In March 2008 I became a volunteer with VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) and I took up a position as Institutional Development Advisor to the Local Council of Maga in the Far North of Cameroon. This post is an attempt to take stock, on my return to Ireland in March 2011, of what has been achieved and of what remains to be done.
The diagnosis which I carried out in 2008 revealed that Maga council’s capacities were very weak indeed. The mayor made all the decisions and he and the Secretary General did virtually all the work. The executive had never met as a group and the council subcommittees had never been convened. The annual budget was prepared by the mayor and Secretary General without the participation of the councillors, including the four deputy mayors, who received the budget proposals at the council sessions at which they were approved. Around two-thirds of the 40 councillors do not speak French and are illiterate (the mayor is the only one who has a little English). Around two-thirds of the council’s 30 staff never did any work at all and most of the others did only occasional work. Only one (the Secretary General) had finished secondary school and several had dropped out of primary school. The council’s finances were in a very sorry state, partly because the previous administration had not had accounts approved during their five-year term and because a large sum of money had gone missing. It was impossible to apply to Government and other organisations for funds because their first demand was to see the accounts for the past three years. Nothing worked in the council offices, and in particular the computer and the photocopier had not been working for a very long time.
Maga is in a remote and disadvantaged area. For example, there are no surfaced roads in the county and in its 50 primary schools the average class size is around 150 and there are almost no desks. The electricity supply in Maga is very unreliable and may be cut for weeks. The rainy season, usually from June to September, can be devastating (as it was in 2010 when 14 people were killed and 5,000 lost their homes in one particular storm) and floods prevent people from coming to meetings. The city of Maroua is only 80 kilometers away but the road is bad and the buses which were in use in 2008 and 2009 broke down several times on most journeys.
Despite all the weaknesses and defects, there has been very good commitment to improve on the part of the mayor, his deputies, the councillors, the staff and the community. I did workshops for the executive, the councillors, the chairmen and secretaries of the subcommittees, the staff, the tax collectors and the village chiefs and the response was always good. It was necessary to begin at a very basic level and I needed to write plays and get local people to present them in Mousgoum (the most common local language) to get the messages across. For example, one of the workshops which I presented to the councillors, the staff and the village chiefs had to do with behaviours such as turning up late to meetings, or not turning up and not sending a message, taking phone calls in meetings and having conversations at meetings, behaviours motivated by prejudice, behaviours such as finding excuses for not taking action on difficult issues and also general lack of proactivity. On behaviours, as on the other areas mentioned below, there is consensus that there has been a good improvement although there is great scope for further improvement.
In relation to building the capacities of the council, the main achievements were:
* The mayor now communicates more, consults with others and delegates responsibilities.
* The executive has regular meetings at which important issues, including reports on receipts and expenditure, are discussed.
* The council subcommittees now meet and were involved in producing the annual budgets for 2010 and 2011.
* The finances of the council have improved, partly because tax receipts have increased under active management by the executive, and the accounts have been brought up to date.
* The council now has an IT room with two computers, a printer and an electricity generator and training of some staff in IT has commenced.
It has to be admitted also that there has been regression on many of these improvements, particularly in periods when I have been absent.
My role was to develop the capacities of the council so that the council could develop the infrastructure of the county and provide services to its citizens, including disadvantaged groups. During my time in Maga I found that there were many opportunities to launch projects for infrastructure development and to help disadvantaged groups. There is a lot of scope to access Cameroonian state funds for infrastructural projects but it is necessary to bring engineers and other experts to the county to prepare the estimates and plans. With the help of donations from some friends in Ireland I was able to support the preparation of proposals to the state
* to build 80 kilometers of roads to remote villages (unsurfaced but hopefully accessible in the rainy season),
* to bring piped water to Guirvidig (one of three big villages, the others being Maga, which has piped water, and Pouss for which a project has already been approved),
* to build ten “forages” (deep enclosed wells with pumps),
* to bring electrity to nine villages
* and to strengthen the electricity connection between Maga and Pouss.
In relation to disadvantaged groups, I supported a census of 350 handicapped people in the county and supported bringing a team from a local NGO, the Fondation de Bethlêem, to examine them. The Foundation is currently constructing tricycles for 20 of them and has performed remedial operations on two and there are plans to provide crutches for others, the costs being met jointly by the Foundation, the council, my friends and the families of the handicapped. I have also supported operations for 17 people suffering from hare’s lip, a condition which tends to have them treated as outcasts since local people believe that they are under spells and will bring misfortune on anybody who associates with them. Discussions are in progress on providing operations for people with cataracts.
