May 21, 2009
It’s hard to believe that it’s been exactly a year since I had my first day in the Water For People office in Denver. It’s been a great year. The first two months were spent getting to know my Denver colleagues and learning about Water For People’s current Africa program, then in July, Jon and I made “the big leap” and moved to Uganda. Neither us had ever been here, though I’d spent a lot of time in Western Kenya, which has some similarities, so it was a big leap indeed. At least here, English is one of the official languages, and so most people speak at least a little.
Once we got here, we had the great fun of finding a house to live in and establishing it from scratch. One of the differences we found was that most of the houses and apartments for rent don’t even have appliances when you move in, and so we not only had to figure out how to bargain for couches, dining furniture, and our bed, but also how to assess and bargain for a used fridge and stove. We learned later that we probably paid too much for appliances that don’t really work (and have since had to replace our fridge, which we bought new the second time around), but we laugh about it and chalk it up to being a part of the great learning curve.
During that time, I was also beginning to establish the Water For People’s program in Uganda. That process started in Denver, where I began the process of registering our office in Uganda. Water For People operates as a local NGO in the countries where we work, and so it’s important for us to be recognized by those local governments. Registration establishes us in a country and sets us up to be able to hire staff, make purchases and sign a lease for an office, and more importantly begin to program in the country. I say that I began the process of registration in Denver because the process itself had several steps that couldn’t be completed until after arrival, and even then the process took several months to finally be completed. That said, we were finally successful at registration in September—a huge accomplishment.
While our registration was working its way though the system, I spent several months learning about the water and sanitation sector in Uganda. In so doing, I talked with lots of local NGOs and visited their work. During our visits, I learned about their individual groups, but I also learned about the sector. One of the most interesting things to me about the water and sanitation sector in Uganda is that access to safe water is slowly increasing, but access to improved sanitation has flat-lined in many districts, and in several areas, access is actually decreasing. There seem to be many challenges, but two that stood out are (1) many NGOs focus on water, but sanitation is something of an afterthought, and (2) management of household sanitation seems to be difficult—when a family finally gets a latrine, they don’t maintain it very well and so it collapses or becomes unusable, or even if they do maintain it, once it is full, they don’t build another one. For these reason, Water For People—Uganda is going to start by looking creatively at sanitation management and maintenance and will work to build a strong sanitation program before looking at water. That’s by no means to say that access to safe water doesn’t need to be addressed. I just would like Water For People—Uganda to become set an example in prioritizing sanitation, and in the mean time give some good thought to really understanding what the challenges are in water and how Water For People can help to address them.
Water For People—Uganda has found two local NGOs with which to begin developing a sanitation program. These NGOs helped to determine which districts to begin work. They also helped to lead Water For People’s initial work in each district, which was to take GPS coordinate readings and to fill in a baseline questionnaire for each water point in the chosen areas. The water points and a sample of households’ latrines and hygiene behaviors will be given scores that are color-coded, those colors will be marked on the map where the water points where found. The maps created will be used by Water For People, our partners, and other actors in the districts, including local government and other local NGOs to strategize where to work to be most effective. We’re expecting the results within the next month, which will be a great way to start our work.
In addition to starting the Uganda program, as Regional Manager for Africa, I also work with our ongoing program in Malawi and our new program in Rwanda. It has been great fun getting to know those two programs, and I’m excited because we’re beginning to share program ideas between the three countries. Last week when I was in Malawi, for the first time we had staff from all three countries together, and it was really fun to hear and participate in conversations between the three countries. There are some differences, for sure, but there are also a good number of similarities between countries, and there are enough that I think we’re going to be able to share learning and adapt programs fairly readily.
