my JF placement, revisited

I left Ghana more than a year ago and I've back to this blog a few times to revisit my thoughts and experiences. Most of these times, I had the feeling that a lot of what EWB would call "the learning" did not get completely captured in this blog. However, I think that I am in a better position to evaluate this learning now that I've allowed the experience to totally sink in.

I must confess that I struggled a bit when I got back. Mostly, I had a hard time coming to terms with the summer, in particular how different my experiences were in comparison with what I had expected and what other volunteers experienced. All the traveling and adjusting finally took a toll on me, especially on my last days in Accra - I was ready to be done. When I returned to Canada, I felt this tremendous responsibility of communicating everything back to the chapter and felt (still feel) a bit unsatisfied with the role I took with the chapter when coming back. But the hardest part was probably going home to Guatemala and having to face some really tough questions from my own family, such as: "Do you think you had any impact?". I would like to think that I did. Here is why:

At the beginning of the summer, KITE’s knowledge of what the situation was at the RBCs was limited to the data that had been collected by the eCARE office, managed by a different project partner. This was mainly information on loan repayment of the centres and technical challenges that had been reported. The information was not always available to KITE - yes, communication between the project partners was more than terrible. KITE itself had a vague idea as to what the situation was like for the entrepreneurs and little was known of what was keeping them from being profitable. This situation was a result of internal challenges in KITE such as lack of people resources to go to the field, lack of incentives for their coworkers to produce good work, being tied to other organizations for funding, and having a strong bias towards producing quantity and not quality (a consequence of donors having similar expectations).

I can say now that the biggest change that occurred through my involvement was with regards to KITE’s knowledge and understanding of the project. After the placement, KITE had data from a combined total of 26 centres. Our analysis included subjective observations and recommendations based on our interactions with the entrepreneurs. So they had hypotheses and numbers to back them up.

Was this enough? Probably not. Did I influence the thinking at the project level? Yes. This new understanding of the project may have contributed to an increased “momentum” in the meetings with other project partners that happened close to the end of the summer. Both the director and eCARE project officer were working towards and pushing for results to solve some of the existing problems before the deployment of any new centres. Having information available made it easier for KITE to push for results from other project partners too.

I accept the fact that the sustainability of my activities was limited because of the few interactions I was able to have with KITE staff. Ideally, I would have liked to work more closely with the project manager in the monitoring process. My impact might have been doubled if the eCARE person at KITE would have gone through the same learning cure as I did!

One of my biggest challenges was to understand the connection between my actions and the ultimate beneficiary because I only had limited interactions with the customers of the centres. Somewhere in the middle of my placement, I realized that I could think of Dorothy as the end user of the centres or the entrepreneurs themselves. I decided to focus on what my results could be for the entrepreneurs because I was working more closely with them. Many EWB volunteers would agree, I think, that their impact was mostly on their coworkers or other development "champions", not necessarily Dorothy. This was a tough realization, but it also allowed me to be more focused on existing and future entrepreneurs and their ability to provide better and more suitable ICT services to their communities.

However, my biggest challenge while overseas was by far being always on the move. Although I got to know Accra the best, I had host communities in 5 different regions in Ghana(and slept in a total of 30 different beds!). I never spent more than a couple of days at one place before I was required to move again. So not only was I in a different country, I spent so little time at each location that often I felt like I had no "home" to come back to. A lot of my energy and time were spent traveling, gaining trust, and adapting to new surroundings. Sometimes I felt that I was perceived as just another visitor and reinforcing this perception of Westerns through my short visits made me very uncomfortable. However, now I can see more clearly that I gained a lot from this. I learned about about myself and how I deal with new situations, also about active listening and being able to make connections with people over a short period of time. I learned to be open, adaptable, flexible and more comfortable with ambiguity.

Traveling allowed me to gain a perspective of what Ghana is as a whole. I was able to see the huge differences that exist between Northern and Southern Ghana, and urban and rural communities. When I think of Ghana now, I don't think only of a remote community ,I think of the challenges that different geography, conflicting religious practices, several languages and modern and traditional cultural practices put on Ghana's development as a whole.

During my travels and village stay it became apparent that many Ghanaians still lack access to basic rights: food security, access to clean water and sanitation, health care, and education. The government does not have the capacity, resources, or systems in place to provide these services to all areas successfully and equally. The lack of infrastructure makes it hard for services to reach those who really need it and for people to reach markets and services. Economic activity is limited by the lack of capital available to process goods and add value to products in Ghana before they are exported. Local products cannot always compete with subsidized products from other countries.

At the local level there are few or no incentives for people to excel in their work. People in hospitals, schools, community organizations, and government bodies are not paid enough to make a living and need to take on other activities to supplement their income. Many are not attracted to work in rural areas. Even when education is available, Ghanaians are not always able to make a living with the skills they have, let alone build on these skills. Local entrepreneurs have little support in starting businesses and providing services those services the government is not able to provide. Because of this lack of opportunities, some decide to leave, taking with them skills and knowledge that could contribute to the development of their communities. Often, they move to already densely populated urban centres like Accra where the safety networks are smaller and the opportunities for jobs and amenities are restricted to those with education, connections, and money. There are a few who don't, the eCARE entrepreneurs I met being an example. These are individuals who drive development in the most remote areas.

My idea of development being complex was reinforced by going to Ghana. Now, my concept of development is more than the ability to fulfill the basic human rights that I mentioned,above ,it includes the ability to make choices about those rights. I understand better the importance of taking rigorous approaches in development, and building organizations that can implement projects with a thoughtful and critical approach. I experienced first hand that volunteers can and do play a role in supporting excisting organizations by providing energy , enthusiasm, and a fresh perspective. They can challenge these organizations by connecting them to the people they are trying to help and asking the really tough questions. But to do this, it takes effort and hard work.

This post is already too long. So I'll conclude by saying that the adventure is not over. I'll continue to reflect about Ghana and find ways to share what I learned.

Thanks for reading!

beautiful Ghana

As I prepare to leave Ghana in less than a week, I can't help thinking about all the beautiful people and places I was lucky to meet and see in my time here. I'm afraid there are many things that didn't get captured in my blog entries: the joy of waving at the little boys in the street as they yell "Obruni bye bye!"; the kindness with which Ghanaians always invited me to share their food; and the rythm and music in the way people walk down the street even when they are carrying huge loads.

In this blog entry, I want to give you a glimpse of the things I will miss of Ghana...

...busy tro-tro stations and streets like this one in Koforidua where I "picked a car" to go to three of my centres...

...simply beautiful places like this street in Adidome with a huge baobab tree...

...and pintoresque places like this one in Elmina...

...the excitement of buying food in food stalls in the streets and the certainty of having fish in almost every meal...

...and the glorious fruit...

...and things that made me laught like seeing a Ghanaian burst into song or break into a dance in the street...or a couple of unexpected sheep...

...and of course, newly made friends, even those who call in the middle of the night like Kwesi just "to ask of me"...

... those who made me think about why it is important for things improve...

...and those who greeted me with a smile.

small small businesses

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about businesses and entrepreneurs. What are the characteristics of an entrepreneur? How do you find an entrepreneur? What is a successful business model? What do small businesses in Ghana look like? What kind of support do they need to grow? What type of support can development organizations provide? Should development organizations support entrepreneurs at all?

I'm still working on figuring out the answers to all of these questions but maybe I'll let you come up with your own conclusions from hearing about two people I met in the Volta Region…

Gifty

While staying in Adidome, I woke up to the smell of freshly baked cake. Every morning, Gifty, the girl who I shared the room with, makes fifty or so muffin sized cakes in her local coal-fired oven. In catering school, Gifty learned how to make all sorts of local dishes and also more special treats like plantain chips, biscuits and meat pie. For a while, she was running a small food stall in a town not far from Adidome but the work was hard and the profit was too small so she decided to try something closer to home. Nowadays, her little sister goes around town with a wooden box on her head each afternoon after school selling the little treats. Even though each of them is only 20 pesewas (20 cents) and the ingredients are expensive, she makes some small money at the end of the day. Gifty knows that the trick is buying things in bulk but she doesn’t have enough capital to buy more than enough for one batch of cake.


Making cake (the metal box with the coal on top is Gifty’s oven)


Emma

Emmanuel is the entrepreneur I visited at Adidome. He is also what I envision a social entrepreneur to be like. His eCARE centre has been running for less than a year and it recently got expanded to a small internet café. Emma is 21, a full-time university student, and one year away from completing a degree in business administration. After visiting an eCARE centre by chance and asking the owner about the project, he decided to take the risk of applying for an eCARE centre himself. He says that he saw an opportunity to learn how business works in real life. In order to make it to the training session, he had to miss a couple of days of classes right before exams and get his classmates to catch him up. Now he is teaching them about what he has learned from owning his own shop.


