA was good institute that the government started but greediness and corruption made it become a failure. I really wish that they become less corrupt and help the poor people in slums.

HEALTH

I am an employer with the medicines sans and it has really helped me improve my standards of living by giving me an employment. We work at the slums by provide basic health care information and care. We have a small mobile car with a strecher to help carry either disabled or very sick people who cant takr themselves to the hospital.
Our organisation has really helped in providing basic health care to slum dwellers. We admit four people daily in the slums who are very sick and can’t access basic healthcare facilities e.g hospitals.
We are a global organisation and we help in relief situations and our division has been posted to help slum dwellers because we saw that there is a shortage of doctors in the slum.
We will continue to provide this healthcare until everyone has access to better health care.

You can download a summary of our Storytelling Project‘s design and aims here:

Tagged: community, Development Informatics, dialogue, Horizon contact centers, kenya, technology aided, Technology Aided Development Informatics, transcription, uganda ]]> http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/transcribing-thousands-of-stories/feed/ 2 Duane Leonards GlobalGiving Storytelling Project east africa story project map DSC08020 dropping off 5000 more stories moses kigozi reading a story carload of stories to transcribe DSC08011_055 2011-04-15-Masaka-Town-Chedra-S#002-P#02 2011-04-15-Masaka-Town-Chedra-S#002-P#01 2011-03-31-Kibera-Victor-SmartClub-S#253-P#01 2011-03-31-Kibera-Victor-SmartClub-S#253-P#02 Zipporah at Horizon discussing the too much data problem pdf_icon http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/america-at-the-crossroads/ http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/america-at-the-crossroads/#comments Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:58:37 +0000 Marc Maxson http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/?p=1716 ]]>

Play "America at the Crossroads" (Complete)

This dramatic music dialogue was performed July 4th, 2011 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowshop of Centre Country (UUFCC) in State College, PA. Accompanying music was  Georgia On my Mind, Thunder Road, and What a Wonderful World:

America at the Crossroads

Listen to the Opening Words

Introduction:

We come together to be connected, inspired, comforted, and challenged.

Today we look at America at the crossroads – connected to the past but yearning for a better future – for all the world’s people. We celebrate America’s birth, and ask in what form will America’s rebirth come.

We think that we see things as they are; we don’t. We see them as we are. Let these words inspire us to see the world from many points of view, and in the mirror of how the world sees us, understand who we are on this anniversary.

We take comfort from the action of great leaders who placed us on the right path. Let not this comfort placate our hunger to bring about a better world.

We light this chalice as a reminder that we are the light of the world.

Dramatic reading: two readers. Left column is read by “America” and the Right column is ready by the speaker for the “world.”

Play Part I

America

Loved

         Hated

America the concept,

the blueprint for humanity

America the promise,

the silver lining of a mirage

that fades as you approach the horizon.

America. A People United.

Out of Many, One.

In God we Trust.

And trust we did.

But what has come of all those promises

in your back pages, America?

Time for self-examination is now,

on your anniversary.

Yes. Let’s. I’ll speak for America.

And you – as the voice of the world – can go first.

America I welcomed you

And kissed the ground when I arrived

I saluted lady liberty

Whose flame shines as a symbol.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

And the one who wrote those words also wrote:

“Until we are all free, none of us are free.”

America, you thrived in the days of Kings, Empires and Revolution

Whether faith, power, or reason formed the core,

we have yet to move beyond those days of strife and war.

America has inspired so many nations.

Our hopes and dreams live in documents:

The Declaration of Independence.

The Constitution.

Dear World: soon Change will come, and stay.

Those Dreams have become mere archives.

Ideals for a civics class.

Why do they never shine on Main street,

Wall Street, or Capital Hill?

The statue of liberty was a gift to America.

And since then, instead of erecting statues

to the liberty we spread elsewhere,

we have become

“The New Colossus” of wealth and power to the world.

But the rising tide of prosperity lifts all boats, doesn’t it? Peace and Prosperity – the lexus and the olive branch – go hand in hand.

But have they? Standing here in our small town,

We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.

Look at your own history.

 Of how this New World

Lured dreamers from old world shores…

…Who, through every stone laid,

And furrow turned,

Did build a world never imagined before,

With free religions, many hearts unchained,

Any many roads to justice paved,

Many paths to the American Way,

All this we forged.

But greed a sly temptress was she.

And when our labor failed

You made your suitors dare

look to African shores.

For hands to steal and chain.

For our dream became a game of more

And theirs a wretched nightmare.

Pioneers on fruited plains

A Trail of tears behind the growing pains

Both true.

Descendents of those slaves also made this land great.

One of whom wrote:

I am the darker brother

they send to eat in the kitchen

when company comes.

But one day America saw how beautiful he was

and we became ashamed. Countries change.

for this same poet believed: I am America.

And right he was. But now we are America too.

America has become more than a country.

It’s a belief. And we of the world are taking

The reins from you.

You’ve grown up. You’re at a crossroad.

Which path will you blaze?

Will you join us, or go your own way?

