PDC inc. “Tamasik” program

Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff is the Executive Director and co-founder of People Demand Change Inc, a socially responsible aid & development startup that focuses on monitoring & evaluation of humanitarian aid and development programs, supporting the capacity of nascent civil society organizations and local governance structures, providing long-term aid and development solutions in the MENA region. Previously, Mr. Ghosh-Siminoff was the Executive Director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force (2011-2013). Mr. Ghosh-Siminoff lived in Syria and attended an immersion Arabic program at Aleppo University when the Syrian revolution began in early 2011 and had the opportunity to experience Syrian society before and during the revolution. Before Syria, Mr. Ghosh-Siminoff completed a Masters degree of Middle East Studies at the University of Exeter, UK and conducted fieldwork in Israel/Palestine-West Bank and worked at Congressional Quarterly (2008-2009). Mr. Ghosh-Siminoff has provided his expertise on Syria to various international institutions, governments and think tanks.

PDC’s work focuses on developing a “bridge” between funders and affected communities that require support. Humanitarian aid and development programs often have narrow sector specific focus, not a holistic approach. These programs almost inevitably create conflict, because they rarely have the funding required to support entire communities. A select number of community members benefit, while others within the community do not meet the specific eligibility criteria laid out by the implementing partner -subsequent inter-communal conflict ensues. PDC’s project aims to create a blueprint in which a conflict mediation/mitigation framework is baked into the program design (similar to how monitoring, evaluation and learning is now a requirement) to take into account the need to mitigate conflict that will inevitably arise from the actual implementation of programming. This project could set a new standard for how international aid programs are designed and implemented, making them more effective, holistic, and more sustainable. 

International aid and development programs face a catch-22; implement programs that will alleviate suffering in the short-term, but will likely create long-term inequalities and conflicts within the very community they are supposed to help. Many international aid programs are under-funded and must go through a bureaucratic and time-consuming process to obtain approval from their respective funders, whether from governments, foundations or private donors. Additionally, most international aid programs are not given long-term mandates, but instead are given shorter periods of time (6-12 months) to implement and show impact. This creates a disincentive to think critically about what the long-term impact of the program will have and prioritizes short-term success and impact over longer-term, more sustainable impact. This is a problem that affects all international aid programs globally. Most programs have specific criteria they follow- such as OECD-DAC criteria or UN SPHERE standards- which requires adherence to principles such as “do no harm”. However, there is no specific requirement to have a conflict mediation/mitigation framework in place, ensuring no long-term inter-communal conflicts arise as a result of program implementation. Nor is there a standing methodology for building a framework designed for international aid programs currently- further research/testing is required.

PDC supports stabilization work in North East Syria where there is a multilateral push to support the re-establishment of essential service provision in areas formerly occupied by ISIS and still recovering. Repair of water/agriculture infrastructure is key to allowing internally displaced persons (IDPs) to return and have the local resources required to sustain themselves through agriculture and direct access to water sources both for farming and potable water necessary for proper hygiene standards. PDC’s programs have had conflict mediation/mitigation components since 2014 and would look to integrate a conflict mediation/mitigation framework into this program. This would ensure that as essential service provision returns to the area, the local population is provided with the necessary tools to cope with inevitable conflict that will arise from the return of resources to the area -such as usable land and water. One example, PDC supports local reconciliation committees that provide informal mediation, in addition to the provision of additional capacity building, to support long-term social cohesion. PDC hopes to build a methodology and a framework based on this experience, which would be transformed into a handbook to guide any humanitarian organization on how they can bake a conflict mediation/mitigation framework into their respective programs. 

PDC’s main focus is working with communities in the Middle East and North Africa. This program would be specifically aimed to meaningfully improve the lives of people living in North East Syria, but once the concept is proven, would be applicable to PDC’s work in North West Syria, Iraq, and Yemen and Libya. PDC has a bottom-up approach when working within communities, so direct consultation with the communities we plan to operate in, occurs first. Needs assessments are conducted, and key stakeholders are interviewed to determine whether our proposed intervention is necessary, timely, culturally competent and sustainable. Since the gradual defeat of ISIS in North East Syria, PDC worked to engage communities post-liberation, working to provide programming and capacity building designed to meet core needs. Capacity building in the areas of conflict mediation/mitigation that are linked with the implementation of urgent humanitarian intervention and essential service provision has been seen as absolutely necessary, as this population has experienced an immense amount of war trauma due to the Syrian conflict which has been ongoing since 2011, in addition to the ISIS occupation from 2014-2019. PDC has obtained the full support of community leadership and key stakeholders within the targeted communities. 

