Sleeping On Borrowed Mats Instruments And Policies For Aid To Sahelian Development

Implications of the PADLOS-Education Study

for the Cooperation 21 debate

Version 2.0

February 1997

A Moré proverb from Burkina Faso holds that "whoever sleeps on a borrowed mat should realize he is lying on the cold, cold ground." Reforming and revitalizing aid to West Africa for a new generation means crafting situ ations under which people can make, remake and market their own mats -- not to speak of beds, barracks and related furniture manufactories or sleep research institutes. And it necessarily involves careful assessment of --

(a) the way in which aid is raised or "tithed" by the governments and donors concerned, as well as allied stewardship issues;

(b) the policy targets and substantive programs toward which aid is directed; and

The following pages concentrate on the latter two of these issues and, in conformity with the priority established in the Cooperation 21 exercise, deal with instruments first and substantive policy second. Remarks are based on initial r esults of the PADLOS-Education Study -- an 18-month effort, carried out in five West African countries (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Senegal) under the joint aegis of the OECD/Club du Sahel and the CILSS. The study focused on what is too often the Achilles’ heel or "missing link" in decentralization policies: lack of appropriate education and training among those who must assume and sustain the initiatives. Remarks to follow are therefore naturally formulated from a human resource develo pment perspective.

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INSTRUMENTS: DOING THE THING RIGHT

The distinction between policies and instruments is always a slippery one, and this fact is particularly important to note in the realm of human resource development, for it is the one sector that is most clearly both an area of substan tive policy concern and a critical instrument for achieving aid objectives -- be they those of different groups of Sahelian citizens, of their governments, of donors or of a critical mass of people in all three categories.

David Naudet implicitly says as much when he classifies "capacity building" as one of the four primary targets of aid (and the one least squarely hit over the last thirty years) while at the same time emphasizing genuinely Sah elian "intermediation" and "structures d’accueil" as critically important instruments. These notions are closely linked, and all entail careful attention to appropriate training and education -- formal, nonformal and/or informal. Nodes of authentic and culturally-rooted intermediation ("intermédiation immergée") don’t emerge unless the capacity to manage these transactional functions is developed; and capacity-building is a short-lived affair if the resulting ce nters of competence have nothing to intermediate -- i.e., no "throughput" to exercise their new skills and to justify the investment in them.

In regard to instruments, it might therefore be said at the outset that one of the major challenges for providers of aid in the "next generation" is to make their instruments and procedures themselves more directly supportive of learning and capacity building, to work out a better harmony of means (the mechanisms for delivering aid) and ends (the types of objectives and programs to which aid is devoted). Corporations and public agencies in industrialized countries are currentl y paying greatly increased attention to strategies for building "learning organizations" -- that is, enterprises and institutions which can adjust creatively to a changing and challenging environment because a majority of employees are regularly involved in learning about, refining and reconfiguring what they do, and because they define new learning to be as much the intended result of their operations as is the production of specific outputs or the delivery of particular services.

One of the weaknesses of aid activities on the instrumental side has been the sharp divorce between program personnel on one hand and administrative/accounting personnel on the other, resulting as often as not in a "good guy/bad gu y" tandem at the interface with host country staff and beneficiary representatives. Part of this is eminently understandable, even if increasingly outmoded. The two have quite naturally seen themselves as having distinctly different, if theoretically complementary, missions: the first to promote all the laudable objectives of particular projects, and the latter to ensure accountability to legislative oversight and demonstrate that no funds are being wasted.

And yet in the "new generation", as decentralization and assumption of management responsibility by increasing numbers of actors in a pluralizing society become realities, the line between management and program begins to blur in significant ways. If it is critically important that citizens and associations of diverse kinds not simply execute development activities and/or benefit from them, but that they manage them themselves, then what was heretofore an accounting and admini strative concern becomes a programmatic one: how to induct people as effectively and sensitively as possible into the rigors and responsibilities of resource management. That requires, at both the personal level and the institutional one, "facilitat ive" and "pedagogic" accounting, or very management-wise technical assistance. This is not an easy junction to effect, management accountants being by habit and necessity risk averse whereas program personnel have to be more adventurous; b ut a lot of energy can be reaped from better fusion -- or at least relation --of the two.

As a consequence, "capacity-building" is progressively migrating into the category of aid instruments and is likely to do so increasingly in the years to come. There follow a series of more detailed and practical implications of the experience acquired in the course of the PADLOS-Education for the "how" of aid, all in a sense extensions and applications of the fundamental points just made.

