A Great Week at Work

Lately there have been some great leaps and bounds at work. As I said in my last post, my evaluation/educational proposal went up for approval. The first step was convincing the executive committee (all the decision makers) to approve it and put it before the house. This went off smoothly, and most of the members of the committee were very excited about it.

Three days later was a general assembly meeting. This is where any large projects get put before elected representatives within the district, to be approved. I was called upon to go to the front of the room at the podium and explain briefly my proposal. Alas, the house approved the proposal and it looks like funds will come in the next couple of weeks for the project.

What this means for me, is that I now have to design this whole evaluation down to the tee, so that it can run as smoothly as possible and be effective. This was a huge step for the District Assembly because it is extremely rare that they finance their own evaluations. One of this size has never been conducted with their own funds. Only when donors have come in has the Assembly gone out to do field evaluations.

So the opportunity for great changes has come. There’s a chance that if this evaluation is conducted well and the findings are proven to be very useful, then perhaps the District Assembly might value and budget for monitoring and evaluation in the future.

Taking all this into account, I’m just working feverishly to make sure that it is as great as possible, so as to have the most impact on the beneficiaries. Done well, I believe that the information gathered, and the participation instilled and taken by the communities will really move the district forward.

Other exciting news is that I’m learning how to ride a motorcycle. Lately the works department guys and I have been going out to the field more to monitor contractors and make sure that they are building quality infrastructure. With my co-workers, we created a field monitoring form to fill out, that way we can start to keep track of the work that different contractors do. Through this, better infrastructure can be built, as well as ensuring that certain contractors don’t receive projects in the future.

For now it’s back to the drawing board for designing this evaluation. I’ve got one month to clearly design all of the logistics as well as our approach in the communities and what exactly we will be doing. Once I’ve got that figured out, I will train the 21 people doing the evaluation. In January, it looks like I will be spending the majority of my time in the field visiting 40 communities or so and monitoring the evaluator teams. The whole evaluation is targeted at visiting all 281 communities in the district, by using 8 evaluator teams. It should be a jammed packed two months, filled with a lot of learning and interacting with the primary beneficiaries.

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.

Fresh from the Drawing Board

So my work has now been broken into four different sections. I apologize for the lack of communication on my work. It’s not that I am trying to be secretive, simply that some things I chose not to put on the blog. I will try to get better at that.

1) Computer Training- I won’t spend too long explaining this because it is obvious. This breaks down into training co-workers in MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and just general skills. This is important because the change I am shooting for and much of the development industry, will eventually require some computerized form of reporting. Imagine doing all finances with a paper & pen and calculator instead of excel. Imagine simple reporting taking 5x longer than it should. Through computer training the efficiency of the office can hopefully be improved and workers will be equipped with the proper skills to use manage large amounts of data. (This one I have been working on since the beginning of my placement)

2) Training local contractors. One problem of development is the construction of infrastructure. Usually contracts will run far late of their expected date of completion. For the rural citizen, this means waiting way longer for their school, well, or particular infrastructure project. Also, the quality of these projects is in question. Roads that get washed away the year after they are constructed, or schools that quickly fall into disrepair. In response, the district works department have come up with a way to address this through workshops and increased monitoring. This doesn’t address all the causes of this problem, but more importantly it enables implementing staff to execute a plan of their own, and hopefully prove to decision makers that it is worth it to invest in implementing staff.

3) More Rigorous planning based on reliable information. This is the main focus of my effort right now. Working with the district planner and other departments such as education, water & sanitation, and health; we will be working on creating a more transparent and rigorous way of selecting communities for infrastructure. This will include using monitoring and evaluation to acquire essential data, and developing a ranking system for deciding which projects go where. What this means for the rural people is that the communities that need services the most will be next in line, as opposed to select communities accessing service upon service. Essentially it is a fair way to select communities for infrastructure

4) Last I will be working on a better monitoring and evaluation system and increased commitment to M&E by government staff. This means that the link between the people accessing public services and the government will be stronger. Not only will there be a better system for learning from implementation and being in tune with community needs, but also the accurate information will be made available to decision makers to make better decisions.

In a nutshell that’s what I’ll be working on for the next 6 months. Feel free to email me questions or post comments.

BIG BARK . . . little bite!!

