The missing keys: education and leadership

“Malawi doesn’t have a water problem; it has a hydrogeologist problem” says Owen Scott, a long term staff for EWB in Malawi on a blog post dated from May 2010.

According to him, there is a lot of bad siting in Malawi and a lot of bad hydrogeological practice. This post identifies the general practice currently undertaken and the main issues associated to such practice. It also provides some reflections and avenues on how to improve the hydrogeological practice in Malawi and how such new practices would be helpful to improve the access to safe water.

Here's a story

“Yesterday I was reading a report about water access in one of Malawi’s lakeside districts. The district has a major hydreogeological split – close to the lake it has a shallow water table, further from the lake it has a deeper water table. This means that close to the lake you can use hand-drilled boreholes and shallow wells, while further from the lake you need to drill boreholes with a rig.

The report examined a GPS survey of the waterpoints in the district, and found that despite the shallow aquifer close to the lake, many organizations were still using drilling rigs to drill boreholes, each at over twice the cost of hand-drilled boreholes, and over six times the cost of hand-dug shallow wells.”- Scott, 2010.

Current practice and main issues

•  lack of technically qualified professionals to manage and make informed decisions in the water sector;
•  lack of good data from past work due to the lack of communication between the different NonGovernmental Organisations (NGOs) and the government of Malawi leading to poor siting of the newly installed borehole;
• most boreholes are drilled using a drill rig regardless of the depth when some location could be hand dig, leading to an important loss of money;
• a lot of the boreholes are drilled dry, run dry, have an insufficient yield and/or a low recharge rate, making them useless;
• recurring hydrogeological challenges (like salinity in the water); and,
• the donors and NGOs are more focused on funding “basic needs” like a program drilling wells instead of  program providing university scholarships or teachers in Malawi, or to a lesser extent, a good and strong training of the decision makers.

What could help improving the efficiency and sustainability?

By having more informed, up to date and educated professional leading and managing the water sector in Malawi, the decision making and planning would be significantly improved. This could empower the government (either at the National, Regional and/or District level) to better regulate and help the NGOs to do more sustainable and better planned work.

If appropriate technologies were used for each section of the water table (drilling vs digging), than the cost of bringing water access in the district up to government standards could be halved and the money saved could be used for training, maintenance or more waterpoints.

The supply aquifers are mostly low yielding, discontinuous and heterogeneous and the cost of exploration tend to be high relative to the return.  Therefore sharing the data and reports could lead to saving precious time and money when planning borehole/hand dug well siting, but for this to happen, the district water officer need to be able to analyze and understand the data to make better informed decisions.

Conclusion

On paper, many of these recommendations are already in place. NGOs are already supposed to go through the district. Boreholes are supposed to be drilled, subjected to a pump-test, and then re-drilled if they fail the test. Hydreogeological information, is supposed to be collected after each drilling, reported to the governmentt, and then added to a database.

The problem is that very little of this happens. Water offices are understaffed and underresourced, can't always do drilling or pump-test supervision, and also most of the time don't always know how to do it even if they have the resources. Contractors, like anywhere, are always trying to cut corners and get away with the minimum standard of work they can....and they get away with a lot in Malawi.

The hydrogeological and geological work done concerns almost wholly the well siting. There is little to no time available or budgeted to observe and supervise drilling, correlate the logs recorded by the field staff with the predicted sequence, analyse, interpret and use the data recorded or carry out more hydrogeological assessments.

If the planning and managing of the waterpoints would be more efficient, a lot more work could be done with the time and money saved.  

There is certainly hope, but the questions that remain are not different than before: are people in the field sufficiently well trained and knowledgeable to record and report the data properly? Are the decisions taken in the field approved by someone with sufficient understanding? Are the data analysed and interpreted properly and are they use to modify the drilling program and decisions? Until the answer to these questions is yes, the water sector in Malawi will remain unstable and inefficient.

Reflection Time

Here are some questions for you guys, some time to think for yourself and feel free to share your reflections with me though.

What were the motivations that brought us to become who and where we are now? Why did we study a certain subject or decided not to go to school, how do we choose a job, and also how do we decide who we want to share our life with? We are surrounded by external elements or influences and we have so many options, what are we basing our decisions on?