Water For People—Rwanda is in a similar place to Water For People—Uganda. The Rwanda program was registered in April 2008 and since then has been doing similar needs assessments and programmatic prioritization. One of the exciting things about Rwanda is that the private sector seems to be very strong there. The Rwandan government has been promoting Public-Private Partnerships in the water sector for some time in Rwanda. Those systems show some strength, but still have some challenges, again, primarily in management. One of the things that Water For People—Rwanda is going to explore is what happens if we move from Public-Private systems where a private company builds the water system but then the government manages it, to more of a standard utility model where the same company that builds the system also manages it and users pay a user fee to the utility. The neat thing about a management system like that is that it ties the community and the utility together, which will hopefully mean that when the water system needs to be upgraded, either because it is worn out and needs to be replaced, or because the community grows, the utility will already have a relationship with the community and will be able to offer that service.
An easy way to think about this type of program is like a US cell phone plan. For example, when you sign up for service with AT&T, you sign a contract with AT&T saying that you will stay with AT&T for two years. During that time, your contract says that you will pay your cell phone bill, and in return, AT&T will keep your phone working. If you fail to pay your bill, AT&T will be able to cut off your service to encourage you to keep up your end of the deal, and if AT&T stops providing good service, you’ll hold them responsible by not paying for service you haven’t gotten. At the end of two years, you’ll have the option to upgrade your phone. That upgrade might be free if you get basically a new version of the same phone, or you might pay a little extra if you get a more advanced model or decide that you want more service.
The utility model works the same way. The community and the utility will have a contract stipulating what the utility owes the community and what the community owes the utility in return. It will also stipulate what the consequences are if either party fails to make good on its part of the contract. After the contract period, or as needed, the utility will be able to work with the community to upgrade service as needed or as wanted by the community. It puts the community in charge of making decisions about what kind of service they want—which is a very good thing.
This program is still being developed in Rwanda, but we’re excited to get it going and adapting it as needed to work in the specifically Rwanda context. We will likely look at this model in Uganda, too, when we begin to water programming.
Water For People—Malawi is also doing some really interesting things right now, and in fact, we’re modeling all of our sanitation programs in the region on the work that Water For People—Malawi is doing. Water For People—Malawi recently declared that it was no longer going to support subsidized sanitation. Instead, Water For People—Malawi is working helping to establish sanitation businesses. One model of sanitation businesses that the program is supporting uses the strength of the fertilizer market in Malawi. Malawi has a large agriculture sector, and that sector uses a lot of fertilizer, which is a valuable commodity. Water For People is working with entrepreneurs to start businesses that sell “humanure” which can be abundantly available if more households use composting latrines. The entrepreneur sells composting, or “EcoSan,” latrines to households. Household use the latrines, which creates compost, and then the entrepreneur buys the compost from the household and resells it to a fertilizer company.
Like the Rwanda water model, this model ties the household to a private-sector company who maintains the toilet. Because households receive payment for compost, they are encouraged to keep using their latrine as intended. In this way, household sanitation will be sustained for longer than it might be otherwise. It also encourages the sanitation market, meaning that households won’t have to rely on subsidies for sanitation, which also means that sanitation coverage can expand beyond Water For People’s direct support—a very powerful prospect. Water For People—Uganda is going to focus on trying out and adapting that model for sanitation, and Water For People—Rwanda will begin to try out this type of work as well.
All of that is to say that it’s been a great year. Water For People is doing some really exciting work in Africa. It’s great being in Kampala where I can get to visit the Rwanda and Malawi programs more frequently than if I were in Denver, and it’s been a blast establishing the Uganda program. I’m excited to begin hiring staff in the next few months and really beginning to see that program take off.
Written by Sarah in Africa, Life, NGO, Uganda, water for people, work ~
I am happy to share today that Water For People—Uganda has been officially registered with the Uganda NGO Board!
This registration is a major achievement. A team of people began the registration process in March of this year, only to find that the requirements they had been given were not the right ones for an international NGO. We began the process again in May from the Denver office. Because I would not leave for Uganda for another two months, the Executive Director of the Uganda Water and Sanitation NGO Network (UWASNET) agreed to allow their Program Liaison Officer, Alex Mbaguta, work with us on the registration process.
