posted by Allah Baksh and Frank van Steenbergen
May 10, 2013

Postcard from Tharparkar, the desert on the border of Pakistan and India and one of the hardest places to be:  summers of blazing heat, child marriage as the norm, groundwater in little patches (but often saline), and hardly any rain.

Here (above) is a picture of a large campaign to get women registered, have an identity card and to start to exist.  The identity card makes them a person belonging to a country – entitled to vote, credit, education or ownership of assets.

In each village, a committee identifies women that have never been registered and are 16 and above. Transport from scattered hamlets is arranged to registration camps: an ID is prepared and an explanation is given on what basic civil rights are all about.

Another change – though an awful lot needs to be done – is the improvement of the water supply in Tharparkar.  Many women spend all of their daytime hours collecting water from distant places. Addressing water supply through a range of measures frees up time for a life.

Take the village of Dedh, 45 kilometer from Mithi, the headquarter of Tharparkar District. Around 150 households live in Dedh. Water comes is various ways, but none of them are easy. It is collected from the roof top and from the compound of the primary school, the only concrete building in the village. It comes from a cascade of two surface ponds fed by sporadic rain run-off. The first reservoir traps the sediment. Clean water is conveyed to the second reservoir through a pipe. There is no guarantee that the reservoir fills though, and the rooftop only yields so much.

Then as a third, a unique structure was built constructing an artificial basin of 100 x 100 feet with concrete. The basin leads to a cistern in the centre. This is the system best liked, as it is clean and a little more reliable.

  This is the system most liked by women. They have made temporary plastering of the shutters to protect water theft from the cisterns, and ensure the protection of the recharge area with barbed wire and thorny brushwood.

These are the options for hard places such as Tharparkar and it is great they are being developed through several initiatives. There is something amiss, however, with water supply options such as rooftop water harvesting, surface water ponds and cisterns. Although they make all the difference between a life and drudgery in the most difficult places of the earth, they are often absent from regular drinking water programs. Neither are they counted under Millennium Development Goals targets. The reason: the quality of water made available through such options does not come anywhere near the WHO standards. And so public investment programs shy away from them and go for the safer official systems in the safer areas, leaving out those that need better water most.

Unfortunate.

posted by Frank van Steenbergen
April 29, 2013

If you would head an organization whose mandate is to protect of the rights of children, help meet their basic needs and raise resources to achieve this..

And if that same organization, upon receiving funds from donors would take between six to eighteen months to get the paper work ready for things to roll out, mainly because of internal procedures and compliance mechanisms (that is what I observed, if it is an odd exception I stand corrected and humbly apologize but I am led to believe it is not exceptional)…

And if you would charge between 7-13% as handling fee on these funds for providing this belated service…

How would you feel?

I for one would not feel good. The reason is that by delaying implementation with say one year several thousand mothers and children have no access to clean water for that one year. This means more diarrhea, more morbidity, more retarded development. I would then not feel proud of receiving a salary upwards of what some heads of state make.

The name of the organization is UNICEF (but it is not the only one) and this open letter is based on several water and sanitation programs I have seen it is entrusted to manage in Africa.  Not only are delays common, what is worse, no one seems be bothered or angry. Obviously it is a much larger crime to break unwieldy rules than to speed up and deliver development to needy people.  It is not unusual that not only starting dates of programs are postponed but also that the time to implement is shortened because first fiduciary (who invented that word!) had to be fulfilled. Here is an issue of leadership and priorities. There is an expression in my country: ‘throwing away the baby with the washing water’, and this is what it is.

Bureaucracy kills.

posted by Frank van Steenbergen
April 22, 2013

With the large and sometimes overexposed attention for land grabbing in Africa, good examples tend to be forgotten. Here is a picture of an inspection team to a land concession issued five years earlier.

The land is in a remote part of Amhara state in Ethiopia. It is barren and windswept. The concession was given to an investor from the ‘diaspora’ community- i.e. Ethiopians who spent part of their life abroad and are often a source of investment.  In the last five years he has, with moderate success, been trying to cultivate sorghum and ‘teff’ (the nutritious grass crop) on the thin soils. Part of the land concession was the obligation to protect the land and undertake catchment measures.

Here is the inspection team, consisting of representatives of several zonal offices (Agriculture, Investment, Environment), making an unannounced visit – checking whether the promises that were part of the concession have been kept. They were not: the investor admitted that he had not yet undertaken land protection measures. The issue would be settled amicably and without any pressure or back payment. The investor will make a land management plan and implement it. So this would be a very normal small event – how things ought to be and often are.

There is a bigger side to this small event.  Things like this do not appear in the news and are not highlighted. What is highlighted are all things wrong or framed to be wrong. While it is good that there are watchdogs, some bark whenever and one gets the feeling that they are like mastiffs let loose. It is good to be critical, but good to be positive as well and not automatically damage a country’s reputation.

Of late, I have been reading a report called ‘Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia:  Perceptions, Realities and The Ways Forwards for Key Sectors’. If you read the title it suggests there is much amiss, yet if you read the content there is the normal and healthy worry but also the observation that Ethiopia does much better than other countries. The question of course is why that message does not make it to the cover.

There is a section in this book on corruption in land management. The report, commissioned by World Bank and the Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (FEACC), finds that corruption risks in land management in Ethiopia are increasing because of a weak policy and regulatory framework on land allocation, titling, and management. This gives scope for lots of local mishaps. In spite of this, there are other things that go well, such as land inspections like the one described above.

This raises another issue related tp land grabs. Often it is portrayed in conspiracy terms: of a new form of colonialism driven by newly emerging and natural resource constrained powers, trying to secure the world’s last land frontiers. However, what I observed first hand is another problem. What is often forgotten is the clumsy and dangerous opportunism in land grabs.  This can be a market businessmen in Addis getting hold of several 1000’s hectares of land in a remote part of Ethiopia without having a basic clue on how to farm, or Spanish building contractors in Mauretania in the same league, trying find another pursuit with the construction industry in doldrums.  Such opportunism does not necessarily create an unbalanced world, because these are the land grabs that fail. However they do much damage because in the course of the ill-planned adventures they forest, land and water resources in some still-pristine areas gets destroyed. In line with the recommendation of the ‘Diagnosing’ report, what is required is a better managed and better planned development of land, not a polarization of the issue.