Ashoka Fellow Till Behnke

 

We at betterplace have known for a long time that Till is great – but now it’s official! Till has qualified as an Ashoka Fellow over the course of a nearly one-year, multi-phased selection process in Germany and internationally with approximately three hundred competitors. Congratulations Till!

Ashoka gives the new Fellows financial support, advises them and connects them to the worlds of business and academia so that they can spread their ideas throughout Germany and the world.

Here is what Ashoka liked about Till and betterplace:

Till Behnke is setting up an online philanthropic marketplace that is entirely new and that is revolutionizing the relationship between donors and recipients. His internet platform betterplace.org enables small social organizations to present their projects such they can persuade users of the quality of their work – regardless of their size. On the other hand, it allows donors to give their limited funds strategically. The website combines rating systems with social networks and ensures radical transparency. Social organizations can insert their profiles and users rate the organizations. What’s great about it is that every user can see the relation that the rater has to the organization, for example as a scientific experts, recipients or donors, for example. The user can also see whether the rater has contact to his or her own network. On the basis of this information, the user can decide whether they trust the opinion of that particular rater and whether they want to additionally support the organization by making a donation of their own. In this way, betterplace provides for well-informed, transparent donations – even on a small scale. At the same time, organizations have the opportunity and the responsibility to actively solicit support. Founded in late 2007, Till Behnke is expanding betterplace step by step, earning an international reputation. In the meantime, betterplace also offers companies professional opportunities to get employees involved.

Network and Hierarchy

I am particularly pleased about the fact that the jury has recognized the novelty of our network structure and the Web of Trust. We are an open platform and, as such, we are not only able to offer large aid organizations a platform but also the “long tail of charity”. In parallel, the Web of Trust expands the hierarchical mechanisms of trust and control that have dominated thus far by network mechanisms.

What do I mean by that?

Some people trust projects backed by large, well-known institutions, be this UNICEF or Greenpeace. They trust in these institutions, for example those that are accountable to the German Tax and Revenue Authority as concerns their balance sheets, use the money in a legal manner. Other people have lost faith in hierarchical stakeholders and they prefer to support organizations or individuals that solicit their support with their networks.

Here is an example. I like to donate to projects backed by someone who knows the project and is committed to it. I was in Bhutan, for instance, and spent several days at the Choki Traditional Arts School. I have been watching the work of the person responsible for the project, Sonam Choki, from afar for three years. She reports to me about her work. I meet other people who have been supporting the project for a long time, have visited the project in Bhutan and whoe inform others about the progress it is making on the betterplace website. Then I tell my girlfriends about the project and if my girlfriends trust me, they will then also trust Sonam Choki and in turn donate to her project. Ideally this trust would spread like wildfire.

But the one form of trust does not exclude the other – ideally they would complement each other. A professional organization like Weg der Mitte in Berlin solicits support based on its good reputation – in the region –and the fact that it is recognized by the German Tax and Revenue Authority as a non-profit foundation. In addition, it encourages its supporters and people who are familiar with it to bear witness to the work it does to support of young mothers on the betterplace website. In this way, mechanisms of trust come together from the worlds of hierarchies and of networks.

In the past months we have been attacked time and again on exactly this point: “What! You don’t control which projects are inserted on the betterplace website and which aren’t? That’s just welcoming lies and deception with open arms!” Ashoka, THE network for social entrepreneurship, has now certified that mechanisms based on social networks and radical transparency may be superior to the established hierarchical ones or at least complement them meaningfully.

Cinema Jenin

For the past few days we had Marcus Vetter, an award-winning documentary film director, staying with us and visiting betterplace. It’s been a great time, with little sleep and much talk, many meetings resulting in a number of creative ideas.

What is a film director doing on betterplace?
Well, Marcus latest film, Heart of Jenin, took him to the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. Here he documented the true story of Ismael Khatib, a resident of the Jenin refugee camp. In 2005 Ismaels 12 years old son Achmed was shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Still grieving, his father agreed to donate Ahmed’s heart, liver, lungs and kidneys to save the lives of Israeli children.

