September 29th - Bulan puasa

This week I have been going back and forth between Calang and Teunom, our two field offices in the district of Aceh Jaya.


Saturday was Syakban, the day before the start of Ramadan (bulan pusa). In Calang, this was celebrated by setting up a camp on the beach in a place called Jabi, where most of the male local staff spent the night from Friday to Saturday. As is customary, on Friday night we all chipped in to buy a goat for the occasion… and Saturday morning we had a delicious curry!

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar in a Muslim year. It is the fasting month. This year, it starts on the 24^th of September and ends on the 23^rd of October, with Idul Fitri or Eid Al-Fitr (24^th and 25^th of October), which is informally referred to as Lebaran in Indonesia. Ramadan is a time when Muslims concentrate on their faith and spend less time on the concerns of their everyday lives. It is a time of worship and contemplation. For the rest, productivity declines and the pace of life is significantly slowed down. Special arrangements for breakfast and lunch have to be made for non-Moslems expats. Food stalls and restaurants are all closed in the field. The evening meal, however, with the breaking of the fast (iftar or buka puasa) is particularly delicious and is accompanied with many sweet foods. It also takes some getting used to the amplified calls to prayers from the many mosques in the wee hours of the night and, in Teunom, the loud sirens to waken the faithful who fast early in the morning to have a meal before dawn (subuh).

Click here for more information about Ramadan in Indonesia and the consequences for expats.

On Monday I went with the new field office manager from Calang to Teunom, roughly three quarters of an hour driving. I always like coming to Teunom; it is a very cosy place and I always seem to be able to unwind there. It has much in the way of a local Non Governmental Organisation (NGO), where the people often work and live in the same building. It is easy to get the wrong idea when walking into the office in the afternoon. The generator is turned off between 13:00 and 18:00 and, when no field visits are planned, the staff is either sleeping or playing scrabble. This surprised me the first time I went to the office and so too did it surprise the new manager (the afternoon hours are then compensated for in the evening, when the power is back on).

The Teunom teams are really good and perform well. So I was chocked to find out that four persons had resigned recently, including all three team leaders. Staff turnover is a big problem, especially in Calang and Teunom. This month is worse than usual because it is a strategic moment to stop; they will be free when Lebaran comes and still receive their extra months’ salary. But people are strategic in this way everywhere! It is just a shame to loose so many good people; it is not easy to find suitable candidates to replace them.

In Teunom, I went with the new manager on some monitoring visits in the villages of Cot Trap, Teupin Asan and Seunebok Padang. In addition I have collected GPS coordinates from the sub-villages we work in so that the Spatial Information and Mapping Centre (SIM) – set up by the Office of the United Nations Recovery Coordinator for Aceh and Nias (UNORC) and Aceh and Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Board (BRR) – can customise a number of maps for us. And finally I have been to a number of CDR communities in Teunom and Calang for our Child Youth Protection and Development (CYPD) department to assess whether or not there are school committees. School committees consist of headmasters, teachers, parents and other interested parties whose function it is to decide on school policies. The committees effectively contribute to the involvement of community members in educational matters, decentralise decision-making and promote transparency, which is especially important in a country where corruption is a serious issue. In the future, the Community Development Boards (CDBs) might possibly play a role in reactivating school committees where they are not active and might work together to develop and implement educational project proposals.

It will leave it at this. See you next week!

Take care,

Alex

September 22nd - Procurement and bookkeeping

At last, I am back in the field and loving it! Not that I don’t enjoy staying in the main office in Banda Aceh, on the contrary, but it is easy to get out of touch with what is happening in the field. And that can lead to unnecessary frustrations, as was made apparent in my last log!

In the meantime, we have landed in the implementation phase of the different Integrated Community Projects (ICPs). A handful of projects are still being revised but there are not many left. The cow husbandry project and computer projects in Seungko Mulat, for instance, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, were approved this week. So we are busy monitoring.

The first step in implementing the projects is the procurement of materials and labour. There are clear guidelines for this; the basic rules are as follows:

- For amounts under 500 USD, all receipts must be kept;

- For amounts between 500 and 5,000 USD, we require a minimum of three quotations;

- For amounts between 5,000 and 20,000 USD, a closed tender process should be held on a local level;

- For amounts upwards of 20,000 USD, an open tender process should be held on provincial level (and because of it is a sizeable sum, the International Rescue Committee [IRC] must be directly involved)

It is really important that procurement rules are followed and that a sound financial system is put in place. After all, the Community Development Boards (CDBs) are accountable for spending the community grants; they must be able to justify every penny they spend, to the IRC and above all to the beneficiaries, the community members. The IRC in turn is accountable to Stichting Vluchteling (SV), The Netherlands Refugee Foundation, which is accountable to its own donors. The procurement process and the bookkeeping must therefore adhere to strict demands. Transparency and visibility are key words here; particularly in the Indonesian context, where corruption is rampant (obviously we want to avoid corruption in the ICPs; as a precautionary measure, the communities have selected the CDB members on the basis of their integrity).

The CDB members have received the necessary trainings pertaining to procurement, bookkeeping and monitoring. Furthermore, they have received a number of books in which to keep track of all this. These books are public and in principle accessible by anyone.

We are now keeping a sharp eye on the procurement process; especially in the beginning because that is when most mistakes are made. Things are still not clear or we find that there is resistance to conform to certain rules. In addition, a number of unanticipated incidents will always occur. Receipts for small purchases, for instance, may be missing, documents may be kept but the books not updated or there may be mistakes in the calculations. Sometimes the CDR teams go on monitoring visits but fail to write monitoring reports. Another problem that has occurred is that there is but one local supplier, making it difficult to obtain three quotations. And even when there are enough suppliers, they sometimes refuse to provide quotations because they do not want to be played out against each other. Or they request payment for it; that too has happened! Finally, an incident has taken place which shows that too much transparency and visibility can backfire. The CDBs post ICP information in a public place, usually close to the mosque or in a local coffee shop. In some communities, they have also published the available budgets for the various projects. In one community where a closed tender process was running, three contractors have made bids for exactly the same amount, namely the entire available budget! There are obvious flaws with this; among other things, the risk is high that the contractors have either rounded up or rounded down their price. In the first case, the contractor would be paid too much whereas in the second case, the contractor may not be able to finish the job for that amount, or might do a really bad job at it (from hereon out, only the total budgets will be publicly announced, the total for all projects in a given community – the project costs will only be posted on a board next to the construction site, as is the custom in Indonesia, once the tender process is over).

At this point it is still easy to intervene; problems can be addressed and mistakes rectified. The consequences of dubious procurement processes and bad financial management are great. The funds for the various projects are paid in a number of installments; should the procurement process and/or the bookkeeping not comply with our demands, the payments will stop, for all projects in a given community.

So it is in everyone’s best interest to insure that the procurement process and the bookkeeping are not only sound but also transparent and visible.

That is all folks. See you next week!

Take care,

Alex.

September 16th - Communication problems

I have spent this whole week in the Banda Aceh main office and, to be honest, nothing really exciting has happened. I continued to help one of the CDR teams in the Banda Aceh field office with the community proposals, which are slowly but surely heading for approval. I have spent the bulk of my time, however, analyzing the information in our CDB member and CDR profile database and incorporating the results into reports. I have also finished writing a number of cases and started collecting new information for our main database. Unfortunately, I have little luck with the latter; it was already clear that communication sometimes is a problem but now there is no doubt about it! Last week the teams received a new form and were asked to provide us with some additional information. We requested them to let us know about any questions or concerns they had and whether they felt they could make the deadline. Halfway through the deadline, we repeated the request when we found out that some of the teams and not even read the original e-mail yet. But there were no questions, no concerns, and nothing pertaining to the deadline. But when the deadline passed by it is eerily quiet. Only after the deadline did the questions and concerns start come pouring in, provided you ask for it. For the first set of questions, I have been to the different field offices to help collect the data and to make sure everything will be done on time. I find it a shame to have to conclude that it cannot yet be done any other way. The CDR staff is absolutely great, they are exceptionally friendly and they are competent enough. It is also sufficiently understood that the teams are working under pressure and that their work is not easy. Nevertheless, efficient planning and task distribution can get them a great deal further. I don’t think the deadline was unrealistic and if it were, a simple timely message would suffice to let us know. Communication, within the CDR programme as well as with other departments, is extremely important; we will have to find ways to stimulate and improve this.

I am going to leave it at this. This week’s log is short because I am working through the weekend to finalise analyses and parts of a report. So I still have many things to do! By the way, today marks exactly three months since I first arrived in Indonesia; time is flying by! Also, we had another earthquake today, it was only the second one I have felt since I have been here (although I hear there have been more). This was a small but quite long quake with a little peak towards the end. I find earthquakes very odd to experience. Because I have not been in the field this week, I have included some pictures from the CDR teams below.

See you next week. Take care,

Alex

September 8th - Another week in Aceh

Presently, the CDR programme counts a total of 40 Integrated Community Programmes (ICPs). 35 of these have had their community proposals approved (though not all activities have been approved for a small number of proposals). Of the remaining five ICPs, two are new communities whereas the last three are revising their proposals.

I was going to go to Meulaboh this week but our plans changed at the last minute. So I spent this week as well in the Banda Aceh offices. This actually turned out to be a good thing. In the main office I have worked on developing and disseminating a new set of questions for our database and I have started to analyse the information I gathered for the Community Development Board (CDB) member and CDR projects profiles. In the field office I assisted different teams in revising their community proposals.

Together with the CDR technical specialist, we helped one of the teams find solutions to deadlocks they had come to in two of their target communities. This concerns Lambaro Neujid and Lambadeuk, in the sub-district of Peukan Bada. In Lambaro Neujid the village seems to be (geographically) divided in such a way that there is little incentive to carry out projects as one community. What is more, the situation is such that there is a potential for conflicts to arise, for instance with agreeing on the location of a building to be erected. We have thus started discussing the option of splitting the village (under a single CDB, with representatives for each side) with the CDB and the community. This way, both sides can be given the chance to prioritise their own needs and formulate their own proposals. Possibly, this will provide the necessary inducement to carry on with the programme.

The problem in Lambadeuk is altogether different. The CDB included only one activity in its community proposal while it identified no less than 12 community needs. This has much to do with the fact that a number of ex-GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka – Aceh Free Movement) fighters still have a firm grip on the village and make absurd demands. This makes a participative process difficult and is largely the reason why the CDB is so reserved. Another contributing factor is that many villagers still live in temporary shelters in a relocation area on the outskirts of Banda Aceh. As a first step, we will assess whether or not the displaced villagers wish to return to their village, why (not) and within what timeframe. Their return could solve the problem with the ex-fighters. It is also a matter of standing up to the ex-fighters; all the surrounding villages have not tolerated this and resolved such problems peacefully.

I also continued with the rejected proposals in the sub-district of Lhoong I have been helping to revise last week. The CDB in Birek is still busy adjusting the budget and developing a business plan for the community cooperative’s shop. The CDB in Paroy, on the other hand, is still looking for a suitable member of the community to make a new drawing and help revise the budget for building a community hall. They will then be assisted by an IRC engineer. So I have mostly concentrated on the two projects in Seungko Mulat: the cow husbandry and the computer course. In the beginning of the week I accompanied the CDR team to the village. The CDB was going to receive training in the procurement process and we took the opportunity to go through the proposals again. Particularly to see whether they had made the adjustments we had requested.

To begin with, for the husbandry project, I have had to explain again why the proposal for 100 cows was rejected. In the first place, this is because providing each household with a cow would not stimulate the community to care for them together; it would be more of a gift to individual households than a community project. In addition, it is more cost effective to buy fewer cows; given that they will contribute a number of bulls, in due time, they will have their 100 cows! This would leave them with more money to carry out other projects. Besides, the procurement of a large number of healthy cows is difficult enough as it is. But they had already formed livestock groups and brought the number of cows down to 58.

We also discussed the computer course with the CDR team leader and the teachers. I am glad this conversation took place because some details were not made clear in the proposal and because the teachers seemed not to have thought much about some of the practicalities of this project. This is a recurrent problem. On the one hand, much information may not be included in the proposals; the CDB and the CDR teams have worked out the details but they are nowhere to be found on paper. On the other hand, a proper vision is often still lacking and planning ahead is sometimes limited; there is somewhat of a ‘we-will-cross-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it’ type of attitude. Also, there is frequently a certain degree of restraint; they are not sure whether a project will be approved and are therefore reluctant to make great efforts for it. ‘Once the project is approved then we will…’, which, of course, does not work for us. Before we transfer the first installment we want to see a sound and well though of proposal with all the required supporting documentation. We want to see that there is a proper motivation to carry out the project and we want to know how it will be implemented and how it will be managed once everything is in place. We want to make sure the projects are sustainable and that the whole community benefits from them. We received a number of additional supporting documents from the teachers (certificates and commitment letters stating their job description and compensation) and have helped them develop a simple business plan.

So much for this week; see you next week again!

Take care,

Alex

September 1st - Project proposals

I have spent most of this week in the Banda Aceh field office where I have mainly kept myself busy helping to revise a number of community project proposals; four proposals, to be exact, from three different Community Development Boards (CDBs). These pertained to building a community hall, setting up a cow husbandry project, empowering a community cooperative and providing computers for a course.

The project proposals were rejected for various reasons. The proposed community hall, for instance, was not approved because, especially when compared with others that are being built within the CDR programme, it is too big and too expensive. It was therefore suggested that they find ways to decrease the budget by altering the design of the building, using different materials and/or providing a greater contribution.

For the husbandry projects, the CDB wished to procure one hundred cows; one per household. This was rejected because these should remain community projects and providing each household with a cow would not motivate the community to work together. Besides, the procurement of one hundred healthy cows would be a logistic nightmare. Instead, they were advised to form groups of, say, ten households who would be responsible for no more than five cows. The community did, however, devise a good system to care for the livestock and resolves disputes, should any arise.

Next, the idea for the community cooperative is to open a shop in the somewhat isolated village. The shop would sell basic need products as well as fishing material. In their budget they have also included a becak, a motorbike with a sidecar, for transportation. This is a good project and the details have been worked out quite carefully. But the problem was that there was no community contribution and they had made a budget for an excessive amount of money to buy supplies. The aim is simply to get the shop started with the basics so that they can expand on their own. They agreed to revise the budget and to contribute the space for the shop.

The last project concerns the purchasing of a number of computers to offer a course, in the first place for students who wish to pursue higher education and require basic computer skills in order to do so. This is a great initiative. A number of things, however, were missing in the proposal: a contract for the space that they will use to provide the course, for instance, a commitment letter from the teachers, a resolution to include the school in the project and a backup plan in case the CDB dissolves or the teachers decide to quit.

In some villages, they seems very aware of the fact they have a grant of up to 55.000,- USD (approximately 43,000,- EUR) available to them to realise their project(s). Although this is true, this does not mean that the whole amount must be spent. But this does seem to be the reasoning in a number of cases. Needless to say, the grants must be used for sound and sustainable projects that aim to have the greatest impact on as many people as possible with the least amount of money. There are conditions and every cent that is spent must be spent justifiably. Building a large community hall for 25.000,- USD (approximately 19.500,- EUR), for instance, is difficult to defend when there are other community needs that can be addressed – even if the community hall is the highest priority.

This is often a dilemma in community driven development programmes. While the idea is for us to stand on the sidelines and let the communities decide for themselves how to spend their grants, a number of demands must nevertheless be imposed. A certain degree of control is warranted, particularly because the capacities of the beneficiaries still require strengthening. Furthermore, the Integrated Community Programs (ICPs) must fit within a certain vision and broader programme. The trick is to find the right balance.

Also this week, a small workshop took place in Banda Aceh for the youth among the CDB members (above) and a CDR management meeting was held (below).

This is it again for this week. I am heading back into the field next week, starting with Meulaboh.

Take care,

Alex