Over the next two months, Kathy Miller and I had regular correspondence with Alex. We gathered the documents that we could gather in Denver, and Alex gathered the pieces that we needed from various offices in Kampala. He helped to arrange a Post Office Box and talked to numerous people in the Ministry of Water to gain their support of our application. Alex also worked with a lawyer, Robert Lubega, to ensure that all of our documents were in order and to put the necessary official face with the registration; we couldn’t turn in the application without Robert’s presence saying that we are a qualified organization.
When finally I arrived to Uganda, Alex, Robert, and I pulled together all of the pieces that we’d collected. We took them to the NGO Board the last week of July, but were turned away saying that we did not have a letter of support from local government that was required, but not was listed on the requirements sheet.
Alex, Robert, and I had the necessary meetings (several letters were needed in order to get the one required by the NGO Board), and returned with a newly completed file on August 1.
The NGO Board was set to meet later in the week, but we were told that their program was already too full and so we’d have to wait until the September meeting. The September meeting was delayed by several weeks, but was finally held on September 26. Although Alex, Robert, and I each visited the office several times in October, it was not until late October that we finally learned that our application had been accepted.
Several visits later, I took our file number to the office on October 24, and Grace at the NGO Board said that our certificate was being signed and to try again the following Tuesday. I was in Malawi that Tuesday, and didn’t get back to the office until today, November 12.
When I was finally seen by the NGO Board staff member who held the certificates, he told me that I was lucky, because the signed certificates from September 26 had only just been delivered yesterday. Three signatures and a photocopy of my passport later, I left the office carrying our certificate of registration!
What does being registered mean? Well, it means that we can finally start to build more substantial relationships with government and potential partners. Before being “official” I found that many people raised their eyebrows at me when I was speaking with them, as though they didn’t believe that we were really going to be able to program in Uganda. I look forward to going back to some of those offices to begin conversations again.
Being registered also means that we can continue with a host of administrative tasks that are very important to our existence in Uganda. Among them are projects like filing for tax-exempt status, purchasing a truck, and opening a bank account. I can also begin to look for an office , hire staff, and enter into agreements with partners.
In essence, being registered means that we have a green light to move forward with all of the exciting work that we have planned for Water For People—Uganda. Hurray!
Written by Sarah in Life, NGO, News, Uganda, water for people, work ~
Before we left Denver, I made a tentative travel schedule. I needed to come up with a budget for the regional expenses through the end of 2008, and to do so, I needed to have a general idea of when I would visit Hélène in Rwanda and Kate in Malawi. I tentatively said that I would make a trip to Rwanda the first week of September to see how the program was coming together after its first few months. However, I would only make the trip if at that point Hélène was ready for me.
As it turned out, in mid-August, I got an email from Hélène, saying that things were coming along well, but that she was really ready for some face-to-face time to discuss how to proceed with program development. We agreed that the first week of September was the right timing for my first visit.
Eileen and John Kayser asked Jon to come along and take photos. We wanted to have some “baseline” photos of the work that Hélène has been doing in Rwanda. One of the challenges of being the sole staff person in a country is that it’s very difficult to take photos at the same time you are leading meetings. We also wanted to make sure that we had some photos of Hélène at work.
Jon and I traveled last Sunday on the 9:00 am flight from Entebbe, Uganda to Kigali, Rwanda. Although the flight is less than an hour, it’s an international flight, and so we needed to report to the airport two hours early. It takes an hour to get from Kampala to Entebbe (where Uganda’s international airport is), and so Jon and I were in a taxi, before sunrise, at 6:00 am.
We flew over a piece of Lake Victoria, perhaps over some of Tanzania, and into Rwanda. It was very clear when we passed into Rwanda. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa. The bird’s eye view showed us that the land was covered in small agricultural plots all lined up. Houses were close together, and from the air, everything looked well organized.
