Inter-NGO politics

Inter-NGO politics is a common problem in NGO saturated Africa. One must not encroach on an NGO’s turf. “This is our turf. Not yours. No, you can’t set up a school here. Yes, yes. We know it’s needed, but you were not listening. This is our turf.”

It is a little frustrating and quite the opposite of my experiences in the Philippines where I worked quite closely with a – technically speaking – competitor. We shared resources and both benefited as a result. We were both working for the betterment of the Filipino people so there wasn’t a conflict of interest.

One tries to be “above all this” and keep the welfares of Africans firmly at the forefront of one’s mind.

This was put to the test recently when a NGO^* moved in on Grassroots Uganda’s turf. Grassroots Uganda is an NGO I set up in 2006. It has about 170 ladies involved and raised about $US 20,000 last year. One American lady liked the organization so much that she decided to – well, these no easy way to put this – butt in on two of our women’s groups and try to take them over. She has stolen logos and text from Grassroots Uganda for her own NGO. She even disbanded one of our boards and then immediately reformed it as her board!

This is frustrating. I’ve turned a blind eye for the most part as she does sell an enormous amount of merchandise. She is helping to empower African women, which is the reason for which Grassroots Uganda was set up for in the first place.

But things recently took a rather sinister turn. As I reported over here, one of the Grassroots Uganda ladies – Flavia – was hideously attacked with a machete by her former partner. She was lucky to survive. Grassroots Uganda along with some good souls from around the world, have raised about $US 2,000 to help Flavia cover her medical expenses.

Pretty cool, huh? Who could object to this? A victim of a horrific domestic violence incident gets the help she needs.

Turns out the previously mentioned infiltrator does object. We are apparently “stealing her thunder” and “she’s mad that Grassroots Uganda is helping her” (as one of Grassroots Uganda volunteers put it). Incidentally, she has contributed nothing to the rehabilitation of Flavia

The possible reason I can think of for such behavior is that she’s really not interested in empowering African women, but is more interested in the glory of being seen to be helping African women.

So what is one to do? She is hindering us trying to help Flavia: Local volunteers are walking on eggshells. They want to help Flavia, but don’t won’t to offend the aforementioned lady for fear of losing an income stream.

We can’t really stay “Say the hell away from our groups!”, as she has her glory-sinking tentacles entrenched firmly inside the groups.

This sorry tale reminds me of the recently concluded talks in Copenhagen. The outcome from the talks was lukewarm: Too many countries and ill-informed interest groups pursuing their own selfish agendas. The sooner we realize that we share this lifeboat called Planet Earth, and that our fates are closely tied with the less fortunate, the better off we will all be. This applies equally well on a global scale, smalltime inter-NGO politics, and the fate of one poor victim of domestic violence.

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^* Name withheld to protect the guilty.

Electricity Woes

Here's a good idea: Design a whole lot of cool systems that'll empower a group of impoverished people in many ways.

Get some literacy programs together - both English and computer, get an online shop together to sell their crafts, work with local health officials to begin the fight against HIV, and bring in some international volunteers to help you.

Then all you need to do is rent a house, flick the electricity switch, and you're away.

Flick the switch. Ugh. Flicking the switch has taken four weeks.

The Heart of Uganda programs - that have been patiently designed over the course of months - have all been delayed for four weeks due to ongoing power nightmares.

Our initial time in Uganda was spent targeting an area in which to start our programs. We settled on the Sironko district as detailed here^*. We found a gated compound in a little village called Chino. The house had all the right electrical connections inside the house and a power line running right outside. All we had to do was "connect it up".

To recount the entire tale of woe would take another four weeks. For brevity's sake, here are some selected highlights:

• We arrived on a Tuesday. People assured us that we would have power by Wednesday.
  
  
• The guy who was going to install electricity dieing (seriously).
  
  
• Giving a guy 80,000 shillings (about $US40) to come early and connect our house to the main electricity line.
  This proved to be pointless as the main electricity line wasn't on.
  
  
• Hiring a retired electricity worker to come to the village to tell us what the problem was.
  The place where the main electricity line connects to the village line was disconnected along with a transformer.
  
  
• The landlord failing to sign the electricity agreement for three weeks.
  
  
• The electricity company refusing to connect the power until we had organized a community meeting to discuss safety issues.
  This is fair enough. Many people die in Uganda every year as they try to illegally connect their houses to the grid. Just a few days ago, a ten year girl died after stepping on an illegal line that had fallen off her house.
  
