It is a debate that I’ve felt myself as I travel around Ghana and previously Malawi to do my work. I can’t say that I’ve ever come to a good conclusion, but I try my best to find a balance that I can live with and that will let me sleep well at night. I think that’s maybe all we can ask for.

Part of the expectations from EWB is a week-long village stay (and regular shorter ones), our cultural immersion, our recognition and appreciation of the challenges on the ground and of culture. We are not perfect, but it’s a good start and a way to unlearn what we thought we knew to start learning again. It’s a value we have and we stick to it (and occasionally try to get some CIDA people stuck at their desks in Accra to get out to the field – still trying).

Sarah Grant, a fellow EWBer and development worker who inspires others and embodies what a good development worker should be.

What are your thoughts on this?  How does this resonate with you? What could you do in your community to help you understand poverty in your own community, not as a tourist and guilty observer, but as a conscious, curious and caring part of a solution?

Amazing when you can boil down an ingrained challenge of development into the positioning of a light bulb and a ceiling fan.

This is a well positioned light bulb and ceiling fan.  It’s rare.  There is enough space between both tools to allow decent light and still blow sufficient amounts of air.  A poorly positioned ceiling fan on the other hand effectively cuts the light in patterns that resemble a disco nightclub or one of those old roller-skating rinks.  If it doesn’t make you dizzy or give you a headache, it’ll certainly make you want to turn off the light – the same is not true of the ceiling fan since you’ll suffer more from the heat.

This trivial example is representative of the design and implementation challenge here.  Why not work hard to provide a good service offering and a job well done?  Why not design a system that serves both functions equally well without obstructing the other?  Why not move the ceiling fan one foot further from the light?

Design for visual appeal and functionality, good customer service and efficiency are goals that every engineer strives to achieve in their work.  However, more than that, they are values and ingrained cultural norms that we have come to accept as the norm and expectation.  In a different culture, these norms might be replaced by stronger values of community, family and cost.  One might choose to have a relative do the job in order to keep the family and community strong as opposed to hiring the best talent.  Businesses compete on price and historical relationships rather than service delivery and effectiveness.

In development it is important to recognize what is possible and where the current state is (and why) to know how to compromise to a reasonable medium.  Neither way is wrong or right, although I’d prefer to not get a headache every night.

Escom is the major energy service provider in Malawi.  Similar institutions exist all over Southern Africa.

In Malawi, we used to have a saying: “Escom – Power All Day, Every Day… Someday.”

Access to reliable power is remarkably rare.  Only 10% of the population has access to power at all.  Power cuts, particularly in the rainy season (December through March) are the norm.   Regular rolling blackouts are tolerated, and alternative sources of energy (coal fueled stoves) and activities (going to the field rather than writing reports on a computer at best, but more likely chatting with colleagues and moving around the town) are always available.

Imagine someone in your office building randomly turned on and off the main fuse box without warning and for unknown periods of time.  Imagine that happens for months on end.  Now imagine trying to work, to cook for your family, to not use coal (it’s illegal)…  It’s difficult isn’t it?

A similar situation exists in Ghana.  In the capital, Accra, offices and homes have resorted to buying generators when they can afford it.  As opposed to electric stoves in Malawi, gas stoves are the norm.  (Although when gas runs short as it did last week, the cues to refill your taxi or your gas-cooker tank are unbelievable).

So why does this keep happening?  The reasons are complex and numerous.  These are a few.

Infrastructure, in general, is insufficient, poor and poorly maintained.  Malawi’s energy is drawn mainly from hydro-power based on a few damns located around the country, as is Ghana’s.  This is certainly a more environmentally friendly option than a dozen coal fired plants.  (Incidentally, the coal-fired power stations that do exist are usually single-cycle-turbines, which in case you are not an engineer, is using massively inefficient outdated technology.)  But these hydro-power stations are old and likely to face troubles as huge flood waters fill the damns during the torrential rainy season and carry farm debris along with the rushing water into the turbines.  Furthermore, even if they worked perfectly, there are simply not enough of them to meet the country’s growing energy demands.

Increasing energy demands as populations migrate to the urban centers and as rural districts connect puts further strain on an already burdened system.

Pricing schemes that pass the increasing cost of operation onto the consumer (thereby leaving out a good part of the population that simply can’t afford to pay for the rising cost of energy) exacerbates the problem.  Escom clearly needs funding to improve and/or expand their energy provision, but having fewer people pay more (and losing the lower income customers) hardly makes sense in an agricultural based nation where access to funds are scarce and barter economies still dominate rural areas.

Corruption (or at least the accusations of it) plague Escom and infuriate Malawians who see their access to power cut while executives enjoy expensive Christmas parties.

