Showing the money

When I arrived here in Mali, I was surprised to find that news of the MPs’ expenses revelations in the UK had made it this far (mostly met with a mixture of amusement and bemusement from my colleagues). For me, it raises more interesting questions about how other publicly-funded organisations - including much of the development industry - could and should be more open about what they spend money on.

A recent blog debate centred on whether the World Bank and UN should be spending their money on business class flights. I suspect for most people involved in international development who have any actual contact with the people they are really supposed to be working for (instead of solely talking about them in air-conditioned conferences) the answer would be: no, obviously the money could be better spent. (The original author’s own tongue-in-cheek verdict, after meeting his future wife in a dusty internet café rather than a five-star hotel, is that the cute aid workers fly economy anyway).

Others have come to the same conclusion that clearer reporting of what is actually being spent by the aid agencies might be a good start in allocating some of the money less wastefully. But while I’m quite happy to declare on this blog what I’m currently paid for my research (my grants, fees and expenses are worth around £20k a year, untaxed, and yes, on that budget I fly economy), it’s a trickier issue when I’m actually meeting the people taking part in my research. One of the questions I’ve been asking people is how they would define someone who would be considered “rich” in this part of Mali. The common response is “someone who can be confident of feeding their family for the whole year”. Most people grow and store millet as the staple part of their diet - but this is often used up before the next harvest, and it can be hard to raise enough money from their other crops or livestock to fill the gap.

So with this apparent* lack of cash it’s hardly surprising that I’m asked if I can help with the repair costs of broken handpumps. This is typically £50 for the ones I’ve seen so far, so clearly I could. But instead I remind people that I’m here to help investigate ways that local collaboration can develop effective maintenance procedures for itself. The unspoken logic is that it is better long-term value to pay £20k a year for my research than 400 hand pump repairs. I obviously hope this is true, but I wonder if people would be so happy to participate in research if they knew what else could be bought with the same money.

*I’ll try to come back to this in a later blog… one of the current interesting trends is how women’s associations are apparently better at collecting money in advance than male-dominated water management committees, who wait until a pump has broken and then try and collect money, leading to delays and frustrations.

Learning the hard way

“A small workshop was given in Osh covering various elements of the new technical manual for the engineers and the result is very positive. A clear methodology for water supply systems has been implemented - this was the high point of the workshop, as everybody actively participated and a wide range of knowledge was shared”

No: not an extract from my latest department report. It is a quote in the handover memo from the last expat who worked with the engineers here before me. To me, it shows how dangerous the thinking of many people working in development can be - that giving short training sessions and handing out new information leaflets is the easy solution to other people’s lack of particular skills or knowledge.

A year or so on from the workshop, the engineers have “designed” (measurements, calculations and diagrams were not part of the process) three water systems, and construction is about to start. If they were built as the engineers planned, two would have exploded (from excess water pressure) and one would have trickled (or perhaps stopped altogether). Some frantic re-designing based on the NGO water systems bible and various emails from experts in the UK means that… well, I’m not promising anything, but fingers crossed at least some parts will work.

So how can you train people effectively so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen? After all, I have attended and benefited from many short training courses myself. Why is it different in Kyrgyzstan? The crucial difference is that if I go on a course, I gain a variety of things: the key ideas and concepts taught during the workshop, but also an awareness of the contacts, resources and support that I will need to refresh and reinforce the course information later - when I actually come to putting my learning into action. Here the engineers were given an incomplete and confusing manual, and no point of contact for the ongoing support and advice they would need.

Training - or at least posing - on better concrete mixing

In fact, some of the engineers did try and find this support - by seeking advice and borrowing equipment from friends in other NGOs (others, in stubborn Soviet style, decided that if something wasn’t worth designing properly it wasn’t worth designing at all). But NGOs need a greater awareness and responsibility to properly equip their staff for what they are asked to do. And this applies equally to the many external training sessions on a multitude of topics (here, better animal breeding and vegetable growing are popular) that NGOs run for their ‘beneficiaries’ around the world.

Some NGOs and donors are more progressive. In El Salvador and India, we were lucky enough to work with local partners who accepted the need to invest relatively large amounts of time in training local builders and engineers in low-cost seismic-resistant construction. Like community water systems, this needs a full understanding of the key concepts and the critical details - and I am sceptical that these can be taught effectively in the 2-3 day courses that many NGOs run on this topic.

