CARE Failing Forward

Too Many Trainings

If you looked at a problem and thought, "the answer is more capacity building and more guidelines" Florence Santos says you might need to think again. Based on her experience leading Monitoring and Evaluation at CARE, she's seen a proliferation of tools and resources that aren't really solving the underlying solution. If it's the recommendation you would always have made under any circumstances, you're probably not looking carefully enough at the solution. Florence reflects on how she would get to a solution with fewer tools and trainings, and more systematic follow through.

Reimagining IMAGINE

CARE implemented the Inspiring Married Adolescent Girls to Imagine New Empowered Futures (IMAGINE) project to design & test interventions aimed at delaying the timing of first birth among married adolescents in Niger (Zinder region) and Bangladesh (Kurigram district) between 2016 and 2022. Rachael Goba explains how the IMAGINE journey went on married adolescent girls envisioning, valuing and pursuing alternative life trajectories. For example, after 22 months of implementation, contraceptive use in Niger was significantly higher in the treatment group compared to the control group; and higher for those who have had a birth compared to those who have not.

The New Usual: Supporting Frontline Healthworkers as a goal, not a tool

Frontline health workers play a critical role in delivering health services globally, especially to the hardest to reach populations. Despite their importance to health systems and universal health coverage goals, this majority female workforce faces diverse and ongoing barriers affecting their working conditions and capacity.   Pari Chowdhary talks about how at CARE, we aim to bring support and work with and for FLHWs to achieve healthy outcomes across our programming countries, but also, we aim to bridge key gaps like equipping and training FLHWs.

Connecting Learning to Decisions

This time on the other side of the mic, Emily Janoch talks about what it takes to truly move from learning to changing the choices we make, and the hard commitment to "do it differently, not just next time, but every time after that." We all need to be accountable to impact. How do we remove the idea that we are the heroes of the story in development, and how do we acknowledge our own privileges, let them go, and learn to deploy them for others instead of ourselves. Christabell Makhokha hosts, asks great questions, and helps hold a space for vulnerability.

Cozy with the context

Monalisa Salib wants you to get cozy with the context. If your theory of change is full of assumptions and logical statements that could easily be true anywhere in the world, it's probably not going to work. Only by understanding the context where we operate and respecting the actors and the expertise in that context will real change happen. That means knowing the specific players, actors, and dynamics where change gets done. Another tip she has for you: people matter more than process, and technical solutions will never be enough.

It is possible: Savings groups in emergencies

Natacha Brice--who runs CARE's work on Village Savings and Lending Associations in Emergencies (VSLAiE)--wants you to know two things about doing group savings in crisis settings: 1) It is possible, and it will have big impacts; 2) it's going to take a lot of hard work to do it right. You can build capital in crisis, which changes how we think about both our long term programming and our emergency response. There's a lot we've learned on the journey. Thanks to Beja Turner for hosting!

Getting Rigor Right

Why do we spend so much time and money on gathering data we never use? Why can't we always find the data we need to make good decisions? Christina Synowiec from Results for Development talks about Getting Rigor Right, and article she co-authored on deciding how rigorous data needs to be based on the decision you are trying to make. Sometimes you need quick, indicative data. Sometimes you need people's voices. (Often you need both). You always need data, but only sometimes do you need the most rigorous data to make a good decision.

Balancing Risk and Agility: The benefits and challenges of 78 years of organizational expertise

In our 100th episode, Michelle Nunn talks about lessons learned since she last joined the podcast with Fourth Quarter Failure, including navigating challenges we never predicted--like COVID-19 and the conflict in Ukraine. Some of her reflections include that we have to lean more into local leadership and networks with humility, we have to lighten our systems, and we have to create a space where everyone can be a change agent. Building new tools to listen to the women we work with faster and more completely, balancing risk, and becoming agile are some of the thoughts at the top of her mind.

Reigniting Empowerment: Redesigning staff diversity training to prevent harm

Aqsa Khan and Diana Wu talk about the journey to re-imagine and redesign CARE's Reflections on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (REDI) training after getting feedback that the previous version was harming staff with marginalized identities. Even with the best intentions, diversity trainings can do more harm than good. So we had to redesign ours. Change only happens when you commit to doing the work. Staff have to reflect, to change, and commit to grow. Some of the other key lessons they shared: senior leadership commitment is critical, we need to focus more on accountability, not just awareness, and budgets and resources are crucial to getting things done.

This is work none of us do alone. We had a lot to learn from people who are doing this work. Here are some of the key resources CARE drew inspiration from for the REDI training.

• AORTA, Continuum of becoming a transformative anti-oppression organization.
• We Don’t Want to be Stars
• Vo Vo
• Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective/ Mia Mingus – Accountability Lab
• Community Accountability Videos from Barnard

Avoiding Hothouse Flowers

Joshua Muskin from Geneva Global talks about the incentives and biases that cause programmers to design "hothouse flowers"--projects that will only work inside the special resource and attention environment of a startup and a pilot. To get to scale, you need to think beyond the hothouse, to what will work under the hardest conditions, not the easiest ones. Who scales, what resources they have, and what their goals and incentives are contribute so much more to scale than having an elegant solution from the outside. "Be more trust based" is just one of Joshua's tips on how to succeed in creating something that could scale.

Telling the Truth in Love

Rachel Wolff talks about the journey to cede power to local organizations, and continuing to push to center people in the most marginalized communities as the leaders, responders, and decision makers in their own lives. We need to put more power and more voice for impact into our partners, and be accountable for impact. Rachel talks about Nepal's Humanitarian Partnerships Platform, and how much faster partners are at stepping into the lead. Mutual respect, being flexible, and telling the truth in love so we can all get better are powerful tools. And speaking of power--remember when you have it, and step back to leave room for others.

Don’t Feed the Zombies

Kevin Starr talks about his article "Don't Feed the Zombies" and how if we focus on measuring reach, instead of caring about impact, we end up doing harm in the world. His vision is a world where you can't get taken seriously if you can't talk about real, measurable change in the lives of people we serve, and the evidence to back it up. "The minute you commit to impact, and a definition thereof, you're starting to be part of the solution." What's a definition of impact? Evidence of change that happened in someone's life, and a plausible description about how your part in that change worked. If we (especially donors) are not accountable for impact, they end up supporting groups that aren't accountable to the people they serve, and are not driving for the full potential of what we can get done in the world. Here are some other links to check out:

• Making Ourselves Accountable
• Strategy: Go Big or Go... Oh, Just Go Big
• The Seven Commandments of Funding
• The Lazy Funders Guide to High-Yield Philanthropy

Life Happens: Balancing Rigor and Lived Truth

Anne Sprinkel talks about trying to implement, translate, and apply learnings from a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) in the middle of a pandemic. "Communities are not laboratories, and they deserve so much more." She talks about how to combine qualitative data and triangulate different perspectives in an RCT, and all of the learning around it. "Simply taking one person at their word...that is truth." Anne first joined the podcast in 2019, talking about Square Pegs and Round Holes and fitting research to community needs. Nearly four years later, she's talking about what their RCT told them, social norms findings, and balancing people's lived truth with "rigorous" research findings.

From $2 to $20: getting more impact for the dollar in international development

Mark Muckerheide talks about what it would take to close the gap that international development aims to work on. Right now, Mark's team estimates that many programs get $2 for every dollar they put in. To truly close the gap, it needs to be $20 per dollar in. So how do we get 10 times better? Focus on putting "money in her pockets" and think about measuring efficiency by the benefits to women who make less than $4 per day. That means we need to think about the bigger system, and fixing the market failures that prevent women from participating fully.

Why Resilience Beats Sustainability

Sustainability fails because it assumes progress is a straight line, and things will always be getting better. Gloria Steele talks about why our thinking about how COVID, climate change, and conflict show us that we need resilience, the ability of people and systems to bounce back. Sustainability is continuing to do what others define as progress. Resilience is being able to choose the path that works for you. What's an example of resilience? Refusing to allow gender norms to define who has capacity, and what capacities they have. Another tip she has is "we are only as good as we are able to learn."