Date: 2025-06-30 Page is: DBtxt003.php L0913-TVM-MMW-000030
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TrueValueMetrics ... Peter Burgess Manuscript
Making Management Work for Relief and Development |
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Chapter 30
Sustainable Development |
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Sustainable Initiatives
What criteria to use? It is rare for national level development planning to be done around making the country sustainable. Where it is done, it makes a difference. Sadly not many countries are being facilitated to do planning for sustainable development by the local leadership or the donor community. Rather there are disjointed projects based on thematic ideas that may or may not fit with local national development strategy and plans. Making a development project sustainable is impossible unless the country has some level of sustainability itself, which is not really true in any of the very poor “south”. For a development project to be sustainable it needs to be value adding, and it needs to be providing benefits that have value that exceeds the cost. Where development projects are funded by loans, a project must be very valuable in order to be able to service the debt. There has not been enough arguing about how to make projects sustainable and value adding ... and rather too much of facilitating approval of loans for financing by fudging the numbers. Where I have been involved with project supervision it is too much evident that the project planning and appraisal was serious flawed, and therefore could not be sustainable. This needs to be fixed so that poor countries get valuable projects funded, and not value destroying boondoggles. Multi-sector dynamics By moving from donor centric development to community centric development, the performance of the relief and development sector can be improved substantially. A community centric development focus is a better way to approach development. It puts community needs as the priority and power into the hands of local people. In a community there are usually a number of different sectors at various stages of development. Some sectors have potential, others do not. Some sectors are needed to support other sectors ... development of one sector is a prerequisite to success in another sector. It is not rocket science, but simply advanced common sense. Planning should take into consideration the considerable interplay and linkages between the sectors. A key sector that is non-performing can be a severe constraint on the overall success of the community. There are many sectors involved in a successful community development, these include: (1) Agriculture (2) Manufacturing; (3) Infrastructure; (4) Construction; (5) Education; (6) Health; (7) Water; (8) Sanitation (10) Transport; (11) Wholesale; (12) Retail; (13) Banking (14) Religion (15) Administration; (16) Services. Infrastructure includes (1) Roads and bridges (2) Electricity (3) Communications (including Internet access) (4) Housing; (5) Public buildings. The FAO fisheries community development project in Shenge, Sierra Leone is one of my favorite projects ... it is multi-sector and was implemented with continuous performance improvement for the community, and would have created durable value for the community if the country itself had been able to maintain its socio-economic viability. This project worked on the basis of doing what is best for the community ... using scarce resources in the best possible way, and the results were remarkable. Linkages There are more or less important linkages between people, communities, organizations, projects, sectors and functions It is said that “All politics is local” and I like to say the “All life is local”. Quality of life is something that is determined as much as anything by what goes on in our own community. What goes on at any distance from my community may be interesting, and may have an indirect impact, but is nowhere as near as important as what goes on in my community. And within the community, my family is far and away the most important. To the extent that people are interested in far away places, it is often because a family member is there. Organizations have a role in society, but it is an artificial role, or a role that is needed for efficiency, rather than being something of inherent importance to society. Sectors also are a somewhat artificial construct. They serve to help organize thinking and the specialized expertise needed in that area of socio-economic activity. Within a community, an organization and a sector there are a number of common functions. Functions are the activities that are needed in a community, organization or sector that have common characteristics. Accounting for example is a function that exists in communities, organizations and sectors. Marketing is a function. Transport is a function, as well as being a sector. Thus, an ambulance is part of the transport function in the health sector. The success of relief and development and socio-economic progress depends on how all of this comes together. Do as much organizing as possible but only do what is essential. Do what is easy, and do not waste time and money trying to do things that cannot be done reasonably easily. Move on to the next stage, and come back later to do more organizing. The process needs to be iterative. In the organize stage, identify who or what organization is doing things and where the resources are going to come from. Planning with a community focus A community focus results in a very different dynamic for development than what has prevailed in the past. When planning is community centric, the priorities are much more likely to be of socio-economic value to the community. Plans that originate in the community have the possibility of “ownership” by the community, and there is a strong correlation between what is priority and what is done. Plans with community focus can be simple and understandable, and at the same time can be totally suitable for the community. Small is efficient and allows for the optimization of plans within a community without the compromise inherent in super-scale projects intended to satisfy everyone, and ending up satisfying no-one. I had the good fortune to do the evaluation of a wonderful FAO project in Shenge, Sierre Leone some years ago (around 1989 I think). This project used its rather limited resources and created community benefit that was perhaps as much as 100 times more than was anticipated for the project. How was this achieved? Two very competent