I want to make sure that I am not coming off as a development professional, because as you already know . . . I AM NOT. In fact it’s quite the opposite, I am in the beginning of my career, and with regards to this particular placement, in the heart of my learning phase. Right now I am still trying to understand how things work in the development industry, Ghana, and in particular my district.

Because of this, my greatest asset is the ability to ask questions, inquire, and tag along on projects with the objective of learning as much as possible. I want to reassure everyone, that I am not in a position where I am telling people what to do or changing MOs left right and center, when I am only 2 months old in Ghana. I know that when we typically think of a consultant, we think of an expert in a particular field who is going to teach/coach an organization on how they can improve themselves. Allow me to respond to your initial gag reflexes upon reading that I would be a “consultant”, with what I actually meant with that label.

One skill that will pay off is effective questioning. Through my learning and persistent questioning, my co-workers reflect on the current practice to provide me with an answer. The value in effective questioning is that I provide an outside perspective, but I am also able to reveal some of the gaps that typically are overlooked because of the nature of repeating a job for a number of years. Through learning about the why and the how things are done, together my co-workers and I are evaluating the current practice.

On top of that, areas of improvement and different practices are easier for me to see because of my outside perspective. In some cases, by learning by doing (such as I am in the gap filling area), I am able to offer suggestions that I have seen in other cases or countries. If not providing a direct suggestion for improving a process, through effective questioning you initiate a dialogue of current practices, which is an added value on its own.

In light of all this, let me finish by saying that 80% of what I do will be in cooperation with co-workers and truly the ideas will be generated from both parties. I am but a facilitator of a motion to improve, where the ideas and action will come from the local development workers/experts.

As I learn more about the workings of the District Assembly and the development industry, I will increasingly move towards more facilitation and doing. Let it be known, that the credit does not belong entirely to me (or even close to it). This placement is truly a partnership and a collaboration of minds.

Office Work? . . . Really?

As you read about what I am doing here in Saboba, many of you may be caught off guard. I understand that you may have thought I would be working in the field with those living in poverty and interacting with them first hand. I know that an office job was not what most expected when they heard I was going to Africa, and it probably doesn’t come to mind when you think about alleviating poverty. Allow me to explain why it is that I am doing what I am doing.

The ultimate aim of why I am here is to help development move along and specifically help the rural poor. What does “help the rural poor” mean? To me that means: allowing the voice of the rural poor to be heard, for their needs to be met, and for them to gain access to whatever their priority is. What I’ve realized from being here is that the way that development is carried out is much more complicated than just providing communities with what they need.

Let’s start off there. How does one find out what a community needs? You go to the field and ask them. But in that activity of going to the field, approach is important, to make sure that the true needs of ALL the people, even the marginalized ones, are heard. Through side projects and being a part of field activities, I am able to make sure that proper plans are made and good methods are used to get that critical information from communities. Not to suggest that this is not already done.

Now let’s say that the field implementers are experts at what they are doing, which in many cases they are, how do you transfer that information so that it can be used for accurate decision making? Documentation becomes important as well as analysis. To make decisions based on the needs of the people and to be able to provide them with the services they require, decisions need to be made on accurate and up to date information. Thus information management becomes crucial to provide communities with quality services. It is funny because I would have never thought that improved reporting and information management would ever be important in development, but when you have the multiple needs of 400 communities, resource constraints, and unexpected occurrences such as floods and droughts plaguing your environment, how could you ever cater to your people without accurate information?

However, information is only as good as it is used. So assuming that good data has been collected and documented; analysis and evidence based decision making is the next step. Making sure that communities gain access to services based on need, and ranking, and not for a number of other biases is the true crux. The rural poor will only develop if fair and well-informed decisions and plans are made. How does one begin to rank and prioritize the seemingly infinite problems with such a finite amount of resources?

As you can see from the trend, to truly develop the district and start to reduce poverty, there are key components that need to be present in the local government in order to facilitate that process. It is because of this need that I find myself working as a consultant, over an implementer. For sustainable development to occur, the district’s capacity must be built first.

Gap Filling

GAP FILLING

The section of my work is really intended to do two things. Accelerate the workings of the District Assembly to make time for the more important things, such as getting out into the field and providing for the rural poor. The second objective is to try and build credibility and trust with my partner organization (the District Assembly) and to share knowledge and skills along the way. I have a lot to learn about this organization if I am going to contribute to its improvement, and an outside perspective is extremely useful in improving processes here at the District Assembly. This partnership is truly an exchange of skills.