The film documents not only the dramatic days after Achmed’s death, but follows Ismaels journey two years later to three of the Jewish families whose children owe their lives to the organ donations.

The New York Times writes:
Offering a startling vision of hope while laying bare the deep divisions between Israelis and Palestinians, “The Heart of Jenin,” a new German-Israeli documentary film, recounts the story of Ahmed, his father, and three of the five people who received the donated organs.

“It’s not about politics, about Jews or Arabs, it’s about human beings,” said Ismail Khatib, Ahmed’s father, in an interview after the film’s premiere in Jerusalem.

“I see my son in these children.”

The encounter with the protagonists of the story, as well as the political and humanitarian catastrophy defining the Palestinian Territories, moved Marcus to go beyond his usual task of documentation. Together with Ismael, who had started a child center in the Jenin refugee camp in order to keep children off the dangerous streets, he decided upon a new social project: the renovation of the old cinema in the city center.

You can read more about the project here. 

Marcus came in touch with betterplace when presenting his project (alongside our CEO Till) at the Hasso Plattner Institute, devoted to Social Entrepreneurship, last month (thanks Dagmar Quentin for making the match and for Jörg Rheinboldt to pass it on to me!).

Since, Marcus and I have met at the film festival in Locarno, where Heart of Jenin was enthusiastically greeted, and where I had the chance to meet Ismael himself. Now in Berlin we sat together with Moritz (responsible for marketing at betterplace), Hannelore (projects), Aishah (press) and Hans-Jürgen (project incubator) to devise effective fundraising strategies for Cinema Jenin. Today we also spent a constructive hour in the offices of German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, leaving with the prospect of systematically gathering support from important German cultural institutions abroad.

Supporting a project like Cinema Jenin is no only intellectually and emotionally exciting, it also teaches a lot about project work. We are in direct contact with a project manager or social entrepreneur, who gives us valuable feedback about the functioning of betterplace as a fundraising and networking platform. Thus by engaging deeply with one project, we are hopefully able to develop solutions which will benefit all users of the plattform.

Volunteering – „Lifestyle NGO“

Large numbers of young Germans are embarking on a volunteering trip to a developing country – and the numbers are increasing ever since the German Ministry for Development created Weltwärts earlier this year. 70 Millionn Euro are availabe for this largest European volunteering organisation, enabling up tp 10.000 youth between 18-28 years to help out in Indian slums, protect giraffes in Niger or support ecological projects in Peru.

The programms are immensly popular: for 100 openings the American Field Service, a Weltwärts partner organisation, recieved 1400 applications. The German Development Service (ded) attracted 1300 applicants for ist 275 vacencies. No doubt: development work is fashionable.

How useful are unqualified volunteers?

But how useful are the services of young volunteers whose only qualification more often than not only consists of a high school diploma? Who is profiting? The local NGOs, the poor or the volunteers themselves, who are leaving their family homes to embark on an adventure?

The experts and NGOs Florian Töpfl interviewed for his article in the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung Egotrip ins Elend are highy critical of the new volunteering craze. Claudia v. Braunmühl, professor of Political Science, is „appauled“ by Westwärts, deeming the whole initiative extremely populistic, as nobody seems to have asked: „What do people in developing countries really need?“. Defintely not unqualified helpers. In its current format the program is for her reminiscent of Reality TV Jungle Camp Shows.

Friends, a Cambodian NGO, whose 240 Cambodian employees run 10 workshops for disadvantaged children, is one of those organisations looked up by Western travellers, offering their services for free. But the organisation doesn’t accept an unqualified helpers. One of the reasons is that „they only distract our children from working“ and in the past there have been a number of problems with pedophiles.