The things that I like about Emma are his vision and motivation. Emma has plans to complete his MBA and continue doing business in his hometown after he graduates. Running the centre from Accra has not been easy as he has to travel often to Adidome to check on his brother Junior who works at the centre when he is gone. Luckily, Junior has taught himself how to use the computer and he keeps good records for Emma to check when he is around. In the months when business is not good and he is not able to make the monthly payment, he has to either ask his parents or take money from his own pocket despite his already tight student budget. But so far, he has not defaulted in any payments.

The first day I was visiting I witnessed a friend of Emma’s do the networking for the two second-hand computers he had bought. Later that day, a man came in asking about the newly installed internet. The smile with which Emma greeted him is what makes me think he is the right type of person to own an eCARE centre (or any business at all for that matter).

Emma

engineers doing development, what?

One of the questions I wanted to answer this summer was: what kind of useful skills does my engineering education equip me with for working in development? Does it at all?

So far, I think it does (at least a little bit). From working with KITE I've realized just how important it is for organizations to take a systematic and professional approach in the development projects they implement. In a way, this summer has given me just as much work experience as any other engineering job would in terms of working in a professional environment. More importantly, I've found that some of the things I've learned in engineering have been very useful during the summer.


Project management. Development projects are...well...exactly that, projects! When I asked one of my co-workers at KITE how he got involved in development he said that what he really had been interested in was project management. In various ocassions this summer, I've had to sit down with my team of interns and staff at KITE to discuss objectives, deliverables and deadlines. Because there are goals to achieve, stakeholders to be accountable to, and limited resources, I think that it is very important for development workers to know about how to deal with the ups and downs of projects.


Processes and Systems. One of the most important thing that all engineers develop, I think, is a deep love for analysing processes and systems. Although we may not recongnize it as such, we learn a lot about how to analyze causes and effects, relationships, and ways of making a system effective. These are useful when trying to understand how development projects work and how to make it work better. For example, our team has been working on "tools" that KITE can use to improve the processes they have in place to implement the eCARE project especially the selection of entrepreneurs and future locations of the RBCs. These tools are there to make the decision making and documentation a lot easier. Projects cannot be efficient if there is no adequate way of monitoring and monitoring cannot happen without establishing a process!


Communication. Proposals, reports, forms, presentations...you name it! Development work is full of written and oral communication! I know that engineers are not known for their grammar, but we do learn a certain approach to communication that is short, simple and to the point. So far I've found that although development talk has a lot of human faces attached to it, there are lots of objective pieces of information that need to be transferred. Being able to communicate them objectively and in a structed way can mean the difference between a project partner reading your proposal for funding or not.

Technology. There are many examples of how technology and development go hand in hand: water and sanitation, infrastructure, agricultural production, ICT's, etc. Yesterday, one of the project managers at KITE encouraged me and the other interns to look for career opportunities in the energy sector not because of the cool enginnering related to it but because of it's importance in development. Although the knowledeg of the technology alone is not enough, some knowledge is necessary to be an effective development worker in those areas of work. For instance, if I had more knowledge on renewable energy technologies I would have been more useful to KITE in trying to recommend what to do with the RE component of eCARE.


No fear of numbers. That is the one thing all engineers have in common. Believe it or not I've spent my last few weeks in Ghana trying to understand the correlations between financial data, making charts in Excel, dealing with statistics, and making rough calculations. Good ideas are better with good numbers.

Stubborness. Im pretty sure this is not officially included in any engineering curriculum! In KITE I've been impressed by the work ethics of everyone in the office. I think that going through the engineering curriculum has made me learn the same respect for hard work and excellence.

Problem solving. Of course, how can we forget everyone's favourite! Needless to say, there are a ton of challenges out there to be solved waiting for people to look at them from different angles. Maybe they don't come in the shape of equations, but they do come with variables and assumptions! (sorry, I couldn't help adding the nerdy comment...)

In less than three weeks I'll be back in school learning more about structures and math. That's ok because as long as I don't forget the people for whom I want to work for, there are no useless skills to learn.

a letter to one of my entrepreneurs

Dear Bro’George,

I had such a fun day helping you with Excel! You are such a fast learner; I can’t believe that although you only made it to Junior Secondary School, you have taught yourself how to use the computer and design all sorts of cards and posters in Publisher and you are now running a successful business. It makes my job of helping you with the computer ten times easier. I couldn’t help exploding in laughter every time you finished an exercise and raised you eyebrows to show me just how proud you are.