  
• At said community meeting, the electricity company representatives shuffling their feet, and gazing into the middle distance.
  I didn't know it at the time, but shuffling one's feet and middle distance gazing means "Give me a bribe and I'll connect you now."

We have another community meeting organized for this week. The electricity reps will almost continue their "zig-zagging ways" (as they say here in Uganda). I'm not going to bribe them.

Once we are connected, we will be the only (legally) connected house in the parish.

On the plus side, some kind hearted souls have donated a generator to Meaningful Volunteer. Not only will this help us to get over our initial power problems, but it will also help to keep us operating during the numerous "normal" power outages in Uganda.

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^*Seems slightly tragic now that one of things we liked about Sironko was that its electricity was "quite reliable".

Solving Illiteracy, HIV, and Malnutrition Problems in One Go

Illiteracy. HIV. Malnutrition.

Three huge problems in Uganda. Wouldn't it be great if you could solve all problems in one easy to run program? The staff at Meaningful Volunteer think they have come up with a solution.

The Three Problems

• Illiteracy
  Illiteracy rates are huge in Sironko (Meaningful Volunteer's target area in Uganda). Many people are denied even the chance to attend school and face an ever-increasing English language dominated world without this vital skill. We are about the conduct some literacy tests around the region to find out the true extent of the problem.
  
  Those who perform poorly on the literacy test will be invited to join the program.

• Nutrition
  Yesterday I visited a wonderful old lady who lived in a mud shack. Her husband had passed away many years ago and she had lost her only child when he was young. She is lucky to eat a meal a day. Sometimes she doesn't eat for days on end and shakes uncontrollably.
  
  She was ashamed that she had no food to give us and at one point set off to get some firewood to cook something with. We had to ask her to sit down again and we got some simple supplies for her from a nearby shop
  
  
• HIV
  Everyone knows how bad that HIV problem is in Africa. Meaningful Volunteer is about to conduct a census survey to try and get a handle of the size of the problem in Sironko.
  
  One obvious solution is to get the ARV medication into the hands of the sufferers. The ARVs need to be taken after eating. If you're not eating regularly, then it is pointless to be taking the ARVs.

The Solution
Illiteracy rates are high. Nutrition is poor. And HIV sufferers can't take their ARVs because they are not eating regular meals. Hmmm... How could we address these problems in one easy to run program?

The staff at Meaningful Volunteer have come up with a solution: Run a literacy program, and provide ARV medicine to take with the meals! Three nasty problems solved at once!

How to Fund It

A simple meal here costs 500 shillings (about a U.S. quarter). ARVs are usually freely available from the local clinic. Taking paper and other resources into account, we can run a literacy program (with ARVs and food of course) for about $US10 a month per lady. This will include four hours of tuition a week plus a meal everyday. Each lady will take turns to prepare the meals for the day.

Meaningful Volunteer will conduct a pilot program with ten ladies. We will be having sponsorship opportunities so you can help a lady to solve her HIV, malnutrition and literacy issued all in one go.

Meaningfully Empowered

Way back in September 2008 (see the entry on my personal blog here) , I had an idea to start an online shop that would empower Ugandan women.

My search for something to sell led me to the village of Namukuma. Namukuma has no electricity and is a one hour car ride down a dirt road, followed by a half hour motorcycle road down something that might be generously called a goat track. I'd given my usual "What crafts do you have?" speech to the community. The lack of forthcoming crafts was frustrating enough for me to advance my ever receding hairline. I was almost ready to give up.

Then Alaisa Nandudu came along.

Alaisa had been up all night and making this seed bracelet. I was suitably impressed. Alaisa was living in a small house with her husband, four of her own kids, two HIV orphaned nephews, and a bunch of chickens. Alaisa and her family were eating maybe one meal a day. She had it rough.

One thing led to another and I eventually released GrassRootsUganda.com. One village I knew I had to go back to introduce GrassRootsUganda.com was Namukuma.

So, what happened next?

Well, firstly GrassRootsUganda.com has gone from strength to strength in my absence thanks to dedicated volunteers on the ground in Uganda.

Alaisa herself has made great progress. With a little extra help from a volunteer, and the money she has earned from GrassRootsUganda.com Alaisa has moved out her her one room "home", bought land and built a brand spanking new home. It's not quite finished. It needs doors, windows, a concrete floor, and a little work on the roof. Out back, Alaisa has a little farm that she uses for both for food and a cash crop. See here and here.