1. Treat subcontracting, delegation and devolution as vital learning tools. Paradoxically, at a moment when the effectiveness of project-style funding and programmatic strategic planning is increasingly put into question at th e donor agency and government Ministry level, simplified and more participatory forms of these methodologies are proving quite relevant to capacity building in local associations and nascent businesses. It is as if the methodology of development administr ation itself had needed to be decentralized.

Performance contracts are instruments that allow potential funders to respond to requests and proposals formulated by civil society groups and institutions on the basis of their own definition of priorities and to jointly specify wi th these beneficiaries -- through open negotiation -- the services or materials to be produced and acceptable and culturally-relevant means for quality control. They provide a medium for putting critically needed resources at the disposal of these local i nstitutions and ensuring them the means to acquire valuable experience and take responsibility for the effectiveness of their operations. They can create a framework for developing and practicing accountability and for training beneficiaries in new areas of technical competence. To achieve these ends, however, contracting must be treated as a teaching and learning exercise, which requires of the grantor agency both a good mastery of the accounting mechanics involved and an ability to configure this activity in a pedagogical manner, complete with appropriate evaluation and quality control and programmed to interweave training and increasingly sophisticated practice.

Modified forms of the request for proposal mechanism can likewise be used to good effect to incite intermediate groups and associations to engage in strategic planning and envisage worthwhile investments. Criteria for selecti on may create incentive for engineering broader participation in these exercises and coming up with schemes that will have a stimulating effect even on those not eventually successful in the grant-seeking process.

2. Develop and use a rich variety of participatory planning techniques for program and project design. Relentless but carefully orchestrated introduction of stakeholder representatives into all facets of the planning of development assistance and the management of the resulting activities is a key means for ensuring the relevance and sustainability of investments, as is explicit adoption of a "process" rather than a "blueprint" approach to activity d esign. Since the crux of participatory planning -- and the watershed often separating bogus from more genuine varieties -- is inclusion in budgetary decision-making and monitoring, these habits and the subcontracting methodologies mentioned above c an be mutually reinforcing.

3. Adopt participatory evaluation and research approaches as modus operandi for program assessment and innovation development. It is high time to institutionalize the voice of local beneficiaries in the assessment of programs and the design of new initiatives. Techniques of participatory evaluation can provide an excellent "entering wedge" for enhanced local responsibility in development decision-making; and participatory research strategie s (like MARP, action research, empowerment evaluation and others) offer a way to systematically incorporate local viewpoints and knowledge in the identification of new solutions. Both activities can be valuable learning and capacity-building experiences f or local beneficiaries and agency or NGO staff alike. Both can be designed in ways that tailor the level of complexity to the technical competence of different groups of stakeholders and to the relative magnitude of their "stakes", while simulta neously creating a common language for dialogue about the underlying issues among technicians, politicians and local beneficiaries alike. Moreover, participatory evaluation and planning are closely linked, for those who have finally had increased voice in the assessment of development initiatives almost always want as a consequence to have increased voice in the programming of subsequent ones.

4. Consider locally-directed (though centrally supported) training in both technical and management realms -- paired with actual transfer or generation of seed resources and legal entitlements, and alternated with genuine assumption of management and fiscal responsibility -- to be quite simply obligatory ingredients of all development investments. The key, as suggested in the section to follow, is linking financial, intellectual and institutional forms of capitalizati on in an ascending spiral anchored at the local level. A prime means for moving beyond donor aid is for the recipients themselves to become donors -- bankrollers and investors, at whatever humble level, of development initiative. So credit facilities, ban ks and related training are arguably the cornerstone of local economic renewal.

5. Explicitly link both formal and nonformal varieties of education to every development initiative. This serves at one and the same time

to enhance learning opportunities for participants,

to give them avenues of access to more responsible positions,

to promote the ownership and effectiveness of the operations themselves, and

to provide sorely needed fields of practical application and "knowledge-testing" for existing programs of formal and nonformal education, which are too often cloistered in the classroom through lack of the resources necess ary to apply their lessons or of the imagination needed to change their teaching and learning styles.

The same effort should create means for much closer relation between FE and NFE and for the kind of "bridges" and "equivalencies" that allow learners to shuttle back and forth with greater ease among certificated edu cation, practical training, and on-the-job experience.

6. Provide for broader circulation of information about development investments, programs and activities by generating new avenues of communication with a variety of local stakeholders as part and parcel of aid programming. Ne oclassical economic approaches to market phenomena generally assume perfect circulation of information, but in societies and situations where dominant-language literacy is restricted, multiple cleavages of geography and culture impede communication, and i nformation is a critical ingredient of power, awareness of opportunities, of accessible new resources and of the "specs" of innovations may be much more limited.