This project relates primarily to dimension #2, by working to find a new way to make aid and development programs more likely to succeed and reduce any negative long-term outcomes. Conflicts are more complex now, due to accessible technology which empowers individuals and non-state actors (like ISIS) to play a substantial role in conflicts usually the sole preserve of Nation-States. With multiple long-term conflicts ongoing, there is decreased funding and physical energy the international community can expend in supporting humanitarian interventions. The funding available needs to be used in a way that results in the most positive, impactful outcomes possible. 

There are numerous conflicts around the globe – like Syria- which are complex, long-term and require new ways of thinking in terms of the types of interventions being made. More careful consideration regarding long-term impact on the communities in which they are being implemented is required. In 2014, PDC implemented a water sustainability project in which shared solar irrigation systems were provided to a village in Idlib Province. These systems were needed to save the local agriculture industry and prevent more people from leaving to neighboring Turkey. The concept of sharing water was new to the community. They needed the required framework and skills necessary to peacefully mediate and arbitrate disputes, to ensure the community did not have any internal conflicts as a result of the implementation of this program. PDC worked to support the creation of a Water Users Association (WUA) which included a dispute arbitration mechanism with bylaws, which all participating farmers signed. A conflict over water usage occurred, but the local WUA used its dispute arbitration mechanism successfully to come to a peaceful settlement. PDC recognized that programs must include a conflict mediation/mitigation framework to ensure long-term success, which also maintains local social cohesion in the process. 

I co-founded PDC with several Syrian and Palestinian friends after living briefly in Syria at the beginning of the Syrian Revolution in 2011. I saw how people had risen up to demand basic human rights, dignity and demand a voice in their own governance. This initial movement devolved into a devastating and protracted conflict that has killed over 500,000 people and displaced over 50% of the country’s pre-war population. As a Jewish-American whose own family was displaced during World War II, my own family’s history has given me a perspective on what it means to be a refugee, and felt it was my duty as a fellow human being to help. My Syrian friends and colleagues have all been displaced to neighboring countries or they are internally displaced within Syria. After watching the US disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of the amount of wasted money and time on international aid and development programs, my colleagues and I vowed to build an aid and development firm which would have the necessary cultural competency and ethical values to participate in the international humanitarian intervention in Syria in a way that would have better outcomes then past US humanitarian interventions. 

PDC Inc., was founded in 2013. We are a small aid and development firm which was co-founded by myself a Jewish-American, and my Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian colleagues who currently reside here in the USA. We have navigated a whole host of obstacles in order to set up our organization in order to operate internationally, including navigating multiple legal restrictions, international finance laws, registration requirements in multiple countries, while simultaneously navigating the political pitfalls of operating in countries that are often controlled by competing military factions. Currently, PDC has legal registrations in the United States, Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq and Lebanon and we implement work in Libya, Syria (in NW and NE regions), Iraq and have previously in Yemen. Most of our organization staff consist of people from the region, so our cultural competency is high, as many of our colleagues come from the very communities we are attempting to support. While we are a small organization, we have worked with numerous donors, including with funding from the US Department of State, USAID, The Government of Canada, the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany, The UK Foreign Commonwealth Office (UKFCO) and other major humanitarian INGOs. From 2013 until now, PDC has completed 61 contracts/grants (several are still ongoing long-term programs) in the following countries: Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Turkey and Yemen. Our work focuses on monitoring and evaluation, third party monitoring, capacity building for local civil society organizations and local governance structures, conflict mediation/mitigation training/programming, and water/agriculture related direct implementation projects. 

An example from Syria of overcoming adversity was in 2016, when there was a major split between the US and Turkey over policy and US supported the Kurdish-majority SDF in NE Syria in order to fight ISIS. After this decision, the Turkish Government demanded that all organizations operating in Turkey either cease working in NE Syria or risk being kicked out of Turkey completely. As an organization that has tried to support all communities within Syria, I was committed to finding a way to continue our work in both regions of Syria. I needed to protect my local staff in Turkey as they are Syrian refugees living in a precarious situation and could be punished for our decisions as an organization. I worked to proactively find a solution to protect my staff and our work in NW Syria, while not giving up on our work in NE Syria. I built a digital firewall for our Turkey office to protect our staff and the NW Syria programs. I traveled to Iraq and registered and established a second office and moved our entire operation for NE Syria to Erbil so that we could continue our work in NE Syria, free from harassment. 

