What ever happened to thinking big? In the social sector, thinking small, micro to be exact, is all the rage, and perhaps with some reason. The blunt force of macro interventions like clumsy development aid have drawn the intense scrutiny of people like Bill Easterly.
Failing the success of sweeping interventions, the sector has recently become obsessed with micro solutions to social problems. The wave of micro activity started with the popularity of microcredit, but has recently devolved into a flurry of any philanthropic word pre-fixed with “micro” such as micro-volunteering, micro-donations, micro-philanthropy, and micro-actions.
My macro point here is that the momentary micro dogma of the social sector distracts us from pursuing real solutions that help people. What matters, of course, is what works, small, medium, large, or super-sized. The micro-trend was started by microcredit, the first, and only member of the “micro” solution set that resembles a real intervention rather than a gimmick focused more on size than effectiveness.
Microcredit is micro in so far as it is a small loan to an impoverished person, ostensibly used for wealth creating activities. While microcredit has been heralded in some circles as a powerful poverty-reduction tool, recent evaluative research has raised some important questions. Specifically, David Roodman speculates there might be a microcredit bubble in Bangladesh. Roodman writes
Indeed, multiple borrowing is widespread in Bangladesh now, and it has raised concerns that some Bangladeshis are juggling microcredit loans the way some Americans juggle credit card debt, in a merry-go-round that must one day stop.
As borrowers acquire multiple loans their debts becoming increasing less micro, raising doubts about microcredit’s core promise that the poor need only small loans to lift themselves out of poverty, a falsehood promoted more by Kiva’s marketing than the fundamental tenants of the microcredit movement.
While the idea that a modest investment by Western standards can create sustainable businesses is appealing, evidence of multiple borrowing undermines this hope. Even though most people involved in the day-to-day development of microcredit as a poverty intervention strategy take a sophisticated, nuanced approach to microcredit, its widespread popularity has less to do with actual outcomes and more to do with the suggestion that solving big problems only requires small actions.
And here, I believe, is where the micro thinking begins to unravel.
The current adherence to the micro dogma does not come from a measured understanding of effectiveness of micro approaches. Instead, our fascination with all things micro stems from a hope that simple, small, and intuitive sounding actions can solve tremendously complicated problems. By attempting to reduce the daunting magnitude of poverty to something we can solve through trivial investments, shopping, and meaningless minute-at-a-time volunteer activities, we simply aggregate our micro inabilities to solve social problems into a macro inability to solve social problems.
Over on the Tactical Philanthropy Blog comments section reader Chip McComb sums up the problem with micro giving nicely, in so doing revealing much of what is wrong with micro thinking in general. Chip writes
I fear that as micro giving, and mobile giving becomes more and more prevalent the attitude of those that give, could shift dangerously to think that all giving should be as easy and as pleasing as buying a coke or a big mac, and when it’s not easy or pleasing, it is therefore not worth their time or expense. What a dangerous trap!
I am not arguing that all micro efforts are problematic. There are some great virtues of thinking small, so long as micro means local approaches to social problems, small strategic investments (like microcredit), or other such reasoned uses that resemble actual strategies. My problem with the current wave of micro thinking is that micro has become a euphemism for easy.
Ultimately, what matters is providing solutions that work. In some cases, small interventions might work best, like microcredit, in other cases, perhaps our investments need to be large and patient, rather than micro, like Acumen Fund’s approach to social investing. Whatever the size of the intervention, all our approaches should be well reasoned and rigorously evaluated.
Of course, unlike our modern micro interventions, evaluation is hard, even if it is indispensable in expanding what works and purging what does not. Recognizing both the importance and complexity of evaluation, perhaps I should pursue the idea of micro-evaluation, a simple evaluative framework that is as easy to use as it is meaningless.
(Photo by Articulate Matter)
David Henderson is the founder of 
David, thank you! An important post.
I fully agree that major, global problems require thoughtful solutions. Visionaries like Muhammad Yunus, social entrepreneurs like Jacqueline Novogratz at Acumen (as you mention), and NGOs like Partners in Health led by Dr. Paul Farmer, are leading the way, just to name a few. I too sometimes find it facile to think that "micro" interventions will save the world.
At the same time, micro-engagements do provide opportunities for everyone to get involved. And micro contributions add up as we see with Haiti. It is for NGO leaders to leverage relationships with corporations and governments to advance and support solutions, and for some NGOs to provide vehicles for ALL people who want to to participate in service and philanthropy, as long as the cost-benefit weighs in favor of the communities that the NGOs serve. Kiva found a way to do that. These micro-philanthropy/service opportunities are also ways for younger people to begin or expand their participation in what will hopefully become a larger and lifetime commitment to service and giving.
I also think that the corporations that engage most effectively do look at the bigger problem, and do so in partnership with NGOs, including universities, and also governments. As Akhtar Badshah of Microsoft said, companies need to ask themselves, “what’s the problem, and what’s the solution.” Companies that are most effective at CSR figure out a digestible and ultimately scalable goal, contributing their business's expertise and resources, as well as philanthropy, to help solve a problem. “Create a clear and measurable goal,” as Badshah says. Microsoft partners with an NGO that is on its way to providing ICTs and internet access to the bottom billion people globally. http://bit.ly/cNYIr7
I think the point here is not that we should discard all things 'micro' within the social sector, but rather that 'micro' should never be an end in itself. If fostering micro-engagement is an effective strategy employed in pursuit of the goal of achieving certain social outcomes, then it is worthwhile for organizations working on those outcomes to do so. In the Kiva example, micro-donors constituted a funding base that helped fuel the growth of the organization.