I thought we were helping you:

From the Halls of Montezuma,

To the shores of Tripoli;

We fight our country’s battles

In the air, on land, and sea;

No that’s not the America

we’re dreaming about.

What then?

We hold these truths to be self-evident

That all men are created equal

And that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Destructive governments shall perish from this earth.

But that same America fought the war on terror for you.

What about Guantánamo Bay?

Very Un-American, I’d say.

We built the allied army that won World War Two.

And rebuilt conquered lands in the decades that ensued.

History, like America, is full of contradictions.

Like Julia Ward Howe,

author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

She is the same who created a Mother’s Day for Peace.

She proclaimed:

‘From the bosom of a devastated Earth

 a voice goes up with our own.

It says: “Disarm! Disarm!

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

While singing:

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:

Jesus died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.

His truth is marching on.

And praying:

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them

of charity, mercy and patience.’

Mine eyes have seen the glory

Of the coming of the Lord;

He is trampling out the vintage

Where the grapes of wrath are stored;

Hah! The Grapes of Wrath. What a true American story!

That’s the America I know.

All power, all glory.

America – here are words from one of your own, a communist:

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

You made me want to be a saint.

America when will we end the human war?

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

Your machinery is too much for me.

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

America is this correct?

Everybody’s serious but me.

Then it occurs to me that I am America.

We are all America

In the sense that we all want a better life for our children.

And a fruitful future.

It’s just that Fear of the other clouds our vision and spoils our wisdom.

Each year you and I need to have this conversation

And see where are, and where we came from.

This next song for me embodies the spirit of America:

[Is america’s resilience better described by a story of a fortress bombardment, or a holding on to freedom and the dreams of our youth as we get older?]

 I’ve rewritten the lyrics a bit.

Play Thunder Road MP3

Thunder Road / America

Freedom Man & Lady Liberty

Like a vision she dances of Eden across the seven seas

Like a storm he travels on the wind

while you and me, we sing through the din

Our lives bring meaning to cacophany.

Don’t run back home yet, cause there’s more to America.

Are you scared and thinking that maybe

we ain’t that young any more

Show a little faith in our magic twilight

You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re all right

Oh and that’s alright with me.

You can hide beneath your covers and study your pain,

Make flags from your crosses, throw roses in the rain,

Pray for a savior to rise from these streets

But Redemption just aint free

Well every hero comes seasoned with wounds underneath

We talk about the glory but hide our history

With a chance to make it good somehow, hey what else can we do now

Except

Roll back the window and take in the scenes

An American crossroad of divided dreams

We got one last chance to make it real

To trade in our legends of history for what understanding of this world reveals.

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away

They haunt this dirty beach in the skeleton frames

of burned-out Chevrolets

It was a hefty price to pay

And I hope what we bought at the end of the day

Will shine like the heavens and hum like a Harley

Because the hopes for our country (carry more than you and me.)

They scream your names at night in the street

From Indo China to Tripoli

We got one last chance to make it real

to trade in these wings on some wheels

Climb in back, heaven’s waiting down on the tracks

Oh come take my hand  We’re ridin out tonight to case the promised land

Oh oh thunder Road, oh thunder road, oh thunder road

Dialogue, continued

Play America at the Crossroads Part 2: "What Now?"

World?

Yes?

This is the New America calling.

This is not about you.

It’s not even about me.

It’s about everybody crowded together.

So let’s not sufficate each other.

We’re at a crossroads and we need each other.

America – I think the world shares your Fears.

Let’s Live Deliberately.

Don’t just allow things to happen.

For now on, lets NAME the things to which we aspire.

Dreams are the scaffold upon which we build a stable future.

What do YOU want to see for our future then, world?

I don’t know. We can’t make up our minds.

I don’t want to wake up one day

and feel your yoke around my neck.

This great nation was built by simpler people

Who believed in justice and sacrifice.

We can promise to keep your neck free.

Then it’s time you talked to your minions on Wall Street.

Conquest to protect American business is a big part of your history.

Oh.

But I have my inner compass to think about.

There’s a Fear we can’t compete, and a Fear we must do without.

 Like all empires of power and might,

You shall wax and wane before you set things right.

That’s going to take time.

Time to live deliberately again.

Own your history.

Write your future.

I have a greater fear than for America’s power to wane:

It’s that it grows beyond our control

– the people who are America.

Then it is up to each of you to be America.

Whatever was done can be undone.

Make this your beautiful life.

Make this our wonderful world.

I can see how what we do sometimes doesn’t make it all that wonderful. Too many things just allowed to happen.

People aren’t mean; they’re busy.

Too busy for housekeeping of the American Dream.

The World Dream, you mean.

Right. So what next?

We live as if we are America.

We must Inspire others

to become all these things that are America too.

And every day we make the world a little bit more wonderful.

(sing What a wonderful world and America the Beautiful)

Play Part 3: What action can we take... Closing words

[Closing words (start at 8:05 in recording)]

I’ve lived a quarter of my life abroad. Sometimes I feel like I don’t know if I am American enough to lead a July 4th service, and so I’ve put a different spin on this to sort of show that when you live part of your life as a an American Abroad, what “being American” feels like tends to change.