The previous post, The Task Ahead, provides a good overview of how things are working, however here is a short re-cap to help you understand the following post. The District Assembly (Assembly for short) carries out its own projects that have been highlighted in the medium term development plan (Mentioned in the “My assigned tasks” post). The Assembly doesn’t have enough resources, human or financial, to get the work done however so non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Donor Projects come in to fill in the gaps.

NGOs are the small organizations that get contracted out to do work. Donor Projects are the big international government backed projects that are really driving the activities on the ground. District Wide Assistance Program funded by our very own government of Canada (CIDA) is an example of a Donor Project. This project is very simple in that money is available to the District Assemblies to apply for, and upon being granted funds they are to undertake the projects of their choice with the money.

Other Donor Projects are rigid guidelines and are more specific in their intended use. Currently in the district there are at least 8 of these Donor Projects. Now I will go into the side projects I have found myself working on.

In Detail

The first is a Northern Region Poverty Reduction Program (NORPREP) evaluation. NORPREP is a big Donor Project that is working in the district. They have asked the Assembly to do an evaluation of the work that a smaller NGO did for them. I have been working on this project in order to pilot new ways of doing evaluations, as well as to improve the quality of reports that we write in efforts of making the knowledge we gain from the field more useful to other people.

The second is working with the Natural Disaster Management Organization. This is a branch of the government that is responsible for managing and distributing relief items to people affected by natural disasters (such as the floods last year). My role with them will be to do the allocation of the rest of the relief items and to make sure that accurate reporting is done to aid in transparency.

Last, I have just started working on a new Community Based Rural Development Project that is providing the district with a large sum of money to do road rehabilitation after the floods last year. My role in that project is to ensure a transparent and evidence based decision making process for deciding which roads get rehabilitated.

For now those are the only side projects I have on the go, in addition to my three other large work streams. It makes for a long 10 hour day, but keeps me busy which is why I came here.

My Assigned Tasks

After three weeks at work my task has been laid out for me. Since starting work on March 19, I have been helping out in the office on various projects, as well as attending meetings and workshops to find out just how the District Assembly works. Through the small work I have done and informal conversations with co-workers and supervisors, I have generated a fairly good idea of the problems here at the District Assembly and have now started to address these issues.

I will start by giving some background into the governmental set up of Ghana. Right now I am working at the district level of government. Ghana is divided into regions (the equivalent of our provinces) and then into districts. The District Assembly is responsible for all development projects in its district. Any Non-governmental organizations (NGO) working in the district must first get permission form the District Assembly, and usually end up cooperating with the local government. As well, money from the national level of government is allocated to each District Assembly so that it can deliver services to its people.

In essence I am here to serve two functions. To provide an extra set of hands in any given development project to help services get out quicker and improve the quality of services to the rural poor. The second is to act as a consultant to this government structure, and strengthen its institutional capacity so that it can perform better in my absence.

GAP FILLING

This is the part of my work where I am just working on any given project to help move things along, and also learn about how the District Assembly works and how to improve it. So far this has been anything from helping with report writing, to monitoring and evaluation of previous projects, to developing ranking criteria for citing projects.

CONSULTANCY

The following tasks were identified by my boss and myself upon observing some of the bottlenecks here at the district.

1) The evaluation of the four year medium term plan. Every district creates a four year medium term development plan which determines all of the projects they will do for the following 4 years. This plan is also supposed to be monitored as it goes, which has been done to some extent but could be improved upon. My job is to actually look at the medium term development plan and see how much has been completed, and most importantly, what we can learn from what we've done, etc.

2) While doing the evaluation of the four year medium term plan, we will also gather the community’s needs, priorities, and suggestions. From all this information we will make the new development plan for the two new districts (the district I was originally posted two has split into two).

3) Through both of these activities I am to resuscitate the district planning and co-ordinating unit. This committee of people is responsible for all the planning and decision making with regards to any development projects in the district. My boss strongly feels that improvement in this area could really improve the effectiveness of the District Assembly.

4) Creating a better information management system. Ensuring that key information is gathered, organized and stored efficiently so that decisions can be made based on evidence.

5) Computer training of the staff.