Here in Africa, one sometimes feels like bashing one's head against a wall with all the poverty and corruption and people seeming to be working for poverty. Then I remember Alaisa and I get up and try again.

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^* Just for interest's sake, here is Alasia's orginal biography from the GrassRootsUganda.com site.

Alaisa lives in a single room with her husband and three of their own children. Her sister and her brother-in-law both died of AIDS and Alaisa is looking after their two children as well. Her nephew is HIV positive - he is very prone to malaria and misses many days of school.

Her husband can sometimes get work digging the soil on other people's farm for ush1,000 ($US0.54) a day. He is happy to get ten days of work every month, but would like more.

Her husband is also a trained tailor. Alaisa often pleads with other tailors in the area to rent their sewing machines for ush5,000 ($US2.70) a month. They cannot afford to buy material to convert into clothes, so they can only perform simple repairs for between ush200 and ush300 ($US0.11 and $US0.16).

Alaisa use to own thirty chickens, but twelve died because she couldn't afford to feed them properly. One kilo of maize bran (chicken food) costs ush300 ($US0.11). The chickens sleep in the same one room apartment that Alaisa and her family live in because Alaisa fears they will get stolen again. They eat some of the eggs and sell some for ush100 ($US 0.05) per egg. She hopes to sell some of the chickens to raise school fees.

At the moment, they are managing to keep the children in school. They are paying ush15,000 ($US 8.18) per year for each of the children to go to school. Alaisa wishes she could send at least some of her children to a boarding school, but cannot afford the fees.

Malaria is a problem in Alaisa's home, much like everyone else's in her village of Namukama.

Alaisa can only afford to feed her family once per day. Sometimes they cannot afford to eat at all and they go hungry.

Alaisa walks a five kilometer round trip every day to fetch the five jerry cans of water her family needs. The water is unsafe for drinking and needs boiling.

She hopes that many Namukama necklaces are sold on GrassRootsUganda.com because she wants some capital to pay for school fees and uniforms. She would also use the money to rent a bigger home and purchase a sewing machine.

She wished that her husband could have a permanent job and the Namukama could get electricity one day.

Developing Countries: The good and the bad

Check out this house. Nice huh? That'll cost you the princely sum of 1,000,000 Filipino pesos, which is about $US20,000.

So why wouldn't you want to move here? The houses are cheap, the people are wonderful and the weather balmy.

One of the best things about life in developing countries is th cost of living. Everything is so cheap! The bad things include education, security and healthcare. They're all terrible!

Take healthcare for example. My 62 year old mother^* recently volunteered in the Philippines. My mum's a diabetic and managed to get her toe infected, which is a very serious thing for a diabetic. She may yet lose her toe. Being the dutiful son that I am, I decided to get her to the hospital. This is where the problems start. I had to send a friend Jen Jen (who was wonderfully helpful throughout) to get a tricycle to get my mother to the hospital. Getting into one of those things is hard at the best of times, let alone when you have an infected toe. The staff at the hospital were awesome and did everything possible to help my mum. No complaints there. The hospital didn't have a well supplied pharmacy, so Jen Jen and I had to dash out to get the required medicine. We had to go to four different pharmacies to get it all - one of which was in a neighboring town! Even getting her back home was an issue. We had to hire some peddle-powered tricycles to get her home, though - truth be told - I think she quite enjoyed that experience!

It is interesting to note that a Filipino nurse working in the States earns ten times as much as a doctor in the Philippines.

Security is also an issue in developing countries. 2010 is an election year in the Philippines. The current president recently tried to change the constitution to allow her to rule for more than two terms. There is also a small chance that she will declare martial law to maintain power. Regardless of what the president does, there will be violence in 2010. The double whammy of presidential and mayoral elections guarantees it. Candidates will be shot, there will be violence protests, and banks will be robbed to raise bribe money.

And education is also - alas - pretty terrible. Only the very lucky students on Tablas island (where Meaningful Volunteer is based) will get to go to university. Most will finish elementary school, but some of those will emerge illiterate. At a guess, I'd say about 50% will finish high school. There are a dearth of reasons why education is so poor on Tablas. Poor governance, bad roads preventing access to schools, under resourced classrooms, disillusioned teachers... the list goes on.