It gets broader.

Let us carry with us the spirit of America. The Fourth of July is not just a day to remember our history and give thanks for the country we live in, but also a day to reaffirm our commitment to the future we want to make.

There is no Left or Right in this story. There is no wrong or right. These are stories of people who can hold contradictory ideas and be Americans. America is all of these things. We need to find a way to live as a people, not just as peoples.

Geomapping

Now that we’ve collected over ten thousand stories and transcribed about 6000, I’m starting to try and make groups of stories about important subjects more digestible. This map shows where all the stories about rape are coming form:

Click for interactive map

For reference, here are locations for all stories:

Click for interactive map

Within theinteractive map, you can scroll down to read all 100 stories in a list, or click on any location marker to bring up a particular story.

Geo accuracy: Those 10 stories from Southwestern Kenya should be in Kibera (Kisumu Dogo is a village) – but otherwise BatchGeo.com worked okay. Overall, 2.3% of all stories were about rape, and over half these stories were told by men.

VAP was interested to see whether their stories (frequently about the problem of rape) were typical of Kenya as a whole. This data ought to be able to answer that question, but it is still hard to parse and compare groups of stories. It is surprisingly hard to calculate the frequency of stories about rape per region within Kenya. I’ll need to sort by city and leave the rest out of the equation.

Pattern Mapping

Using SenseMaker(R) software licensed from Cognitive Edge, I imported other aspects of these 110 rape stories. (Every story mentions either rape or sita kimya.) Each story has more relevance to the idea or the people who benefited. The answers on our survey were: Good idea, succeeded; Good idea, failed; Bad Idea and Right people, Wrong People, Nobody. When you combine both answers SenseMaker lets you create a plot like this:

The dots represent where individual stories fall. Are they more about Good Ideas that succeeded and helped the right people (top), or are they Bad Ideas that benefited nobody (lower right)? I’ve moved these six labels around to get the combination that best parses the data into two major groups.

There are many other filter options on the left. Playing around with these 110 rape stories, I realize that the most represented organization is Sita Kimya and USAID (which funds this anti rape messaging campaign in Kibera, Nairobi).

This plot shows that 28 of 110 stories are related to Sita Kimya or USAID and the pattern is much like the whole set:

However, most of these stories are from men who tell stories as observers. 21 of the 28 stories in fact. What are the women talking about?

20 of the 29 stories from women are tagged as “NONE” or “None” – meaning the women did not identify any organization as the subject of their stories. Sita Kimya, as the USAID website explains, is clearly targeting men:

Through USAID/Kenya’s Women’s Justice and Empowerment Initiative, young men in Kibera challenge each other to reject violent behaviors towards women.

And they seem to be reaching their target demographic:

The above plot represents men who talked about Sita Kimya. 21 of the 78 stories about rape are about Sita Kimya specifically. Every single one of these men identify themselves as either an observer or an actor in the story they told. None are “affected by” the events in the stories.

So who is helping the women? In past stories, we saw that Box Girls International was teaching them self-defense skills, and I previously talked about how VAP tries to reach young women in Majengo with some straight talk about sex.

This kind of searching for patterns in story themes is much richer than the geomapping that is all the rage right now in big development agencies. But of course it is much harder to do successfully. How do you know when you’ve found the right pattern? There are multiple interpretations.

Here are all the locations we’ve collected stories for January to June of 2011 (about 4500 stories so far):

Click for interactive map

The numbers represent unique locations within a city, not numbers of stories.

I tried pumping those 1500 story locations mapped into BatchGeo (http://batchgeo.com/map/1fc96e2b6c4a458a54d51bcb25771493) – the results are not totally accurate, but not bad for an automatic process that doesn’t even support Kenya or Uganda from it’s web interface.

I also ran each Story “Neighborhood”, city, and Country through 44 thousand locations in the GeoNames service. Specifically you can download the list and use it offline or in your own database instead of the API. Here is what Google Fusion Tables does when provided with latitude and longitude values that match via Geonames:

I can tell it misses a lot in Nairobi and Kisumu – where local names are used. The BatchGeo version shows that there are 666 locations (and 3000 stories) within nairobi, but Geonames appears to have missed these:

Following the adage that you get what you pay for, my research assistant Dennis has been manually assigning coordinates to the most common story locations. If someone told a story as part of the GlobalGiving Storytelling project and gave a location that has been used 5 times now (out of 5000 stories), then it appears correctly on this map (which checks our custom Geo-tagging list first, then check Geonames.org:

And finally – a more accurate big picture of where stories are coming from:

So which method works best?

These three methods (Geonames, Google Fusion Tables, Batch Geo) have their relative strengths and weaknesses, depending on how much time you want to spend, compared with how important precise locations are to you. For my, the best approach was Geonames because I could combine it with my own custom lookup table for slums which appear on none of these maps.

If you are trying to put people on the map in Africa for the first time, no automated geocoding method will work. If you just want things in the right country, but no the right town, then any of these will work (but Batch Geo limits you to 2500 points).

