How can aid agencies promote local governance and accountability? Lessons from five countries.

This post also appeared on the World Bank’s ‘People, Spaces. Deliberation‘ blog

Oxfam is publishing a fascinating new series of papers today, drawing together lessons from our programme work on local governance and community action. There are case studies from Nepal (women’s rights, see photo), Malawi (access to medicines), Kenya (tracking public spending), Viet Nam (community participation) and Tanzania (the ubiquitous Chukua Hatua project), and a very wise (and mercifully brief) overview from power and governance guru Jo Rowlands. Here are some highlights:

“Governance is about the formal or informal rules, systems and structures under which human societies are organised, and how they are (or are not) implemented. It affects all aspects of human society – politics, economics and business, culture, social interaction, religion, and security – at all levels, from the most global to the very local.

Most people experience the most immediate impacts, fair or unfair, of governance at a very local level. It is where women experience gender inequalities most keenly, for example in the way that issues that particularly concern them tend to get de-prioritised and their participation obstructed. In most political systems, it is also the place where ordinary people should, in theory, be best placed to participate in governance, for example by voting for their local councillors, taking part in local committees or protesting against laws or actions that they don’t think are fair.

Local people may face barriers of language, ethnicity, gender, class, poverty, access to information, or simply lack the confidence to speak out. They face the visible formal and informal structures of power, such as village or neighbourhood committees, service user groups, tribal councils, dominant families or castes, and formal structures of local government. They also face power dynamics such as business interests or patronage relationships based on debt and obligation.

It is essential for anyone working on governance to make a thorough analysis of local power relations, drawing on history and culture, specific economic realities and the interests of different groups of people. This analysis can then shape the options and approaches that a development programme uses, informed by how change has happened in the past and might happen in the future.

Oxfam differentiates between three key aspects [see diagram, below]: people claiming rights, institutions willing and capable of delivering rights, and people in positions of power with the will to make it happen.

When you deliberately address these relationships and processes, i.e. the arrows in the diagram, interesting things happen to the way issues are tackled in practice. For example, in Kenya, very high levels of mistrust existed between local community members, local councillors and local authority officials. Although there were institutional structures of decentralisation for local decision making, neither community members nor local authority officers knew enough about them to successfully implement them. The tools of social auditing provided a mechanism to address the knowledge gaps and rebuild damaged relationships.

All the case studies show how it is essential to work with both citizens and people in authority in order to achieve positive change in local governance. This might be about finding or creating spaces for constructive engagement between people and authorities, as in the ward meetings organised by women in Nepal. It could involve working with citizens to raise awareness and knowledge about their rights and about how local governance works, so that they can make relevant demands and monitor effectively how resources are used and accounted for, as in Malawi and Kenya. It may require working with officials and elected representatives to increase understanding about how to work accountably and transparently and to understand the benefits of actively involving citizens in planning and monitoring, as in the Tanzania example. Or it might be about working with officials to understand how particular legislation or regulation should work, as in Kenya.

A recurring theme across the individual stories is the importance of focusing action about local governance on the real, tangible interests of local people – health, education, livelihoods, water and sanitation. Women in Nepal moved into participation and leadership in committees and user groups on these issues; in Tanzania, communities became organised around setting up new market spaces for local women to sell produce, or around land rights.

Anyone working on local governance needs to be aware that in many contexts where there is not a culture of speaking out, individuals may be putting themselves at risk if they confront authority.  It is vital to ensure first that individuals who want to take that risk are supported, both from inside and outside the community, and that ideally the demands come from a group that has built the strength, skills and confidence to demand the changes they want to see. In Nepal, women did take a number of risks – facing opposition from husbands, and senior community members – but the support they received allowed them to prove themselves and to join with others in becoming change-makers within their villages.

Accountability and transparency are proving useful entry points for engaging the various actors and processes to help navigate the minefields of power relations. It is also clear that people who take on official responsibilities do not necessarily have the competency to carry out those roles. Therefore, well-targeted support and training for office-holders can go a long way in building better governance relationships.”

