john anner

author, international development expert, fundraising strategist and avid explorer

vietnam

Thrive is now live! Impact versus outputs

vietnam, leadership, international developmentJohn AnnerComment

The new Thrive Networks website is up: www.thrivenetworks.org.

It's a whole new approach to our work. Check out the impact tab/publications. We are moving away from counting outputs, and instead are examining impact, defined as permanent and meaningful change. For example, our neonatal health program treats 55,000 babies a year, which is fine. That's an output. Better is to look for the effects on neonatal mortality and morbidity. How many lived who otherwise would have died? How many were saved from brain damage caused by severe jaundice? What is the mortality rate in the hospital before and after the intervention? These are the questions that we are asking and answering.

Launching Thrive Networks

east meets west, international development, leadership, vietnamJohn AnnerComment

When the world changes, you have to change with it. Twenty-six years ago, Vietnam was just emerging from the dark years of socialist austerity and international isolation. Today, it is a development success story with a burgeoning middle class and a booming economy. Good for the Vietnamese people, but 26 years ago East Meets West was the only NGO game in town. Today, there are over 1,000 international organizations registered to work in the country. So we decided to re-launch East Meets West as Thrive Networks and seek our fortunes in the rest of the world (without leaving Vietnam behind, not by a long shot).

This was not an easy or quick decision; it took years of hard strategic planning work. But we started from the very beginning with a focus on transformation, not just change. We exhumed all our assumptions, aired out our values, cast a critical eye on favored programs, and looked out around the world to see what we thought was fresh, innovative, challenging and needed.

This led us to realize that a lot of innovation was happening in the rapidly-growing NGO sector, but most of these groups were really struggling to reach scale. We also came to believe that the era of helping low-income people with basic needs was over, and it was time to focus on low-opportunity individuals and communities and figure out ways to help them not just survive, but thrive. So we set up Thrive Networks to find great partners with innovative solution-oriented programs, and invite them to join with us to reach as many people as possible.

The board of directors voted in late 2013 to approve this strategy, and in February 2014 to change the name to Thrive Networks. This has led to a fantastic new organizational energy, with lots of new partners, three mergers completed, and more to come. We also learned a lot of lessons about how to do it right. Being a good American, as Churchill once noted, I try to do things correctly, but only after exploring every other option first. So we made some big mistakes along the way.

I'll share those in another post. And on Friday, our new website goes live -- with a big new section devoted to providing real insight into our performance. There is a lot to be proud of, but we don't shy away from telling the truth. Indeed, much of our work is now reviewed and verified by third parties.

Stay posted!

John

Quang Ngai

east meets west, international development, travel, vietnamJohn AnnerComment

There are some areas of Vietnam where development is exploding, and then there is Quang Ngai. A beautiful province with mountains to the west and the East Sea to the (you guessed it) east, Quang Ngai is still over 80% rural, quite poor and with no tourism to speak of. There are a few industrial projects, and downtown Quang Ngai is bustling, but for most people in the province, life goes on much as it did ten or twenty years ago.

Quang Ngai, located south of Hoi An in central Vietnam, is best known as the site of the My Lai massacre, a particularly nasty example of American soldiers out of control and killing every person they could find.  These days, according to the members of the provincial People’s Committee I spent a few days with this week, My Lai is a local symbol of how to turn hatred into something positive, an example of how evil can be transformed over time into inspiration for peace.

Hidden in Plain Sight

east meets west, international development, travel, vietnam, familyJohn AnnerComment

My wife and I stopped the other day at some hole-in-the-wall near our house for breakfast, a nice hot bowl of pho bo chin (beef soup with soft flat rice noodles, served with brisket). We sat on small plastic chairs at plastic tables; at the next table were three white-bearded men eating, laughing, smoking and drinking rice vodka. They might stay there for a couple of hours, the food long since gone, but there is plenty more rice booze in re-used plastic bottles stacked along the walls, and the water pipe sits next to a big box of lung-searing tobacco.

While waiting, I had my motorbike filled up with gas and washed until it gleamed. The total for all this activity was $4.60. Had we wanted, we could have continued down the road a bit, put the motorbike into a full-service garage, enjoyed breakfast at the Intercontinental and spent more like $75, plus plus (i.e. paying the value-added tax, or VAT).

Voyage to Sapa

travel, vietnamJohn AnnerComment

Many tourist pilgrims make the trip to Sapa, in the northwest of Vietnam. Nestled in steep mountains, the town is full of wandering trekkers and backpackers, with a smattering of higher-end tourists, all of whom stay at the 4-star Victoria Hotel.

Can I digress for a moment and say how much I prefer 3-star to 4-star hotels? The 4-stars offer important  amenities like clean beds and bathrooms, and that’s perfect for most people.

Give A Man A Fish

east meets west, international development, travel, vietnamJohn AnnerComment

A few months ago, massive rains hit Hanoi and flooded most of the city. In my neighborhood, the streets were not flooded but West Lake had risen nearly over its banks, threatening to submerge the whole area. Everyone was a bit nervous, except for the fisherman. On every pole on the fence lining the lake near my house was perched a fisherman with a long bamboo pole, line attached to a multi-prong fish hook. The hook had no bait; these guys were jigging for carp, a fish that won’t bite on a baited hook.

Due to the floods, the lake was suddenly full of big, fat carp. Where did they come from? I don’t know for sure, but the best I can figure is that they escaped from nearby fishponds that had overflowed their banks. As I walked along Lane 12 one day when the rain was merely heavy and not torrential, the street was full of fish recently caught by the fishermen. On a normal day, each of these guys might pull in one or two tough urban fish – street fish, I think. That day, each cast seemed to reel in a nice, juicy fresh-off-the farm carp.