Vijana Amani Pamoja (or “VAP,” meaning Youth Peace Together) runs several programs in Nairobi schools and sports fields that try to prepare the youth to make better life choices.
It’s founder, Enouce Ndeche, grew up in the slums of Kamukunji and played soccer addictively. I’ve known him for 3 years. Last year, I remember asking him where he got the idea to start this organization.

“I was volunteering with special olympics and one of the counselors gave me the idea – that one can impart life skills through sports.”

And for the last 7 years, Enouce changed his focus from getting noticed as a footballer to getting his fledgling organization noticed by funders. He’s had a few lucky breaks, but it have been a long hard slog from obscurity in a slum seldom heard of by outsiders.

Over the years VAP has gotten it’s fair share of capacity building support from CARE’s sports for social change network, and the occasional foreign NGO worker that visits the project and donates from his or her own pocket. VAP got introduced to GlobalGiving in 2006 along with CARE’s whole network of Kenyan sports organizations. But since then, it has been Enouce who has had to approach anyone he could think of to keep funding his projects. He can name SafariCom Foundation, SONY, Coaches Across the Continent, FIFA, and now the Anti-Corruption Commission among his supporters. But none of these sticks around for long, and none has provided VAP with funding for more than 3 consecutive years.

This isn’t an anomaly; this is business as usual in the NGO world. And although the money VAP has earned by reaching out to individiuals through GlobalGiving has been a modest piece of the whole, it’s been the most consistent source year after year. That’s because as unlikely as it is for any one person to give every year, the same percentage of 200 supporters will give each year.

Enouce attracted Nancy Waweru Ndeche 4 years ago to VAP, and she has been their programatic backbone. As a program manager, Nancy keeps VAP’s two dozen coaches and community volunteers on task and on budget. Nancy also says she loves the monitoring and evaluation side of her work – figuring out whether their approach is really working to change lives.

While Enouce is a middle-aged goofy, smiling kid with great rapport with youth, Nancy is the quiet inspirational leader. She encouraged Enouce to expand VAP’s programs beyond just sports to raise HIV awareness. Now they run a life-skills after school program for 100 girls aged 8 to 14 in two Majengo slum schools called the “Mrembo Project.” Mrembo means “Beautiful” in kishahili and as Nancy explains it, “The media reminds girls constantly about their outward beauty, but unless we help them realize their inner beauty, they will grow up making poor life decisions.”

The inner beauty is something special to behold, and I’ve had the honor of seeing it at Mrembo’s graduation ceremony today. We’re here handing out certificates to 100 girls who attended weekly thursday night classes about their bodies, boys, sex, aids, rape, and what to expect when they become teenagers. Liz, a teacher and Mrembo counselor, hands me certificates as Opo (one of the VAP coaches) calls each girl’s name. I shake hands with each girl and give them the certificate. Each one smiles and courtseys politely, but it is I who feel inaequate and full of gratitude for being invited to be part of this special moment. If you know what it takes to achieve this, you would too.
In addition to her work, Nancy is also a university trained swahili teacher (my teacher, in fact) and a mother of a 2 year old kid. In addition to worrying about where the money will come next month to pay her “coaches” (who mentor hundreds of youth) their $150 stipends, she found the time to travel to these schools and lead the classes herself for the first few months. She didn’t do it because anyone told her it was a good idea, or awarded her a grant, or took duties off her already full plate; she did it because it needed to be done and nobody else was gonna do it. It is that “funders be damned” attitude about starting a program that I admire in Nancy. I’m here for all of 2011 to run the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project, of which VAP is a part – but would I have the guts to do this if I had to also get a second job to make ends meet? I doubt it.

Kudos to those who trailblaze new programs where not a single funder comes forth to ease the path – like Nancy and her team at VAP. The Mrembo project happened because a mere handful of people made it happen. What they raised ($1,600), they earned all through GlobalGiving. What they couldn’t raise, they simply did without.

The peer educators put in extra time at no extra pay to help – like when they counseled a traumatized 8 year old girl whose best friend was raped. After graduation, Head Teacher Liz wrote her mobile number on the chalk board. “I’m 24-7 if you ever need to talk to someone about rape, menses, HIV, or anything, call me,” she says. This is the face of “innovation” – it’s a labor of love, not intellectual creation. Every time a mother is there to listen to a neighbor’s kid or offers a shoulder to cry about the challenges of growing up poor in a town where aggressive guys are trying to have sex with you before you even know that sex is, you’re looking at “International Development.” Only it isn’t international anymore, or really development – it’s dealing with problems on your street. And I hope by sharing what that looks like, I can make it  easier for others to keep on doing what they’re doing.

In their final Mrembo session, as part of the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project, the girls wrote stories about the challenges they face. One girl’s story went:

“Thanks to Mrembo project for teaching me about adolescence and rape and reproductive health and HIV. I want to end my bad behavior going to airstrip with boys. Now I want to find my second virginity. I was wrong but now I understand. I will give up prostitution forever.”

Another story from a girl under 14 went:

“There was a girl who was my best friend and was known as Elizabeth and we was in the same class which was class six. She have two songs and she is in a bad friendship now.