Today you said “Ah! The day I can type as fast as you I will kill two fowls”. But the truth is, I have so much to learn from you. Your hardwork, entrepreneurship, charisma and vision are all such great characteristics that I would kill three fowls to have a little bit of that instead of good typing skills.

I hope that next time the nurses from the hospital come by to finish their reports, you can use Excel to make the charts of the immunizations around Nkurakan that they need. This time you won’t have to turn them away and they will continue to come to your business for future reports.
As at now, I will try to rest small because we have a long day tomorrow helping Patiene do some typing.

Yours truly,

Andlea from Cua-ta-mela

I'm coming, I'm going to urinate

In Ghana, it is perfectly ok to use this line. Actually, I found myself saying it quite often at the houses where I stayed not just because people are interested in where I’m going in general, but because there’s no point in hiding the obvious fact that I’m walking to the latrine or the public toilet with my “t-roll” in hand.

I think by now I’ve seen almost everything: toilets that need to be flushed with a bucket because there is no running water, smelly public urinals, holes on the ground, “free ranging” and my personal favourite, a hole with an army of cockroaches that make their appearance every evening! It only takes some squatting and balancing on top of a hole on a cement block for you to realize how many things we take for granted, especially having a nice toilet.



A pretty sophisticated and clean latrine – except at night when the cockroaches make their appearance


In one of the families where I stayed, the latrine was shared between different houses and compounds – I’m guessing at least 25 people or so? Just recently I heard that the indicator for access to clean sanitation in Ghana no longer counts using shared latrines as appropriate sanitation because the ratio from people to latrine is so high that you can never be sure whether the place is actually clean and the risk of diseases is just as high as not having a latrine at all. That means that we’ve gone from 60% of the population having access to somewhat hygienic toilet situations to only 10%. Having the latrine itself does not guarantee that people will use it either, but at least it increases the chances that people will be less exposed to diseases than if they were using a spot close to their favourite tree.

Apart from feeling uneasy every time I see a small girl carry a huge bucket of water, I can’t say that I can complain about the water or toilet situation. Really, I've had it pretty good. Most houses where I’ve stayed have access to at least a close borehole and the water is safe so there is no walking to the nearest stream to fetch water and that sort of thing. Even when I try to convince people to let me carry the bucket of water that I will use for my shower, they don’t let me. But what about the 90% of Ghanaians- and many many more people in the world - for who this is not a problem they need to deal with for 3 months, but a part of everyday life?

Mbowura

My short visit to Mbowura started with a two hour ride in the back of a motorbike. The road was red, the sky blue and the trees green – I couldn’t see a lot of details because I had to choose between a helmet and my glasses but the landscape yelled rural Ghana. Almost every EWB JF does what is called a “village stay” in an attempt to learn more about the people we are hoping to help. My purpose in visiting Mbowura was to learn about what it is like to live in rural Northern Ghana and about one of KITE’s projects, the Multifunctional Platform.

the road

My hosts were the chief of the village, Anthony, and his family. This was great because I learned a lot from spending time with one of the most educated members of the community and it was easy to ask questions because he speaks English and most of the people don’t. Every morning, at least three people came by to say hello and greet us before they headed to their farms. People in the village are from at least two different tribes so when the Chief goes around greeting “his people” in the morning, he does the greetings in two languages.

Some buildings in the village

According to the Chief, I brought rain with me to Mbowura. Most people in Mbowura farm cassava, yams, and groundnuts for subsistence so they were beginning to worry because the rains hadn’t come yet. When it rained all morning on my first day, we all waited patiently and enjoyed the smell of wet soil. Everything stops with the rain: farmers don’t go to farm, teachers don’t come to the school (although the children do), and the women watch their metal containers fill up with the rainwater. In some says, everything seems to follow the natural flow of things in Mbowura: wake up at 5 with the sun, farm the food that you will eat, rest after a day of farming and go to bed when the sky is dark.

Chief Anthony planting tomatoes on the side of a yam mount

After the rain had gone, we walked to see the Chief’s farms. He had finished planting his yams so the field was all covered in yam mounts surrounded by cassava plants. Once the yams are harvested, he will move the yams to a new farm and plant groundnut in the old one. Then, he will harvest the groundnuts and eventually the cassava. Of course, all of this means countless hours of backbreaking work under the sun.

