World Ark Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 34) 9 10 Design to specific cost and price targets. We ran across a team in Somalia that had organized a project to help refugee women make and sell soap. But when we asked how much it would cost to buy some of this soap, it was hard to get a clear answer. We eventually learned they could have bought the finest, most perfumed soaps available in Paris, air-freighted them to Somalia and sold them at a cheaper price than what it cost to produce the crude soap the refugees were making. The key issue that prevented the team from implementing a costeffective project was a lack of interest in figuring out the cost and price targets to be competitive in the local marketplace. Like so many other development organizations, they scorned materialistic measurements such as costs and profits, and had no measurements of impact other than their own belief that the group activity was good for refugee morale. Follow practical three-year plans. You may have a world-changing plan with a stunning vision for the future, but if you can’t come up with a specific plan for the next three-year period, you’ll never get anywhere. If your three-year targets are too ambitious, you will likely fail long before you have any chance of reaching your long-range vision. But if your three-year targets are too puny, you won’t lay a solid base for scaling up. When I wrote a three-page concept note for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I said that my long-term vision was to increase the net yearly income of 30 million families by $500 a year, and the foundation was satisfied. But when we started negotiating a specific initiative they could support, they said “Forget the 30 million—we want to see clear evidence over the next four years that you can reach 100,000. Prove to us that you can achieve the specific impacts that you say you can, and then we can consider going on to phase two and maybe even phase three.” plan 34 March/April 2008 | WORLD ARK www.heifer.org design 1 2 3 4 5 67 http://www.heifer.org
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