In a similar vain, Chris Minko who created a national volleyball league for handicapped people, in order to re-integrate the victims of Polio and land mine attacks, rejects volunteers. As he sees it, „the problems in developing countries are so very complex – nobody can gain an understanding for them in 12 months“. Nor can culturally adequate behaviour be learned in such a short period: one of his former volunteers gave away her laptop to a local helper, thereby arousing the envy of all others and catapulting the organisation into turmoil. (As an anthropologist I am inclined to disagree with this latter view: most anthropolgists spent between 12-24 months in the social groups they are researching and most do gain an informed and thorough understanding of local life worlds. Could it be that Westerners who have decided to devote a large part of their lives to a foreign country sometimes tend to develop too strict measures regarding the competencies of their co-patriots, who are a bit less involved? And hasn’t cultural competence more to do with individual sensitivity to context, than with the amount of time spent in a foreign social scene?)

Foreigners add respectibility

One of the benefits of international volunteers to local NGOs is, that they can be used as prestigious fund raisers, targeting international donors. In many countries of the South non-governmental organisations are one of the few lucrative business options availabe – in Cambodia alone there are 300 international as well as 1000 domestic registered NGOs. Yet very often it is hard for outsiders to judge the quality of their work and to find out who they are benefitting: the poor people they are stating to serve or their own self-interests.

Accordingly the author reaches the conclusion that volunteering programmes serve first and foremost volunteers themselves. Not only do they receive a 10 day preparation seminar as well as a 2-weeks long intercultural workshop and are fully insured during their cost-free year abroad, they also aquire a valuable asset for their future careers. HR and recruitment officers judge the volunteering experience as a very positive one, as future job applicants gain rich personal experiences and (inter)cultural competence.

If this is so – if volunteering acts as extra polish on Western CVs – why do the millions spent on the Weltwärts program come from the German development budget and not from that of the Ministry of Education?

But than again, this is a question which can be asked with regards to very many development policies, who all too often mainly benefit one’s own citizens and corporations and not the needy populations the policies where meant to target.

Slightly more differentiation, please!

Overall, I think it is correct to say that many Western volunteers do approach social projects abroad in a fairly naive way and overestimate the impact they can have. Partly this is a reflection of the old Western superiority complex: we know what the rest of the world needs. We are the only ones who can help you.

This attitude ignores the fact, that many, if not most workable solutions for local problems will be developed by those people, who have the best knowledge of the situation on the ground and who have the most vested interests to solve them: the locals themselves. Yet this is not to say that there is no need for outside support. To the contrary, many local initiatives depend upon just such support, be it in the form of expertise, money of volunteer time. I am thinking for example of projects such as this, started by a local social entrepreneur and gaining momentum with the help of a German and an Australian volunteer.

Don’t Wait for The Rain

What a cool social marketing tool! This video by Maasai rap artist Mr. Ebbo propagates the KickStart MoneyMaker pump, one of the most successful BoP products (its inventor recently won the Lemelson-MIT Sustainability Award.) I saw the pump advertised in a number of places in Mali earlier this year.

 

The power of friends telling friends telling…

It’s about more than about giving money — it’s about creating connections. By encouraging individual participation and involvement, we will create international communities of common interest. This is the essence of social networking.

This is exactly what betterplace.org is about. It’s good to know we are in good company. Thanks to my colleague Hannelore for pointing me to this interesting article!

Tom Hadfield had sold soccer.net for 40 million US dollars at the age of 17. Eight years and a trip to Zambia later he’s now taking on the fight against malaria. With MalariaEngage.org the “web guru” (as he’s labeled in the Reuters article by John Joseph) aims to support local researchers working on ways to treat or prevent malaria – and who are facing a terrible lack of resources. The fact “that thousands of people are dying every day from a preventable disease” prompted Hadfield to start MalariaEngage. By joining forces with Peter A. Singer and Abdallah S. Daar, both health professors at the University of Toronto, the social entrepreneur’s initiative has surely gathered momentum. In the article, Singer is quoted as saying: “We feel young African scientists have very good ideas that end up in the dustbin. This is about helping committed young researchers with good ideas to help themselves create a better future.”

This is a great approach to make the world a better place. We share Hadfield’s hope that social networking will be used by more and more people to get engaged in social change.

Like him, we believe in the positive power of the internet – and “in the power of friends telling friends telling friends.” Good luck, Tom!

