Recountability

I’ve just returned home after an eventful 2 weeks and I feel obligated to give a bit of an update as to what the heck is going on. I hope to explain a bit about the placement in holistic terms and what it looks like going forward.

Here is the basic premise of my work: Governments are responsible for delivering services (or allocating resources) to their constituents. The process that determines effective delivery of those services/resources is strategic planning. Strategic planning is strengthened through use of data.

There is room for argument in the semantics of those statements, but essentially governments are better able to serve their citizens if they have data about those citizens available. My job is to facilitate the creation of a data management system at the West Mamprusi District Assembly. The data I am trying to make available falls into two categories—project monitoring/evaluation and development indicators.

In the first case (project data) the basic idea is that any government ought to know how it spends its money and how effective it is at implementing projects. I have worked with one of my favourite groups of people to create a database for entering and monitoring projects (with large credit to Maclean for the actual creation of the database). It uses some nifty features in excel to enter, retrieve, store, and analyse data on the various infrastructure projects implemented out of the District Works Department. The previous storage system was fairly haphazard and a bit unreliable unless you were able to track down the certificates for the projects (which is a lengthy and also a haphazard process). The district works engineer (who will be responsible for recording and storing this information) has enough familiarity with excel to use this system. I’m working with him to teach him to use some of the analysis tools and build up his general computer skills. This transition will make reporting and communicating information easier. If he also learns to use the analysis tools then the District Assembly will have a method for examining the way it spends its money. This database doesn’t examine the effectiveness of the projects, but it does evaluate the effectiveness of the money spent on the project.

In the second case (development indicators) the idea is that a government ought to know some key information about its jurisdiction. More than that, it should know how that information changes over time so it can see how things are progressing. Some examples of the kinds of relevant indicators are population, number of water points (boreholes, hand-dug wells, small town water systems), access to electricity, school enrolment, number of schools, number of nurses, teachers, and doctors, and many, many more. This information is useful in evaluating the effectiveness of projects (i.e. you build a school and enrolment goes up but student teacher ratio decreases), but I’m more interested in the value of these indicators in the planning of future projects. There are plenty of implications of having this information at the district and I won’t try to delve into all of them here. The most valuable reason for having this information available from my (western development worker’s) point of view is that it encourages effective service delivery to the most needy.

My job is not to create, populate, implement, and institutionalize the databases, leave and hope for the best. It’s difficult for me to remember that sometimes. My job is to facilitate the process with significant emphasis on process rather than product. I’m trying to work with 10 different people on a regular basis with a few others on occasion. The 10 people most relevant to my work are the District Co-ordinating Director (DCD), the Deputy District Co-ordinating Director (DDCD), the District Works Engineer (DWE), the District Planning Officer (DPO), the Monitoring and Information Services Officer (MISO), the Director of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture Office in West Mamprusi (MoFA Head), the Director of the Ghana Education Services Office in West Mamprusi (GES Head), the Director of Ghana Health Services Office in West Mamprusi (GHS Head), the Director of the District Water and Sanitation Team in West Mamprusi (DWST Head), and one of the Assembly Members from Kubori Area Council.

I work with quite a lot of other people, but I will be keeping in touch regularly with these people for the remainder of my placement (I hope!). I work with the DCD and DDCD on leadership engagement on the process. I work with the DWE on the project monitoring aspect of things. I work with the DPO on using the indicator data in planning. I work with the MIS officer in developing the indicator database, I work with the four department heads on populating the indicator database, and I work with the assembly member to understand the potential direction of the program in the future as well as the current benefit of it.

As you may be able to tell, this work hinges on my ability to understand and work with people. I need to recognize their abilities, motivations, incentives, problems, and potential and capitalize on their strengths to push this forward. The actual data management system is something that the District Assembly clearly identifies as valuable and it probably will be developed here eventually regardless of what I do. The value add I have is engaging the right people in the right way in the process to create a quality product that is well understood and well used. Of course working with people so intensely is insanely difficult, phenomenally interesting, rarely logical, regularly unpredictable, quite difficult to measure, and pleasantly rewarding.

The point of my work within the context of the Engineers Without Borders project is product development. The Governance and Rural Infrastructure (G&RI) project seeks to create a demand driven product that will be requested by the districts in the Northern Region of Ghana with potential for future expansion. A district will request our help in creating a data management system. We will provide leadership support for the DCD (and others?), we will provide a standardized system for tracking and monitoring projects as well as capacity building support for the use of the system and analysis of the information, we will provide assistance in developing a system for tracking indicators relevant to planning and institutionalizing that system, and we will monitor and support the development of that system for some time. All these aspects come with manuals for quick reference, technical support from alumni of the project in Canada, and on the ground support from the current volunteers.

I’m currently embedded in a single district to understand what this product will look like (and to help create it) and to establish best practices for rolling out the product. In September the model will shift with a few individuals being responsible for supporting many districts without being embedded in one in particular.

I have very high hopes for my district in particular though I recognize the difficulties in what I’m doing. I think I will be able to see the transition to the use of the project monitoring database and I think I will have seen the beginning of the process of the database development by the time I leave in August. I’m confident in the skill of my planner at being able to analyse, understand, and use the data in planning, but I need to be sure that the system is being developed before I go. I can do technical support from afar and there will still be someone here to monitor progress and provide support, so I’m cautiously optimistic. There is still quite a lot of work for me to do in the near future though. I have a meeting on Friday with all the department heads where I will need to engage them in the purpose of the system, show them the value add, and have them commit to the next step (meeting me and the MIS officer one-on-two). Things have to follow a formal procedure here and doing so takes quite a lot of time. Fortunately I have excellent support and engagement from the district leadership who are results driven. I feel accountable to them and I am determined to have tangible outputs and clear steps to be taken (with adequate room for flexibility and support) when I go in about a month.

Wow so that’s about 1,400 words of mildly incomprehensible jargon. Here’s a bite sized summary:

1.       Governments can use data to plan how to deliver services to their citizens.

2.       Two important categories of data are project information and development indicators

3.       I work with people to facilitate the creation of a data management system

So that’s the clearest description so far of what the heck I’m doing; it’s time for a break. I’ll try to continue with a more of a description of the specifics of what I’m actually doing as opposed to the purpose of my work in the next segment. I don’t know if I will post it this week or not.

Quote: “You people have gone too far this time”—a friend’s response to me putting in my contact lenses

Cheerfully Moving On,

Tom