We arrived to Kigali and got settled. Kathryn Cooper, Water For People’s Water and Sanitation Leadership Fellow, had arrived to Kigali from Malawi the day before to begin her study of girls’ sanitation in Rwanda. She was set to stay at Hélène’s house for the two weeks she was working in Rwanda. They’d spent the morning at the market and invited Jon and me to dinner. It was great to have a chance to informally catch up with Hélène and Kathryn. We all exchanged stories of the last few months in our respective countries. We compared internet speeds, motorcycle taxis, and adventures in dining. Rwanda has a lot of avocados this time of year, and so Kathryn made a delicious guacamole. After the sun set, we sat down to a fantastic pasta dinner. Since Jon, Kathryn, and I were pretty road-weary, we called it an early night.
On Monday, Hélène and I spent a long time catching up on various administrative questions as well as some larger programmatic questions. We made a list of topics that we wanted to get through during the week, and began to work through them. Among the topics were:
- The 2009 budgeting process
- Potential partners and the status of choosing partners
- Water For People staffing priorities
- Timing the baseline mapping study so that it happens within the next six months, but doesn’t overlap the rainy season too badly
- Reporting requirements
- Water For People office space requirements and the timing for acquiring office space
- Potential programs and program design
It was an ambitious list, but one that we made significant progress on throughout the week.
One of the things that Hélène and I agreed was that because the Rwanda program is growing and changing so quickly that it makes sense to have more regular, frequent communication. For the next several months, and until we no longer feel it’s necessary, Hélène and I will have a short phone call twice a week to talk about where she’s gotten to and how she’s going to proceed. That type of frequent communication is one of the reasons that the Regional Managers have been moved from Denver to the field—by being physically closer, we’re able to give more regular support to our country offices.
On Tuesday, Hélène set up meetings in Kicukiru (pronounced KI-chee-KEE-roo) District, one of the districts where, through needs assessments, the Ministry of Water Resources of Rwanda has assigned Water For People to work. We met with the Executive Secretary of the District, where Hélène and I explained where she has gotten to in her program planning and what it meant for Kicukiru District. Hélène felt that it was very important for the District to see another Water For People face and to hear about the potential programming from someone else, and so I explained the programming ideas that Hélène and I had talked about. Rwanda has three official languages—English, French, and Kinyarwanda—however, many people are much more comfortable speaking French. Poor Hélène was faced with the task of translating my explanations of the program from English, and in many cases, then translating his questions back to me. I’ve made it through two units of Rosetta Stone French lessons, but I have a ways to go, I’m afraid.
During the conversation, the Executive Secretary told us that public toilets had been built in a nearby market. We think that they were pay-for-use toilets, but it was unclear who was managing them. After our meeting, we set off to find the toilets in the market. When we arrived, we looked around, and the toilets seemed nowhere to be found. We asked several people, and finally got some direction from a group of very bold children. We wandered around and finally found what we think were the toilets. However, it was pretty clear that people were uncomfortable with a group of mzungus (foreigners) entering. As we were entering, a man approached us and said that if we’re looking for toilets, he’d bring us to them. He escorted us away from the public toilet and brought us to a private toilet. It’s a mission that Hélène will need to continue on her own.
Wednesday Hélène arranged for us to go to Rulindo, Water For People’s other district. Rulindo is about an hour away from Kigali. After being in Uganda, where distances are long and where many roads are full of potholes, Jon and I were impressed at how easy the ride was. Hélène explained that many of the roads were new. In the places where there were still a few potholes, she explained that they were roads that had not yet been fixed, and the potholes were left from bombs during the Genocide. It was a stark reminder of what happened in Rwanda only 14 years ago. Although a lot of repairs have been made, there is still some ways to go.
In Rulindo, we met with the Assistant Mayor. We again explained where we think the program is going and asked for his thoughts. In many cases he thought that the ideas would work, but he had some suggestions. Hélène and I thanked him and told him that we look forward to working more with him to put the program together. Government is an important partner in Water For People’s work.
