Social Access Grant video - Part 1

Salahley field trip report - 01/04/2012

The third phase roll out of the Beneficiary SMS Feedback system took place on 25^th March, 2012, in Salahley district. We visited Salahley town and 6 villages with ongoing Community-Driven Recovery and Development (CDRD) projects, including: construction and rehabilitating of water tanks (barkets) and wells and farming irrigation system. We met beneficiaries and carried out mobilization and awareness campaign in: Ina-igare, Ina-guha,  Aden Abokor, Qolbulale, Qoldhuhule, Dhinbiriyale villages and Salahley town.

Goal:

·        Roll out Beneficiary SMS Feedback System to Salahley district.

·       Mobilize beneficiaries, informing and explaining to them how the feedback 
     system works.

·        Establishing a good working relations with the Community Project 
     Implementation Unit (CPIU), Village Committees and local DRC staff to help us   
     implement the project effectively and act as our contact point in the field.

After travelling for 2 hours on a rough road for 75km south of Hargiesa, we reached Salahley town about 2pm. On the way, we witnessed signs of drought and villages where many residents migrated to save their livestock. We have come across skeletons of dead animals on the roadside. Winter season is dry, cold and harsh for nomadic communities living in rural areas and they often migrate with their young children and livestock in search of water and greener pastures.

For the following 5 days we visited beneficiaries in Salahley town and the 6 villages for mobilization and awareness raising, these were mainly beneficiaries of water tanks rehabilitation, distribution of seeds and farming tools and community centres.   Beneficiaries included women, students, project implementation committee units (CPIU) and village elders. We met them in groups to make sure we cover as many beneficiaries as possible. As we have done with all the other beneficiaries, we explained in detail how the beneficiary SMS feedback system works, gave them a demonstration by sending an SMS that returned an automated reply. They welcomed the idea and liked that they had a direct access to the Hargeisa office where they can send their feedback any time of the day. The meetings were interactive with beneficiaries asking a lot of questions. 

In Qolbulale village, located on the Somaliland and Ethiopia border, we met Tawakal Women's Association, an active women’s group advocating on issues of education, health, sanitation, and development. This was the only village where we met an organised and active women’s group. We interviewed the chairman of the association, Ms. Koos Aden. She told us that CDRD project has supported Qolbulale residents and women in particular, by building public toilets and distributing food, farming tools, and rehabilitating of 4 water tanks. She has expressed her gratitude for these much needed services which have contributed to the wellbeing of all the residents but she called on CDRD to do more during the winter season by providing humanitarian assistance. In winter, the village suffers acute water and food shortages, sanitation problems and they need animal vaccination to save their livestock.

To manage beneficiaries’ expectations from DRC we emphasized that we will definitely pass on their requests and concerns to DRC, but emphasized that the feedback system is more than requesting for further assistance and we would like to hear details of how previous projects have contributed to their lifestyles. To give them examples of kinds of helpful feedbacks we are looking for, we have shared some SMSes received from beneficiaries in El-Afweny, Odweyne and Qardho regions, which included detailed SMSes of how particular projects have affected beneficiaries’ lives and some complaints, which help improve project delivery and strengthen the relationship between DRC and beneficiaries.

Beerweeso village beneficiaries

Beerweeso village beneficiaries, a photo by CDRD project in Somalia on Flickr.

Beneficiaries taking part of a workshop to produce a community action plan, locally driven process to determine and prioritize the village's needs for funding.

Extract: Policy Briefing from BBC Media Action. March 2012

Our beneficiary SMS feedback project has been covered in the March edition of the BBC Media Action's monthly E-newsletter. Bellow is an extract and at the end you can find a link to the full brief. 

"Still left in the dark? How people in emergencies use communication to survive – and how humanitarian agencies can help"

Feedback on community projects: The Danish Refugee Council

The Community Driven Recovery and Development (CDRD) project in Somalia provides small grants to communities for local projects identified and managed by community committees. In the interests of effective long distance management – and transparency – the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) has placed as much project information as possible online on a dedicated CDRD website and on facebook, including photos of theprojects at key stages – a requirement for the release of new tranches of funding.

One unexpected and positive side effect of the online approach has been direct engagement from the Somali diaspora. DRC have seen a number of cases in which Somalis overseas have become interested in projects, especially those in their areas of origin, to the point of donating their own money to support these particular projects. “We have had people from the diaspora topping up the money for the community,” said one DRC staff member.

DRC are now orientating their online strategy to target such members of the diaspora. “We hope that putting information online through social networks will give more opportunities to the diaspora that would like to support initiatives that take place in their community of origin, but with which they may not have strong links.” DRC then applied to the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF) for support to establish mechanisms, primarily SMS, whereby benefi ciaries could contact the project directly with feedback and complaints, and to support their social media work. All feedback is posted on the CDRD website, organised via the Ushahidi mapping system that is managed via one simcard installed on a galaxy tablet, requiring no special arrangement or set-up by a telecom company. The primary motivation was to open direct communication channels with community members without the mediation of gatekeepers – such as community representatives and local authorities – who liaise directly with fi eld staff as a matter of course.

Feedback is translated and managed by two local staff members. DRC staff visit communities to explain the system and how it works to ensure everyone understands how to use it. To overcome problems of illiteracy, the project’s Somali staff are developing partnerships between schoolkids and parents (as the children are often more comfortable with new technology). “We see this as a pilot.” said one staff member. “We also run a big wet feeding programme in Mogadishu. A system like this could allow us to collect statistics – if we get 500 messages from one kitchen then that will tell us about food quality”.

To date the project has received fewer SMS than anticipated (under 100 in three months), most of them complimentary or saying thank you for support. One of the biggest challenges is working out how to respond and engage, especially with those whose information or requests do not relate to DRC’s work. DRC believes that a system level approach may be needed in the longer termDRC stresses that its work in this area could not have happened without support from the HIF, which has given them the space and staffi ng capacity to develop the software and models necessary. 

You can download the original full policy brief from the link bellow. The above extract is on page 8.  

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/policybriefing/bbc_media_action_still_left_in_the_dark_policy_briefing.pdf

Kiosks in Bosaso city.

These just seemed too inviting to pass up., a photo by CDRD project in Somalia on Flickr.

Typical place people with no electricity at their homes will charge their phones and buy air time.

Our 100th SMS, received today!

"We congratulate the CDRD and  its staff, we are very happy with the work they do here such as: the construction of the community centre, which has created jobs for some residents who are poor. This project will help strengthen the community’s relations and development."

No beneficiary details provided

Lan-mulaho community,

Odweyne district

  

Original SMS in Somali: "Hadaanu nahay dad waynaha ku dhaqan tuulada lanmulaaxo waxaanu ham balyo sharafeed u diraynaa hay ada D R C .iyo shaqaalaheeda aad iyo aad baanu ugu faraxsanahay waxqabad keeda uu ka mid yahay guriga dad wanaha kaasoo iminkana dad dan yar ahi ay shaqo kaheleen kadibna iskuxidhka bulshada iyo horumarkeeda waxwaykataridoonta"

How a village peacefully voted out a dysfunctional all-male committee

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 19^th 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 22^nd, 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.