Jo identifies some particular ‘issues and challenges’, including:

Culture change: Making change in local governance often requires culture change as much as a change in structures, processes and representation. (particularly true on gender rights and women’s voice).

Access to information: As Maimuna says in the Tanzania case study, “Ignorance is a killing machine”.

Things can take time: Some changes can happen quickly, but the changes in culture and in deeper attitudes required to ensure system and process changes stick can take much longer (decades).

Risk management: Local and national governance are both about political processes, and carry significant levels of risk. This risk can include violence, fear, crack-downs on individuals or groups and a closing of space to operate for particular actors.

Areas where we need to do more thinking? How to deal with patronage systems, corruption and decentralization; improving our understanding of urban governance (the examples are all rural).

Final (very sensible) voice of experience:

“As well as being informed by good analysis, [future governance work] will also be informed by serendipity – watching for the chance combinations of the right person/people, the right moment, the right focus, the right alignment with other events – requiring good judgement and probably inevitably, whatever the expectation about how change will happen, a certain amount of sheer luck.”

Building accountability in Tanzania: applying an evolutionary/venture capitalist theory of change

A version of this post appeared yesterday on ‘People, Spaces, Deliberation’, the World Bank’s clunkily-named but interesting governance and accountability blog.

I’ve been catching up on our accountability work in Tanzania recently, and it continues to be really ground-breaking. Rather than churning out the standard logical framework of activities, outputs and predicted outcomes before the project even starts, the programme, known as Chukua Hatua (Swahili for ‘take action’) uses an evolutionary model of change (try out numerous approaches, drop the less successful ones, scale up and develop the winners). It’s more like a venture capitalist backing ten start-up firms knowing that most will fail, but some will win big. This has been possible partly because DFID has been willing to fund such an experimental approach as part of its Accountability in Tanzania (AcT) programme  (props to them).

18 months into the programme, it’s good to see that Chukua Hatua is, errmm, evolving, according to programme coordinator Jane Lonsdale, who I caught up with recently. The first phase piloted six approaches:

1) Election promises tracking – training of ‘trackers’ in 36 communities prior to the 2010 elections. They recorded rally promises on voice recorders, took them back to the communities to agree priorities and are now following up progress against the leaders’ promises.

2) Farmer animators – training more than 200 farmers nominated by their communities, to understand principles of accountability, how to hold those in power to account, and how to share their knowledge and facilitate their groups to take action. (pic right shows some animators getting into the groove at a workshop)

3) Active musicians – training 42 musicians on principles of accountability to act as seeds of change through their music, which is widely listened to by communities.

4) Student Councils (see pic, below) – building the skills of leaders at primary school level; linking students with community ‘champions’ to help them raise issues with teachers and school management committees.

5) Community radio – creating a new space in Ngorongoro district to enable pastoralists to share information and debate.

6) In addition to the pilots, Oxfam also supported local campaigns where communities were already active, most notably in Ngorongoro.

Last September came the difficult bit – killing off the less successful experiments. We got all the partners in a room, plus a couple of other NGOs, the consultants, some Oxfam staff from outside Tanzania and KPMG (which manages the programme for DFID). The group came up with four basic criteria on which to judge the pilots:
- How much were they spreading awareness?
- How successful were they in mobilising people to take action?
- How effective were they at expanding ‘spaces’ in which people can claim their rights – this includes both taking advantage of existing ‘invited spaces’ and creating new ones
- How responsive was the government (either local or national)?

Overall, the farm animators came out best. The musicians were better at awareness raising and mobilisation, but failed to get a good government response. We dropped some pilots and merged others. The student council approach was dropped and spun off to another funder (one unintended consequence of the venture capital approach  – generating other fundable spin-offs).

What didn’t work and why?

Geography: The active musicians were not able to work well in Ngorongoro, because the communities were too widely dispersed to reach.

Government obstruction: The community radio never got off the ground because the government did not issue a licence.