Chief Technical Officers (CTOs) controlled the money and used it to do what would deliver a lot of value in the community ... and people paid for it. Economics 101 says, if I remember well, that price is determined by supply and demand. If you offer something that has a good value, people will pay for it, if they possibly can. So everything done by the project had a price, and to the extent that it was valuable people paid for it. The project had a valuable inventory of spare parts for fishing boats and outboard motors, and fishing gear. These were not given away, but sold at the local market prices with the money flowing back into the project. The project bought more inventory, and expanded to have a fuel store with a substantial inventory. The fisherfolk went fishing much more rather than having to spend valuable time hunting for fuel, gear and spare parts. The project trained a mechanic to fix outboard motors, and in turn this mechanic started to train other young men to be mechanics. His salary was paid for by small fees paid by the students, and all of them (teacher and students) made money being paid to service the outboard motors in the community. The same dynamic took place in the fish smoking area. The project was meant to teach six local women about fish smoking, but an initial six had expanded into a group of 60 who were learning new skills and applying them in the market, and prospering. More fish were being caught. More fish were being processed for the market. The community was on its way. But the community needed to expand its horizon. The road was impassable in the wet season, and the government was not maintaining the road. The government had a road crew in the area, but not paid all the time and never with any material for repairs. Courtesy of the project resources, some modest amount of gravel and cement was obtained, culverts were installed and the road was made functional. The fisherfolk and traders later paid back the project. What else could the project do? The IDA school built some years before and idle for years because of government budget constraints had great facilities, but no operating funds. The project started to run evening courses at the school using the facilities including electric generators, carpentry and metal working shops, sewing equipment, etc. with people in the village learning and earning at the same time, and the project being paid so that the project could pay ... and never have to stop. Central Planning Central planning ... Gosplan, as it was known in the Soviet Union ... is a system that makes decisions and allocates resources based on what the government thinks. A community focus puts the community first, and it is the community that drives the allocation of resources and the priorities for socioeconomic development. In the past and at the present most relief and development resources are sourced and controlled within governments and public sector institutions including the World Bank and UN and by donors. All the planning is essentially a high level academic or theoretical exercise with little or no contact with the community where people live and activities are going to make a difference. The component stages of a community planning the same as for an organization or a project and are: (1) Get facts; (2) Plan; (3) Organize; (4) Implement; (5) Measure; (6) Feedback; and, (7) Adjustments. People in the community may not be academic. Some who know the most may not be literate, but that does not mean they do not know their community. In practical terms, they will know a lot more about the facts of their community than outsiders. They may have plans to make things better but not the resources, and they may have a rather limited appreciation of what is truly possible. Sustainable organizations While development project sustainability is important for relief and development sector success, it is less important in practical terms than the sustainability of the various organizations. Organizational sustainability is what pays salaries and keeps people employed, and though rarely articulated as the top priority of the organization, in fact it is. Organizations rarely measure their performance in terms of how well they are delivering relief and development value to beneficiaries, but rather how the organization is faring in terms of its size, its income and the number of its staff. If these metrics are getting bigger, the organization considers itself to be doing well. This is organizational sustainability and has little to do with relief and development sector performance. Removing critical constraints Financial resources are usually a dominant constraint. Lack of cash money is aggravated by the lack of banking and financial services that can be of help in the community situation. Local self help groups can help a bit, but their resources are limited. Helping to access financial resources, even in quite modest amounts, can be a great help in catalyzing progress. Infrastructure is another likely area of constraint. How does the village get its produce to market when the roads are absolutely impassable in the rain? Where does the village get water? What about shelter, and schools and clinics? What about electricity, and telephone and Internet? Most poor communities in the “south” are constrained by deficits in most of these things. People are a resource and a constraint. How can they be mobilized in a way that enables them to be of maximum value to themselves and to the community? When a family can feed itself it is not a burden on the community, but when it cannot, then there is a problem. People within the community can help each other up to a point and share, but can never share when there is nothing to share. A family should normally be able to earn a surplus over its consumption, but this does not happen when there is drought and famine, nor does it happen when there are epidemics of sickness. When there are both, the community has a problem, and a lot of assistance becomes necessary. If there is no assistance, which is the normal situation, then there is premature death ... first the vulnerable children and old people, then the others. When the situation is dire, the people in a community will try to migrate to more favorable conditions, but it is often too little and too late. AIDS and malnutrition are making people more and more a burden on the community and are stretching communities beyond the breaking point. This is humanitarian emergency and crisis, and needs to be addressed as such. |
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