A typical day at the dump for a 12 year old girl: collecting cans and plastic bottles |
It is hot and dusty as I am digging a drain for the concrete
sink used at the elementary school, which is situated in El Limonal, the little
community that literally lives from the waste at the dump in Chinandega, a city
in the northwestern part of Nicaragua. In lieu of sewers, wastewater is
“recycled” from the sink by draining it into a big pit with volcanic rock,
which is plentiful in this area. The sink was relocated because we are building
a feeding center at the school in addition to a small library. Over the past
several years we built several classrooms, alternating one every year with
another NGO, up to the full seven classrooms needed to provide for a
kindergarten and elementary school. This project has been a good example of a
sustainable project unlike many others in this and other developing countries
that are undertaken by both Rotarians and many other NGO’s.
Over the past 10 years we have worked as a team of Rotarians
with guests in this area. We have learned a lot from the projects we have done.
We did several construction projects, including five small rural clinics, nine class
rooms, two feeding centers, three libraries, and have delivered many books,
computers, medical supplies and equipment, totaling an investment of more than
US $250K from fellow Rotarians and clubs. In order to be successful, there are critical
factors that have to be met. I believe those listed below, which are based on
our experience, are generally applicable for anyone undertaking a project in a
developing country, whether it is in Latin America, Asia, or Africa.
Here is my top ten list:
1.
A one-year project is almost certainly to be unsustainable.
Our first project in 2004 was a good example of fixing one of those. When we
arrived in Chinandega, we told the local club that we wanted to get “our hands
dirty” and do some work. They put us in contact with a local
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Our first project: finishing up a project abandoned by another team |
Similarly, we saw several examples of partly finished projects that were
“abandoned” by the donor organization, and because of the lack of follow up,
were sitting idle or were only partially used. We also found some of our own projects
having similar issues when we came back the next year. For example, we found
that one of the clinics we built needed a canopy as the patients were sitting
outside in the tropical heat as well as the tropical rainstorms. We found that
the pharmacy that was part of another clinic was broken into three times over
the past few months, so we had to install metal grates around the windows. We
found that the swing set we built at the clinic caused a lot of injuries
because there was no supervision (we are planning to move it to the school).
There are many more examples of this. The bottom line is that there are so many
unknowns and the culture and environment is so different from what we are used
to, that it is very hard to get it right the first time, therefore follow up
for another one to three years is critical for any project’s success and
sustainability.
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Typical example on "orphan" project: non-functioning water tower because of a defect pump |
2.
Community involvement is critical. Without a
strong community commitment, one should think twice about starting a new
project. We saw several examples where the community did not step up and rally behind
a project and therefore were doomed to fail. For example, next to the
neighborhood where we were working, there is a big water tower to store water
from a well and make it available to the neighborhood. It was built a few years
ago by a European NGO. The reason for it was that the surface water that people
were using prior to the water installation is heavily contaminated by the
run-off from the sugar cane fields, which is so poisoned with fertilizer that
there is a high incidence of miscarriages and birth defects in the children
born in that region. However, the pump
of the tower broke and needed to be repaired, but the community had failed to
organize itself to charge a few pennies each time people used the water to
create a maintenance and repair fund. As a result, people are back to using the
poor quality surface water.
The local rotary club is a critical partner as they typically know if a
neighborhood is well organized and likely be able to sustain projects that are
started in their community. A strong community looks after its assets, for
example most of the clinics we built in those regions are always spotlessly
clean (swept at least 2 times/day), have plenty of plants around them (which
requires daily watering) and are relatively secure as the community is like a
“neighborhood watch” looking out for people trying to steal anything they can.
Note that you need to make sure to tap the “true” community leaders,
which are often local priests or church leaders or people actively distributing
food or organizing activities. The “official” community leaders are, at least
in Nicaragua and I suspect in many other countries, political figureheads who
are only thinking about themselves and generally very much disliked by the
community and therefore useless in many cases.
3.
