Business and Management Studies (UOA 17)

What fascinates me about microfinance is the fact that it's a sustainable way of helping low income, marginalised and vulnerable communities, and we think the ultimate thing that we’re trying to do through microfinance and the Lendwithcare project, is to make people more financially independent, more self-reliant.

In the longer term, I think that's the only real solution to poverty.

Lendwithcare is a microfinance crowdfunding platform.

So, what it does essentially is that it attracts support from thousands of people in the UK, mostly, although we have lots of people based in other countries as well.

They see the profile of somebody with a small business somewhere around the world with an idea that they want to develop and they say, I want to support that. So they go onto the website, they make a loan.

Once the loan is fully funded, we collect the money and we transfer it to a local partner organisation overseas. They're the ones who will have appraised the loan application of the person.

Hopefully it's successful and they repay the money and it goes back eventually to your account as well as a lender in the UK.

Myself and my colleagues, we came into contact with Lendwithcare when they were relatively newly established and we worked with them over a period of several years to help them look at how they were presenting entrepreneur profiles, how they were setting up their website to encourage people to contribute.

The research I specifically lead, I was really interested in looking at how contributors on the Lendwithcare platform behave. When you sign up to the Lendwithcare website, you create a profile, if you wish, and you can tell people about who you are and why you lend.

A lot of the ones I was reading were quite keen to kind of emphasize what good people they were.

You know, they'd have photos of themselves climbing Everest and then you had other people who just were kind of anonymous and I think very deliberately so.

And I was really interested in looking at whether there was any difference in the behaviours between these people. 

Economic theory kind of suggests that one reason why people might give to charity is to enhance their reputation or their image.

So I was working on the assumption that people who create these kind of outlandish profiles of themselves possibly had more of an image concern than those who decided to contribute anonymously.

So given that the number of campaigns is visible, but the amount of money given is not visible, hypothesised that people who are more image concerned would want to give a greater number of loans, but would give smaller amounts to each one to kind of maximise the image they were presenting.

And that's exactly what we found.

So that helped inform Lendwithcare about the type of lenders they're working with and the incentives and the motivations that are driving their behaviours.

We've made recommendations to them about how they could better engage and incentivise that kind of thing.

It's just good to be able to understand that and to get a better insight into how you can encourage these types of contributors to give more money.

Well, I think from the perspective of Lendwithcare, the process was that they were doing a lot of work internationally in developing countries but weren't really getting a sense of whether what they were doing was making any real difference to people.

I think they were getting a lot of questions from their contributors about, you know, how their money was being used and how it was affecting the lives of entrepreneurs.

So Lendwithcare were quite keen to get independent academic assessment of just how much impact these loans were actually having to entrepreneurs, both to help sort of present evidence to the public and to CARE International.

But I think also so they could get a sense of the power behind what they were doing and how it was, you know, really making a difference and changing people's lives.

We've recently begun a partnership this year with an organization called Doselva, which is based in Nicaragua. 

So what essentially Doselva does is it helps smallholder farmers to cultivate high value organic spices. A hectare of maize, for example, which is kind of the most traditional crops in Central America, you might get about $290 per hectare. You start producing things like turmeric and it's $1900 per hectare, and then you start producing ginger, which is $2800 per hectare.

So suddenly your level of profit per farmer has increased by sixfold, once you've taken out the costs of production.

These crops, they can be grown in conjunction with the existing forest canopy. So you don't need to chop down trees. In areas that are particularly sensitive to deforestation or on the buffer zones of protected biosphere parks, these are the crops that are ideally suited.

I recently spoke with the CEO of Doselva, our partner in Nicaragua, and I said, "This is such a wonderful idea. It makes so much economic sense, it makes so much environmental sense. Why couldn't you get it going?" And he said, "Look, it's such an innovative project that nobody would take the risk in financing us."

With Lendwithcares funding, this project simply wouldn't have been possible but you've been prepared to take the risk and fund us.

And I think one of the reasons that we took that risk is because we have the flexibility.

Our lenders, the thousands of people that support Lendwithcare, actively want us to do this sort of work because it's the sort of project that makes the most sense.

The next phase of Lendwithcare is that we want to roll out the research to other countries. 

Every country where we work is different, and what we want to do really: to better help the people that we want to help, we better need to understand the challenges that they face.

Lendwithcare and the University of Portsmouth have been in a long term partnership for about seven years now, and it's been a relationship that I think we've benefited tremendously from.

