Still About Working with Donors

Aside from promoting the cause for democracy and reforms under difficult times, donors are actually better known for supporting initiatives that may still be outside the immediate concern of government. It takes quite a bit of time for government to initiate pioneering efforts. Most of the time, external donors come up with innovative ideas and sell these to government as pilot projects, to test their possible suitability to local-level planning and implementation. In some rare instances, it can be the other way round, the government having some concept that requires foreign funding to transform into a pilot project.

Let me list here those projects I have been involved in that without donor support might not have seen the light of day because local governments were still too short-sighted to appreciate their possible significance and impact:

-Local Resource Management Project. Funded by USAID in the late 70s and implemented in several provinces. A systematic approach was undertaken to find out what local resources existed in a locality and how community groups could be assisted to turn these into livelihood. As early at that time, there was the concern about how to link local production to market. Good experience. Sometimes our NGO ended up buying the brooms that women groups in Virac made because they could not be sold in Catanduanes. Our training director, Ike Tolentino, would bring hundreds of these brooms to Manila to sell them to office mates and in neighboring establishments.

-Child Survival and Development Project. Funded by UNICEF in the early 80s. For the first time, a project focused on the poorest provinces. The project was carried out in 8 poorest provinces in the country. The project was able to make the technical staff appreciate the relationship between poverty and armed insurgency while exerting efforts to make child-based services available to remote villages.

-Agro-Marine Project. Funded by USAID in the 80s. It demonstrated that interventions are needed both in the uplands and in lowlands and coastal areas to be able to create impact in environmental interventions.

-Remote Islands Development Project. Funded by USAID in the 80s. It drew attention to the development needs of the 50 or so small islands around the main island of Bohol. LGUs and NGOs
were able to appreciate the constraints met in making delivery of services more systematic to these outer islands.

-Peace and Development Project. Funded by EU for several provinces in Mindanao torn by conflict. Implemented by Habitat for Humanity Philippines in 2007. The project involved the integration of Muslim returnees in predominantly Christian villages facilitated through participatory local planning with the use of the Poverty Database Monitoring System (PDMS) survey methodology and software.

Outside the country, we were involved in donor-assisted projects which were equally innovative as those in the Philippines:

-Integrated Atoll Development Project.  Funded by UNDP and executed through UNOPS. Implemented in 8 atoll countries in the South Pacific and in the Maldives from 1989 to 1995. For the first time, the specific needs of small atoll countries were systematically addressed.

-Equitable and Sustainable Human Development Project. Funded by UNDP and executed through UNOPS. Implemented in the rest of the Pacific countries from 1996 to 2001 with focus on providing livelihood support to the most disadvantaged sectors of the population such as women and those who lived in remote villages.

-Solomon Islands Development Administration and Participatory Planning Project . Funded by UNDP and executed through UNOPS. Imelemented in the Solomon Islands from 1997 to 2001. The project sought to enhance local government capacities in carrying out participatory planning and project development with focus on the involvement of disadvantaged groups.

These innovative projects would not have been possible without the technical and funding support of external donors.

More About Working With Donors

To balance the negative impression which may have been created by my previous post, I will now deal with the good points of working with external donors.

First, during the Martial Law regime in the 70s, it was the donors and the projects they assisted which carried the banner for democracy and reforms. Community meetings were banned; in fact, a group of three gathering for a meeting or informal chat was considered illegal. This martial decree was generally observed throughout the country. Everyone was afraid to be arrested and thrown in jail without warrant of arrest

UNICEF was unfazed. It encouraged the LGUs and NGOs in its various projects to organize planning meetings using its mandated child focus to local development. The donor demonstrated that the child-based concerns were beyond politics, that whatever the political situation, the plans and programs for children should continue. Later, UNICEF was blamed for the leak to the media of a photo of a malnourished child during the famine in Negros that the dictatorship would like to hide. Nothing came out of it because nobody could prove it was the donor who instigated the bad publicity.