Hélène also arranged for us to meet with a potential partner in Rulindo. We met the partner at the Assistant Mayor’s office, and we drove together to see a water system that the group had completed in 2002. We drove up, up, up into the hills. We stopped the car at the base of a hill, and we set out to hike. The water system we were visiting was a gravity flow spring catchment system. We hiked from the road, through a number of homesteads, past a number of women working their small subsistence farming plots, and down to where the spring had been captured.
The Director of the local NGO explained how the system works, and we observed a tap that had been left near the source so that the people in the surrounding area could still access the water while much of the water was piped to the communities below. The system seemed well made, although was in need of some regular maintenance. The Director explained that the fence that had been surrounding the spring source to protect it from animals and other potential contaminants had been stolen. Neighboring children had set up soccer goals on the cleared area, instead. We talked for a long time about the management of the system, how many people the system served, and ways that the NGO might be able to improve the management. Overall, the system appeared to be in good working order.
From there, we visited a church on a nearby hill where some of the water was pumped to. The local NGO was able to rehabilitate a water tank there that had been set up many years ago and had since lost its source. By connecting the new gravity flow system to the tank, the tank was again usable, and the church, school, and other public buildings again had access to safe drinking water. While we were listening to the explanation, a young girl approached the tank and took a drink.
Thursday Hélène and I wrapped up. We finished our list of questions and had a few more meetings. At 3:00 pm Jon and I were on our way back to the airport and back to Uganda. It was a very productive trip. It was excellent to see what Hélène was working on, and to work together through some challenges that she was experiencing. She is making good progress on the Water For People—Rwanda program. It’s going to be an exciting program that will serve to use the good work that the Government of Rwanda is currently doing in the water sector as a base, and hopefully will provide some new ways of thinking that will improve services to Rwanda’s population.
Written by Sarah in Africa, Life, NGO, Travel, Water, water for people ~
I had a great meeting today with SNV. Among many interesting things, they’ve been running a learning alliance platform with IRC Netherlands on IWRM and one on sanitation. There’s been a good amount of thinking on EcoSan here. EcoSan was first promoted in Uganda by the Ministry of Water and Environment. However, the MoWE is responsible for sanitation in public places. Therefore, the first EcoSan that people have learned about has been in markets and other institutions. From SNV’s perspective, the software necessary to go along with EcoSan wasn’t done, and so it’s been sort of a dismal failure.
At the same time, the Commission for Water for Production (also within the Ministry of Water and Environment, but with partial management by the Ministry of Agriculture) did a small, small pilot in the Southwest. I think that is viewed as better. In part, I think, because it was done with the purpose of using the excreta to aid in agricultural practices. Also, because the water table is high there, other latrines weren’t working well, so it may also be that played a factor in uptake. The Ministry of Education is responsible for sanitation in schools, and the Ministry of Health is responsible for sanitation in households. There’s been little movement on EcoSan from those ministries (they’re also not funded very well).
I described to SNV the Development Marketplace concept we’re using in Malawi, and they went wild over it. Apparently the Ministry of Business which is funded to the tune of USD 44 million (wow!) is very interested in the possibility of sanitation as a business. SNV thought that getting them involved would be very positive and that private sector folks, like fertilizer companies, would be very excited. It doesn’t sound like there’s much of a private sector entity for latrines yet, but they knew of at least on enterprising mason that might be able to be helped along to build a larger business (or something).
Along with selling excreta to fertilizer companies, SNV talked about examples of communities who didn’t like using the compost on their own food, but had no problem selling it to people in Kampala. So along with doing value chain research on fertilizer companies, I think it also might make sense to do some value chain research on companies buying produce to see if they could be contracted to buy the outputs of produced grown using EcoSan compost. We’ll have to think it through a little because it gets rid of some of the maintenance that is built into the DM model, but I think that there’s some good possibilities.
SNV was less excited about using a FRUGAL model on water sources. It sounds as though there’s a lot of complexity in the decentralization model as it pertains to the water sector that I didn’t quite grasp all of today, but I’ll keep after it. Basically there’s not been a good track record of private sector collecting water tariffs from communities. Communities haven’t paid and so get into debt and then don’t pay their debt. There’s some thought that perhaps the tariffs weren’t reasonable (something about a flat tariff set for the whole country?), and so that may be partly why it went sour.