It becomes therefore critical to open new lines and media of two-way communication -- without necessarily directly confronting the sources of power that restrict information flow -- in order to improve and equalize access to the fac ts and understandings that generate broad ownership of development initiatives. Tools for improving communication flows include cultivation of proliferating media like private and/or local radio, and use of written materials in African vehicular languages or Arabic script in addition to dominant international languages. Literacy in these languages has always included a significant increment of population not covered by English or French, and they have become increasingly widespread in recent years. Local newspapers in African language have taken root in many areas of the Sahel.

7. Promote lateral exchange among beneficiaries of development investments and programs at intermediate and local levels. Much traditional African culture reposes on networks and networking, which have provided the strength a nd resiliency to survive hardship as well as varied means for enriching quality of life. One major challenge of development is to find ways of broadening these traditional repertories in order to create new forms of association that span geographical and ethnic lines and that provide new bases for resource accumulation and new avenues for intermediation. Top-down program development and administration modes tend to generate networks of a strictly "clientelist" nature, however. Systematically usi ng development programs as an occasion at the same time to link participants in different circumstances and communities in new ways can have major "spillover" benefits both for ownership of the targeted activities and for creation of increased c ollective capacity for innovation and investment.

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POLICY: DOING THE RIGHT THING

Reforming the "how" of development aid only makes sense, of course, if the "what" addresses real needs and is of sufficient potency to make a difference. The remaining pages are devoted to summarizing some of the les sons of the PADLOS-Education study regarding the orientation of outside assistance, particularly in respect to the development of the human resources required for successful decentralization. A background remark first, however. The study was developed on the premise that decentralization is necessarily a two-way street: It must be both bottom-up and top-down to succeed, and the two strategies have to dovetail. It has therefore more to do with a redefinition of the respective roles of center, region and locality than it does with the supposed superannuation of one or the other. (In fact, the supportive and faclitative role that central government plays in a decentralized framework requires more competence -- and so a more proficient S tate apparatus -- than is needed in a traditional hierarchical one.)

The remarkable achievements, if still partial success, of many local associations rapidly pose the problem of better articulation between regional and subregional authorities and these emergent local initiatives, as well as questions co ncerning the culturally-relevant judicial, legislative and administrative forms that will give permanency and meaning to democracy at the local level. The small geographic region is the arena where the two complementary forms of decentralization -- top-do wn and bottom-up -- meet and must be reconciled in a democratic framework. This makes clear at the same time the importance of harmonizing sorely-needed training for newly elected regional and communal officials with the training offered to, or organized by, local associations.

Practically speaking, this perspective suggests that governments and donors should give as much attention to identifying and nurturing the conditions -- legal, economic, informational -- under which "bottom-up" initiatives can take root and lateral linkages among businesses and communities form as they do to figuring out how to privatize, delegate or deconcentrate state functions. In any case, the following paragraphs present a series of policy lessons and practical implicati ons that spring from the PADLOS-Education study and flesh out this perspective.

(1) No effective and democratic decentralization without closely-related education and training efforts. Education and training programs are prerequisites for ensuring the democratizing effect and the sustainability of decentr alization initiatives. Where initiatives to decentralize or deconcentrate development functions and decision-making powers are not accompanied by systematic -- and, to the extent possible, locally-managed -- efforts to develop new competencies among a re latively broad set of stakeholders, those powers risk being monopolized by a local elite and abused.

Training is required at two distinct levels:

(a) At the local level, where those responsible for assuming the new functions need the skills and knowledge necessary to exercise them proficiently and responsibly and those to whom they are accountable need enough understanding of the matter to ensure democratic control of operations.

(b) At the central/regional level, where government or sponsoring institution staff need the skills and knowledge to facilitate and support the process and provide requisite training and technical assistance.

(2) Three ingredients appear necessary for the success of such decentralization initiatives. They constitute at the same time a "recipe" for genuine capacity-building and compose a strategy for local accumulation and investment in three interdependent dimensions:

(a) Financial capitalization: Some actual transfer of resources, entitlements or income-generating potential. Schemes that involve no actual generation of new resources at the level of beneficiaries create little motivation or need for new management competence, and those that involve only a transfer of costs ("Let them pay for it!") seldom remain solvent.

(b) Institutional capitalization: Enablement and reinforcement of institutional capacities and frameworks for associating members, managing resources, selecting competent people for functions, holding them accountable and asse ssing outcomes. Frameworks of inter-community collaboration and enabling legislation for small business are among the most important of these.

(c) "Intellectual" capitalization (Human capital): Education and training facilities to help ensure that those charged with new responsibilities have the knowledge and skills necessary to discharge them and a larger number of other local stakeholders understand enough about the process to monitor activities and replace incumbents when necessary.

