Date: 2024-12-26 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00004839
Peter Burgess Dialog ... Misc
SEEP
I sent the following to SEEP ... May 21 2013.
Burgess COMMENTARY
I sent the following to SEEP ... May 21 2013.
I have been involved in global business, emergency response and socio-economic development in various capacities since the 1970s. I had academic training in engineering and economics at Cambridge and also became a Chartered Accountant.There have been times when I have had interactions with SEEP. This has been over a good number of years and there has been no meaningful connection even though my agenda about metrics and the SEEP agenda about Monitoring and Evaluation should include considerable common ground.Accountability is virtually non-existent in the ODA space in part because the accounting and the performance metrics are weak ... and monitoring and evaluation too little too late. Worse M&E tends to have a focus on a project's activities as a proxy for progress when it would be much better to go for the jugular and measure progress in the place or places where the activities are being implemented.
I am an advocate for what I call TrueValueMetrics (TVM) which seeks to measure state, progress and performance of people, place and planet based on the analysis of value and not just money and profit.
Change the way you score the game, and you will change the way you play the game.
With TVM it will become possible to operate social business stock exchanges as well as holding ODA beneficiaries accountable for the performance of their projects!
Peter Burgess TrueValueMetrics
The purpose of this attempt to renew contact is to 'try again' to engage with the SEEP staff. They are in the right place in terms of their concern that the M&E process is not working, but I do not sense that the solutions they are talking about are going to make much of a difference.
One part of the problem is that the project and the measurement are part of the external intervention ... while the vast mass of economic activity goes on in poor places without any project, and without any external funds, and very little of internal funds. My experience over a very long time suggests that the challenge is to catalyze improved productivity in a place by means other than external funding and projects and heavy handed and often misplaced 'this is how to do it' expertise.
Maybe I can suggest that what is needed is education about 'how to learn', because it will be through learning more than anything else that people are going to solve their own problems.
And in passing, I should add that any assistance that is based on making money profit through helping is a dangerous business and economic model, that in most cases will fail and in the process make the beneficiaries worse off!
Peter Burgess