We worked with a skilled team of six experienced master builders from different NGOs in El Salvador, and spent four weeks of training in the field to combine theory and practice. In India, twelve local builders (with a lower existing skill level) were trained for ten weeks. Both were pilot projects, the first of their kind to be run on this method of retrofitting and reinforcing mud buildings (see www.quakesafeadobe.net - soon to be updated - for more information).

In El Salvador, we first worked as a team with the builders so they could all learn the new skills and practise them by reinforcing two houses. We actively encouraged discussion, innovation and trial and error, with the mantra ‘See, Do, (Make a Mistake!), Do Again, Keep Learning and Improving…’ (it’s snappier in Spanish). The last week of the course was effectively an exam: six builders, two teams, one more house… and two trainers relaxing - well, writing our reports - in the shade and giving only very occasional advice when requested. Successfully passing their ‘test’ gave everyone involved great confidence that the builders could continue the work with minimal ongoing support.

Learning by doing and showing: builders demonstrate to the engineers what they have learned

India was more challenging. Rather like a Soviet-trained engineer, if a village mason in rural India has worked in a particular way for twenty years, it is unlikely that he is going to change his habits in a few weeks (let alone a few days). Ongoing technical support and the provision of useful written resources are also clearly more difficult in communities with intermittent NGO presence and varying levels of literacy. Our local partner had been creating Masons Associations - sort of mini trade unions - after previous training programmes as a way of providing mutual support among those builders trained. It will be fascinating to see how this promising idea develops over the longer-term.

And this, of course, is the key - long-term, rigorous evaluation of projects such as these to find out if the training courses actually change people’s behaviour, and how. The observations and frustrations above are simply my experiences and impressions from working on a couple of projects and reading or hearing about a few more. But I’m not holding my breath for this long-term assessment to happen in a big way. Back in Kyrgyzstan, we are about to begin a disaster-prevention project that includes… training on low-cost earthquake-resistant housing. We will partner with a specialist NGO that has experience running similar projects in Tajikistan. Each training session lasts a couple of days, and the only practical element involves constructing one small model house. But without anyone knowing how many people actually built a better house after the training ended and the NGO left Tajikistan, I’m not confident that it will make much difference here by the time the next earthquake hits.

What Technology is Appropriate?

I am a young, Western engineer with a fascination for international development. My previous work, practical training and research experience has almost all been with small NGOs trying to develop simple engineering ideas which help people in developing countries address some of the challenges they face.

I have a distinctly different definition of what is ‘appropriate’ engineering to my older, Soviet-trained Kyrgyz counterparts. While they want huge concrete water tanks or expensive heating systems, I want simple and sensibly-sized water systems or low-cost insulation methods.

But of course it is not really my definition of ‘appropriate’ - or theirs - that matters if projects are to have any chance of success. One famous question in international development is ‘whose reality counts?’, inviting Western interveners to consider whose point of view is the one that actually matters.

This leads on to the complexity surrounding people, communities, their needs, desires and participation that I discussed in my last post. As ever, it is hard to make useful generalizations. But some people have proposed common issues that should be considered by anyone trying to promote ‘Appropriate Technology’ to communities in developing countries - in particular the importance of trying to appreciate how people react to new technological ideas.

Eric Dudley, in his book 'The Critical Villager', suggests that rather than the question ‘is it appropriate?’ to us, we should consider ‘is it appropriate-able?’ by other people, given the existing norms and pathways for adopting new ideas. People are most likely to take up new ideas that are ‘reasonable, recognizable and respectable’. Does the idea make reasonable sense to the intended beneficiary? Can it be recognized as a tangible, named ‘thing’? And is it respectable - something that ‘people like us’ do?

This can provide a helpful framework for thinking critically about many technological initiatives in international development. For example, I have recently worked in El Salvador and India to help train local builders in a new, low-cost method of retrofitting mud brick buildings to improve their seismic resistance. The method uses a series of vertical bamboo poles attached to the walls of the building, joined tightly with horizontal galvanized wire, and secured to the roof structure to provide a restraining mesh which minimizes movement and damage during an earthquake. (Pictures from El Salvador on Facebook, pictures from both El Salvador and India likely to be uploaded to www.quakesafeadobe.net sometime after the director of QuakeSafe Adobe’s wedding).

