Tying Things Together

“And now I would like to invite Miss Binnu to come to the front to dance.”
Those were probably the most terrifying words I have heard in my entire stay in Malawi. I was busy working with my director to coordinate the representatives of different companies and the media reporters who had come to our big event – the Sanitation Marketing Day. Dancing in front of the excited crowd of over 1000 community members was the last thing I wanted to worry about.


John getting the crowd excited about hand-washing soap on the Sanitation Marketing Day


The Sanitation Marketing Day – what a day that was! It started at 7am with my co-workers preparing a touring vehicle with posters, banners and a loud sound system. They spent the entire morning going around our project area of Makata with over 10,000 households, dancing, playing music and telling people how the sanitation market was now open. John Chinkata, the unbeatable MC, (and the same one who would later go on to ask me to dance) was getting the crowds thrilled about latrines (he is good!) and telling them where they could buy good latrines and other sanitation products. He kept the momentum going as the vehicle arrived at the Makata school grounds, where we had a mini-fair set up to introduce the community to all the suppliers of sanitation facilities. Now John was standing at the stage that seated several dignitaries, and he was talking to an eager pumped-up crowd sitting in a massive semi-circle around the stage. On one side of the gathering were the booths of the manufacturers of plastic hand-washing facilities and soap and on the other side were the booths of the builders of latrines (who are also from the same community) and other organizations in the community. John got people to mill around and go to the different booths, and when the crowd looked restless he’d bring in an incredible troupe of dancers. I’ve never seen an information session be so energetic and fun!

Looking at all the suppliers and the people in the community I felt like we were along the right track. The market, if it works, will ensure that people will have ownership of the toilets that they buy with their hard-earned cash, and most of that money remains in the community since it is the local builders who are constructing the toilets. No need for hand-outs, and creating a sense of dependency on outside aid! Wow, what a shift from the traditional idea of just digging boreholes and handing out free water purification systems.

LWS:
It’s not that digging boreholes and giving hand-outs is a completely bad idea. I think there are situations where you need to put in a lot of inputs from outside, but the key thing is community involvement and getting them to see the value in it. An unfortunate example of this is Mrs. Sowani. Mrs. Sowani is this great energetic 50-something-year-old lady who heads up the local volunteer hygiene group called Kwagwanji in the Makata community. I sat by her on her porch while she led one of their meetings. Her voice is earnest and she talks with genuine concern for the sanitation and hygiene situation in her community. She tells me with pride how she and her volunteers help sick people get to the hospital that’s an hour away, even in the middle of the night. But you can also see her frustration as she describes how people don’t always listen to her group’s advice to take simple steps to improve sanitation in their area and how her group barely has any resources to carry out its activities.

After asking her questions in my broken English/Chichewa combo, I found out that the group was originally empowered by World Vision in 2006 to make concrete slabs, which they built for free for people to construct pit latrines. These are basically a circular disc about1-m in diameter and 6” thick with a hole in the middle. Put this on top of a pit and voila, you have a latrine! It was a great idea, and it gave the group a specific focus. But when I asked them how many slabs they had made so far, they said 6 in 2006, none in 2007 and none in 2008.

It was disheartening. Here was a group of 10 dedicated people who really wanted to change their community and they seemed to have lost their voice. I think what happened was that the community was never really reached out to recognize this group properly and to recognize the value in what they were doing. The Kwagwanji were originally funded by World Vision, but funding only lasts so long. And they were not coached on how they could raise their own funds to sustain themselves. In fact, re-constructing the 2006 project in my head, I feel like a lot of money was poured into the materials and technical training for the project. But really what the project needed was more focus and resources for the soft side of the project – the capacity building, the coaching, the creation of an identity for the group and the involvement of the community in recognizing the value of their work.

But I think there is still hope for Mrs. Sowani. We can involve the Kwagwanji in our project, have them work as a promotion team for us, get them recognized through our events, coach them and train them during their meetings. I hope it we do it right. There’s a lot riding on it. Not just our target of 1000 toilets, but also the dignity and aspirations of hard-working people like Mrs. Sowani. whooooo… the pressure!

Mrs. Sowani and her volunteers show off their new t-shirts at our Sanitation Marketing Day

: LWS End.

So how did our project come to be such an innovative approach on sustainability? Our funding organization Water For People, a strong believer in sustainability and community ownership found this in line with their guiding principles. But how did their guiding principles come to be like that? Their donors, just average every day people who donated money/resources to a cause like so many do, in Denver thought it would be a good idea. (Water For People is a Denver-based organization with largely autonomous branches in different countries) It’s a very simple way of looking at the chain of decision-making and influence. But it made me realize how much I owed to the people in Denver the fact that I was able to be part of this really thoughtful and creative project.

