Foul Play?

The SOCCKET is a soccer ball with an internal mechanism that turns movement into stored energy that can be accessed through a built in jack. It’s marketed as a “FUNctional solution to real-world problems” – specifically the lack of access to reliable electricity and the negative side effects of using kerosene lanterns, diesel generators, and wood-burning stoves. It’s garnered a lot of praise and accolades.

Last week I wrote a critical post that kicked at the SOCCKET and its maker Uncharted Play from a number of angles. Among other critiques, I thought that marketing the equivalent of four weakly-rechargeable AA batteries inside a relatively expensive soccer ball as a solution to anything grossly overplays the potential of the ball and misleads investors and buyers about the social impact they get for their money.

Below, Julia C. Silverman, the Co-founder & Chief Social Officer of Uncharted Play responds to my post ‘Deflating the SOCCKET ball‘. I’ve already said most of what I wanted to say, but I’d like to hear from you. Is the case for the SOCCKET overinflated? Does Julie adequately defend the SOCCKET’s place in the social enterprise playing field? Is this thing a game changer for the poor or just another example of bad aid? Would you invest in the SOCCKET or wish it deflated for good?

Hi Aaron,

As a heads up, some of the copy below is from the email responses I sent earlier this week to Bill Easterly and Seth Gitter.  Just want to be transparent here.

At any rate, as co-founder of Uncharted Play and a co-inventor of the SOCCKET, I want to thank you for your interest in, and perhaps more importantly, your critique of our movement. Constructive comments like yours help us to confirm that we are on the right track to creating the maximum positive social impact in communities around the world (and I mean that without irony).  As an aside, with regard to the title of your post, I’d like to note that the SOCCKET ball itself cannot be deflated!

I wanted to respond personally to your submission since I, too, come from a background in the social sciences. In fact, prior to launching Uncharted Play, I worked on a team of development economists at the World Bank in the Africa Sustainable Development division following several years of fieldwork on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa. Hence, I am no stranger to the development aid dialogue, both on the international and grassroots levels.

At any rate, the overarching point I’d like to highlight is that Uncharted Play is focused on facilitating FUN and letting kids be kids. This stance – and the very simplicity of what we do – resonates with our partners and fans. Providing SOCCKETs is not just about creating change that numbers can track; it’s about letting magic exist in the life of a child.

If it were just about producing as much energy as cost- and time-efficiently as possible (which it seems is the unswerving position of engineers and economists alike), Uncharted Play would be distributing a hand-crank. The big difference is that, unlike a hand-crank, a soccer ball is fun. We are working to distribute a product that emphasizes the joy in life, not something that simply reminds users of what they lack. As you acknowledge in your post, there is nothing particularly joyful about bed nets, deworming pills, bore holes, or even shoes, but the whole point of SOCCKET – it’s very essence – is that it’s supposed to be fun and exciting.

Further, I’d like to clarify Uncharted Play’s business model for the SOCCKET product because this seems to be a particularly sensitive point.  We are a social enterprise, not an NGO; we answer to our investors and are kept afloat by revenue, not donations as your post implies (in fact, we only added a contribution page on our site due to overwhelming demand from people wanting to contribute to our movement). Given the distribution of accountability, it would be all too easy for us to simply pay lip service to our social mission while dedicating the bulk of our financial and human resources to sales, marketing, etc.. However, as I mentioned above, this is not the case: we are truly focused on collaborating with communities to implement meaningful, catalytic programs, and – rather than resting on our laurels or focusing strictly on profit – we are taking aggressive action to engage closely with our partners and participants and track outcomes so that we can drive toward maximal positive impact.

Uncharted Play’s chief aim for the SOCCKET movement is to sustainably distribute as many of the balls as possible to resource poor communities around the world. In order to deliver the SOCCKETs, build context-relevant curricular programming around the ball, and collect data to monitor and evaluate our impact, we partner with best practice NGOs on the ground in our target areas, such as Instituto Promundo in Brazil, Children International in Mexico, Homeless World Cup in Haiti, and Universidad Pedagogica in El Salvador.