Is it reasonable? Yes - intuitively and visually it makes sense when people see a strong net around the walls of a building, and can try to flex the strong bamboo and pull on the tightened wire for themselves. (This can be backed up by videos of shake-table demonstrations etc.)

How about recognizable? Yes, pretty much - the concept of steel reinforcement for concrete is known around the world (witness all the half-finished structures with rebar poking out of the top), so seeing bamboo and wire around a mud building is another tangible idea that can be seen and, hopefully, accepted.

And respectable? This is the tricky one. As Dudley recognizes, there is a growing ‘urbanization of consciousness’ and desire for modernity in many rural areas. This means that the widespread awareness of brick and concrete buildings often manifests itself in the strong aspirations of rural populations towards building methods which are perceived to be up-to-date and urban - even if (for reasons of climate, resources etc etc) they may not be ‘appropriate’ to Western observers. Mud brick buildings - even seismically strengthened ones - are often seen as simply poorer alternatives and not something respectable or desirable.

The modern look for mud: cement/lime plaster (windows on other side!)

So in El Salvador and India we spent less than half our time actually making structural improvements to the homes and schools we were reinforcing. The rest of the time we worked with the local masons to develop a suitable mud plaster mix (to cover and protect the bamboo), which was crucially then covered with a final layer which contained enough cement and lime to give the appearance of a modern, cement-plastered, brick or concrete block house.

Does this work? The importance of aesthetics and its link to pride in a home is clear from the number of mud houses which already have thick, carefully painted cement plaster - but only on the front, the part of the house which is visible to others. Hopefully, longer-term monitoring and evaluations, the kind that so many NGOs don’t do (because so many donors don’t fund) will shed light on the ongoing reaction and interest in these communities.

Appropriate technology, inappropriate vodka consumption: that measuring pole should be vertical…

There are many other examples of the differing views of ‘appropriateness’. My Kyrgyz colleagues refused to let me order a $20 piece of surveying equipment because “We don’t want any of your cheap toys, we know that proper machines cost $2000” (negotiation secured a compromise at the $200 option…). Other technologies (‘low-cost affordable innovative replicable community-based simple drainage techniques’) can be ‘appropriate’ for the proposal submitted to donors while being completely irrelevant to the actual project on the ground. Some (an upcoming energy project for “solar water heaters, high efficiency ovens, salted straw insulation, passive solar houses, bio gas digesters and gas storage cells and micro hydro power generators”… and maybe more) may well be ‘appropriate’. But it might be better to investigate this by small-scale trials to gauge public reaction of how reasonable, recognizable and respectable they are, rather a $3 million, 240 village project being the starting point.

And of course, even something reasonable, recognizable and ultra-modern and respectable could still turn out to be unpopular. I visited one Government-funded new school, built to demonstrate the commitment of the President to modern education facilities (and photo opportunities) using brightly painted prefabricated insulated double steel ‘sandwich’ walls. Even leaving aside the surprising decision to spend $600,000 on a 6-classroom school in a community without a clean drinking water supply, the opinion of the teachers I spoke to was that the “unnatural materials give the children headaches and make them sleep all afternoon”. Whether or not this is the real cause (vodka does start from a pretty early age here), it reminds us that the perceptions of the funders, designers and builders of new technology are not necessarily the same as the views of the users themselves.

Power to the people?

Most developing countries host a complex mix of actors trying to assist the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society. Central and local government, international and national NGOs, community members and outsiders are all involved in attempts to help these vulnerable populations, or, in the now more common language of international development, to “help people help themselves”. But what do people actually want? How can communities represent themselves and express what they want to others? And how can communities then engage with these other groups, work together and ‘help themselves’ to achieve their ambitions?

In Kyrgyzstan, a quick glance at the views expressed by different aid agencies demonstrates the complexity of this issue. Some project proposals ascribe current difficulties and an apparent lack of community engagement to the “entrenched mentality of dependence inherited from the Soviet system… expecting government structures to solve social problems at the local level”. Others think that the rural Kyrgyz in fact have a history of proactive citizenship but the “harsh economic climate and exodus of young people to cities” has now damaged this “ashar tradition of self-help”.