Kwame bikes from his house every day to farm cassava. He prefers living far from his field because there is electricity there and not in Mbowura.


Apart from cassava, farmers in Mbowura have recently started farming soya beans. SEND, the local NGO through which KITE implemented the MFP, introduced the crop as a way of increasing the food security in the area. Soya beans cannot only be sold as cash crops but they are also very nutritious and they have become part of the diet of some of the families in Mbowura. The group of farmers that SEND has worked with for the past three years has 27 members and is made up of farm families (husband and wife). This is because women also farm “women crops” such as pepe, okro, tomatoes and other vegetables for cooking.

This lady didn’t seem to want to stop farming anytime soon

Back at the house, Madame Cynthia was always busy making food: boiled yams with soya bean stew on one day; t.z. with palmnut soup and bush fowl the next one. The rest of the time she was either at her farm, cleaning or looking after her three daughters. I tried helping but doing the dishes was the only thing I convinced her I could do.

Madame Cynthia preparing a meal

When I told the Chief that I wanted to learn more about what women do he decided to take me around the village. In one of the houses, a lady was spreading shea nuts on the ground. She explained that the process of making shea butter is very long and requires a lot of work: collecting the nuts and carrying them from the field, removing the pulp, drying the nuts, extracting the oil, cooking it into a paste and so many other steps that I couldn’t keep track of all of them. At the end, this woman sells each small ball of shea butter for only 5 pesewas (5 cents) at the market.

This lady is one of the only people in the village who still know how to make thread


Close to the evening and once the women have collected the cassava from the field, it was time for the platform to start operations. The MFP is a small diesel engine that can power different machines and the farmer group in Mbowura uses it to process cassava into gari and grind maize, cassava and guinea corn to make flour to make t.z. The group charges a small fee to everyone that needs to use it and then pays an operator. Selassi from SEND comes by frequently to check on the platform and help the group with any maintenance or getting parts for the platform.

Making flour

The Chief introduced me to some of the members of the cooperative, including the lady who is the treasurer. From what he told me, having the MFP has allowed the women of Mbowura to process cassava into gari closer to their fields. Now they do not have to walk all the way to Kpandai (about 15 minutes away on a motorbike) to get it processed and make more money by selling it at the market once it’s processed.


The last step in the gari processing is frying dry grinded cassava in these big pans

In one of our many conversations I asked the Chief what he thought about NGOs. He had many stories to reply with. He told me that less than ten years ago the community was suffering from guinea worm, a worm that can grow up to 1 m long inside of you and burst your skin open as it tries to get out. He and other members of the community had learned that how to prevent it by avoiding the water from the stream and using a borehole that an NGO installed. His son and daughters were born in an Mbowura that was free of guinea worm. There was also a not feeling so good story of a group of white people who had once visited Mbowura briefly and asked the community what they wanted. Then they sent a totally useless machine that was far from being the grinding mill that they needed.

Girls stand under the pipe in this borehole as the water pours down on big buckets of water on their heads.

Even though we were up early, the days went quickly as the Chief kept me busy meeting people and I kept him busy with many questions. He loved talking about farming and how people in the community perform funerals- with a lot of music, I was told. On my second day, I was sitting just outside the room where I was staying – his room – and I noticed that there was something written in the concrete slab. To my surprise, the Chief told me that it was his father’s grave and that his mother’s was just on the other side of the house. I tried not to think about this when I went to bed that night and focused on the goats who were finding a comfortable place to sleep just outside my door instead.
Playing a game. Can you find any girls in this picture? Right, they are all doing chores.


On my last night in Mbowura, the Chief and I had both ran out of questions so we sat quietly in the cool night looking at the clear sky. I hadn’t done any physical work like everyone else around me, yet, absorbing the reality of life in Mbowura was somehow exhausting. One of the wise sayings from the people from Mbowura is that "As much as the stranger widens his eyes, he does not see the town’s secrets". My conversations with the Chief had been so insightful, but had I learned as much as possible? Did I understand what it is to live in a small village and worry about what I will eat if the rains dont come in time? I wasn't sure. As I said goodbye to the peace and simplicity of Mbowura, I decided to put that thought aside for a while and just enjoy the fact of being there.