Paul Farmers Call for Inclusive Social Entrepreneurship

Being an anthropologist concerned with poverty alleviation myself, the name Paul Farmer, has a forceful ring. Farmer, a medical doctor and anthropologist, author of books such as Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (2005), is also the co-founder of Partners in Health. Since its first hospital in Haiti, which provides free treatment to poor patients suffering from tuberculosis and AIDS, PiH has developed into a worldwide health organization.

 

I heard Farmer speak at a conference of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago a few years ago and was very impressed with his uncompromising views on poverty and human dignity. Thus, when Social Edge featured Dr. Farmer’s closing speech at this years Skoll Forum, I read it immediately.

 

In it Farmer pointed to a blind spot in the enthusiasm about social entrepreneurship, when he critiqued the preoccupation (even fetishization) of the movement with scale.

 

After seeing earlier waves of development practice fail, social entrepreneurs – many of whom are financed by a new breed of ex-entrepreneurs immersed in the culture of capitalism – apply business thinking to poverty reduction. Foundations and funds such as Ashoka and Acumen Fund are interested to support initiatives, which are transferable from one place to the other and are scalable. And they are doing admirable work.

 

Yet, as Paul Farmer reminds us, scaling and business solutions might only work for a certain number of issues and people. But what about those poor people, who are not cost-effective customers? Will they be left unserved by the new social entrepreneur movement? When the poor are re-cast as customers, will we loose sight of the fact, that certain goods and services should be rights, not commodities?

 

Farmer asks: “Does anyone really believe that a mother loves her newborn more if she had to pay for some sort of user fee for prenatal or obstetrics care?” and calls for us to include the poor people in the social entrepreneur movement and allow them to be social entrepreneurs.

 

He has a very valid point: its great to be able to scale services and commodities and thus reach out to a large number of poop people, but we should equally support small-scale initiatives, closely in touch with local communities, who might not be potential customers, but who nevertheless have the right to a dignified life.

 

As Mike Lee comments: “Farmer … was asking us not to forget that all acts of compassion (even the smallest), and all efforts to alleviate suffering (even those difficult to scale) are worthwhile and valuable, even sacred.”

The Skoll Forum: Looking back – moving forward

The Skoll World Forum 2008 has drawn to a close – I feel energized, stimulated, encouraged, inspired – and utterly exhausted.

How many times in the last few days have I repeated the words:
/betterplace – an internet platform for philanthropy. /
/We link those who want to give to those in need of receiving.
We are German.
We are European.
We are expanding.
We seek partners. We seek projects. We seek users.
It was also a pleasure meeting you.
Here’s my business card.
We will be in touch./

The event was well organised. The delegates were enthusiastic. The speakers profound.
From Jimmy Carter, Jody Williams and Karen Tse, to Paul Farmer, Ashraf Ghani and Al Gore – these were but a few of the great speakers at the forum that guided the discussion on the responsibility of social entrepreneurs to overcome the challenges in today’s world.

And although the words of these powerful individuals have sunk deep into my mind, leaving me to process and digest their message for long after this Forum is passed – it is not these voices that have left the deepest impact – but rather a small “community” of individuals that share a similar vision and understanding of how the internet can be used as a lever to make real change.

In the very beginning of the Skoll Forum, at the Opening Plenary Karen Tse spoke of how individuals can be connected through shared ideas that often transcend traditional cultural borders.
It is this sense of “connectedness” that has left the greatest impact. Connected because, as delegates, we share the unique experience of the Skoll Forum. Connected because we share a common vision for overcoming the many social challenges of our times. And connected because betterplace, like other internet based organisations, provides a solution to linking people, ideas and support across the globe.

“We are here” – The Skoll World Forum 2008 in Oxford

The start of Skoll World Forum 2008 has been as unpredictable and refreshing as the (much discussed) weather in Oxford.

The rain was drizzling down on the front door steps of the Said Business School as newly arrived delegates gathered to complete their registration and begin the first of a 3 day forum on Social Entrepreneurship. The drizzle continued as delegates were seen mingling, shaking hands, chatting in gentle murmurs, and sipping cups of organic tea in the lobby. A sense of anticipation simmered through the crowd as more and more people arrived, together with the occasional shaft of sunshine the sound of enthusiastic voices of friends and acquaintances greeting one another broke through the crowd.