One day Eliz and I, we went to a place where was a group of people and they was some boyz who was boyfriends of Eliz. I ask Eliz, ‘Eliz where are you going with that boy?’

She haven’t answer any thing but Eliz, she went with a boy by bad new she slept with that boy and she get a pregnancy which was the second pregnancy. She gave up with education.”

These stories are from young girls, not teenagers, yet they’ve witnessed rape, faced pregnancy and early marriage.

According to Nancy and Liz, these girls were quiet at first, but over 18 months it became clear they’re exposed to much more than anyone could imagine. Anyone who thinks sex-education doesn’t matter to an 8 year old needs to come here and see the Mrembo project in action. And yet it only reaches two schools, when perhaps hundreds need it.
After graduation I spoke with the Principal of this “informal school.” In 14 years of operation, they’ve gotten no government funding and they only ask the parents to pay 300 Kenyan shillings a month ($3.75). Still, half the parents can’t even scrape it together. The head teacher said, “so what can he do? I will never turn away a smart student who is working hard. It is a dilemma.” Money has to come from somewhere, but it never comes. He showed me receipts for teacher allowances – 2000 shillings a month. He admits this $24 is too small to be called a salary, but he can’t give them any more. Teachers are here because they too want the community to improve – and giving kids an opportunity through education is worth the work, even if it doesn’t pay.

Their efforts can sometime attract the wrong kind of attention. During the ceremony he made a speech about how when he took over this school 18 months ago, there were a lot of programs that he had to throw out, but that Mrembo was one of the few that remained. There were people coming here to deliver ARVs, but eventually their supply of aids-fighting drugs dried up. By the time he’d taken over the school, these people were still coming – and bringing white people to the school to show off the work they claimed to be doing, but it was a sham. He said, “Eventually I couldn’t lie to the whites anymore. No one was getting any of the medicine as these people were saying. I tossed them out. But Mrembo has been here every Thursday night for months, teaching these girls.”

It saddens me that the world is full of do-gooders that sacrifice for others who live and work alongside freeloaders that try to cash in on that generosity (by convincing whites to give them money for ARVs they’ll never distribute) – but at least I feel there are ways to know who is who. And I’m asking you on behalf of Nancy, Enouce, and all the rest who have always been making a difference – if you can spare some money (perhaps $10 a month) for Mrembo – that you do so today. Their money has dried up, and Mrembo won’t happen next fall without money for sanitary pads and transport.

One person can change a life

It turns out that one person got the Mrembo project off the ground financially. One anonymous donor (of the 14 total) gave $1000 last year on GlobalGiving.  With part of that money VAP bought a mini fridge, stocked it with sodas and sold them, raising 800 shillings each month this way. According to Nancy this monthly $10 has helped them distribute sanitary towels to the girls, but they had to stop in May. The Principal also drove home this point today, noting that girls without sanitary pads miss about 60 days of school each year.

This postcard is from a visit to VAP’s Mrembo Project on May 26 20111. Read about the Story Theme Game that maps community issues in this part of Nairobi, created on a previous visit.

Piled Higher and Deeper has been around for almost a decade, vastly outliving the author’s tenure as a grad student. He still writes it full time for cash and glory while also teaching robotics engineering at a university. But this particular (not funny) episode illustrates the ease with which a cartoonist can turn a conversation with two other physyicists about dark matter into a movie strip. It’s much easier to follow than any text book or magazine article on the subject.

We should all take note of the power of illustration in teaching. RSA animate applies a similar style to make even wonky or complex topics fun to learn. This is the future of education – lectures are just a “quick and dirty” tool for communication. As we teach the same topic repeatedly, we should be developing a catalogue of fun entertaining videos and illustrations.

Click image to see full video, or watch the vimeo link at the bottom:

Can you believe that 95% of the stuff in the universe remains hidden? It illustrates my own idea, that you become a scientist when you realized how little we know. Once you realize how little you know, the scientific method of finding answers is simply the only realistic way to explore the universe.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1430

Gichuki Francis built his organization from the ground up over the last ten years. He operates TYSA (Trans-Nzoia Youth Sports Association) on his family’s pasture land outside of town, about 15 miles north of Kitale, Kenya. His father managed to acquire this land through 40 years of squatting around the time of Kenya’s independence. Francis was the 6th of 9 children, and the beneficiary of a good solid education from primary school straight through to Kenyan university. Gichuki, like Michael Jordan, has a degree in geography he doesn’t use. Other than his Kenyan education, he has no obvious “capacity building” experiences, such as living in another country or working for years at an NGO. Most of what Gichuki knows, he has learned from experience. He is a great listener and student of life – and absorbs knowledge from his surroundings at faster rate than everyone else. I think that is why he is successful.

