First of all, I have secured a place at Tawodep! They are planning on performing a large-scale evaluation of their projects in the new year, so there will be lots of work for two interns to perform, and since the director of the organization has assured me of this, Marika, the other girl interested, seems very happy to work with me! I'm very relieved about this, and I'm really looking forward to starting work. The only small problem is that they're not government funded, and rely largely on individuals or civil society groups for charitable donations in terms of funding. While they still perform their training functions whether they have funding or not, most of the action at Tawodep is reliant on donations, so I just have to hope that they will have funding when I am there so that I can see how everything is done, and hopefully help out.
Also, on one of my sharetaxi rides across Tamale recently, I noticed a sign for a Habitat for Humanity build. My paternal grandparents, and most of my dad's side of the family, has been actively involved in Habitat for Humanity in Canada, so the sign caught my eye. In fact, when my grandfather died about eight years ago, the family sort of adopted one of the builds in my dad's hometown of Brighton in his honour. I remember visiting the build site, and I'm pretty sure there were matching tee-shirts involved. I'd like to say that I helped, but I don't think I was very useful as I was about 12 and pretty much didn't know anything and was afraid to get in the way, do something wrong, or get my hands dirty. Still, Habitat for Humanity has a special place in my heart. I would like to go and check out the build at some point while I'm here, and just see what's happening with it, see if someone will talk to me and tell me how it's organized here. I'm interested to see how it differs from the builds in Canada, but I can't for the life of me remember where I saw the sign. I guess I'll just have to keep my eyes peeled as I go about my life here over the next three weeks.
It's hard to believe that in three weeks this course will be over, and I'll have a whole month to travel and explore and do my own thing before my placement starts in January. It's going by so quickly. I'm really enjoying the course we're taking here in Tamale. Today we did a mock mini-placement, which is about as convoluted as it sounds. In January we start our placements, but next week we have mini-placements, in which we will be shipped out to communities near Bolgatanga for three days to interact with students and teachers and parents and administrators to try to evaluate the effectiveness of the Capitation Grant system. Other groups investigated other aspects of education, healthcare, and livelihood empowerment programs, but all were pro-poor government policies in the Upper East Region of Ghana.
In Ghana, free compulsory basic education is provided by the Government up to the Junior High School level, and every school is given a Capitation Grant to help pay for cultural activities, sports programs, and minor maintenance and repairs. This grant, we learned, is equal to 1.5 Cidies per student per term. We were also meant to evaluate programs of providing free uniforms and exercise books to underprivileged students, though we found that there was much less information to be had about the logistics of these programs, as they are government programs, but not mandated by acts of parliament, so the allocation of funds to these programs are liable to serious fluctuation.
In order to do these assessments, we will be using a toolkit referred to as Participatory Learning Approaches (sometimes called Participatory Rural Appraisal). The theory is that by involving community members and stakeholders in the information generating and planning processes of development work, not only will they be more empowered to hold service providers accountable for fulfilling their rights to education, health, and so on, but that they will also have a sense of ownership over programs and initiatives and be more willing to work on them, monitor them, and maintain them as needed. For the purposes of these assessments, we hope that by interacting with community members on both the supply side of the service (administration and teachers) and the demand side, we will be able to get a more holistic understanding of the challenges that face it, as well as helping the community to understand why there are problems, what they are entitled to, and what can be done to address issues both on the supply and demand side of the service.
The toolkit includes semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and task groups, resource maps, rating and prioritizing strategies, and community scorecards. All of these tools are very simple in theory, but can be challenging to implement when one walks into a tiny village in West Africa where no one speaks English, and few understand why we are here (we're not Peace Corp, we're not missionaries, and we're not representing an NGO, so we're kind of a confusing group).
In order to prepare us for this ordeal and its associated challenges, we did a mock mini-placement today. It was just for the one day, and we're not actually being marked on our report for this one, so it was a great learning opportunity. We got to know our facilitator, Elizabeth, a little bit, and tried our hands at dealing with some of the most common problems in this line of work.