The theme of this years Skoll Forum is culture. Asking the question: if social entrepreneurship is truly about changing the world, then what are the cultural and contextual barriers that social entrepreneurs need to overcome to create sustainable change in the areas where they work?

Amongst the speakers at the opening plenary, was an impressive panel of women, each telling their story about how they have had to having to overcome challenging cultural barriers to be successful, and thereby having a profound global impact.
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Jody Williams spoke of communication being the key to success. That everyone needs the same information to be empowered.

Karen Tse, Founder and CEO of Bridges of Justice told a story of warriors before a battle to illustrate what was needed to overcome cultural barriers. The warriors were told that were 2 things that must be remembered throughout if they were to be successful: compassion and interconnectedness. Both of which remain important in our growing global village.

As we left the prestigious Sheldonian Theatre the rain thundered down – as if in confirmation of Jeff Skoll‘s opening remarks of the forum “We are here”.
We are here, as social entrepreneurs, to cross cultural barriers and make a significant and lasting impact on the discourse of social change and development.

The Skoll World Forum can be followed online.

Line Hadsbjerg

Experience giving!

 

The part I really love most about my work at betterplace is the feedback project managers are sending us (I might have written this before, but that’s the way it is). Normally they do so by e-mail, blogging or uploading photos on their project blog. Not so Ann Wambua, who runs Cecil House in a village near Mombasa, Kenya, an orphanage for children, who have lost their parents to AIDS. Since I first started corresponding with Ann 2 years ago, we have exchanged dozens of text-messages, as Ann has only infrequent access to the internet and hasn’t got the technological resources to scan in photos etc.

Thus I have helped her to publish her project on betterplace. In February we were finally able to transfer the first donations for the renovation of the orphanage to her and today I know exactly were the money went: in the parcel, Ann not only sent all receipts, but also heart-warming thank-you notes from the children, as well as a full photo documentation of the work process thus far. Now everybody who has donated to the project can see how the lorry transported the building materials to Cecil House, how the renovations were done and how happy the children are with the results.

As I am leaving for Laos tomorrow I will only be able to make them accessible to all project supporters after my return, but I couldn’t resist sharing my joy at least in this blog. Thanks Ann!

Tales from Mali

One of the people behind The Mali Initiative, Jürgen Nagler describes in an interesting blogpost some of his recent experiences with the aid system in Mali. In January my family and I had the chance to visit their pilot school in Bamako and are happy to support their work on betterplace. Jürgens tales from the fourth-poorest nation echo William Easterly’s theses about the failure of the Western aid system.  

There is, for example, a project supported by the World Bank, which diverts water from Kalabancoro (the suburb of Bamako, in which the school we visited is located) to other more central suburbs: now the latter have water, but Kalabancoro is drying out and its inhabitants need to bring water in containers from a distant well.  

Money is flowing from the large Western aid organisations to large Southern governments – only to disappear in the Bermuda triangle between ministers, regions and communes without ever trickling down to the intended recipients – the poor.  

Corruption is everywhere. On our trip we witnessed many times how taxi drivers stop for policemen and at road check points only to be allowed to continue with their trip after handing over a few well-used CFA notes. In an article in the German weekly DIE ZEIT, a village elder bitterly complains to the journalist:

If we had our way, we would kill these civil servants! They feed on our blood! The foreign donors should give the money to us directly, not to the government and not to the bureaucracies. Whatever they give them, they might as well not give at all. The bureaucrats only want to develop themselves, not the country.   

Aid disappears, but because donors and recipients thrive on the existing system and manage to support their own interests, they have little reason to reform it. Using manipulated statistics, they manage to hide many obvious defaults:

Thus when Nagler spoke to mayors and teachers in the rural communities where the Initiative plans to establish new class rooms, he was told that 99% of all primary students pass the test for secondary school. Nagler and his collegues were impressed – until they found out that only 5% of these students spoke French. Yet French is the language of instruction at secondary schools and the test had been rigged in order to satisfy the expectations of aid agencies and their backers.