Informal v formal power: The farmer animators’ work was unsuccessful in spreading awareness beyond the groups that the animators belonged to. This might have been due to their lack of a ‘formal’ position in community leadership.

Attitudes to youth: Students were able to make demands within their schools, but were unable to take this approach into the community– there was simply not enough respect for young people’s viewpoints. 

What have we learned for the next phase of the project?

Apart from the shake-out of pilots, a number of other issues have emerged:

• The programme needs to do more to prepare for negative responses, especially from local officials (interestingly, reactions from the state have been most hostile where local opposition parties are strongest, whereas in communities dominated by the ruling CCM, officials are more open to dialogue). These have included threats by village executive officers to community members for being ‘trouble-makers’, arrests for demonstrating for electricity and closing a school for 2 days after students demanded more say in their education. Dealing with these responses will require training in negotiation skills and conflict resolution and linking citizens and partners to national organisations such as the Human Rights Defenders Coalition. The cycle of conflict and cooperation recurs in many change processes, and is always a real headache for both participants and NGOs like Oxfam.

• In Tanzania, building ‘created spaces’ is much harder than helping citizens make better use of existing ‘invited spaces’ for consultation and accountability. In such fora, the main obstacle is often lack of capacity, so the next phase will continue to work with local elected leaders. The benefits of changing the behaviour and increasing the capacity of village leaders and ward councillors are two-fold – they are more likely to support citizens demands’, and they can be a key ally in taking citizens’ issues upwards to central government. 

• Although there have been some notable successes, gender bias in Tanzania is very entrenched and work with women needs to be strengthened, especially looking at women’s leadership, men’s attitudes to women and women’s participation in public spaces. 

Perhaps most interesting for me is the wider impact on how Oxfam is working in Tanzania. The team is getting much more expert in understanding who has power at local level, and in the next phase will involve key local players such as faith leaders, traditional birth attendants and healers. Over to Jane for the last word:

‘I can’t differentiate programming from power analysis – they go hand in hand. We’re doing something different now, not just rolling out a load of community scorecards, or public expenditure tracking – the usual kind of governance work. We’re pushing ourselves to really think through how change happens in Tanzania and try out different things. The whole team and partners are now talking in terms of power analysis. We’ve got the same language to describe what change looks like. Everyone is picking up trends and patterns – it’s a lot better than conventional indicators.’

And here’s a nice 14m video covering the first phase of the project. In the words of the commentary, ‘they all deserve a big-up’.

What use are models of change? An experiment in Tanzania

I spent last week in Tanzania, but had to wait til I returned to internet-land before blogging on it. So this is Tanzania week on the blog.
 
First up, models of change (MoC). As you may have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about these recently. That usually involves exhausting intellectual gymnastics in seminars or dozing off over impenetrable academic papers, but now I got to apply them to Oxfam’s work in Tanzania. Fascinating (at least for me). The task was to use MoC to develop a programme called Chukua Hatua (‘take action’ in Swahili), part of an innovative and ambitious DFID programme managed by KPMG called AcT (Accountability in Tanzania).

Here’s a blurb from the programme coordinator, the redoubtable Jane Lonsdale (left, apologies for the Oxfamese – she wrote it at the end of a long, it was a hard trip):

‘Chukua Hatua (Take Action) does what it says on the tin. The programme is testing different approaches through a series of pilots to learn which can best act as a catalyst for Tanzanians to claim their rights. These include training a network of ‘farmer animators’ at village level, student councils, and an ‘active musicians’ scheme. Each pilot uses several of the following approaches in the design: 1) using visual and digital communication on issues such as monitoring election promises and land rights; 2) building the capacity of citizens to understand the concepts of rights, entitlements, transparency and accountability, and to seek information, organise and take action; 3) supporting citizen networking and the establishment/ strengthening of spaces for engagement and collective action; 4) researching issues that are a priority for the communities and providing simplified information along with disseminating relevant budgets, policies and laws and providing appropriate monitoring tools; 5) promoting women’s voices and rights, including in decision-making; 6) supporting communities’ initiatives to plan, organise and take action.  Following a year of piloting along with close monitoring of changes in communities and their leaders, the programme will be scaling up the most successful approaches through a combination of promoting natural replication across communities and groups, increasing programme coverage, and advocating for adoption and/ or replication.  The programme is delivered across the Shinyanga region and in Ngorongoro district, and is integrated with Oxfam’s agriculture, pastoralist and education programmes.’

