When Raj Kumar was doing the groundwork for his Development Executive Group – a Washington DC-based organisation providing business intelligence and recruiting services to the development community – he and a group of fellow students spent plenty of time on the road seeing how donor money was being spent.
“We found pretty extensive business and operational inefficiency,” says Mr Kumar, who was then at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. “So we decided to build an organisation to directly serve the people who serve the poor.”
The result is a fee-based for-profit membership organisation that works to enhance the efficiency of organisations – both for-profit and non-profit – in the development world. The decision to operate as a for-profit group was a strategic one, says Mr Kumar. “We need to be close to the people who service the poor, and if they’re paying our fees, we’ll be more client-driven.”
Today, the Development Executive Group is one of the leading hubs of information for the development sector, serving more than 100,000 people in the industry, including 200 executive members such as the American Red Cross, World Vision, Catholic Relief Services and Care.
When fleshing out his ideas for the organisation, Mr Kumar saw several areas of weakness in the development arena. For one, the recruitment process was in many organisations haphazard and lacking any formal strategy or procedures. “People were mostly hiring other people they knew,” he says.
One of the Development Executive Group’s main services is an online recruitment marketplace. Anyone can go on to the website and look for a job or post a cv.
Another big problem for development organisations is to identify funding sources. NGOs and consultancies know that money is available from groups such as the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development or the UK’s Department for International Development. But organisations find it hard to keep track of the projects that are being funded.
The Development Executive Group has 25 researchers across the world keeping track of all the projects emerging from major donor agencies. Those are put into a database so that users can search for projects or sign up to receive e-mail alerts about those that are appropriate to their area of focus.
Part of the reason Mr Kumar believes such services are essential for non-profit organisations is that they are now competing with the business sector for development work. And mainstream corporate names are now among the members of the Development Executive Group. Earlier, the organisations’ corporate clients tended to be firms already in the development sector. “Now we have members like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, KPMG and PwC,” says Mr Kumar.
But whether his organisation is assisting companies or non-profit groups, Mr Kumar believes the search networking opportunities it provides are essential for enhancing the efficiency of development projects. “We’re the Google of foreign aid,” he says.
