So, after a couple of complaints from friends that I am not keeping the blog up to date, I resume with some comments I wrote to Gill Scharer one of the three (the others being George Clark and myself, who came to Southern Sudan under British Council auspices in 1981. (two others, Paul Fanning - now in Reading, his marvellous wife Eleanor died four years ago) and Mark Todd were already there at the University of Juba. Whereas we were to be based in Juba, she was posted to Maridi, a place I have now been back to a couple of times this year.

<< Gill, what I wanted to tell you about was my visit to Maridi and discovering (in my house in Entebbe where I am based these days) the books you wrote for Intermediate schools in 1983 (CDC/British Council) and how we may actually want to use them as source material again”.

Well, I went to Maridi to do a rescue operation for a British NGO which had let its local projects go horribly wrong.

The UK HQ was trying to get itself out of a sticky mess and chose exactly the wrong moment to switch its management from the Kampala office (good) to the Khartoum office (bad at this time) while trying to find out what had happened to the project itself.

So I was sent to sort it out which I did, and for once got well paid for it. The value of my work was seen in the fact that I told them categorically not to do X or Y if they wanted to keep the project (lots of DfID money) going. When I was out of the way, the Khartoum management promptly did X (= Do not send a northerner to look at the books, use someone from East Africa) in order to show who was boss, so the local man got his friends in SPLA Military intelligence to arrest the accountant and a few other people and throw them into jail, just as I predicted).

Well, back to Maridi – it has been the home of a CARE project funded by USAID, known as the ‘What happened to $25 million dollars project?’ or, more prosaically, the Sudan Basic Education Programme). Maridi was peaceful for a very long time, and quite a few NGOs are based there. Unfortunately the LRA en route to Congo attacked it very viciously twice and while I was there most expatriates had been evacuated. Very few compounds have any real security provision. Yambio was also attacked. In the same period (April) disaffected unpaid SPLA soldiers (Tall, black) attacked the UNHCR compound in Yei killed a staff member and wounded others, and got nothing, since UN does not normally keep cash on premises. That in turn led to Tim Brown (ex U of Juba) being evacuated. He had been working with UNHCR since the mid-90s, first as a UNV.

I stayed in the CARE residential compound very near your former house which is used by another NGO now. Part of the old complex were you worked is the big Amref nurses’ training school (where, while I was there two nurses viciously beat up the Ugandan principal because they failed their exams).

There is still a sort of Curriculum Development Centre (SPLM now GoSS) there, though since the Peace Agreement almost everything is centering back in Juba and the complexes, which were in ‘liberated territory both in Maridi and in Rumbek (and to a lesser extent in Yei) are diminishing somewhat.

I recalled the VSO Robert (any contact with him?) and your water tank ploy with William Wood, when you let him go without any water to wash for a whole weekend to prove the point that you had erratic water supplies. Of course, you had actually set up an alternative system, which
somehow you forgot to mention to him.

I also remembered that I had seen your, then our, land-rover in Juba last October when I first went back. Even Diana’s, old when the world was young, is still creeping around among the flashy Prados air-conditioned, tinted windows, used by the Government of Southern Sudan, the SPLM leadership (much of a muchness) and the UN and NGOs.

And your English source-book, typed manually, (CARE, the biggest NGO in Maridi has loads of computers, many using solar power, but no public internet café yet I have just put one up in Yei). Marididi still doesn’t have water or electricity either. In fact I could tell very little difference between 2006 and 1984 which was probably the last time I was there.
I don’t know how much you have been following Southern Sudan – it’s only a shortish segment of your varied life whereas for me it has been more than that, as I continued to have a lot to do with the Southern Sudanese refugees, with not much of a break since I left Juba in 1985 and Khartoum in 1990.

Right now (as Echo Bravo, my consultancy organisation) I run a project on behalf of the British Council (they are using my project and others to test the water) to teach English and Communication Skills to those who did not leave during the civil war and especially to the population of Juba who were twenty years or so cut off from anything but a tenuous connection with Khartoum.

In Juba during that period teachers had had to sign a declaration that they would teach in Arabic in order to continue getting salaries. In the liberated areas, on the other hand, while Juba Arabic remains the oral language of solidarity everything is in English (with the usual nod to vernacular teaching; the Summer Institute of Linguistics is tentatively returning and has reclaimed their compound in Juba).

This time round there is no ambiguity, at least as far as language is concerned. The 11 Ministers of Education (10 for each of the states of the south and one for Govt of SS) have made it clear that all the education system will be in English, though ‘When’ is the usual southern problem.
I told the Minister (who, bizarrely for such an important post is not from SPLM, but a southerner nominated by the National Congress (Islamist) party), that we could do it in two years. He doesn’t believe me (he’s a medical doctor) and says it will be done year by year, thus taking eight years for primary (intermediate doesn’t exist now).

People will vote with their feet – parents will send their children to English schools, for the time being in ex-liberated areas and in Uganda and Nairobi. Already a lot of young people who turned up in the first euphoria after the agreement was signed have gone back to Kenya and Uganda, disappointed that there are no serious efforts to get a University system going apart from a partial and very unensthusiastic return of the Unviersities of Juba, Wau and Malakal. Their staff make a lot of money in the North and don’t want to come back to a stinky, dusty Juba with high prices but no services.

Meanwhile, an attempt at setting up a high-cost private school in Juba got exactly two takers!
Why? Well, in way it never was before (throw away those rose-tinted glasses, Barry) Juba is a very miserable place to be. There is no decent accommodation for anyone coming in from outside. Huge sums are spent by GoSS and others on ‘safari-type’ tented accommodation – owned by ‘big’ Sudanese and run by Kenyans and Ugandans -- which can cost $130 a night, not always including food. The tents are cramped into tight compounds mainly along the river bank and some have as many as 100 tents bringing in over $100 each every night.
There is almost nothing cheaper (I tried once to stay in one which mainly houses SPLA officers; it was a nightmare and all but out of control. The officers had huge families staying with them who all ate for the price of one, from the meagre buffet. Going to the loo at night meant tripping over Kalashnikovs of sleeping guards outside many of the tents.
In eighteen months there has been no infrastructure development (naughty people say it is because they are working out how to get round the restrictions placed on the money so they can share out the contract spoils – that was certainly true for the small mobile phone network which has been set up).

There is less tarmac than there was in the eighties but just as much shit underfoot as the town still has no sewage system. There is one bus route, the same as when we were there. There is no electricity and the water is untreated, and as soon as you get off the Uganda-Juba road access through Yei (the East Bank road via Nimule still has LRA remnants on it and has not been repaired at all) the roads are as miserable as ever, indeed worse.

Outside Juba, throughout Equatoria, there is no electricity, no radio, no phones and everyone uses Uganda money (and drinks Uganda beer) as they have since the late eighties. (In Juba you use Sudanese dinars, of course. In the far east of Equatoria and other places reached from Kenya, like Rumbek, it is Kenya shillings).

After being a secondary school teacher in East and West Africa for 11 years, and completing my Masters in Edinburgh University, in 1981 I applied for a British Council job in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and, as an afterthought, for another in Juba, Southern Sudan.
Arbitrarily, it seemed to me, simply because I had no school-age dependents and another candidate did, I was offered the job in Juba, which was a non-family duty station, and he was offered Dar es Salaam. This arbitrary decision dropped me for the first time, for good or for ill, into the front-line of the Aid World.
On paper, my task in Juba was to teach English in a new secondary school, while at the same time training English teachers in the University of Juba, using the school for teaching practice.
I did all that, but also found myself, with my indefatigable colleague George, developing the school from scratch. Since, when we arrived, the school had six small rooms and seven hundred designated pupils, with a head teacher who boasted he would get the numbers up to 3000, one of our first tasks was to expel students Followed shortly by having to request the bull-dozing of squatters’ housing nearby which was preventing the school from expanding.
I was also exposed for the first time to UN agencies, Non Governmental Organisations, to corruption and the vocabulary of Aid like ‘empowerment’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘community-based’. Not all of these words appeared at the same time of course; regular seminars were needed to freshen up the latest vocabulary
I gained friends and colleagues who did not work in the relatively predictable milieu of a school and who had a different perspective on the people, the society and the economy from any I had been exposed to before, one that characterised ‘the people I worked for’, such as the students I taught, as ‘Direct Beneficiaries’, the whole of the rest of the population being indirect beneficiaries in some mysterious way.
The people who were involved in the work were ‘stake-holders’. Aid workers seemed to navigate easily among donors, project managers and proposal writers – or play each of the roles at one time or another, and who, often at a remarkably early age, were handling large sums of money that a teacher could only dream of.
I met consultants who reported and validated multi-million dollar projects after a visit of just three hours, I came across people who rationalised this (which I had thought was just because Juba was a pretty unpleasant place to stay) with terms like ‘Rapid Appraisal’.
I had my first experience of corruption, of refugees and displaced people and of careerists focussing on getting it right in their agency but not necessarily getting it right for the people.
I was plunged into what I now call Acronymia – the incredible use of acronyms; interestingly, though, looking back, it seems we were spared one of the current curses of Aid, the endless seminars and workshops which have spawned their own protocols and language and even the delightful word ‘seminarista’ for someone who spends most of his time in seminars.
A refugee specialist attacked me in a book for applying to refugees the same admission standards as to the long-suffering ordinary people of South Sudan (and daring to disbelieve the refugees’ claims to have lost their documents, which would have shown how brilliant they were). When she then later proceeded to espouse a doctrine that it was acceptable for refugees to lie to get what they want, I started developing some of my own views on the subject. I began, maybe later than others, but perhaps with more perspective, to start to form and inform opinion, and eventually become one of those advisers and consultants I had been so dubious about.
I started asking some questions. I wondered why a cartoon book produced at huge expense promoting Life Skills choices for teenage girls was never stolen and sold in the market. Could it be that no one actually liked it or wanted it? After all dictionaries and science textbooks are stolen all the time from school libraries.
Why a hugely expensive AIDS campaign couldn’t change their roadside billboards even once in three years.
Why no one understood (it seemed to me) that everyone in an HIV/AIDS seminar will agree at three o’clock in the afternoon that behaviour change is desirable, but everyone knows that at midnight after a couple of beers things will be different.
I wondered why half a meeting could be taken up with detailed reporting on how many pencils an NGO had delivered to schools (and where one missing pencil had gone) but no one looked at the outcome of education, that is whether the children were learning anything.
When a consultant told me that my little refugee support set-up was biased towards boys I went into denial, until she pointed out that my staff were always telling people to ‘come back tomorrow’, something, in the rough life led by refugees in the city, a boy found much easier to do than a girl, since no one questioned his movements, and he had all day to kill.
Close contact through teaching practice supervision led me to understand that young men often drop out of teaching (having consoled themselves for a time with the school girls) because they are sent to – and left in - village schools, so that the teaching wives of civil servants can have the town jobs. They never get promoted and have no chance of making a bit of extra money by private tuition, in the village. No one, it seemed, had noticed this very powerful reality before.
When, for the umpteenth time, I was involved in training untrained volunteers to teach in IDP camps I wondered why there were never any teachers among the refugees, and I finally understood that people with salaries flee towards the salary, that is to the towns in their own country. It is only the poorest who flee to another country.
Then, in 2002, I myself had to flee on foot with the population from the volcano’s lava in Goma, and realised that the population looked after itself and families without external organisation or contingency plans; that indeed these might have made things worse. Further that the aid we gave after the volcano was not at all what the people wanted or needed at the time.
In this book I try to answer some of the questions that a new aid worker asks, in order to explain or put into perspective the vocabulary and practices of what has come to be known as the aid industry.
These are questions like:
If you give money to street children, do you get more street children?
If we respect people’s cultures, and their culture doesn’t want girls to go to school, where do we get the right to insist that girls should go to school from?
Is NGO and UN language necessary?
Where are the Togolese projects in Japan?
I AM A TEACHER
The main work I have done in Africa has been in education, but I have in more recent years done several managerial jobs, mainly in places regarded as fairly difficult, recently in South Sudan, Somalia and the East of D R Congo. Many of my examples will come, therefore, from education which hovers uneasily between emergency relief, rehabilitation and development.
Education is a problem for many agencies. If only we could simply inject children with mathematics as we do with various vaccines. Then we could have a national Mathematics Injection Weekend (MIW) and by Monday deal with a few resisting cases, then wash our hands of it until the SIW (Science Injection Weekend).
Hardly any agency can cope with projects which need to last more than a year. The field is littered with one year projects rarely followed up if ever. In Uganda, in the mid-nineties, there was an excellent effort to introduce HIV/AIDS into the primary school syllabuses. Books were printed and distributed and teachers given some training. Now ten years later these books have never been updated or reprinted but nothing else has really replaced them. Why, I asked, did UNICEF go into publishing in this case? A publisher would have had every interest in keeping the books up to date. UNESCO-PEER did a very good job in re-launching school textbook supply in Somalia, but did nothing to encourage local publishing.
I have spent the last three years working in the Congo for UN agencies. The greatly misnamed ‘Democratic Republic is a vast territory with a difficult past and a complicated present.
I worked in the East in areas held by rebels or under the control of militias, though usually just after the worst of the physical violence, in the ambiguous time called nowadays, post-conflict, which as others have pointed out, may actually be a worse time for ordinary people; the violence may well be continuing at local level, with a settling of scores, or ‘creating geographical facts’ even though a deal has been signed somewhere. The perpetrators of the violence and chaos are pursuing their own goals in big hotels in some faraway city while the victims have to live with, or die from, the lack of hospitals, drugs, simple security or good transport.
The deal which brought some kind of peace to Congo in 200X saw an unelected president (the son of another unelected president) remain in office surrounded by 4 vice-presidents, two of whom were rebel leaders with blood on their hands and a bloated cabinet made up of unelected representatives of most of the armed factions with some civil society representatives [redo].

This site is about working in the 'aid world'

After being a secondary school teacher in East and West Africa for 11 years, and completing my Masters in Edinburgh University, in 1981 I applied for a British Council job in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and, as an afterthought, for another in Juba, Southern Sudan.

Arbitrarily, it seemed to me, simply because I had no school-age dependents and another candidate did, I was offered the job in Juba, which was a non-family duty station, and he was offered Dar es Salaam. This arbitrary decision dropped me for the first time, for good or for ill, into the front-line of the Aid World.
On paper, my task in Juba was to teach English in a new secondary school, while at the same time training English teachers in the University of Juba, using the school for teaching practice.

I did all that, but also found myself, with my indefatigable colleague George, developing the school from scratch. Since when we arrived the school had six small rooms and seven hundred designated pupils, with a head teacher who boasted he would get the numbers up to 3000, one of our first tasks was to expel students
I was also exposed for the first time to UN agencies, Non Governmental Organisations, to corruption and the vocabulary of Aid like Â?empowermentÂ?, Â?sustainabilityÂ? and Â?community-basedÂ?. Not all of these words appeared at the same time of course; regular seminars were needed to freshen up the latest vocabulary

I gained friends and colleagues who did not work in the relatively predictable milieu of a school and who had a different perspective on the people, the society and the economy from any I had been exposed to before, one that characterised Â?the people I worked forÂ?, such as the students I taught, as Â?BeneficiariesÂ?, the whole of the rest of the population being indirect beneficiaries in some mysterious way.
The people who were involved in the work were Â?stake-holdersÂ?. Aid workers seemed to navigate easily among donors, project managers and proposal writers Â? or play each of the roles at one time or another, and who, often at a remarkably early age, were handling large sums of money that a teacher could only dream of.
I met consultants who reported and validated multi-million dollar projects after a visit of just three hours, I came across people who rationalised this (which I had thought was just because Juba was a pretty unpleasant place to stay) with terms like Â?Rapid AppraisalÂ?.

I had my first experience of corruption, of refugees and displaced people and of careerists focussing on getting it right in their agency but not necessarily getting it right for the people.

I was plunged into what I now call Acronymia Â? the incredible use of acronyms; interestingly, though, looking back, it seems we were spared one of the current curses of Aid, the endless seminars and workshops which have spawned their own protocols and language and even the delightful word Â?seminaristaÂ? for someone who spends most of his time in seminars.

A refugee specialist attacked me in a book for applying to refugees the same admission standards as to the long-suffering ordinary people of South Sudan (and daring to disbelieve the refugeesÂ? claims to have lost their documents, which would have shown how brilliant they were). When she then later proceeded to espouse a doctrine that it was acceptable for refugees to lie to get what they want, I started developing some of my own views on the subject. I began, maybe later than others, but perhaps with more perspective, therefore, to start to form and inform opinion, and eventually become one of those advisers and consultants I had been so dubious about.

I started asking some questions. I wondered why a cartoon book produced at huge expense promoting Life Skills choices for teenage girls was never stolen and sold in the market. Could it be that no one actually wanted it? Why a hugely expensive AIDS campaign couldnÂ?t change their roadside billboards even once in three years. Why no one understood (it seemed to me) HIVt everyone in an HOV/AIDS seminar will agree at three oÂ?clock ibehaviourernoon that behaviour change is desirable, but everyone knows that at midnight after a couple of beers things will be different. I wondered why half a meeting could be taken up with detailed reporting onNGOw many pencils an NGO had delivered to schools (and where one missing pencil had gone) but no one looked at the outcome of education, that is whether the children were learning anything.

When a consultant told me that my little refugee support set-up was biased towards boys I went into denial, until she pointed out that my staff were always telling people to Â?come back tomorrowÂ?, something, in the rough life led by refugees in the city, a boy found much easier to do than a girl, since no one questioned his movements, and he had all day to kill.

Close contact through teaching practice supervision led me to understand that young men often drop out of teaching (having consoled themselves for a time with the school girls) because they are sent to Â? and left in - village schools, so that the teaching wives of civil servants can have the town jobs. Young male teachers never get promoted and have no chance of making a bit of extra money by private tuition, in the village. No one, it seemed, had noticed this very powerful reality before.

When, for the umpteenth time, I was involved in training untrained volunteers to teach in IDP camps I wondered why there were never any teachers among the refugees, and I finally understood that people with salaries flee towards the salary, that is to the towns. It is only the poorest who flee to another country.

Then, in 2002, I myself had to flee on foot with the population from the volcanoÂ?s lava in Goma, and realised that the population looked after itself and families without external organisation or contingency plans; that indeed these might have made things worse. Further that the aid we gave after the volcano was not at all what the people wanted or needed at the time. ['Case for Cash']

In this blog I try to answer some of the questions that a new aid worker asks, in order to explain or put into perspective the vocabulary and practices of what has come to be known as the aid industry.

These are questions like:

If you give money to street children, do you get more street children?

If we respect peopleÂ?s cultures, and their culture doesnÂ?t want girls to go to school, where do we get the right to insist that girls should go to school from?

Is NGO and UN language necessary?

We have all seen Japanese cooperation projects in Togo. Where are the Togolese cooperation projects in Japan?

I AM A TEACHER

The main work I have done in Africa has been in education, but I have in more recent years done several managerial jobs, mainly in places regarded as fairly difficult, recently in South Sudan, Somalia and the East of D R Congo. Many of my examples will come, therefore, from education which hovers uneasily between emergency relief, rehabilitation and development.

Education is a problem for many agencies. If only we could simply inject children with mathematics as we do with various vaccines. Then we could have a national Mathematics Injection Weekend (MIW) and by Monday deal with a few resisting cases, then wash our hands of it until the SIW (Science Injection Weekend).

Hardly any agency can cope with projects which need to last more than a year. The field is littered with one year projects never followed up. In Uganda, in the mid-nineties, there was an excellent effort to introduce HIV/AIDS into the primary school syllabuses, books were printed and distributed and teachers given some training. Now ten years later these books have never been updated or reprinted but nothing else has really replaced them.