What to do?  I think a lot of things will need to change before access to power improves in Malawi and in Ghana.  Addressing the concerns above is a good place to start.  Diversifying the nations’ energy sources and investing in infrastructure is essential.  Renewable energy sources are well positioned to take off if the initial cost was reduced or deemed an essential expense.  Some of this is already happening; wind power has been making headlines in Malawi (although an isolated event), solar energy should be viable (it’s insanely sunny in most of Ghana).  Pricing schemes that are realistic based on the population and situation would assist to drastically improve ability to access power.

Unfortunately, it’s still not so simple.  Investment in energy sources requires finance, and if that finance is not coming from the population (either in tax or paying for the cost of energy), then the financial burden must be transferred elsewhere, which is currently scarce.

Growth requires energy; it always has.  As Malawi and Ghana’s economies try and grow, as new technologies such as air conditioners, televisions and radio stations expand their market (which they are), these nations will need more power not less.  It’s time to start rethinking power.

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Memoirs of a typical villager

I was born in the village and spent 15 years of my childhood in the village and have some considerable traits of a typical villager. I will not claim that I know or remember everything about those years because the other 15 years I have been staying in town has seen my village mindset being progressively transformed and at times forgetting the everyday hurdles that characterised my upbringing and the familiar villagers’ menu of challenges which Mr. Scott has clearly articulated. My village I believe, had more than 2000 farm families (households). It used to be very big and at that time people used to have more than 6 children per household. So I can approximate that there were at least 12000 people. At the time I was leaving the village to go to town, our village didn’t have a standing water point or Borehole or a protected well.

That was in 1993.

There is river that runs through the village and people used to fetch water from there. However the river used to dry up in the month of August every year. At times like these I used to see several shallow wells dug right in the middle of the river stream. This is where my mum could get water which I proudly drunk, bathed, and used for any activity requiring water.

At some point in 1995, I visited my village and one thing caught my attention. There was a ‘shallow well’ a few meters (15m) behind my dad’s grass thatched house. My mum told me that dad had dug it because the distance was far for her (mayi) and that they thought it would be healthier to drink from this new well unlike the one at the river. Both reasons made sense to me because my memory took me back in time and remembered how she felt ill when a big storm of rain had found her on her way to the common shallow well. About the water being good for drinking, I also 100% shared her opinion at that time, because I remembered when I was a young boy, having let my dad’s 4 cows drink from one of the wells which people used.

I spent five days and saw that the shallow well beside my dad’s house served not only my household but also the surrounding neighbourhood.  Mom explained to me that when the shallow well went dry the neighbours came (all of them) to participate in flushing out the mud and deepening it until an aquifer is found and so they were assured that they had water all year round.

Three years later I went back to the village and found that a great number of households had sunk household shallow wells which were fully maintained and running all year round. By the way, there was no water project which facilitated this idea by then.

In 2006, while on leave from my job I paid another visit to the village and found out that the village had been given a borehole (AFRIDEV pump). Just like any other donor funded project it had its own prescribed dos and dont’s.  The borehole is located 1.2 km from my dad’s house. I asked mom if she goes to the Borehole to fetch water. She told me ‘yes’! But just for drinking and ‘mostly if visitors like you (meaning myself) are coming’. ‘Of course I knew what she meant.’ I quickly thought about the distance as possible reason why she doesn’t go to the borehole.  But I also felt that much as the distance was long, I think she should have managed to go get a 5 litre gallon. At this point I knew there should be another reason (but I didn’t know what it could be by then).

The borehole functioned for two years and its now in ruins but on the other hand my dad’s shallow well and the many others that were there before the borehole are still functioning.

The reasons why the borehole is not functioning are the same as what Mr. Scott has pointed out in his article. The whole questions hinges on how did the borehole get to the village in the first place. Who brought it and how did they bring it?

My opinion is that the idea of bringing boreholes to the villagers is not at all bad and in fact statistics claim huge positive impact in diarrhoea prevention as a result of borehole installation. I agree to this because, I fell the victim to diarrhoea during my childhood days and felt significant change when I moved to town.

However, with all the due respect to all the donors and the government policy makers and indeed all development workers (including myself), it seems to me that something is not right with the way projects are designed, funded, planned, implemented, monitored and evaluated. This may apply at all levels of decision making. In my country, Malawi, where Mr. Scott is working, governments have been changing for the past 46 years. Changing governments have been accompanied by changes in policies as well. We are told, promised and coaxed now and again to believe that Malawi is developing (development means change for the better) and one of the indictors which we are told that we should see is infrastructure.

One of the highly, politicised infrastructure development are these boreholes, which to the best of my knowledge most of them are indeed not functioning. The question that I ask is why are things the way they are? Why is dad’s shallow well of 1995 still there and not the borehole of 2006?