Count on having an 80 percent success rate over
multiple projects. To create sustainable, successful projects requires a lot of
trial and error and you have to be prepared for 20 percent of those projects to
serve as a learning experience for how to do them. Looking back over a 10-year
period, 50 percent of our projects have been very successful. For example,
providing a school at the dump that started with 60 kids being taught in the
open air, and progressed to a seven classroom facility with a feeding center,
library, and playground with a fence around it, which now draws four times as
many kids as when it started. Another example is where we built a single
classroom and another NGO’s built another classroom, toilets, a water system, fence
and feeding center.
In contrast to these success stories, the first library we built was on
the grounds of a hospital,
Grand opening of a feeding center/library. The local official closed it one year later. |
People lining up at the clinic we built for a health assessment of their kids including getting vitamins and parasite meds |
the ministry they told us that they did not have the staff available. In these types of cases, visiting the local officials by a small group of foreigners (us) seemed to help as a year later we found that the clinic was used for at least one day a week, and as of today it has been promised to be open two days a week. It often takes negotiation with the local authorities, for example, we provided an A/C (a $1000 investment) in the local hospital to keep vaccines cool and prevent them from being wasted in return for the same officials providing staffing for a clinic that we had built. The A/C was a good investment, but honestly would not have been on the top of the priority list if we hadn’t
gotten the staff for our clinic in return.
5.
Anything needing supplies is pretty much doomed
to fail or become useless. Another NGO installed a brand new digital X-ray
system in the children’s hospital. This was a major improvement because the old
system was out-of-date, had poor image quality, and many patients could not
afford the cost of a film, which is a couple of dollars, equal to half a day’s
pay in this country. However, if there is a critical case, the patient would be
rushed together with the film to the capital, which is about three hours in an
ambulance, so he or she could be taken care of right away. The idea was that
instead of film, a paper printer would be used to print a copy, which is great
idea except that a printer requires cartridges on a regular basis. Needless to
say the printer was inoperable when we visited the site because the cartridge
had run out. Similarly, we have seen plenty of donated sophisticated medical
devices such as EKG’s that require a particular type of thermal sensitive paper
that go unused once the paper is gone. We also saw a brand-new copier that was
donated to a school that was not being used because there was no paper. Imagine
if this would happen in the classroom of my grandkids here in the USA. The
teacher would have either raised money from parents or bought a pack of paper
for
maybe $7.50 herself. However, in Nicaragua, a typical teacher makes $250 a month,
which is about $12.50 a day. A pack of paper is more than half of his or her daily
wages. And this is just for one pack of paper, let alone of the other materials
(pencils, etc.) they don’t get from the government. Similarly, we bought many
posters for classrooms over the past few years that show the alphabet, tables,
geography and maps, the human body, etc. These cost only a few dollars locally.
However they are very rare, if one looks in typical classrooms, almost all of
what is on their walls is handmade by inventive teachers because even a few
dollars is out of
reach.
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Well stocked library, unfortunately missing electricity, and supplies, hence the copy machine under the cover (on left of picture) |
6.
Don’t assume any infrastructure and assume a harsh
environment. If you are considering donating computers, forget about laptops as
they are too fragile and can’t really deal with power surges and “dirty
electricity.” Also, a desktop computer is easier to repair, for example if a
power supply goes out or a hard disk needs replacement it is easier to get
those components. Regarding keeping the temperature down, the best you can
count on is having fans to keep the temperature somewhat reasonable (assuming
you have reliable electricity). Using solar panels is challenging because of
security concerns, i.e. they are hard to secure so they don’t get stolen. The
people are so poor that they have taken the electricity cables from a water
pump at our school, or even come out at night to unscrew the metal plates from
the roof to sell. Internet access is very slow, expensive and unreliable. We seem to keep viruses under control here in
the US because of the regular security updates, however these computers are not
under the same kind of rigorous maintenance and often get infected. Water is
not a given either. Half of the clinics we built have no water, which is kind
of amazing if you think about it.
7.
Developing countries have a different
interpretation of the 4-way test. The Rotary 4-way test basically lays the
ground rules for ethical behavior of Rotarians, however, in developing
countries there is a lot of favoritism, borderline corruption and no respect
for intellectual property rights. This line was crossed when I noticed that all
of the computers we were providing as part of a Rotary district grant had
bootlegged Microsoft Office software on it. I had to explain to my fellow host Rotarians,
who argued that this is “common practice” in this region, that Bill Gates
himself is a billion dollar donor to Rotary causes and that cheating his
company out of a few hundred dollars for software is not only unethical but undermines
important friendships. I don’t think they got the message but I know now to pay
better attention next time and to make sure that any computer has either a free
open source alternative or that we build in the cost of the software when we do
the costing. Interestingly enough, a fellow Rotarian who was a member of the
club sponsoring this particular district grant provided the computers.