As the Executive Director of an organization that operates in conflict zones, difficult choices are a daily occurrence. One of our primary roles is that of a Third Party Monitor (i.e. the entity that oversees aid implementation and provides accountability and transparency). In one instance, our organization was monitoring a particularly difficult project in an especially complex area of Syria. Our local staff were attempting to verify the specifics of a program when the local implementing NGO implicitly threatened our local staff unless they withdrew and stopped asking questions. Because it is our job to prevent corruption and maintain accountability within the aid system, I worked hard to protect my local staff, while also not being intimidated. I reported the intimidation to both our client (a government entity) and the implementing partner who was funding the local NGO. Both the implementing partner and the local NGO disputed the claims. Because of our excellent network and support for our local staff, we were able to conduct a secondary investigation into the incident and verify our claims to our client. Both the implementing partner and local NGO were red flagged and further investigated for potential fraud. My local staff remained safe.

This project is innovative because it is taking a concept (conflict mediation/mitigation) which is rooted in the work of civil society and human rights organizations and blending it with traditional direct implementation programs that humanitarian organizations traditionally are responsible for. Overall, humanitarian work is narrowly focused, while CSO and human rights work is considered an entirely different category all-together. However, the current types of conflicts the world finds itself embroiled in -like Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen- requires a new approach. Humanitarian aid and development programs need to have more holistic approaches as to how they engage local communities in conflict zones, and should assume that the types of interventions they will implement will cause conflict, because they are bringing resources into a desperate community. Providing scarce resources into a community where everyone in need ultimately causes conflict. This is why a conflict mediation/mitigation framework is necessary and should be mandatory for all humanitarian and development programming. Such a framework inherently built into the program will help mitigate future inter-communal conflicts which these programs may have inadvertently created, no matter how well intentioned. This would be a new requirement that large NGOs and institutions would have to adjust to, should the proof of concept be successful, and it would initially be disruptive. However, in the longterm it could greatly strengthen the impact of humanitarian aid and development programs. 

Our theory of change is simple- use a specific direct implementation program- in this case a water rehabilitation program in NE Syria in Deir Azzour Province- and build into this program a conflict mediation/mitigation framework that will dovetail with implementation of the water rehabilitation activities. In this way, as resources -in this case irrigated land and water- becomes available to local communities, there is a ready dispute arbitration  mechanism available which will address the inevitable conflict that will arise from injecting new resources into these local communities which are desperate for these resources and are contending with high levels of conflict trauma and require a more formal mechanism to resolve their dispute peacefully. The ultimately objective is to use this program to build a case study for why building a conflict mediation/mitigation framework into a straightforward humanitarian program will result in more positive outcomes, less financial waste, and reinforce positive norms that support social cohesion within conflict affected communities. Additional research into the methodology that would underpin this framework would be conducted at the same time. The output would be a comprehensive handbook to guide any humanitarian organization on how they can design a conflict mediation/mitigation framework that will run in parallel and in support of, their respective humanitarian aid and/or development programs. The intention is to convince large NGOs and transnational institutions to adopt and make this new framework a mandatory part of any aid and development program in the future. 

In the past our conflict mediation/mitigation program has supported through training and financial support around 150 trainees and participants in NE Syria while the number of indirect beneficiaries are in the thousands (local community members who have used the informal dispute arbitration mechanisms to solve their conflicts). The hope is to build on these past successes to continue providing training and financial capacity to an additional 300 trainees in the area of conflict mediation/mitigation techniques and support the various informal reconciliation and dispute arbitration mechanisms currently being used in NE Syria. The water infrastructure rehabilitation program (which is the case study) as envisioned, would support around 120,000 direct beneficiaries within the first year. In five years, if we can take proof of concept and apply it to other programs, we could foresee training potentially 1500 trainees across at least 5 countries. 

PDC has a bottom-up approach to our work in the field. So the purpose of our programs and training is to transfer knowledge and skillsets to our local partners and colleagues so that they have the internal capacity and ability to sustainably continue whatever programming or work they had begun with us. In this instance, the purpose will be to train and foster a new generation of practitioners capable of engaging in constructive means of mediating and mitigation conflict, supporting community dialogue and participating in dispute arbitration mechanisms across the Middle East and North Africa Region. Ultimately, the more people who have these capacities and skills, the more likely it is that a critical mass of people needed to solve complex conflicts like those found in the MENA region, will be prepared to take on such a task. It will take a generational shift to see results, but the only way forward is by providing these skills and capacities -and the financial resources- now to local communities who are intimately familiar with the granular details of the conflicts they face, and know how to navigate their respective communities towards a path to peace. 