The first step was two days ‘in the field’ (literally and figuratively). More on some of the encounters there in subsequent posts. In what was essentially a two day rolling seminar, we identified three MoC already exemplified by the programme, and a further three that could add new elements to the work. Ready?

First the MoCs that best describe the current programme:

Evolution: Take Action is a nice example of evolutionary acceleration, built on evolution’s core process of variation-selection-amplification. In the first phase, the programme sets lots of different hares running, from ‘farm animators’ to ‘active musicians’ to primary school student councils. It then selects (or allows natural selection, as projects multiply or die of their own accord). The final phase will be amplification: creating an enabling environment for them, promoting synergies between different initiatives, but otherwise staying out of the way so that new ideas and approaches bubble up from the grassroots.

The Four Powers: One model of change holds that disempowered, marginalised people must first feel a sense of ‘power within’ – the lightbulb moment when people realize they have rights, and that those they elect should serve them, rather than vice versa. Then they move to ‘power with’ – coming together around common issues -  before achieving ‘power to’ – asserting their rights, campaigning, mobilizing. Finally comes ‘power over’ officials or companies. Chukua Hatua concentrates on the upstream part – power within and power with, especially among women. What happens next is up to them.

Transitions to Accountability: This is based on the work of Jonathan Fox in Mexico (an elected one party state for most of the 20th Century, so some similarities with Tanzania, which has been under one party rule since independence). Fox found that local breakthroughs in accountability arise through the interaction of ‘the thickening of civil society’ and successful reformism by parts of the state e.g. particular ministries, or local officials. These often involve cycles of conflict and resolution.

OK, so far that’s just a fancy theory(ies) to describe what is already happening (or at least planned), but three other MoCs we identified actually suggest changes in the programme design.

Drivers of Change and importance of alliances: one of the findings of DFID’s ‘drivers of change’ work was that successful change often comes about through alliances of dissimilar actors, e.g. social movements, churches, sympathetic officials and private sector champions. What works best is if they come together around a simple, winnable aim – nothing like an early victory to galvanize people and overcome fear (a real issue in Tanzania). That suggests the relative purism of the programme in seeking to build ‘active citizenship’ needs to move much quicker to exploring alliances – e.g. when we asked them, five out of 40 farm animators turned out to be church leaders (protestant and Moslem), yet the programme had never explored alliances with faith based organizations. The lesson? Start building alliances from the outset – don’t wait til you’ve got a nice big citizens’ movement (and emerging leaders do it anyway – they don’t wait for your permission!)

Granularity/local political economy analysis: This is linked to the previous point. Social movements are seldom homogenous masses. On closer inspection they are made up of building blocks of more permanent, stable organizations – churches and mosques, savings groups, village militia, faith healers, cultural groups etc. You need to explore and understand this local granularity both to identify potential allies, and to understand the political economy of change (and resistance to change) at local level.

Positive Deviance: the evolutionary process doesn’t fit into distinct periods of variation, selection and amplification. It is constant. So even as you support successful experiments, you need to be constantly watching for new innovations. One way to do that is via positive deviance – studying outliers in terms of project performance or otherwise looking for what was ‘not in the plan’.

Conclusion: In order to use MoCs to understand reality (rather than the other way around), you need as big a range of them as possible. Looking for a single grand theory may close down avenues and stop you spotting opportunities (I even found myself urging our staff not to get too hung up on active citizenship….). Instead, you need a toolkit of ideas, which each contribute to understanding what is happening and how to improve things. But overall, I am reassured that I haven’t been wasting my time in the ivory tower – this looks like an approach worth developing. Feel free to agree or disagree below……

What difference do accountability and transparency initiatives really make?