8.
Have multiple donors and a strong support team. Our
core team consists of three North Texas Rotary clubs that have committed to
allocate funds every year. In addition, there are several other clubs that donate
once every few years, or only once or twice. The problem is that every year the
leadership of a Rotary club changes and priorities and budgets change with
them. Even in my own club I have had fluctuations in funding of more than 100
percent, i.e. from $5k to $12k, which makes it hard to plan and commit to the
receiving community projects a year in
advance. By having multiple clubs
participating, it evens out those funding changes. The same applies for the
support team, it is important to have several committed people on the team that
are willing to assist in raising the funds and who are willing to pay their own
airfare and hotel costs to travel many years in a row. Finding those committed
people is not as hard as it may seem, as anyone who ever gone on one of these
trips knows, as soon as you go once you become “hooked,” because you see with
your own eyes the impact we make. The hardest part for me was the first three
or four years of building the team and convincing many to travel with us.
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This clinic was built through a partnership of six donor clubs together with the club in the host country |
Most of our medical brigades are in the open air or best case under a canopy. Our pediatrician here sees a local family for a basic health check. |
air-conditioned SUV and ran off to his next project. They rarely talked with us while we were mixing cement and looking dirty or preparing chicken and rice for a few hundred kids. So, I learned that it is best to partner with them at an arm’s length. For example, we agreed that each of us would build one classroom every year in a poor community and we would exchange information, plans, vision and experiences. But I would never fund one of their projects or fund anything jointly.
10.
Don’t support free-standing feeding centers. Our
experience with feeding centers has spanned multiple years. The problem is that
everyone’s first gut reaction, when seeing so many hungry kids, is to feed
them. That is exactly what we did the first year we did a construction project.
We told our local coordinator, a missionary who worked there for many years and
lived there with his family, about wanting to feed the kids, and I remember the
expression on his face when he said, “Really? ok if that is what you want to
do, we’ll do it.” So, we bought the food, got the community involved to prepare
it, and almost created a riot. We had to physically make a human chain of
volunteers to get all those hundreds of kids in line and organized. We had kids
come up that did not have a bowl, and they would take big banana leaves with
them and we would scoop in the chicken and rice into the banana leaves.
So, next year we decided to do it differently and we went to a “ticket”
system. We gave the community leaders a few hundred tickets that they could
distribute in the community. However, we found that many people came to us with
no ticket, and we suspected some heavy-duty favoritism was going on.
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These kids are on their way to the feeding center; they should be in school instead in order to have a chance to escape the dump. |
incentive to get kids into school was the fact that they were fed at noon. So, here we were, building and supporting a feeding center that undermined the primary incentive used to get the kids to go to school.
This
year we built a feeding center at the school, and that is where we fed the kids
and teachers and had a great meal of chicken, rice, and veggies, cooked by the
local community together with our help. When the kids were being fed, the
teacher locked the gates so no one could get out and take the food home where
it would be taken by parents or siblings. That is the best and only way to feed
children. I stopped by at the feeding center we built a few years back, it is
one of five (!?) in that neighborhood, supported by very well-meaning churches
and other NGO’s. I would argue that the food that they provide is not
sustainable and likely will not benefit the kids in the future of that area.
These are my top ten recommendations, there are many more,
but in my opinion, these are the most important. I truly believe that Rotary is
the perfect NGO as it is people-to-people with very little, if any overhead for
projects, which is unlike most other organizations. That is also why I joined
Rotary about 12 years ago; it provides a framework to build peace and better
friendships. It also provides life-changing experiences, especially for young
adults as we typically take high school and college students with us.
Sustainability is how systems endure and remain diverse and productive. In my
opinion, we can only do that by learning and working with the local clubs as
closely as we can, and by getting our hands dirty!
Herman Oosterwijk, international project coordinator Denton
Rotary club.