The project documents for water and sanitation are awash with such statements like ‘community participation’, participatory rural appraisal, sustainable development, gender, promote human rights etc. These phrases connect so well such that they form a winning formula to convince the bald headed and highly respected donors where ever they are like CIDA, EU, DANIDA, USAID among others. Of course the donors with all their good intentions fund these projects but some of them tie demands to the aid such that it makes it difficult to be flexible to implement the projects that can leave the desired impact. The end result is that more donor money is spent, more non functional boreholes (standing metal museums) are created, more children and other vulnerable groups are denied the opportunity of drinking safe water, and more hospitals are filled with patients that were supposed to be home and work or go to school.

However there are those people who, in addition to reading about poverty issues in Africa on news papers or watching it on TV in the comfort of their houses abroad, have come down right to our villages eating what we eat, sharing beds with rats and the notorious mosquitoes, and sometimes drinking the very unsafe water, not as spectators but being part of the new chemistry of change.

I don’t know Mr. Scott, but I have been privileged to work with some of the Engineers Without Borders volunteers. Through working with these colleagues I found out that their conceptual model to development brings with it both practical and realistic dimensions, in that not only are they willing to mentor and motivate the working partners, they are also able to highlight and help build basic but fundamental implementation and project monitoring tools. Through such tools, lessons are learnt; hopping that if the provisions for flexibility to the projects’ designs were there, some of the policies would have been reformed, donors would have had a bigger picture of development as seen by a villager, and then more boreholes would by now have been maintained and not added to the list of non functioning ones.

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Loti Ching’oma is a Malawian friend and former colleague for M&E at Concern Universal.  Earlier this year, he was awarded a full scholarship to Ireland and is currently pursuing a masters degree at the National University of Ireland.

DIGESTING DEVELOPMENT
BY OWEN SCOTT ENGINEERS WITHOUT BORDERS

EXPLORING CHANGE Promoting human development and driving extraordinary change requires a solid understanding of the complexities of poverty and the challenges to development that exist in both developing communities and here in Canada. This column examines the work of Engineers Without Borders volunteers, offers examples of new perspectives on old development problems, and shares our learning along the way.

STUPID PROBLEMS
For the almost 6 million people in rural Malawi who lack access to a safe supply of clean water close to their home, a lack of life-sustaining water is a daily challenge.

More than a challenge though, it’s also a tragedy.

Without a safe water supply, young children become victim to dehydration from diarrheal diseases, leading to over 11,000 preventable deaths caused by diarrhea every year. That’s five times the number of kids under 5 years old in Fredericton, dying every year from something completely preventable.

If that’s not a tragedy, then the word has no meaning.

More insidious, but in many ways no less tragic, is the burden of carrying water, which falls almost exclusively on women and girls. Frequently having to travel several kilometers to the nearest water source, women and girls in Malawi lose countless hours, and expend valuable energy, on this inescapable chore. This time and energy could otherwise be spent studying, resting, or growing additional food on the farm, to name only a few alternatives.

Together, these two factors – preventable childhood mortality from diarrheal diseases and chronic fatigue from carrying water – represent what’s often called the First Tragedy of international development, poverty itself. The First Tragedy is enough to get people caring. You can take the underlying statistics, add a few sad looking pictures, and start a fundraising campaign. People will donate. People will support your work.

However, all of this neglects the Second Tragedy, the fact that
things don’t need to be this way. Over the last 40 years Malawi has received enough investment in its water infrastructure that rural water coverage could be 82% and growing, instead of being at only 50.7% today. The difference would be almost another 4 million people with clean water access.

The problems are simple – too simple. Infuriatingly simple.

The first problem is maintenance – everyone wants to install water infrastructure, no one wants to maintain it. $10,000 pumps sit broken for lack of a $1 part. Rather than repairing them, international donor countries (like Canada) prefer to pour money into new infrastructure. It’s a huge wasted opportunity, and it’s measured in human lives.

The second problem is planning. Pressured to spend their budgets quickly, organizations don’t plan properly for the location of new infrastructure. The result is that some villages end up with more wells than they need, while other villages are chronically ignored.

This bad planning is exacerbated by commonly held views that foreign aid money needs to “get to the ground”, leading donors to pressure organizations to minimize overhead – a classic case of confusing efficiency with effectiveness.

The result is…well, bad results.

Poor planning means that money spent on water infrastructure doesn’t go as far as it can.

So there it is. The pie chart shows the impact of these stupid problems, lack of planning and lack of maintenance, on water access in Malawi. It shows the Second Tragedy of international development. It shows that we need to get smarter, that we need to use our aid money better. It shows the problems that we’re working on at Engineers Without Borders. They’re pretty important problems. We could use your help.

Owen Scott is a UNB Civil Engineering graduate working with Engineers Without Borders Water-Point Functionality team in Malawi