Christian's Children Fund

Case 2: Christian’s Children Fund

Central Issue

At the heart of this case is whether or not the CCF’s organizational architecture , specifically their evaluation system AIMES, can be bettered to improve the quality of life of the children.

Recommendations

1. Since AIMES uses several key matrices to evaluate the performance of CCF’s programs, they should prioritize these indicators and assign them relative weights, based on the specific program.

2. Align reward systems with the performance measurement systems

Rationale/Analyses

CCF uses a decentralized model, so the information provided by AIMES is used to make program and resource allocation decisions at the community level. Thus, different priorities are assigned depending on the specific needs of the local program. A program in the US may put a lower priority on families having access to clean water, as good infrastructure assures access to water and most of the tap water in the US is pretty safe to drink. On the other hand, higher priority may be placed on children placement in educational programs. Whereas, when evaluating a CCF program in Somalia indicators such as access to safe water and under 5-year old mortality rate would have very high priorities.

The drawback from such a decentralized organizational model is that limited separation of decision management and control seems to exist. AIMES was put in place by a multi-level cross-functional group to perform the monitoring function in the organization. However, CCF seem to lack a ratification process. After local programs are designed at the community level, the proposed programs should be passed for approval to a higher level, where national directors could review them using of the AIMES system, before returning them for implementation to the local level. This in effect would separate responsibility from accountability.

Local program directors are given the power to decide how to best tackle a problem, whether it’s a high mortality rate, a malnutrition rate or adult literacy.