Building an organisation to serve Dorothy

This is a very interesting debate on the World Bank Africa Can blog between the Chief Executive of Oxfam GB and the Chief Economist of the Africa Region at the World Bank.

http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/oxfam-and-quiet-corruption

In particular, it’s fascinating to think about the contrast between this argument from Oxfam:

The failures to achieve universal access to health and education are primarily due to lack of investment by governments and the international community in publicly financed and delivered health systems.

And this one from the World Bank:

The reason these services are failing poor people is a series of accountability failures in the service delivery chain.

While these are certainly not mutually exclusive diagnoses, the relatively weighting and influence on the debate is quite important.

What do you think?

I recently came across this fantastic article from a NY Times theatre reporter and immediately thought of EWB’s African Programs volunteers and staff. Here’s the defining quote:

It takes a special kind of humility to devote yourself to being backstage for the creation of a play, to knowing from the outset that you will receive little of the credit. There is, of course, a certain safety, too, in being out of the line of fire. But we are a culture that more and more seems to define success as the aggregation of renown, as the cachet of a boldface name, as the catalyst for a gazillion clicks of a mouse and qualifying for a sizable personal entry on Wikipedia.

So toiling anonymously in a public profession such as the theater translates for me into something rather noble. You know from the outset that there will be no fanfare for you, that the satisfactions will on some level always be vicarious. The good of the whole is what matters.

I can’t think of a better way to describe our volunteers and staff who are in the field. They are necessarily out of the limelight, working diligently to ensure that it’s their local counterparts who are credited for every contribution they make. They are working to ensure that the behind-the-scenes development processes – like the un-sexy, but critical, incorporation of accurate data into district level medium-term development plans in northern Ghana – are increasingly effective.

Our Governance and Rural Infrastructure Team in Ghana leads a 3-day workshop on computer skills to allow for more effective district planning.

These incredible individuals who I have the honour of calling my colleagues are doing the work that few people talk about or know about in development. That their work is so unknown is something that we at EWB believe is part of the problem. In particular, too many donors – and I’m talking about large development agencies with “experts” along with individual donors who aren’t thinking about poverty alleviation as a fulltime job – undervalue the organizational mechanics of delivering effective programs for poverty reduction.

Certainly it’s a great moment when the ribbon is cut on a new AfriDev water pump in a community, but if the location of the pump wasn’t based on community-level data and nobody thought about ongoing monitoring and maintenance activities, then the water is not likely to flow much beyond the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

So, here’s my recognition for the stagehands of development, because a curtain call isn’t possible if nobody is there to raise the curtain.

http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/can-better-roads-reduce-poverty

This is an interesting post and paper on a pretty counter-intuitive result for me. Perhaps it was the example of Saskatchewan: An amazing network of roads enabled farming growth and market access in that province. And so I never questioned the basic assumption that roads are good for agricultural growth and an important investment if you have the money.

But this line from the conclusion of the paper yet again summarizes what we should all remember in development – there are few solutions that are not context specific:

The implication for roads planning is that a one size fits all approach is not effective in addressing the problems of all regions of all African countries. Government and donors probably need to adapt an approach that supplies the appropriate road for a rural area, realizing that a large tarred road may not be required and should take more into account the economic potential of the region and do not preclude that roads investment has a quasiautomatic impact on poverty reduction.

http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/can-better-roads-reduce-poverty

The rain began soon after we crawled under our mosquito nets. It had been brooding for most of the late afternoon, and felt like a tiger had suddenly pounced. I read somewhere that roughly 40% of rainfall in Africa is classified as “erosion causing” because of it’s severity – and I was guessing this rain fell into that category.

I was staying in a village with Graham, one of our volunteers in Malawi, in a thatch roof hut. I smiled to myself, happy that I was inside and more importantly, happy for the farmers who were anxious to plant.

But then it began, a slow drip on my leg. No problem, I moved my leg. Then another drip, on my back. Then my face. No matter which way I turned, a slow drip greeted me. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep all that well that night.

But that’s the price we need to pay if we want to create change. It’s the price graham and other volunteers pay on a regular basis. We want to understand farmers to better understand how projects can be designed and implemented to support them – and there is no substitute for living alongside them. And if that means spending a damp night in a hut, so be it!

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