The advice to ‘beware the common sense of the time’ is just as true of today’s developmental buzzwords as it is of the discredited versions of yesteryear. And what could be more commonsensical than ‘transparency and accountability are a Good Thing’? But does supporting them with aid money actually make a difference? Researchers at the UK’s Institute of Development Studies (a bit of personal transparency – I recently became a visiting fellow there), have pulled together all the evidence to try and answer the question, and seem pretty underwhelmed by what they’ve found. Here are some extracts from the synthesis report. Full 128 page report here, with lots of case studies etc to flesh out the arguments.

First, a handy typology:

“The field of transparency and accountability is alive with rapidly emerging citizen-led and multi-stakeholder initiatives.

In the area of service delivery, an array of strategies, often grouped together under the label ‘social accountability’, include complaints mechanisms, public information/transparency campaigns, citizen report cards and score cards, community monitoring and social audits.

Budget transparency and accountability strategies include the now well-known ‘participatory budget approach’, as well as public expenditure monitoring (including, for instance, gender budgeting), participatory auditing, the Open Budget Index, and other forms of budget advocacy.

Many of these initiatives are underpinned by initiatives to secure freedom of information and transparency, including right to know campaigns, strengthening the media, new legislative frameworks and voluntary disclosure mechanisms.

In the area of natural resources, initiatives such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the Publish What you Pay campaign among others have focused on making revenues from natural resources more transparent, often through multi-stakeholder agreements and review.

Similar strategies are now being adopted in the area of aid transparency, through such initiatives as the International Aid Transparency Initiative, Publish What You Fund, and the longer-standing World Bank Inspection Panel and various downward accountability mechanisms applied within large non-governmental organizations (NGOs).”

Next, their conclusion:

“In some conditions, the initiatives can contribute to a range of positive outcomes including, for instance,

· increased state or institutional responsiveness 
· lowering of corruption 
· building new democratic spaces for citizen engagement 
· empowering local voices 
· better budget utilization and
· better delivery of services.”

But besides the fragmented nature of the evidence, the study finds “three significant limits of the existing evidence base: 

a) untested assumptions and theories of change: A common assumption is that greater transparency  generates greater accountability, yet growing evidence exists that transparency alone is insufficient,  and only leads to greater accountability in interaction with other factors. Another common assumption is that making information available will stimulate action on the part of a broad range of stakeholders, when in fact little may be known about the incentives and constraints of collective action to use this information. And finally, many assumptions often assume homogeneous or monolithic categories of actors, such as ‘states’, ‘citizens’, ‘media’, ‘civil society’, without looking at critical differences of position, power, behaviours and incentives within them.

b) The methodological  challenges of assessing what are often highly complex initiatives

c) The complexity of factors that contribute to their success: understanding accountability and transparency not only as formal mechanisms or instruments, but also as relationships involving power dynamics across state and society, and as patterns of attitudes and behaviours affecting all actors.

On the citizen voice (or demand) side of the equation, key factors include:

a) the capabilities of  citizens and civil society organizations to access and use information made transparent/accessible  and to mobilize for greater accountability;

b) the extent to which TAIs are linked to broader forms of  collective action and mobilization; and

c) the degree to which accountability, transparency and  participation initiatives are embedded throughout all stages of the policy cycle, from how decisions  are made to whether and how they are implemented.

On the state (or supply) side of the relationship, key factors include:

a) the level of democratization  or space for accountability demands to be made;

b) the degree of ‘political will’ or support from the  inside for accountability and transparency demands and initiatives;

c) the broader political economy,  including enabling legal frameworks, incentives and sanctions which affect the behaviours of public  officials.

However, while this traditional demand and supply side framework is analytically helpful, the more interesting work

in the field looks closely at the interaction of these two sides, and at how accountability relations are mutually constructed through cross-cutting coalitions of actors, as well as changing norms, expectations and ‘cultures’ of accountability on all sides.”