However, there’s a guy at GTZ that is trying out a new tariff model that’s based on percentages (I didn’t understand all of it either), and so I’ll get in touch with him in the next few weeks and see what he’s doing.
Oh, and back to sanitation for a moment: SNV indicated that there’s a big need to bring the cost of EcoSan latrines down. Right now the country is for the most part using skyloos, but that there’s a call for arborloos and fossa alterna.
In summary, it was a great meeting!
Written by Sarah in NGO ~
A post for the Water For People Blog that talks more about work than I’ve done elsewhere so far:
Welcome to my office; or at least to my temporary office. Really for the moment, I have three: My back porch, which will hopefully have an internet connection soon; Café Pap, a coffee shop with okay internet; and Bubbles O’Leary, an Irish Pub with free, decent internet. Although it’s a little strange to be nomadic, until Water For People has more staff than just me in Uganda, it doesn’t make sense to build a full-fledged office. Once there’s internet at the house it’ll be easier to make that the primary temporary office, and trips between the coffee shop and the pub will be less frequent.
Jon, and I left Denver exactly two weeks ago. We arrived to Kampala, sight unseen, and have, had a very steep learning curve since being here. Though about 15% of my time was spent in Kenya before joining Water For People, and there are definite similarities, I’m also finding a lot of differences. For one, it’s taken both Jon and me the last two weeks to begin to figure out the conversion from US dollars to Ugandan shillings. Currently, the exchange rate is about UGX 1600 to 1 USD—not math that is easy to do in one’s head, especially when prices end up in the millions of shillings. On top of the conversion, which we’ll eventually stop doing on a regular basis, it’s also been tough to figure out what prices should be in Kampala.
Last week, Alex Mbaguta, the Program Liaison for the Uganda Water and Sanitation NGO Network (UWASNET), and I spent all week collecting the final paperwork to submit Water For People’s application for registration to the NGO Board. This final week was the end of a process that has taken Alex, Kathy Miller in Denver, and I the past two months to complete, and Wende Valentine in Denver, Alex, and Kathy also in March of this year.
The application to register as an international NGO in Uganda itself is fairly straight forward. What proved difficult were the numerous documents that were required as further evidence of Water For People’s legitimacy. Though Water For People has an excellent reputation in the countries where we currently work, that reputation is just beginning to bud in Uganda. UWASNET thinks very highly of Water For People, which definitely helps. Their legwork in Kampala allowed us to get most of the Ugandan pieces of our application together before I arrived.
Last week, Alex and I had a few false starts, but finally after several meetings at several different offices and three trips to the NGO Board office, we were able to submit our application. The Board sits next week to review applications, and we have our fingers crossed that the Water For People application will be reviewed on Wednesday. However, we were told that there were a lot of applications this month that arrived before ours, and so it might wait until the Board sits next month to be read.
The next few weeks and months will be spent largely listening and learning about the water sector in Uganda. I had preliminary meetings last week with the Rural Water and Sanitation Commissioner at the Ministry of Water and the Commissioner at the Office for Water for Production. Both were brief, introductory meetings, but I was able to introduce them to Water For People and explain a little about how our programming has historically worked, what Water For People programs look like in other countries and what we’re hoping to do in Uganda. I will make appointments to talk with them further once we’re registered to learn from them what they see as the sector’s primary needs.
At the same time, I’m beginning to make contacts with a number of local NGOs, mostly recommended by UWASNET as good organizations to partner with. I’ll start by revisiting the organizations that the team of volunteers visited during the scoping study to understand what they learned and what has happened in the time since the scoping study happened. I’ll also study the UWASNET membership directory, which gives a short profile of the 140 water and sanitation organizations working under the UWASNET umbrella.
It’s just the beginnings of an office here in Uganda, but it’s slowly coming together!
Written by Sarah in NGO ~