The collaboration has enabled us to produce high level, scientific, independent evidence and address the fundamental question, “What impact is Lendwithcare having on the people that we support?”

We've been involved in this period of quite rapid expansion with Lendwithcare, and I'd like to think a lot of the recommendations and insights we've offered them in terms of how to reach out to the public, how to engage them more effectively.

We've made a significant impact on how they've been able to grow and develop over that time. Neither we at Lendwithcare, or our partners, have the expertise of the University of Portsmouth, so that's where the assistance is so vital.

Peter Lee, Professor of Applied Ethics: I stumbled into the field of drones and military drone use almost by accident.

I was teaching at the Air Force College when I was asked to write an article on the Reaper crew members.

One of the most interesting things for me was interviewing Reaper pilots who had dropped bombs from conventional aircraft, and then later they had dropped bombs or fired laser guided missiles from the Reaper.

What fascinated me was, the brain prompted a physical response that was exactly the same, both in a manned aircraft overhead or operating a Reaper from thousands of miles away.

Drone strike statistics show that UK Reaper drone operators launched 985 missiles or bombs against ISIS between August 2014 and December 2020.

I have a long history with the Royal Air Force, which started during university, and I left to become a chaplain.

I retrained and went back quite a few years later.

So from 2007 to 2008, I served as a Royal Air Force chaplain.

During that wartime period, I was a hospital chaplain for the casualties of the Iraq war.

And it had a life changing effect on me because they were asking me questions like, "Should we be at war?

Should should Prime Minister Tony Blair have sent us to war?" I realised I was woefully ill equipped to answer the questions, to address them even for myself.

And that prompted me to to undertake a doctorate, actually, in ethics and war.

That became the bedrock of my subsequent academic career.

For many years, drones have been controversial, both in public life and in the way they've been represented in the media.

And when I was asked to write about Reaper, the brief I was given was, "Can you write something about the ethics of it?

Is it fair?" Because the crew members can be thousands of miles away from the actual aircraft when they're dropping bombs or firing missiles.

There's no chance that the crews can be attacked because they're on other continents even.

Why, when people are so far away, are they affected?

And I came up with the phrase the distance paradox.

Despite being physically far away, and it can be thousands of miles, visually, emotionally, psychologically, especially with high definition cameras and screens, they have a very intimate view of, for example, a body.

They watch in intimate detail what happens to that body.

Many of the Reaper crew members interviewed did not have a clear ethics framework within which to make their kill or no-kill decisions.

Moral injury is a form of psychological harm that was first identified in the United States soldiers and Marines after the Vietnam War.

Psychologists couldn't work out exactly why some of these veterans were displaying symptoms and behaviour that did not fit with a clinical assessment of, say, post-traumatic stress disorder.

Moral injury is concerned with how an individual's core moral values, core moral self, can be harmed or violated by things that they see and do.

It's a difference between "is it legal?" and "is it right?" To give an example, a crew had been given legal authorisation to kill a Taliban bombing placer who was laying a roadside bomb dozens of miles from from from home.

It was freezing weather and he had a young son with him and the crew refused to take the shot on that occasion because if they killed the father, as night was falling, it's likely the son would have died of exposure.

While they were legally authorised to kill the Taliban fighter, they took the decision not to fire on ethical grounds that it would have this unintended consequence of potentially killing the son.

So by having good ethics training, it helps with decision making.

And I think it it at least partially helps to protect against moral injury.

Lee delivered train-the-trainer ethics teaching to both RAF Reaper Squadrons.

I believe my work has had impact in a number of ways.

After I made my parliamentary submission in 2017, by 2018 I was invited by the Royal Air Force to to go back to both squadrons to help introduce this ethics education.

And people have told me since that it really helped them with their decision making and for some how to live with some of the things they've seen and the powerlessness that they felt.

So it hasn't changed the world, but it's made a small difference to a number of people in this crucial role then that's really important to me.

Perhaps the thing that gives me the most professional satisfaction is looking at the research that started initially just to tell the story about Reaper personnel, then noticing this moral injury and other psychological effects and the need for ethics training and education and then seeing it extend to the police and then seeing new opportunities.

And that's what makes me passionate about it, because there are so many others in fields where they are affected psychologically, emotionally and in other ways.

And if I can help others to come through that and work more effectively and live more effectively, then that will be a life and career well spent.