Work
on Wonderous Wanderland (Burkina Faso), 20/May/2011 16:28, 34 days ago
People keep asking me what it is exactly that I’m doing now, work wise. Starting to get settled in - and after all the touristy stuff I have been writing about - it seems about time to post something about my new job. ‘Cause after all, that’s what I came out here for in the first place. I probably have mentioned before that about a month ago I started working for a very active local NGO called ASMADE (= Association Songui Manégré/Aide au Developpement Endogène)*. They really do a wonderful job in health promotion by raising awareness on sanitation, (food) hygiene, malaria, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, sexuality, etc. They also set up and support mutualities, they try to improve access to services in reproductive healthto reduce maternal and child mortality, they educate on family planning, work with adolescents, etc. They often work by means of theatre. I witnessed one yesterday morning when I accompanied four of our animators to a local market in a very poor area to do a play on maternal health, called“Le lait de ma mère”. With Djembe-music, singing and dancing they first attract a big crowd and then - with very little means - they perform a sketch inMooré(luckily I had read the synthesis in French the day before :-)). The format is comedy but they are addressing some serious and real-life issues. In this case on how pregnant women should look after themselves - and how their husbands should look after them too - eating fruit& veg, taking iron tablets, go on regular consultations to the doctor, etc.. And how to take care of the baby once it’s born. The play ends with a little discussion. It is amazing to see how the public gets sucked into the story and how well they respond to the actors.With very little means they set up a little stage area where they do their performance.They start by making‘noise’ - music, dancing, singing - to attract a big crowd.The sketch is lighthearted and funny but addressing serious issues.The audience - mainly women and children - really follows the story with a lot of attention.At ASMADE there are 46 permanent staff members, a bucket full of projects and over 50.000 beneficiaries, mainly women and children. The organization is led by a strong woman whom I appreciated straight from our first meeting. We immediately found common ground when it turned out that - although they have several national and international financial donors and partners - coincidentally their biggest and most important one is the BelgianSolidarité Socialisteand one or two of their projects is in cooperation with the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. As a result she visits Belgium at least once a year and in fact she has a greater knowledge of the cities and villages in Wallonia - the Francophone part - than me (!). Good thing I didn’t come out here to teach on Belgian geography :). She’s also very competent and knows exactly what she wants and how the organization should be run, but she has too much on her plate and so things don’t seem to go as smoothly as anyone likes.My task as an advisor in organizational development (OD), is to help them identify the areas of improvement by assessing the organization’s different domains of capacity (general management, IT, financial resources, human resources, lobbying, etc.) and defining some strategic axes for the coming years. I work closely together with the internally elected OD-committee. The next 6 months we will be conducting face-to-face and telephone interviews with staff members and partners& donors, we’ll organize focus groups with the beneficiaries, analyze and present the data in different workshops, prepare an ‘Organizational Development/Change Plan’, put the plan into action and set up a monitoring& evaluation system. The key is to facilitate - not dominate - this process. In VSO-terms this means that my role is to provide a“critical mirror of the organization”**, hand them the tools and guidelines but let them make the decisions and come up with their own conclusions and answers on what needs to be changed in their organization (i.e. to guarantee ownership). So putting theory into practice I guided‘my’ OD-committee through a great facilitating exercise during our meeting last saturday. With the help of a 2-dimensional matrix drawn on a big sheet of paper I let them identify the capacity areas they thought are most important and urgently in need of improvement or change.End result of our little facilitating exercise.I was quite surprised to see how a simple visualizing technique like this led to a lively and constructive group discussion - all members reflecting on the different aspects of each domain - and how they eventually came to an agreement on which ones they think are currently the most important to be assessed. [Note: I was even more surprised that I led the whole meeting in (“kind of”) French :) rather easily. I do not have the feeling that my level of French has improved as such, it seems however I have just stopped worrying about the mistakes I make. I only focus on getting the message across, one way or the other, which does give them a laugh too once in a while- a good ice-breaker I must say :)]. The first step now is to adapt the work instruments (i.e. the questionnaires etc.) to the local context - the broad outline of which was made quite a few years ago in, I assume some UK office and then (badly) translated to (my kind of ;)) French - and to select our sample of people to be interviewed. I started to work on the questionnaires last week and it needs A LOT of adapting - although admittedly, having been in academic research before made me perhaps a bit too critical :-). Nevertheless, of the 180 (!) questions which are in the main questionnaire there were hardly any I didn’t change or make a comment on. It is going to be fun going through all those on our next meeting :-)!Besides my job at ASMADE, I also keep going to the VSO office once or twice a week on my bicycle ;-), to work with my Canadian colleague Jeanne on the improvement of the whole OD-process in general and to give support to other volunteers who are guiding their organizations through the process. We’re going through the pile of documents which have been written over the years by various sources and which were subsequently sent to VSO Burkina to help them get started. We’re selecting what’s useful, adapting what’s not and we’re producing more practical guidelines on how to conduct interviews, select the samples, organize focus groups, analyze the data, etc. Bottom line: I’m getting busier by the day but I’m enjoying it. Getting finally into a (work) routine again, starting to feel settled in my new work environment& getting to know my colleagues.... It has definitely all helped to gain more confidence in the continuation of my mandate. Next step is moving to yet another house....but that is another story, and another blogpost :-)!And so, after a few months of moving around and feeling unsettled, the sheep too has finally found a new home ;-)))!And what about the ministry??? They called VSO today to inform them they want me to start now.... *sigh*.....to be continued, no doubt! :-)* www.ongasmade.org** VSO Ghana’s approach& guidelines to the process of facilitating partner self-assessment - august 2010