So, if the low cost of living good enough to offset the educational, healthcare and security issues? Come on over and check it out first hand and make up your own mind!

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^* If she can, why can't you?

Desperate people do desperate things.

Physically preventing the elderly and young from access to emergency food is not something I thought I'd ever be doing. Yet, there I was - as part of a human wall keeping the aid workers safe from a desperate crowd. Elderly hands kept poking through the wall as people begged me for food in broken English. One grandmother fell to her knees and pleaded and pleaded for an aid pack. Shafaq - a fellow volunteer - broke protocol and gave her one. I remember one young girl trying to piece together a torn aid docket in an attempt to get herself some food.

Desperate people do desperate things.

This was all in response to Typhoon Ondoy which slammed into Manila leaving hundreds dead. The even bigger Typhoon Pepeng was mercifully deflected at the last minute.

The aid effort was coordinated by the Bayan Muna (People First) political party. Bayan Muna is headed by Satur Ocampo. Mr. Ocampo is one of the premiere human rights activists in the Philippines. He has been arrested, tortured and harassed by various oppressive regimes. He even has some daring prison escape stories. Mr. Ocampo was one of the people I was keeping safe at the aid distribution.

Looking back at that day, I can't help but feel a little guilty as I was little more than a 'disaster tourist'. I didn't really help in any meaningful way. Meeting Mr. Ocampo was a personal highlight. I'll die a happy man if Meaningful Volunteer achieves half as much as he ha

Technology Failures

Over the past few weeks, I've been working hard on the Meaningful Shop - an online store that allows Meaningful Volunteer to coordinate its child sponsorship, fair trade, community support, and building intiatives. It's an exciting project to say the least! Keep an eye out for the formal launch in a week or so.

In a previous life, I worked as an I.T. manager for ten years, so developing a website is nothing new to me. Developing a website in a developing country has many unique challenges.

Electricity

Electricity on the island of Tablas (where I am based) is a temperamental beast at best. On a "normal" day, the power goes out at least once. Sometimes for an hour, sometime for the rest of the day. One one auspicious day, the power came on and off five times! Tablas Island is also hit by an unfair share of tropical storms which play havoc with the electricity infrastructure. The island was without power for over a month after Typhoon Frank.

Some of these issues are just life in a developing country like the Philippines whose economies are crippled by foreign debt and internal corruption. What is really frustrating though is the incompetence of the local officials. Let me explain.

The island is powered by several power barges which are basically floating diesel generators. Every so often a tanker arrives and replenishes the diesel in the barges. Now it seems to me as if it would be easy to work out a) the rate of diesel consumption and b) the current amount of diesel, so as to work out c) when the diesel will run out and therefore when the diesel tanker needs to arrive. This simple math seems beyond the local officials as the island recently went without power for several days as the barges ran out of diesel.

(Ha! As I type this, yet another power cut kicks in!)

Internet

We tend to take the Internet for granted in developed countries. You click on the Internet icon and - bang! - there it is.

Things are no so easy here in on Tablas. The closest high speed Internet spot is on the island of Romblon - a thirty minute motorbike ride followed by an hour long boat trip. There is a cool little device called Smart Bro that connects to the USB port of your computer. This allows you to get Internet anywhere you can get a cell-phone signal. In ares with the 3G network, this provides for super-fast Internet. In areas like Tablas which lack the 3G network, the Internet comes through in a trickle. While this is no doubt better than nothing, it makes it very frustrating to get answers to technical questions.

Jeffry Sachs - the great economist and champion of the poor - was once asked if he could wish for one thing for impoverished villages, what would it be? He said cell-phones as these open you up to the greater world. Market prices, medical advice, traffic conditions, and countless other pieces of information are just a phone call away.

I'm sure that the Internet would be a close second on his list as this opens up the world in ways much greater than the cell phone.

Getting the Site Going

Developing the Meaningful Shop has been a challenge. Not from a technical point of view - I've done countless similar sites before, but from an infrastructure point of view. I have had to stop work many times as first the power would cut out, and then my laptop itself as the battery was whittled away. Throw in snail paced Internet and things get even more frustrating.

Things in Uganda will be - alas - no better. Uganda has a day-on day-off system for most ares. The on-days have power for between four and twenty four hours. What makes this extra frustrating, is that Uganda is actually a net power exporter...

Fun times ahead no doubt.