Sustainability and Corruption in donor funded projects.

I wrote this article a couple of days ago and it attracted a lot of comments. Many of the comments focused on these two issues which I didn't go into in much detail, but they are very important to donor funded ICT projects.

These are somewhat controversial subjects so again I will keep from naming specifics.

Any donor funded project should be sustainable. That is it should continue to function when the donor leaves. Sounds obvious I know, but most people would be amazed at just how few do carry on working. Anybody who has like me, worked and traveled extensively in Africa will be able to recount stories of when this has failed. Here are just a few of mine:

• Water pumps that cannot be maintained when they break down because there are no spare parts, no money or means to get them, nobody trained to fit them if they were available. 
• Fields full of farm machinery (Tractors, Canadian sized combine harvesters etc) rotting away. Why? No spare parts, and nobody trained to maintain them.
• I once visited a large hospital in East Africa which had a modern but non-functioning CT scanner. Again the reason given for its lack of functionality was that it had broken down and nobody could repair it. The hospital was losing considerable income from its not working. This income could easily have paid for a maintenance contract but nobody had arranged it. Lives were being lost in that area of East Africa because the only hospital with a CT scanner had no plan to maintain the scanner once it broke down. The hospital director told me that eventually somebody would donate a new one and the old one would be thrown away.

I am not finger pointing here, this is a story you will hear throughout Africa. In order for projects to be sustainable they have to generate some income, and that income has to be put back into the project in order to provide for the maintenance. For instance I saw a very good scheme in rural Tanzania where the donors had paid for a water pipeline bringing fresh water from a mountain spring many miles away. The local towns people were charged a few shillings (one shilling equals 0.00037 British pounds at current exchange rate) for the water. This money was used to pay local towns people to maintain the pipeline. The money stayed within the local community, and the water continues to flow to this day. Why can't a similar model be used for the above mentioned pumps?

I have seen projects providing hospitals with software. The hospitals were led to believe that the software was free, so no provision was made to support the system once it was installed. When bugs were found in the system there was nobody to fix them, and the software fell into misuse. However this software made the hospitals more efficient, improved their income, that income should have been used to fund local support for that software.

This is one of the reasons why billions of dollars in aid money floods into Africa but things never get better for its citizens.

The other reason is the corruption that follows these projects. I have over the years had conversations with people who have been found to have taken money from projects.  The common theme is always that they do not see it as stealing, or as something wrong. The best analogy I have is that aid money is seen like a river flowing down the mountain, and if you divert a little to irrigate your own field, then the water doesn't stop flowing, and you get a better harvest. The flaw with this argument is that the supply of money is finite and the river does stop flowing.

The best solution I have for this is closer and more rigorous scrutiny of the project by onsite managers who are appointed by the project donors to supervise the use of the money. Just the same as would be done with any commercial company when a budget is allocated to a project.

International aid is not working, but it can. It needs a change of attitude from both the donors and the receivers of the aid.

Updated Supplier Payments in KwaMoja

One frequently asked questions we get on the KwaMoja project is why you cannot just select the supplier items you want to pay, when you are making a payment to a supplier.

Well now you can:

As can be seen in the above screenshot, all open items are shown for the supplier. Checking those items adds it to the amount to be paid. If it is a credit or old payment, then the amounts will be deducted instead of added.

If the item is unchecked then the amount is deducted.

Once you hit the "Accept and Process Payment" button then the payment is posted and the items are allocated against this payment.

ICT Aid projects in Africa - Why so many failures?

Before I start this article let me make a couple of statements:

Firstly my experience of donor funded ICT projects is limited to Africa, so by necessity any anecdotes in this article refer to projects in Africa. This isn't meant to indicate that any of the points I make are special to the continent of Africa, and are quite probably true of similar aid projects throughout the rest of the world.

Secondly I will mention no names of people, or institutions. This is an article about what I perceive as issues in many of the projects I have witnessed, either as an observer or as a participant, and is not intended as an indictment of any person, or institution.

Failure of ICT projects is not an uncommon thing. Most statistics seem to show a failure rate of between 50% and 70%. So Africa is not on its own in having these failures. However from my observations I have noticed specific areas in donor funded projects that seem to make these projects more liable to failure:

• "We are a donor funded organisation so we shouldn't use for-profit companies". I have heard this a lot from the donor organisations. This means that they use charitable or religious organisations in order to do the ICT work. This means that local skilled people who happen to work in the commercial sector will not be able to participate in the project. For-profit companies tend to have a better understanding of the importance of meeting deadlines, and they have a reputation to keep up, which means that a successful completion of the project is to their advantage. Non-profit organisations tend to react more slowly and worry less about deadlines. This is a curious decision from the donor organisations as they are happy to hand over money to Toyota for their vehicles, Microsoft/Apple/Dell etc for IT products etc. but when it comes to the most important aspect of the project they limit themselves to the non-profits.
• "The project should be staffed and managed by local people, and not by outsiders". This is a laudable intention, but does it make sense in this sort of project? As pointed out in the above point many of the quality project manager staff will be in the private industry. Also the fact that ICT projects are a newer idea in Africa than in the west, there is a limited number of qualified local project managers available.
• Project employees are more interested in perpetuating the project than completing it. Donor funded projects generally pay much better in local terms than other employers. As the project is run by a local project manager, with local staff, then the major interest of these people is to make sure that the money continues to flow, rather than in getting the project completed. In fact, completing the project often goes against their personal interests. I know of several projects where the donors are taken on periodic "stage managed" tours to show that the work is really being done.
• Projects encourage "cronyism". Too often have I seen projects staffed by the family and relations of the senior members of the non-profit institution charged with the running of the project. I even know of one project that is supposed to be writing software that doesn't employ a programmer as part of it's large staff.

• Project aims are often too vague. I know of projects where the aim is to do something vague, such as "design and implement software for schools". Project aims should be specific, and the time scale should be set down at the start. 

My experience shows that projects should:

1. Be managed by an external person employed by the donor organisation charged with meeting targets.
2. Use the best resources available to them regardless of whether they are non-profit or for-profit.
3. Set definite targets at the start, both in timescale and project goals. The project manager should be the person held accountable.
4. Donor organisations should be firmer in their dealings on the ground. Too often I see donor organisations that take a far too "charitable" view of bad work. The project should be run as a commercial project. The original donors of the money deserve nothing less.

These thoughts are based on many years of watching the failings of such projects in Africa. Donor organisations need a radical change in how they view such projects.

Not all projects fail, there have been some outstanding successes but the failure rate is way too high.