At this stage, two years of the five-year plan to build the capacities of the council have been implemented. The work which remains is very real. The council has recently got approval to recruit six new staff with experience relevant to key roles and has also decided on a revised organisation in which existing staff will have their roles redefined. Once these changes are in place there are many actions in the plan which need to be carried out, starting with training and including the introduction of good people management practices. With support from the Government-backed PNDP (Programme National de Développement Participatif), the council has started work on preparing its development plan. This plan will set out the infrastructural and other developments which will be prioritised over the next five years. It is likely to be completed around June and the projects referred to above will be integrated into it. The council’s capacities will certainly need to be strengthened if it is to manage effectively the resulting projects.
One project which could not wait has to do with repairing pumps in forages, most of which are in need of repair. There was a serious outbreak of cholera in the county in 2010 and this is likely to flare up again at the onset of the rainy season in June in addition to the “normal” water-borne diseases, such as typhoid. I initiated this project before leaving for home and am coordinating it by telephone and email. I will cover this in a subsequent post.
VSO has been looking for a replacement for me for over a year without success and my return to Maga in October 2011, following completion of my original contract in May 2011, was an attempt to maintain progress while the search continued. I think that my return made a big difference but it is vital that VSO find a replacement for at least two years to carry through the remaining actions in the plan, particularly those which follow the recruitment and reorganisation of personnel and the preparation of the development plan. The main requirements are experience of management and passable French. The latter might appear intimidating to those not fluent in French but in reality people are very tolerant and helpful in relation to language (only one-third of them speak French in any case so they are very used to language difficulties). There is also a very good national volunteer in Maga who works closely with the international volunteer and helps with language as well as with cultural, social, legislative and other practical issues.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Maga's Development Plan and My Return Home
Apologies for not writing for quite some time. I was very busy and did not manage to fit it in. On this occasion I had committed to returning to Maga for only three months. I extended this for one month to the end of February but although there clearly was much to do I chose to work intensively and then leave rather than endure the increasing heat yet again. Maga really needs a volunteer for another two to three years and having worked the best part of the past three years I feel that I have done my bit. Aicha and I are now safely back in Dublin and I will do a few posts over the next few weeks for completeness. I also have to finish out some work in progress from here, including constructing a website for Maga and remotely managing a project to repair the pumps in a large number of the wells in the county.
While we were in Ireland last summer a friend, Atapassing Ajaccio Evele (more commonly known as Ezekiel) became a father and called his son “Collins” after me. Most people here think that my surname is “Tom” and that my christian name is “Collins”. Thus I am usually referred to as “Mr. Tom”, or as “Papa Tom” by children. Another friend whose wife is pregnant said that if it is a boy it will be called after me. This one will be called "Tom". I worked closely with Atapassing on projects for roads, electrification of villages, building wells, providing piped water to one of the big villages and also on various projects for the handicapped. He brought valuable knowledge to these projects and his initiative, energy and endurance must take the main credit for what we achieved.
One of the major council activities in which I was involved on this occasion was the preparation of the its development plan. This will be a five-year plan setting out the proposed development of the county’s infrastructure and is vital to attracting investment. The work is sponsored by PNDP (Programme National de Développement Participatif), a Cameroonian Government organisation. The funding is provided by the World Bank and by bilateral aid from governments involved in Cameroon’s debt forgiveness programme (the French Government is the largest bilateral donor, and in the case of the Far North the German Government is the main donor). The production of the plan takes about six months. A private company (CAFER in Maga’s case) is appointed as service provider and it puts together a team of around twelve people who are divided into smaller teams which spend four days in each of the villages of the county determing the needs and priorities of the villagers. The planning and methodology of these activities are very impressive and were clearly put in place by a very competent international development organisation for use throughout Cameroon. The plan will consist of a set of development project proposals and once it is ready one of these will be selected and PNDP will implement it with the council, thus transferring knowledge and expertise on project management. After that the council will need to attract funding partners from among Cameroonian Government organisations, domestic and international NGOs, the EU and supportive governments. Implementation of my own plan, to strengthen the capacities of the council (which was initially very weak and still is weak), is necessary to prepare it to take on responsibilities such as these. When the council’s development plan is produced it will provide a context for development of the county which Atapassing and I lacked in the work that we have done to date.
