Terms Of Reference Podcast

Would you be willing to give up everything you have, and go into debt, to help some of the most impoverished people in the world? Would your answer change if I told you that you had to jump off that cliff without knowing exactly how you'd go about helping those people?

This is exactly what my guest for the 120th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast did when she founded the Blessings Basket Project - an organization inspired by the small acts of kindness shown to her when life didn't work out as expected in 2002. Now, years later, Theresa Carrington and the Blessings Basket project has not only helped thousands of women, but created a system for identifying, supporting and ensuring that women entrepreneurs break out of poverty, into prosperity.

Theresa is my kind of entrepreneur - she jumped head first into solving the problem she identified without knowing anything about the business of helping those in need. She's brought along some of the voices of the people she's help and works with as extra inspiration for the show.

Even if you are a newbie in the humanitarian aid and development community, I'm willing to bet you've heard about cash. And, by cash, I mean the very-much-growing interest and support for providing assistance to those in need by giving them cash. The theory is simple: people in need of help, especially in situations of poverty and emergencies, know the specifics of their situation better than anyone and cash provides them the best tool to getting those needs met quickly.

My guest for the 119th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast is no newcomer to the cash discussion. Paul Niehaus is a co-founder and president of GiveDirectly, which is currently the top-rated nonprofit by GiveWell and ranked among the 25 most audacious companies (Inc) and 10 most innovative companies in finance (Fast Company). GiveDirectly is a recognized leader in the use of modern technology to transfer funds directly to the extreme poor, and in the use of rigorous scientific methods to document its impact.

You can go ahead and admit it your yourself - I won't judge, because I do it too - that its nice when you have a substantial number of people "like" or follow something you've posted on social media. For most of us, this revolves around a picture of a vacation, something the kids did, or random silliness we happened across on the street.

But what if your post went viral? I mean really viral... so much so that it resulted in you receiving so much feed back that you decided to start an organization to fulfill the need that you just uncovered? Well, this is exactly what happened to Annamaria Olsson, who is my guest for the 118th episode of the Terms of reference podcast.

As you'll hear in the episode, she wrote a post that launched a vibrant growing organization called Give Something Back To Berlin, that seeks to connect people in the city, especially migrants who are looking for ways to thrive in a place that has welcomed them with open arms, but may not necessarily with all the resources they need.

Annamaria is a Swedish journalist and writer, who also has 10 years of NGO experience. As you'll hear in the podcast, she tells you her story much better than I ever could.

When an emergency happens, whether its unexpected like an earth quake, or the result of a steady build up like many of the violent conflicts we have in the world today, people scatter. They scatter from where they live to not only remove themselves from immediate harm, but then to also find and connect with those they care about. This movement presents one of the larger challenges with delivering humanitarian aid to those who need it.

But what if there was a way to detect where people are going, or where they've gone - and determine if, or when, they might come back to their homes... without having to physically see them? This is one example of the work of Flowminder, an organization that uses anonymized data from mobile operators and household surveys to help humanitarian agencies and governments understand the movement of people before, during and after an emergency.

On today's 117th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, I speak with Linus Bengtsson, who is one of the co-founders and the Executive Director of the Flowminder Foundation. Linus is a medical doctor and researcher. In his academic research, Dr. Bengtsson performs evaluations of the use of new digital data types, such as mobile operator data, to measure and monitor development outcomes.

What is it like to not have a voice? More specifically, what is it like to have a voice - a powerful, intelligent, passionate voice - but one that no one can hear? This is the case for, literally, millions of people in the world today who have stories to tell, and stories that need or should be heard, but who are not able to access mainstream media channels that we all still turn to for our news. These are stories about fleeing violence, about what its like to be disabled or about trying to see where the road from poverty to prosperity begins.
Now, I know that social media has evolved this equation, to be sure. However, I also know first hand that even when you have access to all the right tools, and resources and great stories, it is still a massive effort to break out of the overwhelming ocean of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and thousands of other "individual voice outlets" to be heard at scale.
Libby Powell, my guest for the 116th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, is implementing a vision for giving voice to the unheard in mainstream media. She is the founding director of an organization called On Our Radar, a non-profit communications agency that seeks out, supports and helps to amplify unheard voices.

Libby started out like many of us: for several years she worked in humanitarian aid supporting health and advocacy programmes in Palestine and the refugee camps of Lebanon. But then she retrained herself as a multimedia journalist to cover development and rights issues for the UK press. And, as you'd expect, she's no slacker - in 2010, she won the Guardian International Development Journalism award and in 2014, she was listed as one of Journalism.co.uk's top female innovators in digital media.

