Prof Paul Collier urges NGOs to improve measurement and feedback

Professor Paul Collier, influential author of The Bottom Billion and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, recently recorded a talk on NGO effectiveness for a conference of NGOs in Ireland.

He emphasised that:

•    NGOs should develop common metrics, so they can improve their performance. Using shared performance measures stimulates learning, because performance can be compared and everyone can learn from the best in class.

•    NGOs should gather feedback directly from their intended beneficiaries. Mobile phone and texts provide new ways of doing this cheaply and at scale. Feedback data can be used to benchmark NGO performance.

We didn’t write his talk here at Keystone, but we could have!

He makes exactly the points we argue for.  See our work on feedback and performance measurement elsewhere on this site and www.aline.org.uk/feedback.