The first one was waiting.
We meant to speak with the District Education Officer, but he was not there, so after greeting a lot of people, and a lot of waiting, we eventually spoke to the District Accountant, who ended up being very kind and very informative. Still, it put us about an hour or so behind schedule.
The second one was also waiting.
When we got to the village, we had to meet with the chief in order to officially "enter" the village and to have permission to perform our work. That too, involved a lot of waiting, as the chief could not be found. We ended up greeting a sub-chief instead of whatever level of chief we had planned on greeting. Regardless, we met him, and it was nice, and we got our permissions to proceed.
The third problem was structuring our session.
The question period was very informative and rewarding, but we found it challenging to transition into some of the more abstract parts of the session, namely compiling the scorecard. We identified components and indicators of problems with the services from the question period, and wanted rated in terms of severity, which is fairly simple in theory, and for the most part the community seemed to understand. The problem was that the names we gave them, like "Time Frame" and "Inclusion in Decision Making Processes" proved to be very difficult to translate into Dagbani, and it was difficult making a "thing" out of the problems (such as the waiting period after the start of the term before students receive their subsidized uniforms) that were discussed in the question period. Still, a huge smile and a small effort to speak the language goes a long way. When we identified our categories to be rated, I asked for the translations for "waiting time" and the like, and said them loudly with a huge stupid smile whilst holding up an item to the group. Time was represented by a bowl, quantity of uniforms by an empty water sachet, inclusion in decision making by a pen, etc. As a group, we had them recognize and repeat what each item represented, and from there asked them to rate how happy they were with the pen, or the water sachet, by placing stones in a grid that we drew with a stick in the dirt, with boxes representing very poor, poor, fair, good, and very good for each item. It seemed to work fairly well in the end.
The last, and biggest problem, was inclusion.
It was hard to get the women to talk. There were about as many women present as men, but they didn't sit together, and the women didn't talk unless we explicitly asked them question. Also, when it came time for voting, and the women were given stones, the community talked at them very loudly and seemed to influence their votes, although without understanding Dagbani I really can't be sure. There were some children present, but most were too young to try to include in the process, and those that were old enough didn't stay for long. Even within the men and women groups, as always, there were some who dominated the discussion and some whose voices were not heard. If we'd had more time to split into focus groups, or better yet, to do short individual interviews, perhaps this could have been better mitigated. Even if we shared a common language, we could have mediated the discussion a little better to gear it towards those who were less vocal, but as we were speaking through an interpreter, this was difficult to do. We managed to get some opinions from the women, and a few of the less talkative men, but in general this was something we struggled with.
It was a really good learning experience though. I mean, we are always taught that we have to try to get all members to participate, and we always want to do that, but we saw today why it can be so hard to enact that in practice. Hopefully this experience will help us to come up with some strategies to address this issue in our real mini-placement. We have to do our mock reports tomorrow, and then our professor (who's kind of a rockstar; everyone in development or government in the area seems to know him, and he's so engaging and informative) and the rest of the class will give us suggestions for next time.
There's not much else to report from this end, other than life continues to be life in Africa. There were ants in my sugar cubes, so I must either find ziploc bags (which I have not seen anywhere here, amazingly) or start keeping my sugar in the fridge. I found that nothing is more wonderful than a fanchoco on the walk home from the sharetaxi stop on a sunny afternoon when it's 40 degrees. A fanchoco is one of a line of fan-something products that are all frozen and delicious. Fanchoco tastes kind of like a fudgesicle in a little bag (kind of like the ones that Yoplait used to make tubes of yogurt in) about the size of Canadian paper money. Other flavours include fanice, which kind of tastes like coolwhip, fanyogo which apparently tastes like strawberry frozen yogurt, and fandango which I have not yet tried, but very much want to because of its name. This one is sort of mango flavoured.
I thought we were done with essay writing when we left Accra, but apparently I was wrong. I have an analytical essay on the Participatory Learning Approach due on Friday, and then my mini placement report at the end of the course. More Northern adventures to come! I'll keep you posted.
