Counted Like Sheep: Retooling the WASH Model’s Beneficiary Indicators
January 28, 2011
By Ned Breslin, Special for Circle of Blue
I hate the word “beneficiary.”
Beneficiary is a misleading indicator and driver of development assistance. It implies passivity on the part of the “recipient” that does not mesh with my experience overseas, where people are indeed active agents of their own development, not simply recipients of donor benevolence.
Many organizations understand this and have implemented programs and projects with considerable up-front financing and sweat labor from community members. In good programs, communities are heavily involved in the planning and execution process—they are hardly passive beneficiaries and do not deserve to be counted like sheep.
Yet people are still counted like sheep. Beneficiaries remain the only common measurement in the current model of the international water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector. NGOs (and others) take donor funds and support the installation of a new water point or a latrine. Then they figure out how many people benefited from the project and publish the results in annual reports that are emailed to donors and supporters, and, more recently, are posted on Twitter and Facebook in hopes of garnering even more support.
Read any annual report, and the number of people helped last year—the number of beneficiaries—is often the key data point on which the organization wishes to be judged. Strategic planning generally follows a similar pattern—more countries and bigger budgets lead to more beneficiaries.
The underlying message: good organizations help more people each year—showing scale, growth, and impact. Success is, in the end, measured by simply tallying up the number of beneficiaries served in a given year. Kind of like the McDonald’s of the development sector.
It’s true that the number of beneficiaries may show what happened in a given year, but it does not, in any way, prove whether the intervention was long lasting or transformative for the community.
And given the wreckage of failed water systems that litter Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it is really quite surprising that beneficiaries are still used as the primary indicator of impact. Anyone who checks back with communities from a few years ago can see that there are far too many who have returned to using polluted rivers because water is no longer flowing from their WASH-implemented spigot.
The focus on annual beneficiary numbers emphasizes short-term results—it’s all about what you did this year—and has had significant and detrimental implications for the NGO community, let alone the communities we were supposed to have been helping.
What do you think?