That is my work in brief. I wish there was a way to boil it down into a simpler picture, but as I have come to learn, the development industry is convoluted mess of different players and activities that makes it difficult to wrap your brain around at first.

Setting the Stage II

The last half of the document was a clearly defined plan and implementation strategy for what the Saboba/Chereponi District Assembly (SCDA) will do over the next four years (2006-2009). It's very exciting to be reading exactly what the district I'll be working in is planning to do. Indirectly, it shows me what I will be working on as well.

The goals laid out for district are as follows:

• Livable environment with enhanced opportunities
  
• Equal distribution of development benefits, and more consistent living for everyone
• Double economic growth rate, and maximize agricultural gross output
• Halving the growth rate and doubling income levels
• Science and technology at the forefront

I will only highlight a few of the projects that stand out because after all, we're talking about the development of a district.

Agriculture
They are looking to expand the crop production and area farmed by 4% each year. To keep up with that growth SCDA plans to increase extension services, improve farming practices with and without appropriate technology, and diversify crops to include non-traditional export crops. The challenge with this plan is the isolation factor. Gas prices increasing causing transport costs to rise only exacerbates the lack of extension services available to rural farmers.

Education
Right now school participatory rates are 28% for primary schools. One of Ghana's goals is to provide free basic education to everyone. SCDA plans to increase this number by 11% by the year 2009. To get this done, they need to build an additional 17 schools and train 418 more teachers by 2009 (remember these numbers are taken from a report written in 2005). To attract those teachers to rural posts, the government plans to get energy and roads reaching out to those communities. What occurred to me was that to increase the school participatory rate, you have to keep up with the population increase, which is quite high in the district.

Facilities
The national average is 400:1 people to borehole (water well). To catch up to where they should be and to keep up with the population increase the district needs to drill on average 30 boreholes per year. Electricity and roads are also a top priority for the government.


I'm astonished by the need of this district and its apparent that there will never be a shortage of work to be done. As I said in my first post, donor funded projects have come in to fill the gap because the entire plan is too large for the district to complete without any resources. Hopefully this will give more meaning to what is meant by providing services to the rural citizens. My job as stated before, is to work with the SCDA to find ways to improve providing services, and more importantly address the constraints that are strangling the government and preventing it from doing its job.

Setting the Stage

I was lucky enough to be given the four year plan for the district I will be working in. This document was written by the government of Ghana, upon consultation with local communities, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and other districts. After working through the entire document (122 pages) I wanted to give you an update on what the current situation is and what I will be working on while I am there.

As you can see from the picture, Ghana is broken up into regions, and then into districts. I will be working in the Saboba/Chereponi District.

Population
Saboba is a rural district, with 110 000 people. The capital of the district, Saboba, has approximately 3700 people and this is where I will be living and working out of. 93% of the district's population lives in a rural setting, compounded with an extremely inadequate network of roads that become impassable during the rainy season. This results in complete isolation for the majority, especially when cell phone coverage doesn't reach mush further than town. Most of the people living in these rural establishments are subsistence farmers, meaning they only produce food for consumption, not for sale. Being rural they also lack access to electricity, and most use wood for cooking which contributes to higher respiratory illnesses among women.

Some of you may not be surprised as this is typically what most people think of when they think of "Africa". However, when I started to really think about what some of these numbers represented the reality of how difficult development can be for local governments really dawned on me.

97% of the population is rural, and most are subsistence farmers. How do you start to provide services to a population that doesn't pay taxes, and is completely cut off for half of the year during the rainy season? How does the government even start to generate revenues to pay its employees?

Demographic
In any society the most needy are children and elderly. They generate less for their society because they aren't working, and at that age they require many services. 46.2% of the population is under the age of 15. 54% of the people in the district are under 20. It's difficult to put that in perspective, but now we have half of the population being children, leaving a small working class to provide for society. Though deep down we know that children should be in school, these numbers provide an explanation for why kids are taken out of school to work. On average there are 5 children per woman.

Education
After reading those numbers, the public services provided to the people of Saboba did not come as a surprise, but is no more acceptable. 80% of men and 87.7% of women are illiterate. For every 55 students there is one primary school teacher and 56% of teachers in the district are not trained. In rural parts of the district there is no accommodation for the teachers and an absence of electricity, which deters educated teachers from taking posts in rural communities.