(3) Mobilizing the skills and competencies to take charge: Successful community organizations and local associations "font feu de tout bois" ("make fire from all [available] wood") -- that is, they draw on the entire mix of human resources of their constituency, including primary school leavers or dropouts, former literacy or Koranic students, out-migrators returned from urban centers, and people who have undergone diverse apprenticeships or job training experiences. Nonformal education programs are often the meeting point of these different groups and the place where knowledge acquired elsewhere is recycled into the specific skills and forms required by the new enterprises. From this poin t of view, nonformal and formal education programs clearly compose part of the same local system, and one that is increasingly needed to furnish "human capital" for local as well as for regional or national markets.

The spread of literacy in African languages and the presence of people literate in Arabic script and/or Arabic transcription of African language (e.g., ajami, wolofaw) have greatly facilitated the self-governance and operation of ma ny local associations and nascent enterprises, particularly in areas where knowledge of English or French is not widespread. Accounting systems have been successfully set up in these vernaculars and in some cases are used for effective management of hundr eds of millions of francs in transactions. The relation of widespread networks of Koranic learning to new local economic and socio-political activities and the practical literate and management competencies conferred by Koranic instruction and by sociali zation in related commercial ventures are, however, insufficiently understood.

(4) Empowering women: Nonformal education and literacy in African languages are often particularly important for the effective participation of women in decentralized development schemes, given the lower rates of school ing that typically characterize this group. The most successful forms of literacy and training for women place immediate emphasis on acquiring management and accounting skills. There are at the same time an increasing number of examples of women’s cooper atives, businesses and development associations -- in rural areas as well as in urban ones -- that have capitalized themselves to an impressive degree. This said, because of the greater difficulty women experience in obtaining credit, deficits in their pr evious access to education and training, and the weight of tradition, "co-ed" or mixed associations are still generally run by men and even those explicitly for women often still depend on male assistance in accounting and technical realms.

(5) Promoting local "HRD": To meet the knowledge and skill requirements of a truly democratic brand of decentralization and to make maximum mileage from the impetus that it can give to "education for all", we are increasingly required to think in terms of a locally-managed "human resource development system" -- that is, a mutually reinforcing network of all training facilities available in a given locality, from existing primary schools to nonformal education centers, Koranic or confessional institutes, and even systems for in- and out-migration. From the perspective of self-governing associations and businesses that are assuming important new socio-economic and political functions, these varied "training facilities" all constitute sources of competence and human resources -- each perhaps with its own comparative advantage -- that can be mobilized to meet and profit from the new challenges posed by democratization and decentraliz ation.

This is also where the movement for greater parent, teacher and community involvement in the governance of schools is most successfully reconciled with the larger decentralization impulse, because communities which are taking -- and whose citizens are acquiring the skills necessary to take -- greater responsibility for a series of new social and economic functions prove increasingly likely to approach schooling in the same fashion. It is no longer seen as the local and inviol ate outpost of a distant Ministry or culture, but as in some sense the education and training branch of the growing set of locally-managed enterprises, and therefore a logical target itself for a larger measure of local management.

(7) Revamping "Education for all" strategies: Under conditions of genuine decentralization like those sketched above, one finds an increasing number of communities which have opted to take their children’s basic educ ation in hand themselves -- including villages previously without schools that have established their own institutions of schooling, often based on the African language writing systems used in literacy programs, to ensure that no child reaches adulthood i lliterate. The examples strongly suggest that basic education -- formal as much as nonformal -- no longer needs to be conceptualized and pursued as a benefit solely dispensed (and often rationed) by a central school system but constitutes an activity that communities can and will organize successfully themselves, as an essential part of their own program of self-managed economic and social development, provided a modicum of decentralization and income-generation make this possible, appropriate tec hnical support and quality control are ensured, and transitions among languages of instruction and nonformal and formal modes of organization are facilitated.

(8) Revitalizing extension and innovation-diffusion methods: Public extension services (agriculture, forestry, health..) and traditional strategies for the diffusion of innovation seem increasingly outmoded by the growing comp lexity of local development problems and the increasing initiative and competence of their intended beneficiaries. "One size fits all" technical solutions and top-down dissemination methods find little audience, while examples abound that the gr owing number of literate rural adults are quite capable of playing an active role in the experimentation and dissemination processes.

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Right tools, right targets: The chance of making good choices and attaining sustainable outcomes are obviously much improved if those most concerned are integrally involved from the outset. And for that to happen, much learning must tra nspire on both sides. The human factor is both instrument and substance, both means and end in improving the record of foreign aid. For communities and groups across the Sahel to have the wherewithal to weave, use and market their own strong mats in the e ra of a new Charter, the institutions of learning and the institutions of doing must interweave their operations in new and innovative ways.