Aldo Benini

Organizations of the poor

Book-length:

“Does Empowerment Work?” (2008) investigates the effectiveness in poor rural societies of a concept of modernity that has enjoyed an explosive career over the past fifty years - empowerment. From rich-nation self-help movements to the liberation of historically oppressed groups, programs claiming to give power to the powerless are legion. Often they are mixed with other normative master frames and social technologies such as human rights or micro-finance.

"Is Empowerment Efficient? - A Data Envelopment Analysis of 260 Local Associations in Bangladesh" (2008) attempts an inroad into the little-researched field of NGO efficiency, as distinct from effectiveness. I find that efficiency, i.e. measures of optimal resource use, is not correlated with effectiveness, the degree of achieving stated objectives. I seek a coherent interpretation of these various findings with the help of Dani Rodrik’s allegory of “second-best institutions”. The organizational arrangements that prove effective in poor societies are not always those recommended by context-free best-practice thinking. The method used to measure efficiency, Data Envelopment Analysis, has been used, in NGO contexts, almost exclusively for the study of micro-finance programs. It has potential as an evaluation tool for other multi-objective programs that traditionally have resisted an overall assessment of their efficiency.

What happens to very poor households after they have been NGO program participants for several years? An 800-household three-wave panel survey carried out by RDRS Bangladesh investigates this question. In "Resilience and Vulnerability in Long-Term NGO Clients" (2008), we find that while the rate of extreme poverty has fallen faster than in a reference population surveyed by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, both vulnerability and resilience remain high. As in other research, the ability to shift away from poorly rewarded casual labor is a key factor in escaping from poverty. We supplement standardized questionnaire interview data with life history interviews with a small sub-sample and find very few smooth declines or ascensions, but many zigzag trajectories, with most decline or improvement episodes not lasting more than three years. Practically, NGOs may not be able to stabilize their clients beyond an initial empowerment phase and may need to focus on strengthening enabling environments. - This is a second draft version (February 2008) for comment; your feedback will be highly appreciated.

Evaluating poverty reduction requires repeated measures of the living standards of the poor. Durable household goods have been used as simpler measures than annual income or expenditure, but the statistical analysis has remained complex and beyond the capacity of most local data-collecting organizations. In "The Wealth of the Poor. Simplifying living standards measurements with Rasch scales?" (2007), I investigate a large (10,500 households) data set for a simple wealth measure. I demonstrate that the count of the items present from a list of only 10 goods and services provides a measure of relative household wealth with satisfactory validity. The adoption of such a measure can reinforce local ownership of poverty studies and program evaluations.

"A Monitoring System for Numerous Local Organizations of Poor People" (2007) is an offshoot of my book on federations of the poor in Bangladesh (see top item). It retraces the evolution over the past ten years of a standardized, bureaucratically administered monitoring tool and its difficult coexistence with the participatory governance of the federations. It contends that neither the monitoring nor the participation literature is adequate to explain this dynamic, given the sheer number and diversity of local organizations being monitored. The concept of systems of mutual observation in which the supporting NGO and the participant organizations observe each other continuously may be more appropriate. This paper appeared in the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, vol. 31(8).

Estimating program effects on poverty reduction when the baseline is missing:  In Bangladesh, as in other countries, a host of NGOs operate programs intended to lift low-income families out of poverty. Pressures to document real poverty-reducing effects have grown. However, particularly in multi-sectoral NGOs with complex program histories, baseline information against which to evaluate selection into programs and simultaneously changes in participants and others may be missing or unusable. Is a work-around possible? In "The Incomes and Participant Careers of the Poor. Insights from the RDRS Bangladesh 2003 Impact Survey" (2005), we assume that the true program effect lies between the extremes of two implausible scenarios.

On one extreme, any income difference related to levels of participation is fully attributed to program effects. This would be the case if the larger incomes observed for households with greater participation (in the shape of more loans and trainings in our study) were not influenced by baseline assets and other unobserved factors selecting into those programs. On the other extreme, one assumes that none of the assets used to produce income during the observation period had been acquired or protected with assistance from the NGO. One may then think of the household assets estimated for the start of the observation period as being roughly proportionate to the unobserved baseline assets.

Program effects were significantly positive under both scenarios, but the range of these estimates is large. Assuming a mid-range effect, given the income distribution of the sample households, about a third of the participants may have left behind extreme income poverty as a result of working with RDRS. However, the data is not strong enough to suggest lesser vulnerability to income shocks; in a small subsample of households studied more intensively, income mobility due to significant life changes remained high.

"NGOs in Bangladesh – How Far from the Thermodynamic Equilibrium?", written 20 years ago, is a "one big idea - no data" piece that surged at the intersection of complexity (Luhmann), non-linear dynamics (Prigogine) and my own undigested field management experience. I would have preferred to forget about it had it not been for a recent chance conversation with a physicist working for a United Nations disarmament program. She was investigating the applicability to political and conflict dynamics of similar concepts originally developed for systems far from a dynamic equilibrium.

In 1986, I brought this perspective to the study of the fast expanding NGO sector in Bangladesh and its concomitant changes in development programming. In hindsight, some of the predictions about the future of this organizational field look abstruse; others - such as the massive influx of women into the ranks of NGO programs - have been vindicated. Nowadays, one might tackle something like this more modestly, though a combination of social movement, organizational ecology and – perhaps – modernization/inclusion concepts, rather than by borrowing from grand theory.

The fact that these interdisciplinary exchanges continue, although mostly in lofty metaphorical ways (vide the overstretched "bifurcation" diagrams), consoles and confuses me at the same time. I offer this vintage item as a hopeful inspiration for others apt at translating thermodynamics into concepts that empirical social research can access.

More papers will be added gradually.

I took this photo shot in 2004, at a moment when I had to wait for a train to pass the bridge across the Teesta river, between Rangpur and Kurigram, in northwestern Bangladesh. These men had a good laugh at me when they felt that the sight of live fish might frighten me.

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Last updated: 9 October 2008