Weeks before I was scheduled to arrive in Bossaso, Puntland, 2
colleagues from the Danish Diming Group, were kidnapped in Galkayo! This
unfortunate incident tightened security in the whole of Puntland and affected my
planned trip to roll out the SMS beneficiary feedback system. It meant postponing
the trip and traveling to Nairobi for a personal security training course. The
course was worth it as I felt better prepared in case there were any security
threats.
I arrived in Bossaso, Puntland, on the 19th of
December. Security was very tight and I had to have security guards whenever I
stepped out of the DRC compound. I had to negotiate hard to be allowed to visit
beneficiaries outside Bossaso. The advice was that visiting Galkayo was totally
out of the question given the high security risk and after back and forth discussions
with both our Nairobi office and staff at the Bossaso office, I was finally
allowed to visit beneficiaries in Qardho, 3 hours drive from Bossaso. On the
condition that I took 2 body guards.
We arrived in Qardho on the 22nd, a small sleepy
town with friendly people. We went straight to meet beneficiaries of 4 projects:
Community market in Shimbiraale; a livelihood project and IDP camp in Qardho
town; community health post and 2 wells in Shire village. The first project
beneficiaries, a group of women at a community market in Shimbiraale, a village
just outside Qardho, had an interesting local governance issue they shared with
us. Their project is part of the Community-Driven Recovery and Development (CDRD)
and the market was already built and functioning.
Around 30 women were at the market when we visited, they seemed
keen to hear the purpose of our visit and about the project. In the middle of
my explanations, a woman with a speaker walked in, she looked like she was in
charge. She sat at the front and politely asked me to repeat the explanation
for her. It turned out she was one of the implementing committee members and a
very active member involved in few other local initiatives. She explained she just returned from a local ‘cleaning day’
event.
I found all the participants engaging, they asked a lot of questions
about how the project works and if they could test it by sending SMSes right
then. Even though I knew the basics about the project, they insisted on telling
me the history. They explained the following:
CDRD projects are typically given $15,000 to implement a project
local communities have chosen. The community is then asked to contribute 20% of
the fund in any way they can. Most common form of contribution is labour but in
the Shimbiraale case, the community contributed the land on which the market
was built. The land was valued at $4,000, more than the expected 20% contribution.
As part of the grant, the community is also required to
select an implementing committee to manage the day to day management of the funds
and the project. The Shimbiraale village residents ended up selecting an
all-male committee made of 11 members and they set up a deadline for the
completion of the market.
The committee only built the foundation of the market and the
project fell behind schedule. The
community, mostly the female members, started pressuring the committee to
finish the project as they needed to sell their produce in the market. Impatient
with the slow progress and lack of explanation, some of these female community
members, called for a village meeting and proposed to vote out the committee!
After a village meeting, the committee was found to have:
·
Lack
of cooperation - among themselves and with the community members, which has
interrupted the project’s implementation.
·
Lack
of commitment - most of the elected committees had their personal projects and
prioritized them over the work assigned by the community.
This led the community to vote the whole committee out and
vote in a new committee entirely made up of female members. The new committee managed
to complete the construction of the market within a month of taking over.
I was amazed with the efficiency of the
female members of Shimbiraale village and how determined they were to sort the
problem out. We hear a lot about power struggle and mostly male-domination in the
decision-making process at this level in
most Somali villages and towns but this is the first time I witnessed the
results of a fair and democratic system where a village unanimously voted out a
dysfunctional committee and an all-male committee at that, for the benefit of
the whole community! This story made it worth all the security hassle I had to
go through to visit the beneficiaries. It is the kind of success story of local
decision-making and governance I hope to hear more of.
