13 thoughts for aid in 2013

As I was sitting in a year-end retreat, I started jotting down this list of things that the development aid world could use more of in 2013. I offer it as some food for thought for the year ahead.

Aid organizations that are external-facing, employing attentiveness to “taking the pulse” of the customers and partners they serve and the world around them. No more head-down, power-through focus on “our programs”. Time to look up and outside of our own systems, requirements, and politics.
Macro-micro linkages. After all, it’s all about the layers, joining policy—program—practice—reality.
Which road will you take in 2013?
Expert facilitators who can translate between people speaking different languages, e.g. economists and activists, presidents and community leaders, poets and scientists, to ensure fruitful dialogue rather than diatribes.
A renewed focus on capacity building, this time based on people’s identified needs. It’s fundamental, and hard to measure or not, it’s more important than service delivery.
Experts in building functional and practical client/beneficiary feedback mechanisms, i.e. people who can close the loop and create the institutional incentives to ensure it continues.
A lowered aversion to risk-taking. What have we to lose?
Well-resourced funding mechanisms that distribute more funds, to more actors, in smaller tranches.
People who specialize in working across disciplines and sectors, specialists in generating connections that would not typically come about.
The courage and honesty to talk about aid’s most difficult topics – race, power and privilege.
Behavioral psychologists who can tell us more about how perception is formed and how decision-making works by those in power. (Hint: Time to stop diagnosing the poor’s behavior and look at those whose decisions structurally enable poverty to persist.)
Storytellers that can convey complexity.
An ability and willingness to keep watch for often unpredictable dimensions of change and progress that don’t occur in a logframe.
Moral leadership. We need all the echoing voices we can find to bring Freire’s and Biko’s and Ghandi’s (and, and, and…) ideas into aid’s day-to-day reality.