The main issue is financial because the way in which funding parameters are set by most governments - who are the largest International aid and develop donors- is that they push INGOs and NGOs to be narrowly focused and sector specific in terms of what they will implement in terms of programming (i.e. stay in your "lane"). They are highly resistant to funding programs that combine humanitarian/development work with other concepts that are closer to civil society or human rights work. As a result, it is very hard to pitch a program to a government funder which takes a more holistic approach. Additionally, putting together a group of practitioners and academics to help support the research for the methodology that will provide the underpinning of our framework is a project in itself and requires networks and potentially financial support as well. 

PDC has been actively searching for funding for both our case study program (the water rehabilitation program) and have some promising leads from one government funder and is currently awaiting to hear if our application will be accepted, however it will not provide the full funding needed to implement the conflict mediation/mitigation framework and turn said case study into a full fledged handbook. PDC is actively searching for funding for this component in addition to searching for funding for the research component of this project, which would allow for the handbook to be fully developed. 

PDC currently has a number of partners with International aid and development firms or is fulfilling contracts for specific contracts for different humanitarian partners such as IBTCI, Global Communities (GC) and Norwegian Peoples Aid (NPA). These three examples are contracts (both short term and long term) to complete TPM and M&E evaluations and site visits which are then sent to their respective funders such as USAID and The Norwegian Government.

PDC is currently registered as a C-Corp due to all the various legal differences from country to country in terms of how they classify "aid and development" work. From 2013 until 2020, PDC has operated as a socially responsible for profit business. We have worked by bidding on and winning contracts both from government entities such as the US Department of State and USAID, and by applying for and winning sub-contracts from international NGOs who require a specific service be fulfilled. In PDC's case, that is usually conducing an M&E baseline, mid-term evaluation or endline evaluation. PDC has some longterm contracts (+2 years) to conduct third party monitoring of humanitarian partners being funded by a government donor. PDC is specifically doing this currently in Iraq and Libya. PDC provides value to the communities we operate in by hiring as many local staff as possible, by keeping home office overhead low/within reason and by ensuring everyone is provided a proper living wage that support them and their families.

Finding longterm investors that can provide investment capital would ultimately be the best way to achieve financial sustainability. The aid and development industry is extremely volatile, and it is best to have investment capital which can help us weather political changes to foreign policy, which ultimately leads to funding gaps. This is especially true for large government donors who fund the international aid and development sector (including the UN) such as the governments of the USA, UK, EU countries and Canada. Additionally, PDC has worked to branch out from acquiring only US-based funding and is actively applying for work and grants from other countries and international institutions (such as Canada, the EU) to help diversify funding streams.

We are currently seeking funding for this project. 

For this project, PDC had applied for $950,000 for 18 months from a government funder and we are awaiting to hear if our application was successful or not. It should be known by August 2020, if we will be awarded this grant or not. 

As an organization our estimated expenses for 2020 are around $700,000.00 

Being able to find a funder that will support a project that merges multiple "lanes" of aid and development work into one holistic project has been difficult because it is not something that government donors often fund, so this is one area in which the Elevate Prize and provide support. Additionally, we are looking to have an expanded network of academics and experienced practitioners who can support the research side of our proposed project -specifically support the development of a standing methodology that will support our framework, and support our development of our proposed handbook and future advocacy efforts in getting this handbook and methodology adopted by the wider aid and development industry. 

While funding is important, we need an expanded network in order to obtain more advisors and potentially board members that will help support our work, provide expertise and advice which can help shape the direction of the organization and specifically, would support the goals and objectives of this proposed project. 

MIT Center for International Studies- providing academic support to the development of the methodology to be used for the conflict mitigation/mediation framework and support in producing the handbook. 

MIT J-PAL Crime, Violence and Conflict Initiative- providing academic support to the development of the methodology to be used for the conflict mitigation/mediation framework and support in producing the handbook. 

The UN- Will need an agency within the UN like UNDP or UNOCHA to ultimately adopt or validate the findings of our research, case study and handbook, to make any institutional changes to the wider aid and development industry.

Google- to provide additional technological resources which could allow for a more secure means of providing training and support to conflict mediation/mitigation practitioners in the field (I.e. in conflict zones).