This week I attended the XIX International AIDS Conference on behalf of REPSSI (The Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative.) Based in Johannesburg, REPSSI trains "front-line" service providers on children's emotional and social well-being and works with governments and NGOs to develop child-friendly policy frameworks in 13 countries in southern & eastern Africa. There are at least 1,994 project sites where REPSSI approaches are being applied and…

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As we drove past the White House and the Lincoln Memorial on Constitution Avenue yesterday, Tapfuma and Lynette noticed the flags at half-mast.

“It must be because of the tragedy,” our conversation began.

Flags in Washington D.C. are honoring the 12 people killed in a shooting in Aurora, Colorado on the day REPSSI staff arrived in the U.S.

“What causes…

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This post on behalf of REPSSI originally appeared on A View from the Cave.

The first and most challenging exercise of the day when I took a seminar from The OpEd Project required me to fill in the following blanks and share with the group:

Hello, my name…

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At the upcoming XIX International AIDS Conference here in Washington D.C., I'll be joining REPSSI (the Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative) as they celebrate their decade-long work to lessen the devastating social and emotional (psychosocial) impact of poverty, conflict, HIV and AIDS among children and youth across East and…

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“But how will we hold them accountable?” the senior technical advisor said of the proposal from the high-profile NGO. “There’s not even a logframe in there.”

Silently in my cubicle, I thought, “Oh, if only that would only make people and organizations accountable…”

Obviously, the need and the desire to be accountable in our industry are not going away. With foreign aid budgets under fire in many donor countries, accountability perhaps becomes even more…

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I’m sharing an interesting discussion that’s been going on via the LinkedIn Africa NGO Network group, "Why is development aid having corruption problems in Africa generally?". Some of the key contributions on root issues follow below.…

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A wannabe hot-shot technical advisor, I had just enough knowledge to be useful and just enough naïveté to be dangerous.



I was new to the country office and eager to demonstrate my monitoring and evaluation (M&E) prowess.



The task at hand was completing a mid-term review of a “problematic” implementing partner whose work focused on HIV and food security programming. There was no baseline, but go for it.



Oh, and this particular country office needed to put…

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I recently had the pleasure of "virtually" connecting with Renee Martyna and Steve Munroe of Satori Worldwide. They have a compelling story with which I think many aid workers can identify. They share it below.



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When we met back in 1998, we were young in more ways than one. Although we were not missionaries in the strictest sense, we were surely full of a non-sectarian but very potent form of ‘save the world’ zeal. The…

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Harare, 2002. The word came. Cash is in the banks. The three colleagues I was standing near at the time and I quickly jumped in the car to get downtown to Standard Chartered as soon as possible.



It was my first “real job” in the development sector after graduate school. I knew enough to know how little I knew, and little else.



The conversation in the car from the office to Nelson Mandela Avenue inevitably turned to the growing inequality between our corporate aid agency… Continue

How-matters.org has been rather quiet the last few weeks as I am currently in the process of moving back to my hometown of Bruning, Nebraska, U.S.A. population 248. It’s a major transition, which I recently wrote about on… Continue

One country, seven districts, seven international NGOs, five million dollars (excluding food commodity monetization), and…



161 indicators.



How do you begin to collect, analyze and, more importantly, utilize data on 161 indicators in this scenario?



Got me. And I was the Technical Advisor on Monitoring & Evaluation for this project – ha!



What a beautiful, i.e. funded, proposal it was—concocted by the lead INGOs’ most well-respected,… Continue

The following article was adapted from Faye Dresner’s article, “Leader: First Know Thyself.” As I read it, it occurred to me that the term leader could easily be replaced with [aid worker] and the message remain directly relevant. In many ways, all aid workers, whether the volunteer or director, act as leaders as we strive for the self-awareness to be……

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