Forgetting the “Analysis” of the “Needs”

If you have been long enough in your field, you must have had the experience: There is a difficult area you have worked in for years with varying degrees of success. It’s complicated but important. Let’s say the field is media councils and the establishment of self-regulatory mechanisms against the continuous threat by governments to impose “media commissions” to control the press. Then a competitor enters your field, often one with a “U” as the first letter of its acronym. This competitor has all the good intentions of this world – and bags of money. Then UXXX or UYYYYY does a “needs analysis” which only too often means to ask stakeholders and local NGOs for their needs and to conveniently forget the analysis.

Those stakeholders are not stupid. They go to their bottom drawer and produce an elaborate variation of the proposal you know from years back. It is the one the implementation of which has driven you nuts because of lack of will or lack of capacity on the side of the stakeholders. It was just when you told them that there is no money left for repeating the same breakfast meetings with parliamentarians and the same seminars without outcome, when your competitor moves in without knowing or without caring about the past.

What do you do? Loose your customers in the media field to the competitor and watch the whole exercise to be repeated for more money? Or sabotage the whole endeavour which won’t make you popular on either side of the development business.

What about lessons learned?

Wouldn’t it be nice to insist on the “analysis” part of the needs analysis without making enemies in organisations with the acronym starting with “U”. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if their staff had more of an incentive to analyse the context of their work first and only then begin to disburse their funds.

Is anybody working on these problems out there? Would be nice to hear.

- November 3, 2009 by Rolf Paasch, fesmedia Africa