Giving Compass' Take:

• Yuen Yuen Ang, writing for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, describes how to reform development agencies by highlighting three critical areas of improvement: lack of knowledge about non-best-practices that work, lack of diversity, and lack of incentives.

• What are the significant barriers that create the divide between development agencies and local communities that need help?

• Read about how international philanthropy has a role in progressing global change. 

"Going local" means to account for the specific needs and particularities of a community, whether national or subnational. It also entails using local resources and knowledge in a manner that goes beyond just setting up local offices and hiring local staff.

Although going local is widely embraced in principle, it may not be carried out in practice. For global development agencies to move forward, they must first reform themselves to overcome three major obstacles: lack of knowledge about non-best-practices that work, lack of diversity, and lack of incentives.

If we fail to address these organizational constraints, calls for change risk turning into nothing more than platitudes and buzzwords that exhaust practitioners and drive away true solutions.

On top of hubris, I highlight a different problem: By insisting on one universal standard of good governance, practitioners become blind to numerous possible solutions in developing communities. For decades, influential development organizations have benchmarked the quality of governance worldwide by a single standard — that of wealthy Western democracies.

Although international development organizations (IDOs) come in many varieties, leading organizations like the World Bank are traditionally dominated by economists. When causal inference is the holy grail of econometric rigor, we can expect economists to focus on statistical techniques for isolating the causal effects of an intervention on rice production.

I highlight three ideas that outline broad directions for reform rather than prescribe specific policies. After all, the individuals most qualified to recommend specific organizational solutions are the professionals who work in IDOs.

  • Build a bank of knowledge about non-best practices that work
  • Leverage different competencies at different stages
  •  Experiment and redefine success 

Read the full article about reforming development agencies by Yuen Yuen Ang at Stanford Social Innovation Review