Officially, the lowest level of local governance in Kyrgyzstan is the Ayyl Okmotu (AO), a district-level elected body typically representing five to ten villages, up to about 15,000 people in total. But NGOs here try to set up further local governance units at a more decentralised village level, to empower local people with a stronger voice in the development of their own communities. Each organisation has a different name for these bodies - those created by my employers are known as Social Community Councils (SCCs), committees of around ten people elected by each community.

The chief role of the SCCs seems to be as an interface between the communities that they represent and the international NGOs intervening in the region, but it is intended that the councils act independently to address problems by liaising at community and AO levels as well. It is also hoped that the SCCs function as a focal point of coordination for all the other local self-help groups initiated by different NGOs. Depending on the community, this might include Project Steering Committees, Water Users Associations or Groups, Parent Teacher Associations, and (for those at even greater risk) Disaster Preparedness Committees and Village Rescue Teams, among others.

So does this effort by international organisations to create effective local democracy in Kyrgyz communities work? Published case studies from one collaboration between a UK and Kyrgyz NGO describe a series of success stories where enhanced local community structures gained the ability to effect some of the changes they desired in their villages, by lobbying local government, working with other NGOs, and realising practical collective action among their populations. Another more in-depth study by an American NGO working in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan concluded that three years after mobilization programmes through ‘Community Action Groups’, communities were confident they had increased their abilities to find solutions themselves and work with government and other organisations to do this.

Working in the field, reading project evaluations and discussing these topics with my colleagues can sometimes give a more sceptical impression. One post-project assessment highlights the dangers when there is more concern with statistics for the donors than the reality for the people involved: “Reports from all communities were filed as required, but Project Steering Committees in certain villages exist only on paper and villagers had not heard of the idea”. In another example, we visited a community where an NGO-created Water Users Association had proved ineffectual in resolving disputes over the shared allocation of irrigation water because it was still too easy for people upstream to divert most of the water from the main community channel onto their own land. The next NGO intervention planned is physical as well as social: the installation of lockable metal water gates at the entrance to each farmer’s own irrigation channel, and the appointment of someone (with a key for the gates) paid to control the distribution fairly.

As well as promoting better use of shared resources, the other key purpose of the committees is to help give villagers a voice to visiting NGOs. But this may not be useful if the NGOs are sometimes unable or unwilling to listen. For example, the involvement of the SCC is usually considered important during the now common NGO-led PRA process (Participatory Rural Appraisal - a method through which the community “defines its problems… and designs solutions” for itself). But it is not uncommon for a community to define and rank up to ten of its priorities (such as the construction of a medical centre, a clean water supply, bathing facilities etc) but then be told by the NGO that due to budgetary constraints or a differing strategy the villagers will have to make do with some new pit latrines for the school instead. Also, the PRA process itself often involves less than 1% of the community population, so can be susceptible to ‘hijacking’ by particular interest groups who do not represent a wider view.

One interesting comparison with these NGO-created committees is my experiences of rural communities in El Salvador. While working in one village, I had the opportunity to speak to members of the local women’s group about how and why they formed. They explained that they had joined together to address two key issues they saw in their community: violence against women, and a lack of sex education for younger girls. They then sought assistance from an NGO in the capital city, who agreed to provide training for members of the committee so they could run workshops themselves for other women in the village. This demonstrates a different situation to that described so far in Kyrgyzstan: local people initiating self-help groups themselves and then petitioning NGOs for the specific assistance they want.

It is not possible to make generalisations about any ‘typical’ attitudes or approaches among people in Kyrgyzstan and El Salvador from these situations. They are only instances from my extremely limited experiences that demonstrate some of the different processes evident in different communities. And even when there is effective community-led local action, it may not always receive the endorsement of outsiders. In my most recent field trip, our host described how the villagers had been concerned about the lack of a qualified Russian teacher in the local school. Then they heard about a girl in the neighbouring community who had just graduated in Russian and returned from university. The first village held a community meeting to select a suitable young man who was then nominated to go to the next village, kidnap the girl as his bride and bring her back as the school’s new Russian teacher. This tradition of bride-kidnapping is now illegal in Kyrgyzstan but still continues to be practised in many parts of the country, particularly in rural areas. It is another illustration of the complexity of every individual situation - perhaps a reminder to any well-intentioned interveners of the difficulties of creating village democracy that can achieve both the wishes of the local community and the international donors that pay for it.