His passion for starting TYSA comes from the struggles he had trying to gain access to education while growing up. He learned from his father at an early age that education unlocked opportunities, and wants the same for the youth in his home community. After his first year of high school, he approached the local priest teaching there to let him know that he would probably not be attending next year for lack of money. His father had a choice of selling off some of their land to pay for his school, or having him drop out. Eventually Gichuki was able to arrange a compromise – a lease of the family’s land to pay for his high school. As the 6th of 9 kids, few families would have prioritized education this way. But on account of his families financial efforts, Gichuki was able to find other scholarships and continue through university. All this is backstory to why Gichuki is able to manage so many local programs in a flexible and effective way.

Girls’ Football tournament

On Saturday TYSA hosted an all-girls soccer tournament on the cow pastures that he’d turned into soccer fields. 8 high school teams came. During the byes in the tournament, TYSA had arranged for the girls (ages 10 to 14) to attend two learning sessions: First, a doctor talked to them about female reproductive health. As mothers are reluctant to talk to their daughters about sex, menstruation, and adolescence, this might have been the only time some of these girls actually get told about their bodies. For a few, it was visibly too late: some of the girls attending were already mothers, though none were over 14 (according to the rules).

Second, Zip and Elizabeth (a local woman who runs a seed business and volunteers with TYSA) got the teams into a classroom and led them in a story writing exercise. As a witness, I could tell the hardest part was getting the girls to choose their own story to write about. Elizabeth used four examples in her explanation (Red Cross, TYSA, “talk about an accident,” or talk about poverty). Afterwards I read the stories and over half were about one of these four topics. While it may be true teens are particularly susceptible to adult suggestions, I think this reflects a more general problem in education – that young people learn to look for the implicit “right” answer hiding within a question asked. So even with a completely open ended question such as “talk about something happening in your community,” only a minority of storytellers answer with a story about something that matters to them personally. Most try to respond with “appropriate” answers that will be deemed by powerful outside authorities worthy to unlock opportunities for them and their communities. But for the minority that do have their own voice, storytelling can be very revealing about the community. The funny thing is that slightly younger kids don’t do this, and their stories are honest without regard to audience.

All in all, the day was a success. Girls from 8 teams wrote 250 stories, and the Kenyan doctor managed to give all the girls a crash course in female reproductive health. And there was some good soccer too.

At the awards ceremony Gichuki gave out cash prizes to each team, based on performance. These were to be allocated to purely educational needs by the girls on the team, in consultation with their local principal. “And I will be personally following up and reporting on how each of you use this money!” Gichuki added. “Don’t just eat it. Bread and sodas are not your ‘educational needs.’”

Prize money came in three ways: 2000 for winning the tournament, 200 for each girl scoring a goal in the first or last 7 minutes of a game, and 10 shillings for each story they wrote (GlobalGiving’s standard reward). When placed in the context of the other prizes, 2500 shillings ($30) from GlobalGiving essentially doubled the money going to local educational needs that day. And the value of these stories to TYSA in learning what these girls need is probably has much more value than what $30 could buy in any other form of community “evaluation.”

To understand how stories can change an organization, I’ll summarize our conversation with Gichuki from the night before. We were sitting in the hotel restaurant as Gichuki explained the tournament. He mentioned that the reason he was setting up the tournament to explcitly deal with female reproductive health came from their feedback over the past year from local girls. Through stories told in 2010, the girls said that (a) no local organizations truly target the needs of girls and (b) once they raised important issues, there was never any follow-up.

“So that’s why we’ve restructured our whole program to now have a FRH component. We didn’t talk about these issues in the past, and it was clear they needed it.” Gichuki said.

I asked him what other issues they’d learned about. He told a story about one girl who had gotten pregnant, dropped out of school, but after two years, was again pursuing her degree. It was a chaotic journey and she was thrown out and had to move in with her boyfriend at one point. But after TYSA helped inspire her with the confidence and determination to finish high school, and helped with school fees, she was managing again. In fact, she’d recruited a dozen girls from her school to join TYSA after that.

Similar traumatic events happen in this rural community quite a lot. We discussed another story about a girl who asked during a discussion, “what do you do if you your mother cannot feed you and there is a local boy who offers you food and a bed?”

It was a hard discusion, as no one at TYSA had an easy answer. Was it better to starve or trade sex for food? These are the dilemmas girls can face here. Morality and chastity become a luxury when faced with starvation, and yet many girls do choose this because they have positive support from their peer community at this “sports organization.”

I asked Gichuki my usual question about what words he would search for in a large body of ten thousand stories to try and pull out similar stories of girls experiencing the same problems elsewhere. He wasn’t sure, but was willing to experiment. He mentioned that “rape” is not described as rape here. The context changes everything.

For example, sometimes girls have to work shucking in the corn fields all day, and sometimes they’re alone with older men who approach them and make sexual offers. As there is no one who can see or hear them, the girl is on her own on how to respond. She might suffer a lot more refusing, maybe be beaten and then forced to have sex. But to avoid this field work is also to face starvation. The ways girls talk about these stories are hardly straightforward.

Zip was intrigued by the whole thing, because she also runs a primary school in a poor part of Nairobi (Komarock Kayole) when not working for GG. “How do you work with your community?” She asked.

Gichuki explained that there are four parts to doing this right. Through trial and error he’d realized you can’t solve a problem that crosses community boundaries without involving every group.