My role in relation to the development plan over the past few months was one of quality assurance. With Maga’s national volunteer, Doubla, I visited the teams working in the villages to verify that they were doing good work and to add value to the process where possible. Some of the villages were very remote and even finding them could be difficult. On one occasion when we stopped to ask for directions from a group of boys who were carrying basins filled with some produce on their heads, they were terrified (maybe by my white skin or my crash helmet), they dropped their basins, spilling the produce, and they scattered in all directions. On another occasion we were advised to follow the “grande route” which turned out to be a dirt track often barely wide enough for our moto and taking us through fields of millet, over very bumpy ground and at times through muddy streams. Sometimes we had to wade through them and somehow get the moto across. We came across one enterprising person who had a pirogue to ferry people, animals and motos across a deep stream but it capsized twice, dumping our moto into the water. However it was a privilege to visit and experience the hospitality in the villages and even in very remote villages they usually knew about my work with the council and said that they appreciated it. I have offered to be available over the internet to help with the completion of the development plan, if that proves feasible.
These visits underlined for me the enormity of the needs of the county and reminded me of a week that I spent, shortly after arriving in 2008, visiting the villages and sometimes sleeping out in the open. On that occasion I accompanied a man who was inspecting the county’s “forages” (deep enclosed wells with pumps) and while he did his inspections I spoke with the village chiefs and elders about their needs. On both occasions access to safe drinking water was the dominant priority in most villages. On this occasion the need is more acute. More pumps are now broken (perhaps as much as half) and there was a serious outbreak of cholera in the county in 2010 which continued to the end of the year and will probably flare up again when the rainy season arrives in June. Large areas flood in the rains and human and animal excrement, as well as fertilisers and rubbish in general, are carried into open wells and ponds. People drink the water from these open wells and even from ponds and streams. In one village that we visited the only source of water was from a stagnant stream with very murky water where some local fishermen passed the day immersed in the water with their nets. In addition to cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases, there is a very high risk of bilharzia (it is thought that over 90% of the population suffers from bilharzia).
It is very difficult to walk away from such problems. I decided to mount a project to repair all the broken forages in the county before the start of the rainy season. Preliminary estimates indicate that 59 out of 134 forages are currenly non-functional and the man whom I accompanied in 2008 is currently carrying out fresh inspections to enable the project to be scoped. I have set up structures in Maga and Maroua so that I can manage the project from a distance. It will be the subject of a later post.
Before coming home, Aicha and I visited her family in Foumban. Her grand-mother had been very ill but happily had recovered. Visiting Foumban is always a very pleasant experience because her family is very welcoming and she has connections everywhere. In my youth in Ireland many people used to love “tracing” such connections and you had only to mention a name and they would be off: “He would be the son of X whose brother …” The Cameroonian equivalent is far more complex due to polygamy and my own efforts at understanding relationships often run aground very quickly. Everywhere we go in Cameroon we bump into Bamouns (often selling African art) whom Aicha knows and refers to as “petits frères” and “petites soeurs”. Foumban, and West Cameroon in general, has a much higher standard of living than Maga and the Far North but even so there were power cuts every day and there was no running water for most of the time that we were there. Also cholera was not far away: Bafoussam, a city about 30 kilometers from Foumban, has recorded 100 cases. In Maga it is impossible to get statistics and I expect that the mortality rate is much higher there because of difficulty of access to treatment and lack of money to pay for it.
It is lovely to be home in Ireland and I am quite happy to pay some extra tax to carry us through our own little crisis.
While we were in Ireland last summer a friend, Atapassing Ajaccio Evele (more commonly known as Ezekiel) became a father and called his son “Collins” after me. Most people here think that my surname is “Tom” and that my christian name is “Collins”. Thus I am usually referred to as “Mr. Tom”, or as “Papa Tom” by children. Another friend whose wife is pregnant said that if it is a boy it will be called after me. This one will be called "Tom". I worked closely with Atapassing on projects for roads, electrification of villages, building wells, providing piped water to one of the big villages and also on various projects for the handicapped. He brought valuable knowledge to these projects and his initiative, energy and endurance must take the main credit for what we achieved.