What's risky is promoting micro-engagement without evaluating it as a strategy. In some cases not all people who want to participate can contribute meaningfully and courting people whose desired engagement level is too low is an inefficient use of resources. Philanthropy Action's evaluation of social networking for small and medium non-profits gives some examples: http://www.philanthropyaction.com/articles/social... I think that micro-engagement is now a tool that we have as social sector professionals, but one that we should be careful about using only when it helps us to do what we ultimately are after: social good.
Hi Alice,
Thank you for your thoughtful comments, you make a lot of important points. First, to your point about the role of small scale opportunities to engage youth, I could not agree more, and let me be clear that my post is not meant to be an attack on such activities. However, when so called "microvolunteering" is used to engage youth, the point is less about the social output of those activities but rather about developing young people as engaged members of our community. My criticism in the post above is targeted at micro interventions that are meant to be interventions in and of themselves rather than learning opportunities for young people.
Your quotation about about finding "what's the problem, and what's the solution" is dead on, and is a short phrase that likely could retire my future blogging efforts. The problem I see with our micro fascination is that the micro trend by and large is a solution in search of a problem. In the cases where efforts like crowd-sourcing are best suited, then I see no problem with micro-sized solutions. Indeed, I find microcredit to be a worthwhile, if not momentarily beleaguered, intervention.
I called out the incessant use of "micro" in the sector because aside from the word "micro", microcredit (a serious intervention) and microvolunteering, for example, have nothing in common. Our collective conscience believes that microcredit is effective, but any perceived success has wrongly been attributed to the word micro itself, leading to some wasted efforts trying to figure out a place for micro-insert-word-here, then looking at a problem and trying to figure out "what's the solution."
Very important n insightful; I’ll share this widely.
[...] Full Contact Philanthropy blogger David Henderson’s post today on micro solutions in the social sector offers some salient critiques on this trend in the social sector. [...]
A good articulation, Dan. And important points to consider. Not that I believe this is your intention, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, here.
While I agree that portraying social change as worthwhile only to the extent that it is "easy" could be a terrifyingly slippery slope, I think your argument neglects one of the fundamental potentialities of the micro–aggregation.
Often the most amazing things are made up of thousands, even millions of individually insignificant units. Indeed, that's the basis of life!
Perhaps one of the best ways to "think big" is to think about how to effectively organize, mobilize, catalyze the micro.
Thanks for the comment. I believe that "thinking big" is less the point than thinking effective. If we are simply aggregating a bunch of fruitless efforts, then aggregation is meaningless. I think the Extraordinaries are the best example of both of our points. They have been effective at tagging photos for museums, an illustration of the power of crowdsourcing micro efforts. Alternatively, every other task the Extraordinaries ask their micro-volunteers, such as sending encouraging messages to children in the developing world who are about to take a test, provide no social value at all.
So yes, there may be some potential in crowd-sourcing, but only if we use it for enhancing social outcomes rather than as an end in itself.
Completely agree that choosing "micro" strategies simply because the sector is obsessed with them is misguided at best. And that "micro" anything is seldom a good end in and of itself. I even share your specific concerns about the Extraordinaries.
I take issue, however, with the idea that microcredit is "the first, and only member of the “micro” solution set that resembles a real intervention rather than a gimmick focused more on size than effectiveness."
None of the other micro-strategies are as far along as micro-credit, and at its inception many questioned whether it was a "real intervention." Micro-philanthropy, micro-volunteering, and others are bound to experience similar growing pains as they scale–and we can only hope the ones that don't stand the test will be abandoned in a timely manner.
But I believe that the aggregation potential of micro-strategies still holds immense promise, even outside microcredit–when micro-strategies are used as enablers and catalysts.
Kiva.org is a prime example. Without that "micro-lending" platform, the macro intervention of micro-credit would be $130,000,000 smaller. And, in my opinion, still almost unknown to the general public. Instead, microcredit is literally becoming a household word for the US. And millions are more aware not only of the magnitude of the world's poverty but of the complexities of working to solve such social problems.
And that is a "real intervention" if I ever saw one.
[...] The Social Sector’s Micro Problem – Full Contact Philanthropy David Henderson makes the case that the social sectors current interest in "micro" solutions is misplaced and won't lead to the big changes that we need. (tags: philanthropy) [...]
A good articulation, Dan. And important points to consider. Not that I believe this is your intention, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, here.
While I agree that portraying social change as worthwhile only to the extent that it is “easy” could be a terrifyingly slippery slope, I think your argument neglects one of the fundamental potentialities of the micro–aggregation.
Often the most amazing things are made up of thousands, even millions of individually insignificant units. Indeed, that’s the basis of life!
Perhaps one of the best ways to “think big” is to think about how to effectively organize, mobilize, catalyze the micro.