We have spent a fair amount of time on the Terms of Reference Podcast talking about data - big data, data collection, using (and not using) data. While I'm sure that we will continue to talk about data a lot in the future, and hopefully (and more importantly?) the useful information that data creates, today's episode focuses on the portion of the innovation spectrum in development and aid where the truly tangible, potentially game changing product or service that someone (or group of people) who has poured blood, sweat and tears into making a reality... is actually becoming a reality.

For the 115th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, I speak with Ryan Oksenhorn of the company Zipline. A member of the founding team, he is the company's Software Team lead and and also runs the flight testing program. Zipline is a complete rethinking of the delivery of critical and emergency health care products, like blood or vaccines, for hard-to-deliver-to places. They fly them there. On demand. Within minutes of receiving a request.

While this seems like a no-brainer, as you'll hear in the podcast, the Zipline team has had to solve massive amounts of problems to achieve the safety, reliability and quality necessary for this service - the solutions to which have only become possible in the last few years. They are kicking off the launch of the Zipline service in Rwanda this summer. I was inspired and I hope you will be as well.

There is a good deal of energy in the development and humanitarian space focused on building an evidence base for what works - and what doesn't. Here on the Terms of Reference Podcast, we've talked with numerous individuals and organizations who are building data sets towards that end, and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation - or 3ie - has been contributing to this conversation since its founding in 2008. To date, they've funded 146 impact evaluations, 33 systematic reviews and 38 other studies in over 50 countries.

But how do we properly reflect on and communicate about the evidence we've collected, and its resulting analysis, so that it can be used by development and humanitarian actors to design (and deliver) better programing? I discuss this and a host of other topics on the 114th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast with my guest, Dr. Jyotsna Puri. Jo is the Deputy Executive Director and Head of Evaluation at 3ie and has more than 21 years of experience in policy research and development evaluation.

Those of us in the innovation space in development and humanitarian aid often talk about making sure that what we do is market driven. Not only should following this path provide the best solution to those who are interested in using your product or service, it should also create a clear roadmap to sustainability. Because, after all, if you have created a solution with such value that the demand not only sustains your organization, but allows you to continue to refine, grow and take risks (or, in one word, thrive), you're doing something right.

This relentless pursuit of providing a product of consistent high value is the passion that drives my guest for the 113th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast. Chris Robert is the founder of Dobility, which produces SurveyCTO, an electronic data collection platform used worldwide by leading researchers and evaluation professionals.

Chris has literally seen and done it all as a technologist, an entrepreneur, an economist, a researcher, and a lecturer. He's been a technology guru before anyone knew what the Internet was (or would become), a deep field researcher in India and Harvard professor.

The field of international development and humanitarian aid is so broad and diverse that it is essentially impossible to keep up with everything that is going on. Combine that with the rapid pace of technology development, communication and all-things-internet and you wouldn't be alone if you felt a bit overwhelmed by it all. The good news is that there are a growing number of forums, groups and conferences that interested professionals can tap into to dive deeper into their area of interest, connect with others of like mind or, perhaps most importantly, take time to look up from their desks to see how the rest of the universe is out there trying to help those in need.

My guest today on the 112th episode of the Terms of Reference podcast is Dr. Silvia Hostettler and she spends a good deal of her time convening spaces where development and humanitarian professionals can interact. She is the Deputy Director of the Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV) at EPFL in Switzerland where she is responsible for coordinating research activities and for the UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Development - who, incidentally, are also responsible for hosting the biannual Tech4Dev conference in Lausanne. Silvia She is also in charge of the educational program offered by CODEV and gives lectures in the field of development cooperation, in particular on the potential of technologies and innovation in the Global South. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Development Engineering and of the Commission for Research Partnerships with Developing Countries (KFPE).

It is no secret that there is a very strong push from donors and policy makers that programming for development and humanitarian aid be "evidence based." This push has, to a large degree, driven the technology revolutions we are seeing in data collection and analytics, and it is also responsible for the more difficult conversations that are had around value for money.

So what if you were in a position where you were responsible for both testing and building a viable path to scale for promising evidence-based interventions? This dream job is currently held by Karen Levy, our guest here on the 111th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast. Karen is the Director of Global Innovation at Evidence Action. She leads the organization’s innovation strategy and oversees the “Evidence Action Beta” department that looks for new ideas and tests them to see if they'll work.