Do you consider yourself influenced by others (parents, partners, employers, mentors, teachers…publicity…) when it comes to important decisions? Most people will say yes to this question. If it’s the case, how does it affect your present life? Are you happy with your decisions, satisfied with your situation? This question comes from the fact that if we choose to go a certain way because someone influenced us to or told us to do so (ie. go into engineering because a teacher or parent told you so, vs you really wanting to do it because that’s your way of getting where you want to be, or;  get a job you’re not passionate about, but there is a great salary, or ; choose a partner because all your friends have one and it’s pressuring you to settle down, or; …), we might or might not come to a dead end and reconsider our path. And when our decisions are internally driven, what makes us change our path sometimes?

When you think about your job or occupation  where do you position yourself most of the time:

1- Apathic, 2-Bored, 3-Anxious, or 4-Flowing.

I guess our objective is to be in the flow zone, when you are pushed just enough to learn and be motivated, but not too much that you feel like it’s way over your capacity. How would you define that zone? When and how often does it happen? Can you, simultaneously, be dancing on the stage and be looking at yourself dancing from the balcony?

What makes us bored, what can we do when it happends: for exemple when things are not going fast enough for you, try to understand why that is instead of assuming that someone in the system is either evil (not doing the job) or stupid (does not know how).

On the other end, what makes us anxious, what can we do then? Are we too afraid to show that we don’t know everything, that we don’t know enought to do the job perfectly? Are we just too afraid to fail? When we feel that our capacities are limited to overcome the challenge, there are many options to feel better: one is to divide the problem into smaller pieces and deal with them separately; another option is to try something, see how it goes. If it does not go perfectly on the first try or even on the tenth try, step back and realize that even when we fail, the world didn’t stop revolving on its axes! And then try something else…life goes on.

If your interested here are my reflections of the last few weeks:

I realized that I’m internally driven and I strategically position my powns in the direction toward where I want to go. I’m not quite sure I have clear vision of where my end goal is, so I sometimes change my way, but I definitely have a good idea, so I rarely make my decision based on someone else’s judgement. My passions, my feelings and my reflections are triggering my actions; when I have something in mind, I’m hard to stop. I also realised I’m a dreamer and I’m really idealistic, so I might not always make good decisions and might not always be happy, but I only have myself to blame when it comes to that. Is this good or bad, I don’t know, but it’s who I am.

Here is what led me to the path I’m on right now:

I did my college in English cause I wanted to be able to go work somewhere else on the globe. My parents and friends thought I was crazy. I went into geological engineering cause I wanted to become an oceanographer. I worked in that field (oceanography) for a bit and realized that it would not be a good fit if I wanted to have a familly someday (so I changed my path based on my values). I’ve always wanted to make the world a little better, so from there, I did a Masters in environmental hydrogeology to work at figuring out solutions to environmental issues. I ended up working in the environmental buisness but not for the environment and realised my vision of the world was probably too idealistic! I love my job, but I definitely find it challenging sometimes to not be able to act on the bigger picture, to act on modifying the regulations and the laws instead of being restreint by them. So here I am, in Toronto doing the training for an oversea placement in Malawi for EWB to go work at the district level in the water and sanitation sector. I know I want to be able to make a difference in the world, not sure where (internationnally or locally) and how (changing my career or influencing the way things are done), but I know this placement is going to get me a step further on my path to success. No one asked me to go there, I was not even involved with EWB before I applied, I just felt like it was the right place and time to do this. Why now and not after university? I feel like I have a little bit more to offer, I think I gain a bit of perspective and maturity over the last years and I definitely went outside my comfort zone.

Hope you are and will continue reflecting on these things, and please send some thoughts back at me if you will.

Now back to work
Ge

Are Circles too Strong to be Broken?

Our assignment last Thursday was: going in the community to find out about what is the relationship between poverty in Toronto and the "informal lending sector"?

This assignment was also a great way to get us out of our comfort zone, a way to make us explore and create contact with the community, a way to open our eyes on poverty surrounding us… a way of bridging the gap and realizing that their reality is not so different than ours, that their reality could be ours or someone’s we know and love.

So we broke into three teams: Binnu and Jordan went to small bars, alleys and money marts; Don and Lisa explored the mysterious world of pawnshop and chatted with people on the street; while Bernard and I visited shelters. What an amazing day it was. After many hours outside, we met back home and talked about our days and shared our reflections, trying to see the trends and connections.

Here is a summary of our findings:

“My view of pawnshops prior to this assignment was solely as a place to unload stolen goods. Admittedly this was a narrow-minded view and based off of zero first-hand experience and the reality of the situation is obviously a little more complex. We spoke to both pawnshop owners and people living on the street to get different perspectives on the issue and the opinions we received were varied. While the view from the homeless people we spoke to fit more into my previously held view, the owners all felt they were just providing a much needed service to community members. Some usage highlights that I'd never considered:

• Using a pawnshop as a storage facility: If someone is going on vacation for a few weeks, they sometimes sell valuable items to a pawnshop to keep them safe while they're away. Apparently this is a cheaper alternative option to safety deposit boxes at a bank.
• Using a pawnshop as a loan center: By using material goods as collateral, people are able to get small, short term loans at much lower interest rates than credit card companies, banks, or other lending institutions.