We have devised a unique business model so that we can simultaneously maintain financial sustainability and pursue our social goals.  We take a two-pronged approach, which allows us to reach users in developing and, eventually, developed settings.

For our users in disadvantaged communities, corporations and public institutions underwrite the cost of SOCCKET distribution through bulk/wholesale ball purchases. Users (children) “earn” the balls by participating in the programming of our official NGO partners. For those in wealthier areas, SOCCKETs will soon be available for commercial retail on our website (in late 2012/early 2013), and we will aim to expand to an in-store presence during 2013. Revenues from the direct-to-consumer sales stream will go toward our SOCCKET social impact activities. Like you, many people are eager to get a ball of their own!

As you can imagine, we’ve dealt with the opportunity cost question before (and, given my own background, it’s a point I know not to take lightly). That said, I can confirm that, rather than taking funding away from other causes, the SOCCKET is actually attracting investment that would not otherwise come to the sustainable development space. Our corporate partners are wonderful, but they are not development institutions. When they were deciding to work with us, they were evaluating whether to put marketing dollars into SOCCKET sponsorship or into another campaign, not another charity.

We are a new company (just over 1 year old), and we certainly do not have unlimited resources. This has implications for where and how we have implemented our programming thus far. In the near future, we hope to “target failure” by going to countries with limited infrastructure; however, those initiatives will be more expensive to execute and will require more careful planning (e.g., getting in and out of the DRC is no easy task). Moreover, our initial programs in the countries that do not have the so-called “most glaring cases of need” will provide useful guidance in shaping improved technical, logistical, and social impact plans.

Uncharted Play remains extremely sensitive to the potential unintended consequences of our initiatives. We are well aware of the unfortunate fate that befell the PlayPump, and we took measures to make sure play with the SOCCKET will never become a chore for our users.  For example, we capped the SOCCKET’s power storage capacity so that children would not be forced into “play slavery.” Further, we designed the SOCCKET product in collaboration with our end users rather than in a vacuum. Indeed, children’s feedback from pilot studies in Mexico, South Africa, El Salvador, Nigeria, and Brazil has been critical as we continue to iterate our technical designs for the SOCCKET.

From the kids’ engagement with our prototypes, I can tell you that, even without the ball’s energy-generating functionality, the SOCCKET is indeed a “boon” for our users. In the communities where we work (and hope to work), children are used to fashioning make-shift balls from whatever is available, such as a bundle of plastic bags, an empty bottle, or a piece of garbage – I’ve even seen a brick. Since the SOCCKET is an honest-to-goodness sphere that does not need inflation, cannot be deflated, and lasts multiple years instead of mere weeks, the ball has been very well-received indeed by users.

In terms of the added impact of SOCCKET’s energy component, kids have found the product to be truly magical. The response has been universally positive, and variations on the same scene unfold each time we first introduce the ball. First, it’s pure joy – and that is before the kids even know there is anything different about the ball.  When we actually say that the ball is special, that it can harness energy and power a lamp or a phone, there is always a collective yell of excitement.  Then, when we plug in a lamp to demonstrate, the kids’ eyes just pop out of their heads, and you can see the wheels beginning to turn.  There’s a moment of silent amazement, and then, right away, kids start brainstorming their own ideas.  “We should make one that has a soda fountain in it!” or “We can make it different colors so it looks like a rainbow when you kick it!”.  Just seeing a cool idea like the SOCCKET immediately inspires kids to unleash their own imaginations.  I certainly think that type of creative inspiration qualifies as a “boon” for our users even if there is no MDG that adequately captures it or tried-and-true metric for recording it.

Thanks again for getting in touch. I hope my responses have helped to illustrate the delicate balance Uncharted Play has worked to achieve as a social enterprise that is both financially sustainable and socially responsible. I say this not as an excuse for any failings you might perceive, but as a call to action for other organizations to follow our example and place social impact as a central objective in their mission and, more critically, their operations.

Keep in touch. I’ll make sure my team lets you know when the ball is available

Cheers – Julia

The SOCCET: a premium soccer ball and an eco-friendly generator.

Since learning of the SOCCKET a couple weeks ago, I’ve been perplexed by the lack of critical chatter in the development blogosphere. We shredded 1 millions shirts, bruised World Vision over its Superbowl t-shirt debacle, and happily beat the hell out of PlayPump. So why the awkward silence over the SOCCKET, which to me looks to become PlayPump 2.0? Even Bill Easterly was surprisingly light-handed on his blog after his initial tweet saying that “Lant Pritchett gave this [SOCCKET] as a hilarious example of what’s wrong with development today”. I thought this was a prelude of much snarky scrutiny to follow. Instead he writes, “Now I’m not going to do what you expect and get all crotchety at this point and say this is all useless nonsense.” I say, “Why not?”

As far as I can tell, the SOCCKET is just another example of donor-driven development deserving of some seriously snarky jibes.  Maybe everyone’s just getting tired of pointing out the same basic fallacies again and again to well-intentioned social entrepreneurs and the donors they market to. And, as TOMS shoes has proven, people’s aspiration to do something both easy and good for the world (and, in the case of TOMS, the appeal of  winning social kudos for displaying these philanthropic impulses) trumps our efforts to say, “hold on a minute, there’s a problem here; this is not good aid!“

The SOCCKET sounds pretty cool. I’d like to have one quite frankly. It’s a soccer ball with a gyroscopic mechanism inside that captures the energy of motion and converts it into clean electricity. It’s a soccer ball and it’s a mobile six-watt power generator. Cool. I’d take mine to the beach. According to the story on their website, Unchartered Play, the maker of the SOCCKET, was founded to “show the world that doing good and doing good business need not be mutually exclusive.” The thing is, I wonder both about the good they claim to be doing and about how their business model demonstrates ‘good business’ rather than say, so-so charity.

Cost-Benefit Failure. Uncharted Play says that 1.6 million people are killed by alternatives to the SOCCKET. Specifically, they are referring to the effects of harmful emissions from kerosene lamps, diesel generators, and wood burning stoves. I’ll accept that. But what I won’t swallow is that the SOCCKET is a sound alternative to these. There are already many far cheaper and more efficient solar/LED alternatives to kerosene lamps available for lighting (like this or this or this). There are also many other clean-burning alternative cookstoves out there. Although the SOCCKET is cheaper than some of these, I can’t imagine how it could possibly compete as a family’s primary source of cooking heat. Plugging a hot plate into a soccer ball with the power output equivalent of four AA batteries is just not culturally or practically commensurate with cooking on a fuel-burning stove.  As far as diesel generators go, this is really a stretch. Communities use diesel generators to produce large amounts of electricity – as in several thousand watts of electricity. You would need 1000 SOCCKETs to equal the power output of a single 6000 watt diesel generator.* That would cost donors $60,000 (at $60 per SOCCKET) vs. $2-5,000 for a decent diesel generator. I don’t know how to calculate the comparison between diesel fuel for the generator and food fuel for the caloric input required to power 500 hours of kids kicking these SOCCKETs around for a charge, but I’m guessing the diesel’s cheaper.** Maybe I’m thinking too much like an economist here, but this doesn’t seem like a sound option for replacing community diesel generators. I hope this isn’t an example of the ‘doing good business’ thinking at the foundation of Uncharted Play.

Targeting Failure. Uncharted Play says that 1/4 of people in the world live without access to reliable electricity. Again, I’ll accept that. And then I’ll wring my hands and ask “What can I do about it?” I can give a soccer ball/electrical generator to children living in one of 19 countries through their ‘unique distribution process’. Now, certainly these countries were selected because they represent some of the most glaring cases of need, right? Wrong. Eleven of the 19 countries have rates of access to electricity higher than their own statement of global need. Let me say that again – most of their targeted countries have above average access to electricity. For example, you can give a SOCCKET to a kid in Brazil, where 97.8% of the population has access to electricity. Or China (99.4%), Mexico (98.5%), Cuba (97%), Dominican Republic (95.9%)…shall I continue? As I read their list of places where you can donate a ball, few rank in the bottom half of their respective regions for access to electricity.*** I mean, if you were going to target an electricity access intervention based on need, there’s just no way that Brazil, Mexico, and China make the cut.

Now, certainly there are pockets of people in these countries that don’t have access to electricity, and we might assume that their distribution partners are targeting intra-nationally to reach these people. But many of their targeted countries have largely shown a capacity to supply their populations’ demands for electricity through governmental and/or private service providers. The basic problem here is that distribution is based on the supply of distribution partners rather than a mindful targeting based on unmet demand. Shoot, there I go again sounding like an economist, what with all this talk of supply and demand.

Image from Gwenn Mangine. Used without permission. Is that cool Gwenn?

Market Force Failure. Speaking of supply and demand, the most egregious thing about this ‘good business’ model is that the buyer, the distributer, and the user are all three different. In other words, the families that get these things don’t have to be convinced they are worth the $60 Unchartered Play is charging for them. They get them for free. Of course kids eyes are lighting up with free soccer balls that are all gadgety with a plugin light. Ask their parents to cough up even $30 for one, though, and I bet you’d have a pretty hard time moving these things in rural villages across Malawi or El Salvador or Laos. I’m not sure the SOCCKET would survive long if its makers were accountable to the end users for the value of the good – unless maybe they sold them online at The Sharper Image.**** Take TOMS shoes for example – priced at over $50 a pair in the US, they only fetch $1.25 in the Haitian marketplace. Ouch.

Luckily for Unchartered Play, the business model divorces their revenue from consumers’ cost-benefit calculations. They don’t have to convince the end user that the SOCCKET is a good deal, they only have to convince a donor that they’re a good deal. How do you do that? Insinuate that you can provide poor villagers with reliable electricity, save 1.6 million lives, and save up to 30% of families’ incomes. Paint a mental image of needy children discovering joy, line up smiling celebrity endorsements, and use words like ‘innovation’ and ‘eco-friendly’.  Tell them, “give a SOCCKET – for $60 you can make a world of difference.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the ‘business model’ of a charity, not a social enterprise.

Oh, Joy! PlayPump 2.0. Play is great – awesome even. I totally support the right of children the world over to play. I think keeping ‘joy at the forefront of our lives’ is a great aspect of Uncharted Play’s mission. But will it still feel like play when daily access to a basic need like light or cooking heat is tied to it?  In the marketing pitch, the SOCCKET runs on child play. But I suspect that with extended use in the real world, kids and parents will tire of having to invest 30 minutes into kicking the ball around to get back 3 hours of relatively limited light. Might the reliance on child play end up being a source of child labour?

The infamous PlayPump at its best (not its usual).

The PlayPump is an instructive forebear to the SOCCKET. Its maker, Roundabout Water Solutions, also talked about joy, claiming to “bring joy and access to clean drinking water” by utilizing the rotational movement of children at play to pump water. According to them, “Playing on a roundabout or merry-go-round has always been fun for children, so there is never a shortage of ‘volunteers.’” But, this claim was not borne out in the field. Owen Scott, an aid worker with Engineers Without Borders Canada in Malawi documented his observations in a remarkable series of six blogs, noting “Each time I’ve visited a PlayPump, I’ve always found the same scene: a group of women and children struggling to spin it by hand so they can draw water.” WaterAid refused to adopt the PlayPumps technology, in part, because it’s “reliance on child labour.” Owen’s fourth post in the series includes a video of local teachers pleading with aid organizations to stop building the PlayPumps.

Like the SOCCKET, the PlayPumps were a relatively expensive and relatively inefficient solution to a basic needs access problem that required an inordinate amount of kinetic energy input for the output given back. Like SOCCKET, they were marketed to donors who paid to have them built by the hundreds (thousands?). Eventually, the realities of the lame cost-benefit equation could no longer be ignored and their construction has all but ceased, replaced by the reliable if unremarkable, proven if uninnovative, old school hand pump.

To use Laura Freschi’s language when talking about the PlayPump, I suspect the SOCCKET will for a time “represent the triumph of bad but photogenic solutions in a broken aid marketplace” and be shown to be another “donor-pleasing, top-down solution that simply [doesn't] fit many of the target communities.” To use Owen Scott’s language when talking about the PlayPump, I think the SOCCKET illustrates well the “triumph of rich-country whimsy over poor-country relevance. It illustrates how standards, like basic cost-benefit analysis, that are routinely applied to public expenditure in developed countries, aren’t applied to our foreign aid spending.” It is the quintessential donor-driven development intervention. It is a solution dreamt up by innovators in the rich world, marketed and sold to donors in the rich world, and dumped into needy communities. Because it’s free, there’s no incentive for communities to even bring up the opportunity costs involved. I guess that’s where we, the snarky development bloggers come in.

Why it Matters. Look, I actually like these guys over at Unchartered Play. I like their mission; I like what they’re trying to do. I think they’ll sell lots and lots of SOCCKETS. They seem like a smart, innovative, and distractingly attractive team of people. The co-founders are even fellow Harvardians. I’d like to be friends with these folks. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure this blog post blunts that possibility. So why am I socking it so hard to their beloved SOCCKET? (bah-dump-bump.)

The SOCCKET is a pretty cool innovation that deserves a shot to live or die in the marketplace. What bothers me, though, is that its impact in the developing world as a solution to scarce electricity access is just way oversold. It’s not just that I figure the cost-benefit ratio of their product fails to be competitive against other alternatives to kerosine lamps and wood burning stoves, or against diesel generators. It’s not just that they are grossly mistargeting countries on energy access grounds. It’s not just that their business model side-steps direct market forces that might otherwise determine that their product’s cost exceeds its actual value – making them functionally a charity, not a sustainable social enterprise. It’s not even that the SOCCKET has yet to prove its relevancy in the field under extended use. It’s all of this coupled with the fact that their super slick marketing all but guarantees that thousands of these things will get fabricated and shipped all over the world, crowding out donor dollars that could be going into field-tested, rigorously-proven development interventions that have actually been shown to ‘make a world of difference’.

I know that when innovation is involved, competition for aid dollars isn’t a perfect zero-sum game, but donor dollars make, to a substantial degree, a finite pie. They aren’t as sexy or innovative or gadgety, but bed nets, deworming pills, bore holes, some improved cooking stoves, or chlorine dispensers at water sources beat the pants off of the SOCCKET as ‘tools to address major issues facing society today.’ And, when donors get caught up in the excitement of well-marketed, but ultimately ill-conceived interventions, less money is available for that which is proven. Granted, these proven interventions don’t help much with the last part of Uncharted Play’s mission statement to keep ‘joy at the forefront of our lives’. … Unless you think supporting proven cost-effective interventions that help people live longer, healthier, more educated lives is something worth getting all joyful about.

Update – July 2, 2012: You can read Uncharted Play’s Co-founder and Chief Social Officer Julia C. Silverman’s response to this post at The SOCCKET ball bounces back?

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* The SOCCKET supplies a 6-watt power output.

** Based on their claim that 30 minutes of play equals 3 hours of light from the SOCCKET.

*** Certainly Malawi (9%), Uganda (9%), Kenya (15%), Haiti (38.5%), and Laos (55%) qualify, but that’s about it. But, even these are considerably better off than other countries in their respective regions. What about Burundi (2.8%), Chad (3.5%) or Rwanda (4.8%) in Africa, Bangladesh (41%) or Cambodia (24%) in Asia, Honduras (70.3%) or Nicaragua (72.1%) in Latin America?

**** Same goes for the distributers. It’s like the losing team Superbowl t-shirts distributed by World Vision. This would never happen if World Vision had to actually pay the tax-deductible value claimed for each shirt ($11.65) instead of counting this value as donation income and just paying the shipping costs. The distribution partners don’t have to be convinced that the value of the Soccket is $60 a pop, they get to count that as donation income. GIK is great for making organization look efficient. Its an almost unethical incentive to distribute. The final cost to provide a SOCCKET to a poor family can be approximated by the per unit sum of the funding partners’ and distributions partners’ contributions.

The issue is this: 98% of the relevant information we need to write a good plan is unknown at the time we write it. We more or less know where we want to go, but the map we draw to get there is based on heroic assumptions about the terrain ahead well beyond our vision. We will certainly have gathered as much information as possible to help us create this map – government statistics about the project area, analyzed results from our own community surveys and focus group discussions, documentation from meetings with community leaders, and so forth. We may even have multiple scenarios mapped out to manage multi-dimensional risks that give our map a sense of flexibility to likely changes in conditions. But even with all this, a constant stream of unforeseen events, new information, and unpredicted behavior will quickly unravel our confidence in the assumptions on which our plan is based.

There is a saying, ‘reality always wins.’ Unexpectedly heavy rains will halve the planned number of community participants in workshops over the winter. A report showing the community’s school to be lagging will suddenly shift their priority from the health sector to education. The death of a key community leader will drain the momentum out of a whole line of activities that she had championed. Election violence will create security risks that will keep staff out of the community for three weeks. A string of unannounced donor visits will throw off an entire month of work, leaving staff playing catchup for the quarter. The head office will announce changes in the financial software and chart of accounts for the coming fiscal year that will require several members of the administration team to attend training workshops, and they will then fall behind on requisitions and payments, forcing delays in planned development activities. Two staff members will give birth and three will get sick in an oddly coordinated attack on productivity right in the middle of the annual planning season. The dollar will weaken unexpectedly and suck 5% of the budget out from under foot. At times it will feel like Murphy’s Law is in effect. Reality isn’t polite, it doesn’t wait for an invitation, it barges in. Reality always wins.

Double Jeopardy

We fall into the myth of the plan twice, once when we write the myth, and again when we try to manage to the myth. When we plan, we omit a reasonable cushion, making it unrealistic. When we manage, we apply an unreasonable rigidity, making it mythological. When things don’t go as planned – when reality doesn’t follow the myth – we make ever more heroic efforts to improve the planning process and increase the incentives to stick to the plan. That is, we make the plan even more detailed and rigid, falling further into land of make believe.

When Writing Plans. We write plans that fully utilize all available time and resources. This is foolish. Do we suppose that nothing will make unexpected demands on our time and resources or reduce our capacity? I did an experiment recently with a field team of development professionals. We tested their ability to plan their activities three months in advance – activities that were already based on the annual plan! They did alright the first month out, but by the time they got to the third month, over 30% of what they actually did no longer matched what they had planned to do. Yet most planning is done at least 12 months in advance, and project designs often have a 3-5 year time horizon.

Certainly we are not unaware that ahead in the darkness lurk beasts of the unexpected. Yet we are stoic in our planning, assigning all resources, finding a place for all capacity. Taking the offensive, we push hard to improve the planning process, attempting to capture the demons of uncertainty.  We adopt ever more detailed DME standards and templates that implicitly assume sci-fi levels of prescience. We start the planning process earlier so that our time horizon is even further out than before. Yes, we should think things through before we act, and yes, we do owe it to our donors to give a pretty good idea about how their money is to be spent. But most of the plans I’ve read over the years evidence not so much professionalism and responsibility as collective self-deception.

When Managing Plans. Here is where the more significant problem with the myth comes in. It’s one thing to make plans for a specific number of participants, and a specific number of purchased materials, and specific costs for things, and so forth – its another to prefer the myth of the plan over the reality of … reality. That is, when we apply rigidity to the plan and provide incentives to stick to it despite new information and changing conditions, we move into a realm of unicorns, fairy dust, and bad development practice.