My take-away from this? Don’t just throw money at transparency and accountability initiatives and expect a revolution. Unless the domestic politics is right, especially linking state and civil society actors into accountability coalitions, it may not make that much difference.

Is the aid industry’s audit culture becoming a threat to accountability?

I’m a big fan of Rosalind Eyben, of IDS, so got her permission to cut and paste her note of a meeting she organized recently while I was wandering around Ethiopia. It brought together some 70 development practitioners and researchers worried about the current trend for funding organisations to support only those programmes designed to deliver easily measurable results. Here are some highlights.

“Funding agencies are increasingly imposing extraordinary demands in terms of reporting against indicators of achievement that bear little relation to social transformation. As Andrew Natsios, former USAID Director notes, ‘those development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those programs that are most transformational are the least measurable.’

There are different views on how change happens: linear cause-effect or emergent. With linear change it is easier to imagine oneself in control and therefore claim attribution, whereas with emergent change the most we can claim is a contribution to a complex, only partially controllable process in which local actors may have conflicting views on what is happening, why, and what can be done about it. Whose voice and whose knowledge count risks being ignored when organisations report on their achievements with indicators of number of farmers contacted or hectares irrigated.

Thus ‘value for money’ becomes equated with aggregated numbers rather than with effectiveness in supporting social transformation. Symptoms are treated as goals and turned into indicators of success. A participant mentioned an encounter with a high-level official who said, ‘I want a simple problem with a simple solution so that I can measure value for money.’

Why are many funders – philanthropic foundations as well as government ministries – placing ever-greater stress on demonstrating tangible results in terms of aggregate numbers?

Supporters/taxpayers have little appetite for complex messages but international NGOs have been complicit in pretending that development is simple – the ‘goats-for-Christmas syndrome’. Organisations are competing for financing so they comply with donor requirements to meet their income targets and thereby confirm and reinforce the current trend. Aid has been around for a long time and there is increasing pressure for quick ‘wins’ to demonstrate that it works. The shift to the right in European politics puts aid flows at risk. Numbers can be very misleading but they provide a comfort blanket when reporting achievements.

What to do?

· Build counter-narratives of development and change that stress the significance of history, challenge the primacy of numbers and emphasize accountability to those who international aid exists for.

· Communicate to the general public in more innovative ways the complex nature of development by facilitating debates and expanding spaces for voices from the South, while building up our knowledge of how the public in the North understands development.

· Building on already available methods, develop different methods of reporting, so that the requirement for aggregated numbers at Northern policy level does not distort the character of programming in complex development contexts.

· Collaborate with people inside donor agencies who are equally dissatisfied with the prevailing ‘audit culture’.

· Re-claim ‘value for money’ by communicating to donors and the public that some aspects of development work are valuable even though irreducible to numbers.”

I think the conclusions try and straddle both sides of a difficult dilemma. If you are sceptical of ‘impact fundamentalism’ and fear it will drive out some good development practices, do you ‘push back’ against the demand for measurement, or try and change what is measured?

I used to argue for the former, endlessly quoting Einstein’s dictum that ‘not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted, counts’. But I am coming round to the view that unless it can be measured, it is not going to be taken seriously – so the task is twofold: to develop the best possible metrics for showing impact in terms of improved well-being, rights, empowerment etc and to work out a way of establishing a plausible link between our actions and changes in a real world of emergent change. After all, if we can’t do that, why should anyone believe (or fund) us?

But this is still all a very donor-centric argument. My colleague Martin Walsh, who attended the meeting, agrees with fellow participants that we also need to ask deeper questions – ‘accountable to whom? Who audits the auditors?’ A move to an audit culture could very easily end up with the only accountability that matters being that to the providers of the funds, rather than to the people the funds are trying to benefit. To be fair, DFID at least is adamant that it wants to ensure downwards as well as donor accountability, but once the audit genie is out of the bottle, it could prove very hard to contain. If everyone is running around collecting data to prove impact to donors, how much time will they have to worry about accountability to the people they are trying to help? So audit and accountability are not the same, and may even work against each other. On the other hand, not measuring impact invites lazy thinking and prevents us being open to challenge. Conclusion? We need to think more about this one.

