The Ball is Rolling

Work is now moving faster than I can keep up with, which beats the slow pace of the Government in Ghana. How did such a scenario arise where I am working more than I can handle? Well once my work started to show some benefits, more people became excited, and so it has expanded and started to snowball.

As I said in my previous newsletter, I am working with decision makers and implementers, and in some cases some of the beneficiaries, to create evidence based decisions.

Take boreholes for example. What sort of factors do you need to consider when selecting a community for a water project? What factors are more important than the others? How do you prioritize all 281 communities when the water need is so much?

So I have captured that decision making process, and with my co-workers we have developed an excel file to store all that information and analyze it. I know that this may not excite some of you, because it sounds like we have just worked on a computer for a few weeks. But what this has done is it has created a more transparent, and unbiased way of considering which communities benefit from water projects.

What this can do is reduce the amount of political influence that interferes with development. When a sound, unbiased way of ranking communities is adopted, then favouritism is reduced (hopefully).

So now where I am at, is doing a similar thing with the education department so that schools can also be properly sited.

But siting infrastructure is only a means to so many great ends. Now that all of this data is stored and available to planners, government staff are now in a better position to truly strategize and develop the district. It is unbelievably difficult to know everything about the district at a given moment. But these tools store all this information, and can aid in providing planners with the exact needs of the district to guide development.

What makes me even more excited however, is community participation. The biggest factor used in deciding whether a community benefits from a borehole or not, is whether the community is ready and has shown ownership. The sad thing is that there are so many communities that don’t know about this process.

This is where part 2 of my work comes in. I am designing an evaluation/educational campaign to all the communities in the district. It will be put up for approval in 3 days. This evaluation will collect all the necessary information (community needs, community status), in order to fuel the government with the necessary evidence to make sound decisions in planning. It will actually provide the government with an exact picture of the district, which is something that is difficult to obtain and rarely done.

The second component will be to educate all these communities on this new transparent way of siting infrastructure. So now communities will know exactly how projects are sited in the district – which is something that few communities know. But more exciting than that, is that they will be told all the steps that they can make in order to better their chances to receive a project. The ball will be thrown in their court. They will have the knowledge, of what steps they must complete, and are thus put in the driver seat of their own development.

Lastly, on this district wide education campaign, the government will be the student also. After communities learn, and are given a chance to give feedback, on this new decision making process; they get a go at the government. Indeed, through a meeting and several interviews, the government will ask communities:

“How can we serve you better? What do you not like about us right now, and what can we do better?”

Then we will brainstorm with the communities, how both parties can reach the overall vision of a better Ghana.

That’s the short of things right now, but I also have other things that I am working on in my work. If you are at all curious about the details of my work just email me. I would love to discuss further. If you want a copy of the proposal I have prepared, or a copy of the tool we have created, just ask.