Summer Spotlight: A Tale of Three “Summers”

Mike McCreless is currently serving as a summer associate on the Portfolio team.  He is a joint-degree student at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School’s MPA-ID program. He has worked as a consultant for Monitor Company in New York, Madrid, Paris and Morocco, and as a Research Associate for Professor Michael Porter at Harvard Business School, where he wrote case studies and research notes about economic development in Rwanda, foreign aid and other topics.

A couple of years ago, Larry Summers gave a guest lecture at a class I was taking on international development. He delivered a fascinating 20-minute lecture as if reading it from a transcript in his mind’s eye, and then took questions for an hour. I asked him why foreign aid had delivered so much less ‘development,’ by any definition, than expected, and what should we be doing with our time and money instead?

He took a long pause, staring into space, and then said slowly that that was perhaps the most profound question in economics, causing me simultaneously to swell with pride and recoil at my own pretentiousness. He listed several of the standard arguments for aid’s ineffectiveness, but what really stuck with me was his contention that advances in technology, not foreign aid, would do most to eradicate poverty in the long run.

Well, that made sense, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. It was not as if I had a stockpile of socially valuable technological innovations saved up for just such an occasion. I was a white twenty-something from the American ‘burbs, with no technological expertise and limited experience in Africa, but enough experience with the foreign aid system to give me misgivings about a career with the big multilaterals.

I didn’t have any technological innovations, but I did have ideas about how to make the foreign aid system more effective. Before enrolling in grad school, I spent time in Rwanda, researching economic development and in particular, the efforts of aid agencies on the ground. As I traveled around the country and met its people, I was astonished at the level of deprivation that they endured despite the vast inflows of aid. It appeared that aid had delivered surprisingly little ‘development,’ though of course the counterfactual might have been much worse. Moreover, the academic and popular press was awash with possibilities to improve the management practices of aid agencies. I hoped that better measurement of project outcomes, and alignment of organizational structures and staff incentives with those outcomes, would help donors and recipients alike get more out of the $100 billion spent on aid every year.

I am in a three-year program in which students work in internship programs during the two intervening summers. Last summer, I had the opportunity to test some of these ideas during an internship at a large aid institution. My role was to help design the next version of an internal system to track project outcomes. I worked with project managers to understand how they select projects, manage them over time, and measure their impact. I tried to assess the potential for better management practices at U.S. headquarters to improve results on the ground in Africa.

I also tried to understand the culture of the organization and how I might fit in. I tried to understand managers’ jobs, how they spent their time day-to-day, and more importantly, how they felt about their jobs. What did their work mean to them? Did they feel like they were making a difference? Did they believe that somewhere out there, in some forgotten urban slum or rural village, someone’s life was improved, their burdens eased by the work we did behind our desks in the U.S.?

During these conversations, I was often reminded of a quote from Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’ memoir of his time on Wall Street during the 1980s: “Goodness was not taken into account on the trading floor. It was neither rewarded nor punished. It just was. Or it wasn’t.” On a trading floor, this is as it should be, but I did not expect it to be as true of aid institutions in 2008 as it was of Salomon Brothers in 1987.

Many of the managers I spoke to care deeply about development, and think critically and often about whether their work actually helps anyone. Others wish they worked at a purely commercial enterprise, where they would not have to be bothered by concerns about social impact. To some, a job in the foreign aid system simply meant a comfortable life in the U.S. and enhanced status in the socio-political elite of their home country. Most staff simply assume that what they do helps people, without really checking to make sure. Their hearts are in the right place, and they have faith in the system to direct their efforts toward socially valuable ends. In fairness, it is extraordinarily difficult to know whether one’s activities in U.S. headquarters actually help anybody on the ground. I was nevertheless taken aback at how little people cared to find out.

I realized that my ideas about reforming management practices at aid agencies were a technocratic solution to a cultural problem. Managerial fixes such as systems to track results and incentive plans aligned with results help on the margins, but do not directly address the fundamental cultural issues that constrain the effectiveness of foreign aid.

For my second summer internship, I focused on smaller organizations that I believed shared my values, and my interest in experimenting with new modes of foreign assistance. To make a long story short, this June I found myself at Acumen Fund. The fourth day of my internship was “World Metrics Day,” declared as such by Acumen Fund and its partners to celebrate the progress they have made in measuring the social impacts of their investments. As we sat down to a World Metrics Day teleconference, Acumen Fund Chief Investment Officer Brian Trelstad turned to me. “World Metrics Day! What better way to inaugurate your first week!” He stared at me expectantly. I wasn’t used to this level of excitement about measuring social impact. I stared dumbly back, trying to figure out if he was joking or not, if I should laugh or nod. He has a wry sense of humor, but he wasn’t joking. The man really cares to know whether what he does actually helps anybody. It was going to be a different kind of summer.

I have spent half of my time working on a deal to use innovative biomass technology to electrify rural off-grid villages in India, and half of my time thinking about how to integrate the many approaches Acumen takes to measuring the social impacts of its investment. The biomass project has vividly demonstrated the potential for innovation to create tremendous social impact. This social impact may be difficult to measure, but Acumen Fund’s investment in impact measurement also demonstrates that an organization that truly wants to measure its impact can find a way to do so.

In the end, Larry Summers was right. My quest for an organization that was serious about high-efficiency social impact led me to an organization that invests in innovations—innovations not only in technology, but also in distribution and delivery of essential products and services to the poor.

On the surface it may seem like Acumen Fund, and venture philanthropy in general, seems to just be the hot new thing these days. They blog, and tweet, and use fancy words like ‘philanthro-capitalism.’ They are undoubtedly in fashion. That’s great, because it gets new people excited about the work they do. But look past all that. Acumen Fund could fall out of fashion tomorrow—no more headlines, no more keynote speeches—and what would be left is a handful of people who actually care whether what they do is valuable. Not to the blogosphere and the editors of The Economist, but to poor people in India, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. That is my experience of Acumen Fund this summer: a small group of people who are in it for the right reasons, a handful of villages in India that have access to clean electricity for the first time (and the prospect of bringing electricity to many more), and all for much less than it would have cost my former employer to accomplish the same. The fashion may fade, but the impact will remain.