Lira: first project done

It seemed it would never happen, but it did: the first and the biggest of the three projects I'm working on in Lira actually finished. Though there is still enough left to keep us busy for the next few weeks, the official end date and the bulk of work are over. I still cannot believe it myself.

So what was it all about?

As I already wrote before, from 1986 up to 2006 major part of northern Uganda had been affected by an armed insurgency of the Lord's Resistance Army. Apart from the conflict violence as such, this also meant that in some areas the majority of people were displaced into IDP (internally displaced persons) camps (which looked pretty shocking), abandoning their homes, villages, fields and ways of life. As a consequence, many of the infrastructure and public assets were abandoned or destroyed.

What this project did was helping to rebuild some of this infrastructure and assets, with particular focus on those infrastructures that are essential for re-establishing agricultural production - a source of livelihood for the majority of the population.

One of the problems for many communities in the region is access: the only tarmac (surfaced) road is the main "highway" leading to Lira, and the rest of the large area is linked at best through murram (dirt) roads. In the countryside people are often connected to trading centres, schools or health centres only by footpaths, and during the rainy season swamps can often cut them off.

That's why under this project we built some 164 km of so-called community access roads. These roads are the most basic type of unsurfaced roads connecting rural communities and are maintained at the local level. Since this type of road is not very sophisticated, we constructed them with participation of the community members of the surrounding villages. Each person involved in the construction received cash payment from us for every completed work task, such as clearing a certain area from the bush or digging a certain number of metres of drainage channel.

Oh, and if you think it was only men participating, you're very wrong:

The result in use:

And a few cool photos of the roadworks from the April visit we hosted here.

In this way the road construction also provides additional short-term income for the community members - the money should then ideally be saved in village saving groups, which we're also forming and supporting (though of course not always this happens, and sometimes the money is spent on alcohol or a new wife).

One of the 100 village savings groups supported under this project

Another basic infrastructure this project looked at is water. In the rural areas, the most common water source is a borehole with a hand-pump, and bringing water to the house is the job of women (and children). That means that all the water needed in the household - for cooking, cleaning, washing of people, clothes and dishes - is brought by women in 20-litre jerrycans on their heads from the nearest borehole - which may be several kilometres away.

Under this project, we drilled 15 new boreholes and rehabilitated 24 existing ones that hadn't been functioning.

Drilling of a new borehole

Same place, before (drilling) and after (finished borehole)

Every borehole should be normally looked after by a water management committee, composed of 9 members from the community. The committee should collect fees for water usage (for example a set small fee per household per month), and this money should be used for any repairs of the borehole. Around each of "our" boreholes we also helped to establish and trained this committee - ideally this system should work fairly well. In practice though, especially after some time, the fees are not always (regularly) collected, and/or the money collected is "not there" when a repair is needed. Accountability is a huge issue, and reliance on external help is another.

Another important part of life here are markets: at the local level, a major part of trading is done on regular market days (normally once a week).

Local market

These markets attract people from the neighbouring communities, and of course with such large regular gatherings of people, absence of proper sanitation infrastructure can be quite a big public health risk. That's why in 12 local markets we built new latrine blocks.

But things don't finish with building, and especially in case of public latrines, proper maintenance determines whether they'll "survive" beyond a few months. In this case, at every latrine site we trained a management committee composed of representatives of local authorities and community members. This committee would then take responsibility for taking care of the site: opening the access only during the market days, collecting fees for usage and of course cleaning - in return for keeping the fees collected. It's a fairly new system and it would be interesting to see if it will actually be implemented. In some of the places the local authorities got quite excited about the idea - hope it will translate into an action as well.

The other things we built were cattle crushes - which I confess I didn't know what they were when I started to work in Lira (slightly inconvenient considering that we were to build 17 of them). And no, they are not machines to make juice out of cattle, as the name suggests to me - they are metallic constructions to hold cattle so that it can be safely examined or treated. Here they look something like this:

In a region such as this one where livestock is practically everywhere, but veterinary services are scarce (and animal disease outbreaks are regular), this - if accompanied by trained veterinary personnel - should help improve animal health, which in turn is important because animals are used not just for wealth accumulation, but also for field work.

And as you can imagine, any works being done become a spectacle, especially for children.

Cattle crush construction and borehole rehabilitation in progress

Right, so what was my role in all this?

Sort of the same as in the project in Kaabong - basically ensuring that all this happens - as planned, in the time expected, for the money planned, that everyone does what they are supposed do and that all others involved - local authorities, donors and of course the recipients - are happy. And above all, solving all the (very many) problems along the way.

Many people think that development work revolves mainly around sitting under a mango tree with a group of cute African children, teaching them to read. In reality, most of the time it's more about managing more-or-less complex projects in an environment where the single biggest constant is that the majority of things don't work as expected - and your role is managing all the randomness to make sure that everything works out at the end. Which is very interesting, challenging, rewarding, enriching - and in the longer run can also get very exhausting.

And what next? There are still two more projects running, which should both be concluding in November/December, and I want to stick around to finish them. With a planned break in the middle though - in two and half weeks I should be on my way to Spain and Sicily for two weddings :-) And after December, a substantial holiday of a few months, yet to be properly planned :-)


And as a bonus, a few photos from our office here in Lira:

(In case you think we're discussing some life-saving development strategy, you'll be disappointed. We're trying to decide which sentence to put on the t-shirts we're going to print. Because every good visibility t-shirt has a motivating slogan printed on the back. Some better than others.)

(Almost) the whole country mission team