He says, “We always start by focusing on the child. We listen to them and often they know what they need.”

He flipped over the paper with the tournament schedule and began to sketch it out:

“How do you work with the community?

Priorities are:
1. Child
2. Parent
3. School
4. Community”

“We don’t talk to the parent first. Sometimes a parent will come to TYSA and say ‘can you help my child succeed?’ And we say, ‘send your child here and we will talk to them.’ And sometimes it takes years before the parent realizes we mean this. You cannot help a child through a parent.”

He then sketched out the things that a child needs in order to succeed:

“A) Sports
B) Child protection –> youth parliament 0-14 -> junior assembly 15+
C) Capacity building –> life skills
D) Must Embrace education”

Sports is a bridge to the child, a fun activity that gets him or her into situations where TYSA can talk about issues of “child protection” and “life skills.” To get parents involved, he makes every kid bring back a signed parental permission form, though he doesn’t collect any fees from them. And finally – no child can participate in sports if they are failing at school. In fact, every school respects TYSA because through their program about 70% of the students pass with a high school degree, whereas the national average is half that.

Gichuki then explained a “points system” they’ve adopted to award students for achievement. Students that earn a total of 270 points become eligible for a scholarship, funding through the GlobalGiving program. Points are awarded not just for good grades, but also for exhibiting leadership qualities, performing community service, and for participating in sports – which is essential for learning to work with others as a team. Every time kids take the pitch for a game, he reminds them, “You are not here to win. You are here because it is a learning experience. We don’t just kick this ball around, we kick it because it means something – it helps you build character.” [or something like that] His motivational speeches are consitently about the whole person, and not just the great athlete. And yet TYSA breeds winners. When they traveled to Nairobi last year and faced better funded and more fully clothed teams (often wearning cleates!) they still dominated while running barefoot. TYSA and Carolina for Kibera faced off last April in the Semi-finals of a MYSA tournament and won! (BTW TYSA, MYSA, and C4K are all on GlobalGiving).

What does rewarding points for character mean to Gichuki? He grins and replies, “it doesn’t take brains to fix that fence over there,” pointing to the boundary between the field and the road, “it takes character.”

Lamec, his right hand man of about age 20, was also a “beneficiary.” Lamec manages just about all the programs for Gichuki, but focuses on the scholarship program. Lamec wasn’t the best athlete nor the best student in the area, but he had outstanding character and leadership qualities that Gichuki recognized and nurtured. “When Lamec was in St. Theresa’s secondary he averted a student strike. Both sides were getting hot and he intervened and managed to negotiate a compromise.” That kind of leadership is worth “points” in Gichuki’s system. And what a great meritocracy he has created in rural Kenya – where honesty, hard work, and personal character are rewarded with scholarships and opportunity to help one’s community. It takes a leader to nuture leadership – and I find it compelling that neither Gichuki nor Lamec have the kind of resume that would attract outside attention. He simply excels and searching for solutions.

It reminds me a Buckminster Fuller quote:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

And that is what his points system does for the grading system in schools, without creating any conflict with the ministry. Kids go to school because they want the opportunity for a career and a better life. Grades and schooling are just an intermediate step. TYSA provides that opportunity more directly – through merit-based scholarships that measure and reward the whole person, not just the person’s ability to memorize answers for a test or kick a ball into a net. You know it works because what emerges from TYSA’s program are leaders, not mere students. I know some failing “education” NGOs that have recognized failing schools and tried to reform them from within – but here’s model that works in spite of the shortcomings of the school. And most of what this “sports organization” does doesn’t even happen on a soccer field. (read about the “community” approach below.)

When putting this in the context of “innovation,” Gichuki typically fails to recognize how innovative his approaches are. He intuitively modifies his programs based on “what works” so effortlessly that he doesn’t keep good records of all the failed approaches along the way. Continuous community feedback keeps him on the right track.

This is simpler, yet more effective than most expert-driven methods in “international development.” None of his solutions were suggested by outsiders, nor evaluated, nor funded as a concept on its own. Funding goes into scholarships (the ultimate reward for individual performance) but the rest of the system is community and volunteer driven. It works because Gichuki builds upon solid foundations – by starting with the child, listening to the child, working with the school, orienting parents, and inviting community elders to participate in guiding the community’s children.

Yes, he’s won a Millennium Development Goals award and all that prestige (As best NGO empowering girls in Kenya in 2010), but the way Gichuki tells it, “I wished we could have competed for Goal #8 – partnerships – but the MDG Trust didn’t think they could pick a winner in that category.”

And why aren’t there awards for building strong community-wide partnerships, when that seems to be the most important part of success?

A model of community building

TYSA’s community feedback approach preceded the GlobalGiving storytelling project. Gichuki actively partnered with GlobalGiving for storytelling because he saw it aligns with his existing system. When problems arose for TYSA’s kids that were beyond the scope of sports, school, or what parents could do – he reached out to the community and formed groups. Some village elders became community mentors, men and women that the youth could talk to about problems, and who could also be a bridge between the children and parents.