It makes me wonder how much we can influence real projects on the ground by leveraging our donations. It’s just like voting for the government. We can change how things are done by choosing which organizations we support and what expectations we have from them. They have to respond to our choices and demands as donors, since all implementing NGOs need us to support them.

It’s an interesting way to look at all this development. Here I am, hands in the dirt working the little levers and knobs in the field trying to create some change. But I could have pulled bigger levers and turned more knobs from Canada just by using my voice as a donor.

Oh, and about the dancing? It was great! I pulled in a few kids and we danced up a storm to some Zambian pop. Ine mechanico wako…

Zikomo po werenga!
-Binnu
=)

“Nambewe!”
I instinctively (my co-workers had given me the Chewa name of Nambewe, as in woman of the Mbewe clan and introduced me so to the students of Makata School) turn around and find a little girl in a bright new, severely over-sized uniform (these new uniforms were distributed to the orphans at the Makata School by UNICEF) running to catch up to me. She had this awesome grin on her face with this great big mess of crazy hair and this great spring in her step that made me for a moment ignore the fact that the money spent by UNICEF on her uniform could have been spent on training the teachers or something else more sustainable. I asked her the only questions I know to ask kids: “Dzina lako ndani?” “Zaka zingati?” “Uli standard chiyani?” Basic questions that give you no important information but totally get the kids giggling. As I see her getting more comfortable and starting to volunteer information, and as I start taking a shortcut path with her, I realize I am getting accustomed to Malawi. Or maybe the Malawi I know is getting accustomed to me.

It didn't take these kids too long to get some dirt on their new uniforms.

Several of the people in my project area know be my name and most of the kids have stopped running away from me. (In fact the kids happily and unsurprisingly kicked my butt at football the other day.) And I now feel quite at home walking into the urban village (or Informal Settlement Area, ISA, as the officials call it) of Makata, where I am working with Hygiene Village Project, or as people call it “Hygieneh”.

To clarify, Hygiene Village Project does not only send its staff to play football with kids, but it also has them working on two projects:
a. Rehabilitating and building additional hygiene facilities at the Makata Primary School
b. Introducing the concept of sanitation marketing in Makata.

The Makata School project, like a typical NGO project involves quite a lot of construction work. But, following the encouragingly increasingly popular trend among NGOs, it does involve as much participation as possible from the community. So last week I was standing in a classroom watching the masons build the new urinals for the students, as there was a panel discussion going on in the classroom with the teachers and the parents trying to figure out how they will improve and maintain the sanitation in their school.

The second project on Sanitation Marketing is exploring an even newer trend, where the NGO is not involved in the construction at all. Instead, it acts as a facilitator – facilitating a demand for sanitation, facilitating the learning of toilet construction skills by builders within the community, facilitating communication between the builders and the rest of the community. We are basically trying to create a market where there was none, by working on both the supply side and the demand side. It’s tricky. I went with our director to persuade one of the big soap manufacturers in Malawi, Azam, to produce hand soap. Hand soap, in a country where even the most expensive private hospital in the biggest city doesn’t have hand soap in the washrooms. We are trying to create a behaviour change in Makata, by stressing on the importance of washing hands with soap. But how do we guarantee Azam a ready and profitable market? This is one of the issues we still have to work out.

The initial project was in fact much bigger in scope, covering all the informal settlement areas around the major cities. But the current impasse in the government due to differences of opinion on Section 65 of the constitution, the government budget still hasn’t been passed. Part of the budget is aid money from organizations such as the World Bank, which was the original donor for our project. Since then another NGO, Water For People, has stepped up to provide some of its own funding to get the project started, with a much smaller scope. NGOs across the country have to come up with alternative methods while some of their funds are locked up in the crossfire of partisan politics

of an infant democracy (about 35 years old).

(Last week they had a session where MPs could present Private Member’s Bills, which is an opportunity for them to bring to the table the issues in their constituencies. Sadly not one single bill was brought forward and all MPs sat back, too stubborn to proceed with the session without resolution on Section 65 or the budget. I don’t know of a time when our Canadian parliament was caught up in such inaction for 6 months. We are fortunate that our democracy has matured enough that we can hold our MPs accountable – all government officials are required to respond to all communication they receive from the citizens. I hope that everyone back home takes advantage of this privilege and writes to their MPs and MLAs about issues of importance to them. Please check out www.results.org for pointers on how to do so.)

