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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Crystal Simeoni, the Director of NAWI Collective, shares tips for decolonizing, deconstructing, bravery, and joy in development. International development gets so much wrong, but there are ways to be better. Some of Crystal's tips include: align your operations with your values, give up power, center care, and just get it done. You know what you need to do; stop analyzing and act. A few other key pieces of advice: "slow it way down," "pull your head up from your laptop," and "the narrative of...

When you're leading a change to have more equity in your staffing practices, people who hold privilege will feel that they are losing power, no matter what the data says. You also don't usually get to such a profound organizational change unless you REALLY have a problem. Listen to Esther Watts talk about how CARE Ethiopia had to change it's policies and practices so the staff was no longer 26% women--the worst equity rate of any office in the CARE federation, and what they had to do to get...

We learn more when we have to sit in a failure than we do when we succeed. Listen to Sarah Eckhoff talk about what happened when we offered and opt out to CARE's Gender Marker. It showed us a lot about commitments to the process, data overload, and when reporting is optional. It also changed our approach to supporting teams in the gender marker process.

"If failure is uncomfortable, get over it." Rebecca Rosetti and Tara Ross talk about CARE's 2022 Learning from Failure, and how their background in laboratory sciences helped them learn early that failure is inevitable. "Failure is just data." They talk about what CARE sees as big gaps this year--partnerships and sustainability--and how we can now see that projects are improving over time. Gender and M&E have been two big areas of improvement since we started.

In part 2 of her podcast, Kalkidan Yihun talks about how to make sure that data transforms into action--and especially that women and girls who contribute data get that data back in ways they can use themselves. Instead of extractive processes that feed into a black box that communities never see, think about how to format and share data so women can act. Who needs to see it? Who will take action? What ways make sharing that data safe for people who provided it? Kal coordinates the Women...

Kalkidan Yihun talks about how to redesign data collection so it centers what people--especially women--want and need, instead of being a burden on their time and lives because of what's easiest for the data collectors and researchers. Kal coordinates the Women Respond project, and offers tips and lessons about what doesn't work (and does) in putting women's voices first.

What do you do when your pursuit of a necessary program partner falls through? Don’t waste time on pushing a failed strategy, and don’t be afraid to move on. How do you guarantee commitment from partners early on? Assess interest from partners to ensure equal buy-in on both sides.  Naureen Chaudhry identifies two challenges and the resulting lessons experienced by the CARE Pakistan team while working with female entrepreneurs through the CARE Ignite Program.

Tran Thi Minh Nguyet discusses her experience with working to increase access to finance for local micro and small women-led businesses in Vietnam through the CARE Ignite program. Partnerships with microfinance institutions can prove to be very difficult in these contexts. How to work against experiencing potential failures with these partners? Build in flexibility in financial product development that allows for pivots in the face of issues. Additionally, have a deep understanding of your...

Cash transfers designed to help women re-enter markets after COVID-19 lockdowns lifted worked really well, AFTER we added programming to address GBV. Partway through the project, gender dialogues showed that women were facing so much violence that even cash was not enough to get back into the market. So the project re-designed their work to include social norms and addressing GBV, and helped more than 1,400 vendors get back on track. Media Matyanga talks about what the team learned, how they...

Como trabajadores humanitarios/as la conversación difícil e incómoda es muchas veces necesaria, si de verdad queremos tratar a fondo temas como el antirracismo, la descolonización y la igualdad de género.     Resumen: Considerando temas mencionados entre los diferentes podcasts anteriores y en vísperas de la Vision 2030 decidimos realizar nuestro primer podcast en Castellano con el fin de hablar sobre temas como lo son la aceptación de los errores, el antirracismo, la descolonización y...

Rojan Bolling and Hannah Itcovitz talk about their paper on how to design flexible programs that work for fragile settings. Along the way, they discovered 4 myths that everyone believes work, but that really don't. Flexibility can make a huge difference--especially in complex contexts--and that makes it even more important that we do it well. The idea of flexibility in institutions and relations, not just in operations, and getting beyond a 15% budget benchmark are two of their key insights.

Solar water pumps were a great business opportunity for women in northern Kenya--so great that as soon as businesses were profitable, men took over and shut women out of both the business, and sometimes access to water. Dorothy Aseyo from CARE Kenya talks about what she learned about how to pick technologies, pick partners, and make sure that when your goal is women having successful businesses, you don't set up systems for failure. Keeping track of who leads and adapting quickly are some of...

Monica Tobar and Ronald Picso talk about their experience working with cryptocurrency instead of cash to support refugees and host communities in Ecuador. Some key lessons? Just do it--don't spend all of your time trying to get everything perfect. Get lots of feedback--participants will tell you what's not working. Build more supply--get many vendors up to speed on crypto so people have choices about where to shop. Plan for training--it takes time to learn a new technology, especially in a...

We talk about sustainability all the time, and commit to guaranteeing it in almost every development program. But is it really working? CARE launched a series of post-project studies to find out what lasts and what doesn't after a project closes. Caitlin Shannon and Maria Tobin talk about what they learned doesn't work. A few tips they saw across all 9 research studies: No matter how good it is, training alone is not enough for sustained impact. If you can't figure out how people will get...

"You have to believe that girls have the power. You don't empower the girl; you have to see the power in her." Suniti Neogy from CARE and Jayanthi Pushkaran talk about lessons from girl-led activism in the Tipping Point project, adapting a model from EMpower in India to Bangladesh and Nepal. What would they do differently now? Have girls lead more! It's very difficult for adults to let go of control, but girls can lead themselves. Ask them the questions; don't tell them the answers. Help...

Madj Sawan from Ihsan for Relief and Development Organization, Fe Kagahastian from CashCap’s Syria response, Ola Batta from the Shafak Organization, and Reem Khamis from UNFPA describe their experience from the Cash and GBV working group. Why was 9 years into the crisis the right time to get started? How do we overcome the failure that most cash responses aren’t focusing on survivors of GBV? They shared the process that helped them get to a better set of standard procedures, and what we have...

Fe Kagahastian from CashCap’s Syria response and Reem Khamis from UNFPA talk about the importance of getting Cash practitioners and experts in supporting GBV survivors. Doing it wrong sets off all kinds of alarm bells, because if we do it wrong, we can hurt the people we’re trying to support. We need to speak “not necessarily the same language, but at least an understandable language.” This podcast is produced in partnership with the Women's Refugee Commission and with support from the...