When one girl got pregnant at 14, she met with the elder, and the elder woman started casually talking to the parent, and dropping in hypothetical hints to ease the shock, such as, “say your daught got pregnant… how would you handle that?”

Gichuki explains how the other group of elders worked with ‘black books’:

“We formed a community council and trained the elders in conflict resolution. The elders wanted help resolving conflict but they were not addressing the root of the problem.”
“We gave them black books. They would walk around and record the conflicts they resolved. This is how we discovered that one of the common issues in the community was drunkenness.”
“Second, these black books revealed to us the issue about the children – how they were caught up in the conflict. The mother and the father were fighting and the kids were in between.”
“One girl ran away – and that led us back to the issue. The father beat the mother, and he was not her biological father, so the girl wanted to run away. This was a common story – where a girl doesn’t live with both biological parents, we see many family problems like this.”
“Later, that mother lent her phone to the daughter so she could talk to a boyfriend. The father thought this daughter was using TYSA to find boyfriends. So we tracked the phone number – and it wasn’t from Kisumu, where she had gone for a running competition. It was the neighbor boy. So we were not to blame. I remember her because she was a ver good 800 meters runner.”

Operation Back to School

“We later used the community leadership council in ‘Operation back to school’ to find out how many kids are not staying in school. Between the school and a nearby bridge – we’d see a child sitting on a school day and we ask ‘which is your school?’ Then we would pick them up and bring them to their school. We’d ask the teacher, ‘you know this child?’
She’d say, ‘Yes – last time he came was months ago.’ Sometimes years! She’d say, ‘I rememer he stopped coming because there was this case of the text book that was lost.’ And we would resolve it like that.”

That’s all it took – turn a life around and put a kid in school simply by resolving a lost text book that would have cost $10 to replace, but the fear of punishment was turning him into a dropout. I remember hearing the same story in anecdotes form Isobel Turner at RETRAK. A large number of Kampala’s street children were runaways because of minor misunderstandings at school or home. If only there was a way for TYSA and RETRAK to see their own problems through each other’s stories, hmmm?

Gichuki continued, “In other cases uniforms were critical to keeping kids in school, so we’d buy them uniforms. Other times we cooked food because that was the problem. Or when the problem was at home, we would call the parents. Sometimes the parents would never come to school for a conference until we visited them at home.”
“So for 6 months we were out there on the roads, identifying and resolving issues. And soon there were no more kids hanging around the roads on the way to school. “

The next year Gichuki explained that conflicts and safety issues were happening on the path from TYSA back to kids homes. Parents blamed TYSA, and Gichuki asked them, “when they leave our place, to whom does this kid belong to?” And he mapped out the crux of the issue:

[ TYSA ]  <––––––––––––––––––    [ HOME ]
         -–––––––––––––––––>   

             [ SCHOOL]

In between TYSA, SCHOOL, and HOME, the kid belongs to the whole community. “It is all of our responsibility. Don’t leave TYSA alone, or the parents, or the school alone,” he told them. “We must all play our part.” And eventually the kids were not getting into trouble.

I found myself frantically scribbling down everything coming out of Gichuki’s mouth during that meeting, and over the next day. This is what the “searcher” that Bill Easterly talks about in the White Man’s Burden looks like. Fun, interesting, easy to follow, and effective. We should be all so lucky to have someone like that in our community.

Follow TYSA on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/tysa

Support TYSA: http://goto.gg/4237

Search TYSA on GlobalGiving

Read stories abut TYSA from community on GlobalGiving (you need to scroll down to 2010 on the project wall)

After building Lexicons (most frequently used words) for the NGO world (4970 projects), 3300 community stories from Kenya, and the Millennium Development Goals experts, I decided it would be fun to see how my church community compares: Unitarian Universalists.

Why Unitarians?

I picked UUs because I could find over 100 sermons online, whereas Mennonites (the other group that preaches social justice religiously) don’t have much. Quakers would be interesting, but having no ordained ministers, they have very little text to mine in the way of sermons.

If people find this interesting, and ask, I can build a word list that reflects the common phrases and attitudes of other church communities and compare them to stories about the people whom they aim to help.

Download the 2000 most frequently used words from 100 Unitarian Univeralist sermons: UU_sermon_keywords.txt

Highlights

• The top 10 Unitarian Universalist sermon words read like a phrase: Unitarian life, know, time, world may see just work, community love. (Details below)
• Unlike community stories, UUs talk about Spirit, sense, questions, and being creative, in order to find truth, religion. (For me this is a reasonable representation of many sermons I’ve heard.)
• Community stories focus on real life needs and events. They use words like spread,  problems, killed, government, village, hospital, and animals, whereas UUs rarely do.
• The overlap: The words life, community, time, work, need, people, and good are important words in UU sermons and in Kenyan community stories.

Data

Top 20 words used in sermons, versus the relative rank (1 to 2000) same word is used in community stories. (Score of -2000 means it it doesn’t appear. Score of -7 for Life (UU rank of #2) means it appears 7 places lower in stories (#9 overall in this case):

Words that are most important to UU but not at all in stories. The number is the rank that each word has among UU sermons: