Evaluating (and continuing) the impact of aid to Africa: lessons from the Millennium Villages - ODI, Fantsuam Foundation, and Dadamac June 26, 2012
On 3 July 2012 I'm going to an ODI (Overseas Development Institute) meeting. - Evaluating the impact of aid to Africa: lessons from the Millennium Villages
There was a Millennium Village project in Nigeria fairly close to John Dada and Fantsuam Foundation, which is in Kaduna State. It was "the Pampaida cluster, located in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna"
Over the last few days John Dada and I have been discussing MV and the ODI meeting. He'd like to join in at a distance, but it's doubtful if his bandwidth would be up to it. I'm going to go in person to see if there is anything I can do on behalf of Fantsuam Foundation and the continuing legacy of the MV project.
Here are some of the things John said during our most recent skype chat:
Sannu Pam, here's an email we exchanged in 2010 in which I mentioned that the Jeffery Sacchs team in Nigeria were implementing a model which Fantsuam Foundtion has already successfully implemented, but linking up with them to come and visit us was not possible because they had to be directed from JS's office in US.
(Note from Pamela - I have copied the emails below this skype chat archive)
Unfortunately I never heard of them again since 2010
I am not aware that they did a needs assessment or that the program was an organic growth
JSacchs seems pretty close to the Abuja powers and that may have influenced the site selection etc.
Unlike the DFID programs of ESSPIN and PATHS whose preparation involved community meetings and meeting CSOs, the Millenium Village did not follow that strategy.
It seemed more top-down, well funded.
ESSPIN and PATHS are fully community based and with significant community ownership and control, and we can see it has a sustainability strategy inbuilt.
I have no such information about the MVs.
We certainly would love to link up with them and contribute to their sustainability and exit strategy, whatever those may be.
The theory of MV is what FF is implementing: its start and exit strategy are areas I have no information about.
It will be a shame if such a promising project would not continue
I expected that the MV village was a model to be replicated.
They could also team up with the grassroots approach of the ESSPIN and PATHS so that the a chain of self-sustaoning community based initiatives can be formed.
Regarding the emails referred to in the skype chat:
On 18 September 2010 John wrote to me;
Jeffery Sacchs is one of the authors of the MDGs. Director, the Earth Institute. President & Co-Founder, Millennium Promise
The midterm results of the Millennium Villages Project show that the integrated approach being used is working - including interventions in health, nutrition, education, agriculture, infrastructure and business development - and that these interventions disproportionately benefit women, who tend to be the most at-risk population. As their voices are strengthened, crop yields rise, infant mortality rates fall, educational attainment is increased, and the quality of life rises all around.
If we are serious about achieving the MDGs by 2015, we must make women an urgent global priority. Women make up a significant majority of the world's poorest people. Investing in women and girls pays dividends throughout entire communities and women should be at the heart of our vision for international development. In the coming week, I will be working closely with world leaders at the MDG Summit in New York to ensure that the voices of women everywhere are heard.
on 21/09/2010 John wrote
I asked if I had permission to quote him - John replied
I went back to the Millennium Villages website http://www.millenniumvillages.org/the-villages - but although I could read plenty of information about the projects and invitations to support them I could not find any "way in" for "people like John Dada and Fantsuam Foundation" - i.e local initiatives on the ground keen to be involved.
I have taken another look at the Millennium Villages website and its most recent report The Millennium Villages Project: The Next Five Years 2011-2015 The report has several big quotes:
- Over the first five years, the Millennium Villages Project reached nearly half a million people in 10 countries across sub-Saharan Africa. To date, the Project has shown that simple interventions applied through an integrated approach can bring substantial change.
- The MVP is committed to addressing issues of sustainability and maintenance to ensure that energy and infrastructure initiatives endure beyond the timeline of the Project.
- The ultimate goal of the Millennium Villages Project is to ensure that communities achieve the world’s Millennium Development Goals and are firmly on the path to self-sufficiency when the Project ends in 2015.
- The Millennium Villages model is fully realized when it is taken to scale. Scale-up efforts are already intensively underway in several countries across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.
- Ultimately, the lessons learned, technologies introduced, and progress recorded during the 10-year period of the Millennium Villages Project will remain with the country teams and in the public domain for all to consult and use for scale-up efforts everywhere.
It gives project targets:
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—endorsed in 2000 by all United Nations member
states—are the world’s shared framework for development. The MVP’s program targets are
aligned with the MDGs, and Project interventions are specifically designed to achieve the Goals.
And then it goes through the MDGs is more detail. There is extensive MDG information on Wikipedia
Now, call me naive, but it seems to me that replication and a lasting legacy is a strong part of the Millennium Villages message, so of course John and I are interested to know how that will play out. The programme has another three years to run. We wonder if there is any way that Fantsuam Foundation (which is in the same state as the Pampaida Millenium Village cluster) could somehow help with the ongoing legacy and replication. We know that not only do we have a project on the ground which is deeply aligned to the integrated approach of MVs. We also (through Dadamac) have a strong person-to-person communication channel between Nigeria and whoever has access to the Internet - such as the "people at the top" who are behind the vision of the MV program and who live in countries well served by the Internet.
NB - There is evidence of our good communication channel though our latest UK-Nigeria collaborative project "Fast Tractor" - see http://www.facebook.com/FastTractor.
Going in hope - yet again
I often go to meetings in London - arranged by various organsiations - meetings that seem relevant to my friends in Nigeria and elsewhere who are working on local community driven projects. I go in the hope that there will be some practical relevance, something positive that I can tell my friends about, something that will be impacting what they are doing.
I often go in the hope that at some point I will discover how to enable communication between top-down and bottom-up i.e. people who are making things happen, or deciding what shoud be done, at a high level, and the rich sources of local information that I connect with via the Internet - people active in local projects who share information with me frequently.
Imagine for instance what John Dada and his team at Fantsuam Foundation learn by serving the poorest of the poor through micro-finance, with a team of field officers going out to visit the clients month after month, year after year. Literally tens of thousands of women have been helped over the years. The field officers are hearing about local micro businesses, and sharing in the challenges, successes and failures of the women running these enterprises. Imagine knowing thousands of these stories, and seeing how the women are empowered over the years and what they choose to spend their gradually increasing income on (education for their children. health care, phone calls, a new wrappe). All these little details come through, and more besides.
Imagine what a mine of information that network could prove to anyone making policy decisions who really wanted to know about the realities on the ground (and the micro-finance is only one part of Fantuam's work - there are various integrated development projects at Fantsuam). I believe it would be valuable if this information could flow more freely. (See "Why Dadamac? - Dadamac - the Internet-enabled alternative to top-down development"
Usually I come away from London meetings disappointed because I can't see that they will make any difference to the poeple I know, and there doesn't seem any way to make a connection regarding communication either. I tell myself I won't bother going to any more meetings. I decide I'll just keep on making information visible online so it will be available to anyone who does want to know grass-roots realities.
This meeting looks special and I feel I ought to be there. Perhaps it will just be people talking, but perhaps, just perhaps, there will be an opportunity for two way communication, a practical outcome and a better ongoing legacy from the MV project in Kaduna State.