The Straightjacket: bind the budget to the plan, then make it a performance issue to stay within the margins.

Here’s a typical practice: bind the budget to the plan through the logical framework, fence it in with margins on each activity line, and then make it an employee performance issue to stay within these margins. If you’re making widgets, this makes sense. Good project management is about the ability to follow a plan – accomplish scheduled activities on time and under budget … if you’re making widgets. If you’re doing community development, though, do you really want to create incentives to follow a plan that was written while most relevant information was still hidden? This may be good in some ways for the organization, but doesn’t’ necessarily make for good development practice. Why would we voluntarily put ourselves into such a straight-jacket? We need the ability to make mid-course corrections. Once the real terrain comes to light and we realize that our planned route that looked so straight and perfect on paper six months ago will actually take us across a mountain range of under-capacity, across a gorge of community disinterest, and through a labyrinth of political complexity, we will be sorry to have bound ourselves to the path.

Since I’ve been on the subject of ‘facipulation’ in my last two posts, it’s worth noting that binding development facilitators to a plan is a pretty good way to get them to start facipulating their discussions with the community. Ignoring new information from the community is a key facipulation skill. Finding ways to push off dealing with new events and conditions is too. Armed with the ability to say, ‘well, it’s not in the plan for this year, but we can talk about it in the next planning cycle’ is a great way to side-step reality when your organization’s plan is out of step with the community’s preferred future. Hear that? That’s the sound of your project stepping a rung or two down somebody’s participation ladder.

Good project management in this context requires a team, structure, and policy environment that encourages adjustments to new information and events. It requires creativity, agility, flexibility, and very good communication between staff, volunteers, community members, and donors. In mythological terms, we should prefer the creative agility of Hermes over Odysseus’ lashing of himself to the mast.

How Then Shall We Plan?

A good plan has three essential elements that define both how it is written and how it is managed.

1.  Shared Objectives. The community, the development organization, and donors should agree on the general objectives of working together. Not to be confused with the activities that will move them all toward these, the objectives describe the changes a ‘successful’ project would contribute to bringing about. This is the core of the plan – to work together to make this preferred future a reality.

2.  Agreed Methodology. The partners should also agree how they are going to move forward toward these objectives. This includes a starting set of activities, but it allows for some of these to be dropped and for others not imagined up front to be included as future conditions become known. It also includes, perhaps more importantly, a process for working together – how, who, and when will the partners negotiate the next steps together; how will they deal with new information and events; what will the process be for monitoring progress; and how will decisions be made about the scarce resources available to the partners as they move forward.

3.  Guiding Principles. Finally, a set of principles that will guide decisions as tradeoffs and hard decisions come down the road. What are the values and principles against which two forks in the road should be considered?

“By the standards of history and cost-effectiveness, we are hugely overinvested in military tools and underinvested in education and diplomacy”

He notes that, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, our battle fleet is “larger than the next 13 navies combined” and that our military “has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has diplomats.” Mr. Kristoff would rather we put some of that money into building schools, pointing out that for the annual cost of 1 soldier in Afghanistan, we could start about 20 schools there instead.

The liberal Mennonite in me nods in full agreement, but I was raised in a conservative military family. I’ve developed the habit of testing such easy approvals by arguing against myself lest I have to defend them come Thanksgiving. The upshot of this internal debate is that I mostly still agree with Mr. Kristoff’s view, but not without a few caveats.

1.  Schools may not accomplish US goal in Afghanistan

The primary US goal in Afghanistan according to the Obama administration is to keep Afghanistan from being a safe haven to al-Qaida terrorists as it was under Taliban rule when we were attacked on 9/11. To make this happen, the Taliban insurgency needs to be defeated and a stable government established in Kabul. To make these two things happen, there are a host of tactics being deployed from training Afghan police to constructing roads, from hunting Taliban leaders with drones to opening new health clinics, from patrolling hot spots to building local governance capacity. Each of these tactics has some theoretical return on investment (ROI) in terms of meeting our objectives and the ultimate goal in Afghanistan. The question is, how does building a school stack up in terms of ROI against these other options? Do new schools promote peace, undermine support for the Taliban, help build a strong economy and a more democratic and stable Afghan society? Maybe. Probably. Is a new school the best way to directly contribute to defeating the Taliban and establishing a stable government in Kabul so that Afghanistan won’t be the base for future terrorist attacks on the US? Well, that’s a good question (a $37 billion question).