Overall, I've realized these shops aren't inherently good or bad – they're just a tool that can be used by people in whatever manner they wish – and they do provide a needed service to different parts of a community. Do they contribute to the vicious circle of urban poverty in Toronto? Yes, they can, but so do all the major financial institutions in the city. It's really about how they're used that's important as opposed to their actual existence.”

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Don and Lisa

“We started with a naïve and simple hypothesis: Places like money mart make people go deeper and deeper into poverty. In just a few of hours of roaming around some sketchy neighborhoods we found amazingly resilient people with powerful stories and a strong community with so many layers of connections that it made money mart seem insignificant.
One of the people we met – let’s call him Dan - was standing outside a bar and reading a book. He had run bail and was living on disability payments. Talking to him there on the sidewalk, and watching him wave to all the passersby and have short friendly exchanges, I felt like the community had taken him in and he was part of this tight family. He talked about how he could get ten bucks from anyone on the street there and not worry about any interest. Then Dan showed us some scars from when he didn’t pay back, “… and this was for only three dollars…” Money mart seemed like a distant insignificant reality.
On the other extreme, we chatted for an hour with a former Oxford school of economy graduate who mentioned how the mafia are also lenders in the community, and how they make sure payments are made with the threat of broken bones.
Our day ended with an amazingly resourceful man who would buy things that homeless people had scrounged up, and then sell those items on the street. What a one-man economy generator! He helped the homeless get an income, while making money for himself and providing the residents cheap alternatives to buying phone chargers at a Bell store!
I came away with a feeling of awe. There are so many transactions and support systems invisible to a person who lives in the safe confines of a 9-to-5 job. I know my emotional high is just the honey-moon phase of getting to know a really rich community and I’ve still only seen the positives on the surface. But I am really glad that it has shaken my simple assumption that money mart was one of the very few options that people in these communities have.”
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Binnu and Jordan


“I got up on Thursday morning not quite sure what my day would be like, turn my computer on and read the assignment…then thought: what were we going to do with this, which approach should we use to get some answers? I wanted to know if the shelters were offering an alternative to borrowing money. So we started our quest by trying a few things, like inviting someone on the street to come have a coffee with us, going to a couple of shelters and asking questions, we even bought cigarettes to be able to bond. Man are cigarettes expensive!! It’s -20 deg Celcius outside and it’s quite windy, so the shelters are super busy and the people on the streets are trying to get some money, so we realize fast enough that our approach was not the right one. We ended up walking to another shelter and offer to help instead of simply asking questions. We met three women working there, had great talks with them, had a visit of the building and volunteered at night for a few hours. One thing I realized is how genuinely nice and friendly everyone was. Throughout the day, we asked a few questions regarding our assignment. We found out that the main link between poverty cycles and money is often a lack of education or knowledge on managing it, how to do a budget and respect it. We all have more needs than we can afford, we all have debts, either for a mortgage, a car or because of school, we use our credit cards and sometimes can’t pay them…we are no exception to this vicious consummation and false needs circle, but one main difference is that we have the ability to work more and get out of it, we have the ability to realize at some point that we can’t spend our monthly income in a few days…they often don’t have that chance: Drug addiction, mental problems, having no family or friend supports, no one to help them out, loneliness, repeating patterns, are some of the root cause of poverty in Canada. The shelters are offering mentoring, friendship, support, trust, food, showers, beds… they can’t force or impose anything, but they can help finding the weak link in the vicious circle to find a way out of it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t; truth is vicious circles are hard to break. I’ll go back next week to volunteer, I was touched and want to get more involve within my community, there is a lot to be done and we both had an amazing time.”
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Genevieve and Bernard

What conclusions did we draw?

We came to the conclusion that poverty circles and informal lending sectors are linked to a certain extent; money mart, pawnshops, the mafia are certainly opening a door to vicious circles (steeling, violence, borrowing more) but at the same time they are offering a way out of it. I guess that just like anything else it depends on how and why they are being use.

If nothing else we learnt a lot on how to approach strangers and ask them intimidating and personal questions on how they deal and manage their money. All this will be pretty useful in our placement.

So that’s it for today, we have the weekend off, so we went out last night and had tons of fun, we danced and laughed… slept in this morning and had a great breakfast. I’m on my way to discover Toronto.

Please go under this link and vote for EWB everyday for the next 23 days so we can win the 50000$ price. Right now we are second. We need your votes! Thanks
charity challenge

How do you define your comfort zone and push yourself outside of it?

Here is and update on where I stand after my first week in Toronto for pre-dep training. I decided to take some time to write while am in a good space.

Body space: I went running with Jordan today after work and it felt great, it's nice and cool in Toronto. I needed some reflexion time and some physical activity. I put my headphones on with my iPod on shuffle and every new songs brought me to a different place in my mind. I'm lacking sleep; I'm sharing my room with two other people and we have bunk beds with noisy plastic sheets! haha. We are working a lot and I'm trying to get assignments done at night on top of getting to know my team mates and doing some other stuff. We're eating super well so far, making family dinner and we make sure to have some drinks together everynow and then (like tonight).  7/10

Heart space: Hummm! I'm starting to disconect from all the things that were holding me back...I think it's a good place to be at. It feels better anyway. I'm leaving my initial fears and hopes behing to replace them with brand new ones; it's complitely uncomfortable but pushing my borders and extending my comfort zone a bit more. I'm missing my friends a lot, but they are super supportive and I appreciate it tons. 6/10

Head space: Although it was a though week because of a lack of time and lack of space to self reflect on my learnings and experience, I had an amazing time. I'm having ups and downs: it's hard, uncomfortable, overwhelming and fantastic at the same time. I had a great day today; I got to learn more about our programs, got a coaching session with Boris about my self development and my role in the team, then got a four hour insightfull session with the CEO of EWB about leardership...WOW. Best day so far! And to make it better, had a a great night with my teammates/housemates. We laughed and talked, it's good to get to know them and work on building trust. I'll need their thoughts, perspective and support over the next year as they'll go through the same things I'll be going through. I appreciate that we are all coming from different places and that all of us had our different life experience that brought us to apply. None of us is a new graduate.

I'm not always sure of the purpose of every session or activity, but at the end of the day, when I look at the outcome or the big picture, I've learnt tons. I'm in a happy place, uncomfortable, overwhelmed and tired, but definitely positive. 8/10

So far we had learning sessions about rural livelihoods, frameworks, systems and root causes of poverty, leadership, meeting, coaching, behavior chages, buisness approaches in development... almost every session is presented by a different person and in a different way; we have workshops, assignments, role playing, participatory learning activities...It's a great place to be. I particularly appreciated the buisness approaches in developement session. It connected my reality at home and my consulting background to the agriculture and developement world. It gave me a few ideas on how to make a buisness, even here in Canada be suistanable on a social and global point of view without changing the actual profits, but on changing some the objectives in the decision making process.

On the side, I'm learning about myself: what triggers me, what challenges me, what motivates and demotivates me, how I react to all of that, what is my role in the team now and where I want to go. It's like stepping outside of real life for a month to learn about myself and the world. It's helping me define and extent my confort zone and knowledge skills. Great opportunity, what a lucky girl am I to be here!

I'm exhausted, so I'll go to bed now, but before I do that, I'd like to challenge you to define where you stand, what your comfort zone is and how can you extent it? I'll be more than happy if you feel like sharing it with me.

Night...

Ndi funa phunzira Chichewa -> I want to learn Chichewa

Pre-departure training has officially started. Here we are, in Toronto for the past few days, having a looooooot of work and information being throwned at us. We are seven people, all really amazing. Seriously we have a good team and we’ll be having fun. Four of us will be working in Malawi, two will be going to Ghana and one will be sent to Burkina. Although I’m learning tons every day, it’s quite overwhelming as we have learning sessions and workshops during the day and assignments at night. On top of all this work, I still need to read other documents about our WatSan projects in Malawi and learn to speak Chichewa…which is not easy, it sounds like nothing I know. Thanks to Jordan and Lisa for their motivation. So far, I think we’ve been learning about 4-5 words a day… haha, at this pace, I’ll be leaving for Malawi knowing  less than 150 words. We’ll have to come up with a better strategy. So I’ll go back to work now, I just wanted to give you guys a quick update. I’ll try to write more about our learning sessions and my thoughts this weekend; I need some time to digest the information and what I’m getting out of it.

Also, on a very exciting note, my plane ticket is booked. I'll be leaving on March 1st at night, arriving in Lilongwe on the 3rd, via London and Johanesburg. CAN'T WAIT 

Night