One of the major council activities in which I was involved on this occasion was the preparation of the its development plan. This will be a five-year plan setting out the proposed development of the county’s infrastructure and is vital to attracting investment. The work is sponsored by PNDP (Programme National de Développement Participatif), a Cameroonian Government organisation. The funding is provided by the World Bank and by bilateral aid from governments involved in Cameroon’s debt forgiveness programme (the French Government is the largest bilateral donor, and in the case of the Far North the German Government is the main donor). The production of the plan takes about six months. A private company (CAFER in Maga’s case) is appointed as service provider and it puts together a team of around twelve people who are divided into smaller teams which spend four days in each of the villages of the county determing the needs and priorities of the villagers. The planning and methodology of these activities are very impressive and were clearly put in place by a very competent international development organisation for use throughout Cameroon. The plan will consist of a set of development project proposals and once it is ready one of these will be selected and PNDP will implement it with the council, thus transferring knowledge and expertise on project management. After that the council will need to attract funding partners from among Cameroonian Government organisations, domestic and international NGOs, the EU and supportive governments. Implementation of my own plan, to strengthen the capacities of the council (which was initially very weak and still is weak), is necessary to prepare it to take on responsibilities such as these. When the council’s development plan is produced it will provide a context for development of the county which Atapassing and I lacked in the work that we have done to date.
My role in relation to the development plan over the past few months was one of quality assurance. With Maga’s national volunteer, Doubla, I visited the teams working in the villages to verify that they were doing good work and to add value to the process where possible. Some of the villages were very remote and even finding them could be difficult. On one occasion when we stopped to ask for directions from a group of boys who were carrying basins filled with some produce on their heads, they were terrified (maybe by my white skin or my crash helmet), they dropped their basins, spilling the produce, and they scattered in all directions. On another occasion we were advised to follow the “grande route” which turned out to be a dirt track often barely wide enough for our moto and taking us through fields of millet, over very bumpy ground and at times through muddy streams. Sometimes we had to wade through them and somehow get the moto across. We came across one enterprising person who had a pirogue to ferry people, animals and motos across a deep stream but it capsized twice, dumping our moto into the water. However it was a privilege to visit and experience the hospitality in the villages and even in very remote villages they usually knew about my work with the council and said that they appreciated it. I have offered to be available over the internet to help with the completion of the development plan, if that proves feasible.
These visits underlined for me the enormity of the needs of the county and reminded me of a week that I spent, shortly after arriving in 2008, visiting the villages and sometimes sleeping out in the open. On that occasion I accompanied a man who was inspecting the county’s “forages” (deep enclosed wells with pumps) and while he did his inspections I spoke with the village chiefs and elders about their needs. On both occasions access to safe drinking water was the dominant priority in most villages. On this occasion the need is more acute. More pumps are now broken (perhaps as much as half) and there was a serious outbreak of cholera in the county in 2010 which continued to the end of the year and will probably flare up again when the rainy season arrives in June. Large areas flood in the rains and human and animal excrement, as well as fertilisers and rubbish in general, are carried into open wells and ponds. People drink the water from these open wells and even from ponds and streams. In one village that we visited the only source of water was from a stagnant stream with very murky water where some local fishermen passed the day immersed in the water with their nets. In addition to cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases, there is a very high risk of bilharzia (it is thought that over 90% of the population suffers from bilharzia).
It is very difficult to walk away from such problems. I decided to mount a project to repair all the broken forages in the county before the start of the rainy season. Preliminary estimates indicate that 59 out of 134 forages are currenly non-functional and the man whom I accompanied in 2008 is currently carrying out fresh inspections to enable the project to be scoped. I have set up structures in Maga and Maroua so that I can manage the project from a distance. It will be the subject of a later post.
Before coming home, Aicha and I visited her family in Foumban. Her grand-mother had been very ill but happily had recovered. Visiting Foumban is always a very pleasant experience because her family is very welcoming and she has connections everywhere. In my youth in Ireland many people used to love “tracing” such connections and you had only to mention a name and they would be off: “He would be the son of X whose brother …” The Cameroonian equivalent is far more complex due to polygamy and my own efforts at understanding relationships often run aground very quickly. Everywhere we go in Cameroon we bump into Bamouns (often selling African art) whom Aicha knows and refers to as “petits frères” and “petites soeurs”. Foumban, and West Cameroon in general, has a much higher standard of living than Maga and the Far North but even so there were power cuts every day and there was no running water for most of the time that we were there. Also cholera was not far away: Bafoussam, a city about 30 kilometers from Foumban, has recorded 100 cases. In Maga it is impossible to get statistics and I expect that the mortality rate is much higher there because of difficulty of access to treatment and lack of money to pay for it.
It is lovely to be home in Ireland and I am quite happy to pay some extra tax to carry us through our own little crisis.
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