2.  Schools may need soldiers

There is a practical limitation on the US government building schools in a war zone. The Taliban don’t want us building schools there anymore than they want us posting our soldiers there, and they will resist either with violence. If we build schools where the Taliban are active, they’ll need soldiers to protect them.

Mr. Kristoff tries to preempt this argument by observing that CARE operates 300 schools in Afghanistan and that Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute has helped build another 145 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and none of these have been razed by the Taliban. But he fails to mention that these schools are built in areas where the Taliban is least active.  In the South, schools still get attacked regularly. According to a recent UNESCO report, there were over 1,000 attacks on education targets between 2006-2008. The first half  of 2009 saw 123 schools targeted by insurgents (UNICEF). A recent CARE report (Knowledge on Fire - Nov. ’09 ), acknowledges that several southern provinces saw the closure of between 30 – 80% of their schools. With schools getting bombed or burned, caretakers mutilated, teachers kidnapped and threatened, and students attacked with acid or gas, its hard to make a clean case for replacing soldiers with schools.

But at the same time, much progress has been made in areas with less Taliban activity. Enrollment for Afghan girls has gone from almost zero prior to 2001 to some 2.5 million according to UNICEF. In some provinces now the problem is that demand for schooling has outstripped its supply. The Ministry of Education indicates that there will be a shortfall of 50,000 – 100,000 female teachers over the next four years. Clearly, there are parts of Afghanistan that could benefit from an investment in schools, and 20 schools for the price of one less soldier seems like good deal – especially since President Obama has tripled the number of soldiers there since taking office to nearly 100,000. The caveat here is that there are a lot of other parts in Afghanistan for which U.S. publically-funded schools without soldiers’ protection would be obvious and tempting targets inviting more violence, including violence against children – especially girls.

3.  Schools in Afghanistan may not be a US spending priority

I would love it if every American chose to support an organization like CARE, World Vision, or CAI who are building schools in Afghanistan, but that’s not the case, and for many struggling families there is good reason. As the price tag for the war on terror continues to soar, I can’t help but think what else the US could be doing with its money. (see www.costofwar.com)  Afghanistan is neither a powerless nor penniless nation. It may not be able to rout the Taliban by itself, but certainly it can build and run its own schools. I think people want to reduce our total public spending in Afghanistan, not just trade military spending for humanitarian spending. If there’s a peace dividend to cash in at this war’s end, Americans are not about to sign it over to someone else.

Let’ call it a draw.

I agree with Mr. Kristoff that our current patterns of public spending don’t accurately reflects real US values and priorities. We overspend in general, and the culprit seems to our appetite for defense spending, which accounts for more than a quarter of our budget and about 40% of our tax revenues. According to the SIPRI yearbook, the US accounts for roughly 47% of global military spending. A shift in our public spending is clearly needed. But in terms of what to do in Afghanistan, it isn’t clear that trading soldiers for schools is the answer. The reality seems to be that both are needed, but neither can easily be afforded.

A tighter focus on spending to directly achieve our security objectives in Afghanistan and ending our near decade-long military engagement there would allow us to either reduce our public spending or shift it to much needed domestic concerns. At the same time, as citizens continue to manifest their values by making financial contributions to organizations working with the Afghan people, a better future is made possible through education, especially for girls. Schools in Afghanistan may not provide a clear ROI to our national military objectives, but they seem to provide one to the humanitarian objectives of many, myself and Mr. Kristoff included.

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Photos by Danfung Dennis from the New York Times, except Mr. Kristoff’s headshot which is from his Facebook profile.