DONOR PROJECTS – Just Enough but Not Enough
I have just spent three days in a donor-funded workshop with government partners, the objective of which was to develop communication strategies for a health intervention.
Great, right? Nheh! I sat up most of the night struggling to come up with one thing that I accomplished in the last three days.
I have met a lot of nice people, I have had way too much food and I have re-connected with a few dear friends. The one thing I have not done is contributed to the development of a meaningful communication strategy. Was that not the reason we came together – all 60 of us? The numbers, by the way is always a dead give-away. If you have group of more than 30 people trying to work on anything, chances are, they are simply there to rubber-stamp an idea that was already fashioned by a much smaller group. Don’t get me wrong, we went through the motions, we did the whole song and dance but we missed a couple of crucial steps on the journey because we did the entire routine in the same old way that has failed in the past. THAT failure leaves me with a very painful feeling, especially because it evokes some of the strongest reasons why I left the development sector.
From the outside, the development sector is this great DO GOOD effort, however on closer inspection I have found it to be wanting on many levels. One of the biggest areas where the development sector falls short is in the area of facilitating TRUE change. It seems that for the entire 8 years I spent in the United Nations, we always got just close enough to see the real obstacles to change but never pushed through enough to make change happen. We adopt these pseudo-scientific methods of effecting change that cost a lot of money but not enough money and are supposed to be sustainable but are actually unsustainable.
Take for example, the way we conduct RESEARCH. The most tested and proven research agencies are private sector agencies. They are professional, they have done this over and over again but do we use them? No, we go and hire these University Professors and Civil Servants (in the name of capacity-building) whose closest experience with ACTUAL research is in text books. They know how to teach research but don’t know how to do research. They in turn hire these one-off investigators, conduct elaborate training of trainers and we send out FIRST- TIME, untested investigators to conduct research which we put forward as the authoritative data on everything from female genital mutilation to National Development Indicators. Once a development agency puts its name on it, it becomes gospel and no one subjects it to empirical tests as they should. Everyone quotes it and we develop interventions based on these tainted, skewed and flawed data. The first time I saw this in the UN and spoke against it, I was told I was too young in the organization to criticize. I should simply watch and learn. This was regardless of the fact that I had been a middle-level manager with 10 years of post graduate strategic communication experience from a global brand organization who had commissioned and used research successfully for years. That was apparently not one of the reasons they hired me!
After watching this go on for two years, I concluded that neither the donors nor the National Implementing agencies were interested in real change; they are all only interested in SELF PERPETUATION. After all, how can they keep their jobs if they do their jobs? How will a Polio expert remain in employment and feed his family if his team actually eradicates Polio? So everyone is involved in this elaborate song and dance that always falls JUST SHORT of the goals, so that we can all remain in our nice development sector jobs pretending to do what we don’t intend to do! Unfortunately, that remains my conclusion 13 years after I first had that incidence of cognitive dissonance.
Can we do it right? What do we need to do? We need to do things differently. We need to take the donor funds but not necessarily the donor route. We need to take the best of western practices and adapt them for our own use in Africa. We need to find the best in ourselves and improve on it. We want to avoid ticking off the key deliverables when we have actually just gone through the motions. This is one time when we need to reinvent the wheel, discard the old failed processes that always fall just short of the mark and adopt new processes that have been proven: best-in-class processes. Imagine if that happens in one community health project, then in HIV/AIDS, then in the elections etc. We have the power to TRANSFORM our continent. We can prove that we are not a failed people. We have the skills but do we have the WILL to turn our testimony around? We need to stop looking over our shoulders at Massa’s (our white neo-colonialist donor master) face and just go ahead with what we know to be right. We just need to find one project to be the crucible – in which we get it right – just once!