Read Ros’ report on the meeting here and another account here. Last word to the wonderful Dilbert

How Change Happens: Improving the Education system in Niger

I’m always keen to pick up and explore examples of ‘how change happens’ in different situations (feel free to send suggestions). Here’s one from a conversation with Oxfam’s country director in Niger, Mbacke Niang,

As one might expect in one of the world’s poorest countries, Niger has a dysfunctional, poorly managed and inaccessible primary education sector. Adult literacy is less than 30% and rates of primary school enrolment were running at just 57.1% in 2007. The barriers that restrict access to education for children in Niger include the effects of chronic poverty, allied to traditional cultural practices and beliefs about the role of girls, particularly in rural areas. In terms of the supply side of primary education, the main constraints are a lack of resources, a chronic shortage of motivated and well-trained teachers and governance issues.

Working with a range of national partners, Oxfam in Niger decided to embark on a campaign for better education provision by government. The campaign wanted the government to build more and better schools, improve teacher training, and adapt the curriculum to nomadic pastoralist cultures.

The methods: Mostly at local level, Oxfam supported the establishment of ‘School Management Committees’ (SMCs) of parents’ and teachers’ associations and worked with parents to raise their awareness of the importance of girls’ education. At a national level, it supported teacher-training and lobbied for increases in the education budget, backed up by monitoring of education funding by civil society organizations to see if education spending commitments were actually being implemented.

Successes: The government more than trebled its education budget from 2001-10. As always, it’s hard to put the increase down specifically to the campaign, but officials have made clear it was an important factor.

The campaign has seen clear improvements in enrolment rates, with parents keener to send their kids to school. By 2008, all girls in the area of the project were in school.

Active SMCs now demand regular meetings with local education inspectors to raise issues like teacher absenteeism. SMCs have now been adopted as government policy and are required at every school in Niger.

Within the whole education programme strategy, Oxfam partners have piloted school construction processes that have involved all stakeholders including communities. These have been picked up by the government as better and more cost effective than traditional government building programmes, with the intention to scale them up across the country.

What was less successful: Although girls enrolled to begin their education, some continued to drop out early. Enrolment rates can be boosted by providing a conducive environment, including decent buildings, school meals, community awareness-raising, teacher training etc, but drop-out rates reflect deeply held attitudes and beliefs, for example on early marriage, that take decades to change.

Oxfam mainly works via partners, but national advocacy coalitions have been divided, leading to conflicting agendas and reduced influence. Much senior staff-time has therefore gone into building bridges between two rival coalitions, luckily with considerable success.

To build or not to build? Advocacy NGOs typically find that building a few schools is an essential ‘downpayment’ to being taken seriously by governments, whether local or national. The size of the downpayment required varies according to the issue, country, the NGO’s reputation and the attitudes of officials. In Niger, building 32 classrooms out of a total of 14,000 was enough. A good process is also important, involving officials from the outset (see similar experience in Vietnam).

All fascinating, but as always when studying any given change process, I am pretty sure this is not the whole story. What of the other usual suspects in a change episode? What were the politics of all this – was this about votes or party rivalry? Did any particular events make the authorities keener to promote education? Or were they emulating some neighbouring country? What individuals at local or national government level played a role? And are there bigger contextual shifts at work, e.g. pastoralists settling down and changing their lifestyles, or changes in gender norms? What other external actors were involved? (I notice Unicef has stuff on its website on SMCs). All comments or references welcome.

Does Grassroots Activism Work? Two new collections of case studies

NGOs talk a lot about empowerment, voice, agency, grassroots mobilisation etc but it sometimes sounds a little woolly and you can’t help wondering if it actually amounts to much more than talk. Still those doubts. Two new collections of case studies, from the Institute of Development Studies and Oxfam, provide a gold mine of real life examples. Read More …