During the martial law years, UNICEF was operating globally under its development thrust labelled as basic services strategy, which emphasized the importance of popular participation in child-based development. Although I was in some sort of rehabilitation program on account of my involvement in anti-Marcos protest, UNICEF dealt with me while I was assigned with restricted movement at the Green Revolution office at the Nayong Pilipino. In more than one occasion, the donor recommended to the Government that I should be sent on study tour abroad as part of my task in looking into the participatory aspect of UNICEF-supported programs. The Government did not approve the recommendation for fear that I would not return and worst, I might make some noise about the martial law regime.

Finally, when I was allowed to live outside the confines of the Green Revolution, UNICEF provided me grants to pursue further studies at the University of Bradford in England and the Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development. UNICEF supported the piloting and eventual replication of the Ilaw ng Buhay (Light of Life) Program as an innovative approach to community development.

While our group of community development workers raised funds for the physical infrastructure, UNICEF provided logistic and funding support to curriculum building and the piloting of innovative training approaches at the Ilaw International Center (IIC) established in barangay Bool, Tagbilaran City in 1983. The IIC, on account of its "Ilaw ng Buhay" approach to development, which featured partnership between local government and organized communities, was able to implement replication of the approach not only in some provinces in the Philippines, but also in other countries by training participants from Yemen and Indonesia.

Our involvement in UNICEF-assisted programs during the martial law regime brought us in close contact with other donors supporting programs advocating participatory strategies at a time when they were not encouraged by the Government. We can credit donors for their support to people-based development during the repressive regime in the Philippines.

More next post

Working with Donors

First, I would like to say most of the projects I have been involved in during the last forty years or so are funded by external donors.

I am often asked what have been the lessons learned from this experience of working in donor-funded projects. Well, my stock answer has always been the same: it often takes the patience of a mule to manage or implement externally-funded project. A positive spin can be that donor-funded projects can teach us to be patient and tolerant and flexible in dealing with all sorts of characters we meet at various stages of a project.

You will agree these are virtues one needs to cope with life, most especially in difficult circumstances. Which is to say it's a little bit more difficult to be part of a donor-funded project than a project that relies solely on local funding for support.

Let me show some examples:

-In the late 70s, I held the record for the most number of times to revise a project proposal. If I recall correctly, I had to revise it 20 times. One reason was that there were just too many experts looking at my masterpiece. I had to revise the document each time a consultant from either the Government or the donor reviewed it. The other reason was, according to a friend from the donor agency, I kept forgetting to put in the child focus. She said jokingly: "You must put the child every fifth sentence in your proposal." That's the moral - you must always be guided by the donor's mandate or bias. Forgetting this basic thing will mean you are in for a rough ride starting at the planning stage.

-Sometimes the price of success in donor-assisted projects is to give up your peaceful and quiet life. Donors would arrange visits to your project both from foreign and in-country projects or offices. Sometimes you wonder when will you have time to implement the activities of your own project.

-More often than not, your life gets complicated when your Government and the donor agency do not see eye to eye on certain project matters. You are caught in a tug-of-war between the two which can take months to unravel. I have experienced this a number of times both as a project adviser operating under Government mandate and as a consultant representing the donor's interest. In some cases, it is no longer the technical issue that is difficult to resolve, but how to save the face (or preserve the self-esteem) of the persons you are dealing with in the stand-off.

-It may happen that the conflict is between two donor agencies that support your project. Things can get so petty that you wonder whether you are still in college involved in some kind of fraternity rivalries. I had the experience of being told that I was not doing my duty just because I happened to position the official vehicle with the door displaying the other donor agency's logo!

-I have worked in a project where the donor seemed not to trust anybody from the projecr or the Government, whether it is about technical or funding matter. Staff from the donor agency will arrive in the morning by plane from Manila and leave in the afternoon to fulfill tasks which can be assigned to local counterparts, e.g. giving an overview of the workshop; introducing the participants; announcing each session; and doing a wrap-up of the activity.

