Welcome to Malawi!

This blog is about my life in Malawi and how it relates to the lives of the other 13 million people in this country. Each and every day it gets a little more interesting. Thoughts, stories, moments, ups, and downs. As I learn more and more what it means to have your life in Malawi, I will share it with you, and I hope to hear your reactions.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

The responsibility of the intervener - understand how you change what you fund!

Hi everyone,

It's been about 2 years since I updated this! EWB's current "perspectives challenge", a fundraising and outreach campaign, prompted me to put some updated thinking on here.

I've learned a lot in the past couple of years, trying to move past thinking about the "what" and more about the "how". It's true that the whole system is important if you want water and sanitation solutions to be sustainable, but what can actually be done about it?

My updated perspective is that we need to understand the contexts in which water and sanitation challenges persist as complex systems take responsibility for an integrated way of thinking - take responsibility for understanding the problems from the perpsectives of those who are have to worry about the issues after the end of a project or program or outside the scope of one particular intervention. The local government staff, private operators, central government authorities, and most of all communities are the ones who actually have to live with all the infrastructure, planning documents, new organizational structures that result from the aid sector's inputs, and like it or not, we are making more work for them every time we intervene!

When you are the African Development Bank or the World Bank, who for example are bringing $48,000,000 and $170,000,000 into the Malawian water and sanitiation sector respectively in the next few years, you have to recognize that these numbers represent the majority of the resources in that sector. The money, ideas and people an intervener brings into a system change that system for better or worse the same way a private company would respond if two of their 50 clients accounted for 70% of their revenues. The difference with state in a developing country is that they are also expected to be accountable to the central government, who controls thier careers, all the other donors, who are still bringing in a lot of resources, the people via democratic structures, and literally hundreds of NGOs implementing one-off projects around the country. A private company can ditch the revenue sources not worth its time and focus on the two big contracts, but a local government has to do it all.

The effect is a highly fragmented system that confuses and ask too much of local authorities who are ultimatley responsible for change. Consider post-Taliban Afghanistan. After the Taliban was removed from direct administrative control and a transitional authority was established, the Minister of Finance found himself spending 60% of his time coordinating his government's efforts with the dozens of donor agencies and NGOs who had rushed in to provide assistance and fill gaps in services, making it impossible for his to focus on creating an effective financing strategy with medium or long-term goals. From the user's perspective, a fragmented system is costly in a way an intevening donor or NGO can barely attempt to understand**.

So what's the answer? It's not easy, that's for sure, but there's still a lot we can do. Consider the government of Uganda, who sucessfully created an overal basket fund into which all donors must put their funds so that the country can move forward with their own strategy instead of trying despartely to manage dozens of strategies at once. That solution comes with its own problems, and the success of that strategy depended on the strenght of the state to enforce the strucutre, but it's a step in the right direction. In countries where the state remains weak, the onus is on the donors to undertake integrated thinking to determine how thier resources are affecting the effectiveness of the state, the local people, and local organizations who are ultimately responsible. Want to do a water project? Coordinate and plan with local government before you start. Want to fund a nation-wide sanitation program? Consider budget support for local government instead of implementing through dozens of NGOs with different strategies (you can always earmark it)!

Thanks for reading!

**Thanks to Clare Lockhart and Ashraf Ghani for their great book, Fixing Failed States, from which I pulled these figures.

 
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