When I try to pinpoint a starting place, an entry point, a first step forward . . . I come up short. It is obvious that there is no ONE answer to this picture. That a multifaceted approach needs to be taken. Providing the infrastructure to link the isolated majority to the services available is crucial. Simultaneously, education cannot be forgotten, nor can the development of the agricultural sector which is the livelihood for at least 90% of the population. But when working within such a limited budget, choosing a starting place creates quite the conundrum.
(I've even omitted health care and water & sanitation from this picture, which I can assure you, are in a similar situation as the rest of the district's public services.)


I could go on but I don't want to simply write down a lot of stats without a reason. I not only want to provide some context for the challenges that the local government is pitted with, but also put development into perspective. Before I started to learn about the complexities of development, I had always wondered why with the billions of dollars poured into Africa annually and 30 years of aid were unable to "fix" these types of problems.

This is an oversimplified picture of the causes that explain the slow progress. I can assure you that there are many other factors at play. However let this be a start to understanding the local situation. Through my work you'll find out more about some of the challenges of development, and more importantly what is being done to address them.

All numbers and statistics were taken from the Saboba/Chereponi Medium-Term Development Plan (2006). For more information, please visit:
http://www.ghanadistricts.com/districts/

The Task Ahead

Many of you may be wondering what I will be doing overseas. I know that before I left for this training I couldn't provide you with much of an explanation but now that I know a little more I will try to explain. Because the development situation in Ghana is somewhat complex, I will start by laying some background down first, followed by where I will be coming in.

Before the recent past, Ghana's government was divided into ministries that would carry out various projects similar to here in Canada. The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) would be responsible for all projects related to food and agriculture, obviously. All the Ministries had their own responsibilities, and most projects were planned from a national level and then implemented down through the regional and district level, until finally the activities would occur at the field level.

The problem with this was that plans were being created from a national level, which didn't include the field realities and were sometimes out of touch with the real needs of the farmers. In other words, there was an information gap between the implementing bodies and the fund releasing bodies of the government. Anytime a field worker needed to get something done, approval would need to go through a beauraucratic obstacle course, until funds would be released.

So in the recent past the government has started to decentralize. Essentially this means that districts have gotten more responsibility and more freedom to meet the needs of the people. Now field workers should be able to get the money from the district and do their projects. The districts in turn will get money from the regional office, far in advance through lump sums of money. The outcome of all this is that districts would be able to do projects quicker, with less transfers of funds, and without standardized projects and processes that omit the needs of the people, and the room for innovation.

THE PROBLEM. The districts were given this new responsibility without the funds to do it or the increase in labour to get it done. To fill that gap, large donor projects have come in. CIDA funded projects, UNICEF, and many other donors have come in to fill the resource gap. Each donor program has their own specific application process, database to fill out, and field of focus. Also, coming close to the end of the year these donors will run numerous and time-consuming training sessions that prevent the field staff from doing their jobs, that they are later held accountable for.

For example, as I understand it, if one of the field workers of the government sees that a community needs a hand washing project, they would then write a proposal to UNICEF (one of the many donor projects) to get funding. Then, if they were lucky enough to get funding, the project would be granted however with so many restrictions and conditions that it really restricts the field worker's ability to do good work. The restrictive conditions and regulations associated with the funds are ways to hold the field staff accountable to their project and ensure success. The only problem is that it stifles all innovation and since the projects are decided from the donor level, they don't take into account the field realities.

MY JOB. My job is to work at the district level to share skills, and hopefully offer some insights into how they can improve their programming. Some of this might be in terms of implementation tools, but more likely proposal writing, computer skills, and offer some solutions to the problems they have already identified. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure exactly what their need is, but I will be serving as an outside view.

THE BIG PICTURE. I will be working with a district that is already functioning well. The big picture is that after working with that district, together we can create some tools to enhance the capacity of districts, and then those tools will be disseminated across the region in other districts. Also, Jen Hiscock, another EWB volunteer, will be working with UNICEF. This is important because as I come across frustrations at the district level because of problems higher in the food chain, I can communicate with Jen to understand more of the donor level.


This is a very vague and approximate idea of what I will be doing. I want to highlight and emphasize that my work with the district is a sharing of skills. Realistically, I have to find out what they need, and try to fill those gaps. Also, I must learn about implementation at the district level, so that hopefully we can transfer those systematic problems to the people who need to know.

Feel free to ask questions, or offer suggestions.