-Too much centralization is still present mong some donor agencies perhaps of some sad experiences in the past, but there should a healthier outlook regarding relationships with project staff. In finances, the same donor insists on paying everything from the central office, including for the cartolina used in training. The same donor required that a copy of the marriage certificate of the hotel owners be provided before the processing of payment to show a document supporting the joint bank account where the payment will be deposited.

-The other extreme can also happen. The donor is virtually non-existent during the first or two years of a project, not issuing any guidelines, and it only appears when the project is about to end. Naturally, there will be problems created by this laissez fair approach. Then when the blame game starts, you will expect this type of donor to quickly pass the blame to the locals of course.

The foregoing are some of the things which can complicate your life in donor-assisted projects. I often find myself wishing that we go back to just working out projects on our own, utilizing local resources, and not complicating our lives and those of the people we try to help.

But this may be too simplistic a solution. The other way is for donors and their counterparts to have an honest appraisal of what they do and do not do together under the overarching theme of poverty reduction and sustainable development.

Just a reflection.

Working with Local Government

Now that I am thinking of retiring from active project work, something which I have been engaged in for more than 40 years both in my country and abroad, perhaps it is time to pause and reflect on some lessons in the hope that these can somehow be useful to anybody thinking about a career in development work. Or somehow ease the emotional burden I carry since I have been thinking during the past few days that such engagement did not really amount to anything quite different from the experience of previous development workers or prefessionals.Nothing qualitatively different from what other project implementors, consultants or volunteers have experienced about working with government or local government units, in particular.

I will try to talk about these lessons as actually advice to those who will be in projects involving local governments -

First, be prepared to be creative in dealing with political leaders. They share a common idea to be seen as doing something good for their constituency. This is a fact to be accepted rather than serve as source of cynicism about the political influence in decision-making regarding service delivery at local level. There will always be political interference, but you need not be afraid to face this fact and do a good job of explaining the project, its purpose and methodology, and sell the idea to the politicians it will be good for them to be perceived as having technical criteria in the provision of services to the people. Project resources will always be short of demand and the sooner they understand that prioritizing beneficiaries based on relative levels of deprivation, the better it will be for their image.

Second, right from the start of the project, show respect for local people and their leaders and reject all efforts of government agencies from higher levels or donors to short-cut the process by immediately plunging into the business of distributing largesse to the people to help local governments win some political points.
Be good at making local communities and their leaders feel they are really the ones making the decision, not the project, on matters such as selecting individuals or households who will receive priority assistance.

Third, it will be good to get broad-based support from civil society institutions as leverage in dealing with local governments. Be good at social mobilization work without being an added burden to local project stakeholders. Respect authority of ideas as against authority of command. More likely than not, political leaders and the government officers under their jurisdiction will substitute authority to technical criteria or information as basis for decisions involving your project. It can be discouraging and frustrating at times, but we are development workers and must persevere in the vital task to win people by ideas. Educate political leaders without lecturing them but by the sheer power of demonstration or concrete examples.

Fourth, never be afraid of those in the bureaucracy who will marginalize your managerial role and functions. That comes in the territory. Be good in managing the situation. The governance protocol in projects is often not observed because some people have been given ad hoc or informal authority. Be calm and composed and do not go into unproductive cat fights for control of turf. Always show principled leadership to overcome the damage which may occur on account of ad hoc or informal exercise of management functions.

Fifth, practise servant leadership and go an extra mile with political leaders and government officers you deal with. Have an extra storage of patience and if you feel you cannot bear the elitist tendency of the people you work with, take a little walk for some fresh air and say, "This, too, shall pass." Then come back and try to make sense of the situation and decide on what you have to do under the circumstances without putting the project in a bad light.

Sixth, always be professional and maintain the dignity of being in the service of the the disadvantaged and marginalized through development projects funded by the people of other countries. Not all development workers are given this opportunity. Show respect to fellow workers despite differences.

Seventh, smile though your heart is breaking, as the song says. In case the project is declared a failure or get aborted, never engage in a blame game.Consider the whole thing as a learning experience for all.It will be productive if you will be able to get everybody together and honestly look into the experience and reduce self-serving statements from everybody to a manageable level.