This time my mission to Uganda was limited to within the capital city, Kampala. This was despite the fact that the main aim of my mission was to finalise especially the district local government proposals that I have been negotiating with the local government authorities.
You are probably wondering, ‘but district local government should be in the districts, not in Kampala city, right?” True but I will explain later why my visit was only in Kampala.
My mission plan also included negotiating partnerships with a number of non-governmental organisations.
Before I go on, however, let me first tell you a little bit about the context of our proposal negotiations. According to our baseline research findings on the three goals (in the targeted three districts: Apac, Kumi and Nakapiripirit) in Uganda: young children have more than adequate space and natural materials to play with around their homes. There are also virtually no places outside home where the youngest children could spend their days. The main challenge however is the state of hygiene and safety of that space especially given that many of the youngest children are often under the care of older siblings/children, not adults. It is not surprising therefore that on average half of the children were reported to have been sick one month prior to the research. This is also in a context where the majority of children are exposed (both as victim and witness) to violence. The research showed that on average seven out of every ten women interviewed in Kumi and Apac had experienced violence from their husband or partner in the one year preceding the research; every 8 out of 10 families in Apac and 4 out of 10 in Kumi believe in beating children as a form of discipline. Interestingly enough, the poorest district, Nakapiripirit, recorded the lowest rates of violations: only 3 out of every 10 women had experienced violence in the one year preceding the research, and only 3.6 out of every 10 families believe in beating children as a form of discipline. At the same time, in all the districts children talked about the lack of basic essentials, not just what we mostly know of - food and medical care, but a basic thing like sleep. How does a child sleep not only because s/he is hungry, but without the basics – no mat (let alone a mattress) and no adequate cover, nothing to keep her/him warm? That is what the children of Apac, Kumi and Nakapiripirit said. Yet without decent sleep, children cannot grow or develop properly. “Sleep is the primary activity of the brain during early development” and “a child will spend 40 percent of their childhood asleep”, according to the National Sleep Foundation.
In that kind of context, and more importantly with the hard evidence from the research, including the fact that there is high awareness among households about the issues and their impact on children, one would expect that the district government as well as NGOs would propose to address the core issues underlying the situation of children. Instead, the combined district local government team of health, education, water and community development people, and some of the NGOs are proposing to do even more awareness raising and sensitisation about the same issues and their impact on children, and to give things to the poor households. Understandably, awareness raising and sensitisation in workshops, the use of IEC (information, education and communication) materials, as well as giving things out to people is easy to budget for. However, when one asks about what change is expected from such interventions, there is only theory to it - it would propel parents to take action on the actual issues. But why parents would do something they have not been doing before by being told the same things is a question whose answer I have yet to get.
So back to the first question, why was I in Kampala and not in the districts to discuss district government proposals? The answer is simple. By the time of my visit, it had become clear that the district government people were stuck or were sticking to their approach of having more awareness raising and sensitisation in workshops, and we needed to work differently. We needed to completely redesign the district proposals to reflect the approach we believed would help shift the high awareness to behaviour change, and help engage parents in a meaningful way to address the challenges they faced in enabling the wellbeing of their young children. We needed to get parents talking amongst themselves, reflecting and interrogating their situation and their actions, and coming up with possible solutions with support from project facilitators. In addition, we would need an oversight position for the first at least two years of the district implementation process to ensure that the redesigned approach would be implemented as expected.
The person for the oversight position was not too difficult to find. Nascent Research and Development Organisation (Nascent RDO), an organisation I have worked with to support partners in the past in Uganda and Kenya fitted the position well, especially since they had come up with an interesting training process for the village health teams (VHTs are going to be the main vehicle for engaging parents and families in the redesigned approach) when I had approached them earlier. So with Nascent RDO as the coordinator of the district projects and the research team (the Centre for Basic Research) that was helping the district governments develop the proposals, we met to restrategise and redesign the district proposal – in Kampala and not in the districts.
What this new approach means also is that after the proposals are completed, we will need to go back to the district local governments to get what the researchers call their ‘buy-in’ to the proposals. Their buy-in is important since they are the people who will be implementing the project. At the same time, we are aware of the likelihood that they might bring up objections or delays because the projects are not as they envisioned. Our plan therefore is to also get the buy-in of the sub-county local government people. They are the people who are held directly responsible for the delivery of services to the local population, and as a result, they are keener to embrace interventions which they recognise as helping them to fulfil their mandate of service delivery to the people. We have no doubt that they will embrace the district projects and support their implementation.
Nyambura Rugioy
October 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment