A week at the office

(Last week)

I haven’t had a productive week at my current office since I started working here a month ago. At least as far as work with my partner is concerned – I’m trying to support the district water office in developing a way of keeping track of the waterpoints in the district, which ones are functioning, which are not, and which communities don’t have sufficient water access, so that when money comes to the district for water projects, there can be evidence to inform how that money can be best spent. I have been productive with other EWB stuff – meeting planning, learning about decentralisation, and keeping tabs on water policy discussions. But I’m realizing I’m going to have to push a lot more if anything is going to happen here in the district.

I’m speculating, but I have a couple of ideas why things are slow. It would be easy to blame the individuals (including myself) directly, but I think that would be missing the mark. The people I’m working with are smart, interested in their work, and care about improving people’s access to water. There are some bigger issues at play here.

Some observations.

The office is usually empty.

Really. I was told the office hours are from 7:30am to 5:00pm, with an hour and a half off at lunch time (12:00pm to 1:30pm). So that’s when I show up – but then I sometimes wait 30 minutes to an hour for someone to come to unlock the gate. Or someone will have come to unlock it, but I’ll be the only person (of a theoretical 6 people working here) physically present for half the day. To be fair, sometimes there are meetings going on in town, or trainings (for a day, or even a full week) out of town that keep people busy. And some of these people are field staff who aren’t usually supposed to be in the office anyhow.

So why is the office empty? There’s at least two reasons.

People are bored.

And I can’t blame them. I’ll give the example I know best (which still isn’t that well). There is a hydrology officer, whose job it is to monitor river flows and water tables in Ntcheu and neighbouring districts. But… (a) there isn’t enough money in the budget to buy fuel to travel to the monitoring points; (b) the “machine” (I suspect it’s actually a database, but I’m not sure) that sends the information he would collect to South Africa to be analyzed is broken; (c) no one is all that concerned about this, so it’s unlikely to change anytime soon. This is the guy who spends the most time by far at the office of any of the staff (or at the chip stand down the road), but he still has nothing to do. So he fixes the office vehicles, and seems to also be rebuilding a truck to sell. Or he goes to the chip stand (fries) just down the road.

There are meetings where people are paid allowances.

I’ve heard of schemes where students are paid to show up to high school, and that this decreases drop-out rates. And it makes sense that people should be compensated if they have to pay out-of-pocket to attend mandatory meetings, particularly since transportation in Malawi is very expensive because of an ongoing fuel crisis. Allowances, however, look a lot more like paying people to do their job that they get paid for. (The allowance system has evolved in a completely logical way, but I still don’t think it should exist. This will probably be worth it’s own blog post someday to explain.) For example, a meeting on the other side of town – a 15 minute walk at a slow pace – pays people allowances to attend. This (a) makes it harder for me to invite myself to meetings, since people assume I would also want an allowance, which I don’t; (b) skews work efforts towards things that pay allowances and away from things that don’t (like working with EWB); (c) makes it so key office staff are often out attending meetings – even if they see little practical value to them, the financial reward is great enough to stop them doing other productive things.

Wait, what work?

Ok, so the “other productive things” from the last paragraph might not actually exist. Yet. There isn’t a structure here to inform what staff need to do – no job descriptions, no position definitions, just people hired to fill spaces. And there isn’t really an accountability system to make them do whatever it is they do. Which is probably a good thing, since they often don’t have the physical and financial resources (especially fuel) and maybe also the human resources (expertise or knowledge) required to do them. There are some attempts to fix this lack of structure currently underway from a national decentralisation program of the government – I’m optimistic, but it will be a slow change to alter the culture that has built up around the status quo.

And what about me?

I’ve had other things to make myself feel productive, and so haven’t been pushing things at the office here as much as I should have been. I should have spent more time looking bored, asking for direction, and nagging for meetings to be arranged. I should have taken up more space, blended into the desk less well, been more demanding of people’s time, and generally tried harder, instead of letting the other 30% of my work flood into the whole.

So where from here?

I’m trying to re-set-up my placement – explaining again why I’m here, what I can do, how we can work together, what needs to happen to get things started. Why things haven’t happened, from my side and theirs. And I’m making sure people talk again about what they want from me, what they are hoping for, what is useful to them. I’ve explained that they own 70% of my time, and if they don’t use it, I will sit around being bored.

And I’m remembering the questions about why things aren’t happening, to feed into other conversations about local government structures in Malawi and how to better support the water and sanitation sectors. Because it’s not the individuals, it’s a system that is broken, and we’re trying to nudge it back towards working.

 

And since writing? We’re slowly moving in good directions, have some key meetings set up to start things moving, and have some little things started to show baby steps of progress. I’ll let you know how it goes.