So what is my role in the middle of all these exciting happenings? Officially I am a field coordinator, working hand in hand with two others. That involves supervising construction work in the field, spreading awareness among the beneficiaries and facilitating discussions in the community. Unofficially, I am also working on helping Hygiene Village Project develop organizationally – this duty ranges from teaching computer skills to helping them with their planning and monitoring and evaluation processes. Both parts of my job have helped me learn a lot about Malawian culture, but they have also brought more questions than answers.

LWS: The Luxury of Having Dorothy as my Boss
My mandate for this placement is pretty straightforward – do what I can to help benefit Dorothy. For those of you who don’t know her, Dorothy is an EWB term used to represent all the people we are trying to help. It comprises of all those living on less than a dollar a day, but who are actively trying to better their quality of life – people such as enterprising farmers, innovative tinsmiths, and entrepreneurial women seeking to better their shea butter manufacturing process.

So here I am, on the ground eager to get my hands dirty and to spend long days trying to understand Dorothy’s life and how I can help. She is my sole responsibility for the summer (see figure). And I am privileged to have it so.

My fellow NGO workers have so many overwhelming responsibilities that I wonder how they can focus on helping a group of people when they themselves have so many stresses in their own life. To help you sort through my jumble of words here’s a story about my co-worker Cecilia.

Cecilia is this mild-mannered 25 year old woman who is really soft-spoken unless you say/do something funny, in which case she bursts out in the most genuine and carefree laughter I have ever seen. At work, I noticed that she would always be late and would try to leave as early as possible. She wouldn’t contribute much during our meetings, but if given a specific task she would get it done. I didn’t see the enthusiasm, energy and dedication that I thought you needed to be a good field provider.

Then, I visited her at her home to cook and have lunch with her family. What I saw was this strong African woman who in her 25 years is already much wiser and has seen much more in life than I have. She is the mother of two adorable children and like so many Malawians has lost both parents. So she is taking care of her two younger sisters as well as a baby nephew. She gets up at 4:30am every morning to prepare the house, do laundry, make food, and ready her children for school. Her house looks impressive from the outside – plastered and painted walls, a tin roof, a separated cooking house, and a big yard. When you go inside Cecilia in her element - making some nsima

you find that the walls are made from un-fired bricks that are falling apart; the roof is leaking; the once-expensive cloth on the table is tattered. She inherited the house from her parents and is personally fixing everything in it.

As she takes the nthiko from me to get rid of the lumps I had created in the nsima, she tells me about her desire to build a better house to raise her children in. She wants to learn as much as possible at work so she can gain more skills and make herself more marketable. She has no hesitation doing work traditionally done by men (like fixing her roof). But at the same time she has to make sure there is enough money in the house every day to feed all the people who live with her.

When she is worried about feeding her own family, how can I expect her to stay longer at work to make sure we deliver the best to Dorothy? Maybe what I can do is help her add to her skills and effectiveness field coordinator, so that in the long run she can become more marketable. But in the short-run it may help her perform better at the projects we do have and in that way help Dorothy. Or is my definition of Dorothy too narrow? Maybe Cecilia is my Dorothy too? : LWS End

For the past few weeks I was really focused internally – learning about HVP and the projects, and seeing where I could help. But lately I’ve started looking outside to see what other NGOs are up to. There are several NGOs in the water and sanitation (watsan) sector and one of the most popular projects is bore hole drilling. Although there are some associations designed to coordinate the work of these NGOs, I haven’t personallys seen any collaborations happen on the field with different projects. On a positive note though, I have discovered more about the work of Water For People which is striving hard to create sustainable solutions in the watsan sector. Their strategy is to fund small NGOs and CBOs for different projects, coach them through the project on implementing community-focused solutions and on building organizationally, and eventually try to make them responsible and self-sustaining. And so far, I can see them working in that manner with HVP. It is quite exciting to see a Malawian NGO (they are based in Denver, USA, but the Malawian office is pretty autonomous) taking such an approach.

I also had the chance to meet with a representative of the Dutch organization, SIMAVI, which supports grass-root level NGOs as well. They will be launching a website this summer that will allow Dutch individuals to donate to African NGOs through an online system. I will post an update on this cool initiative this summer. It is amazing how much Denmark, for being such a small country, invests in international development - 2.6 billion USD which is 0.81% of its GDP. As I look at all of the development initiatives the Malawian government is undertaking, with official development assistance (ODA) being about 30% of the GDP, it makes me realize how there are so many programs hinging on receiving aid. Maybe when you write to your MP, you could bring up the fact that Canada should increase its development aid from 0.28% of GDP to its original commitment of 0.7%?

Zikomo po werenga!
(Thanks for reading!)
-Binnu