Paper Tigers

As a general rule, the development industry has figured out how to prepare exceptional project planning documentation. It is detailed, compelling and after a critical read through, the reader is convinced success is inevitable.

However, after working closely with one such project for four months I see the reality of paper-based development: these documents can create inflexible and impractical structures and expectations that prevent projects from identifying and adapting to emerging opportunities or necessary changes to field implementation.

We know – everyone knows – that development is complex and entails a lot of failure and iteration.  It is impossible to predict what these failures will be and what will be learned until projects are implemented. Yet project plans rarely allow for recognition of, and adaptation to, failures or new knowledge.  The result is that project interventions are confined to activities and expectations that frequently prove to be impractical or unconstructive, regardless of what might be learned along the way. Allow me to provide a couple of examples:

Like almost every other project, the one I’m working with wants to engage and strengthen the capacity of farmer groups.   The project plan calls for a needs assessment of a sample of farmer groups.  This looks great on paper and gets approved with the thought that the project will use the results of this needs assessment to base the training on what farmers really need.

But, in reality, the needs assessment is resource and time-intensive. When it is finally performed it is surface-level and unrepresentative of real farmer challenges, which should come as no surprise. After all, how can an outsider come in to one village for half a day and determine precisely what knowledge, skills and attitudes all the farmers in the entire district need to succeed?

As an anecdote to prove my point, a JICA-sponsored yam project came to visit one of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) district offices.  It was the start of the rainy season so the MoFA staff were very busy but, unwilling to disappoint the visitors, they took them around the district to perform a needs assessments of rural yam farmers.  The JICA staff categorised all the different yam farming activities, found who did them, how they did them and made suggestions on what was needed to improve that specific task, promising that more thorough training was to come.

At the end of the day, when the JICA trainers had gone home, the disgruntled MoFA employees complained about what a waste of time the needs assessment and training had been. The farmers (and MoFA staff) already knew everything that had been taught and, for various reasons of their own, had made the choice not to perform the task in the prescribed way.

It was very evident, to both MoFA and the farmers, that the visitors only scratched the surface of what was actually needed by the yam farmers.  The needs assessment wasn’t able to determine what was needed in this complex situation faced by people they had never met and whose livelihoods they didn’t fully understand.

The fact is that it’s virtually impossible to know what the real issues are when you plan a needs assessment or plan the resulting training; they simply can’t be figured out from an afternoon sitting with a group of farmers. The issues are complex and reveal themselves slowly through trusting relationships and genuine desire to understand rural livelihoods. It follows that project activities should be open to changing as understanding of the issues evolves throughout implementation.

As another example, the project I’m working for calls for the establishment of Inter-Professional Bodies (IPBs) which is a fancy term for associations comprised of different stakeholders affiliated with the same commodity (e.g. input dealers, farmers, traders, processors, exporters, etc.). The project supports these IPBs by funding the meetings and workshops that bring all the actors together.

Again, as the plans are written, this seems like a winning approach. An efficient and functioning commodity chain depends on long-standing and trusting trade relationships. It seems an IPB would give all the actors a forum to build these relationships and work out common challenges.

But long-standing and trusting trade relationships are built from a history of mutually beneficial transactions not by sitting in the same room at a meeting. You can’t force actors in a commodity chain to collaborate and talk about their challenges openly. And you certainly can’t expect competitors to give up whatever advantages they have in the market to make it more fair and equal for all.

So how does the development sector go about sculpting a more efficient and functioning commodity chain for the benefit of all? Well, because constraints and opportunities differ for each commodity in each location the answer is case-specific but here I’ve listed just a few (extremely simplified) examples of interventions that have been tried and tested. While not perfect, they can at least illustrate what is possible:

• Help the producers improve the quality and/or packaging of their product to appeal to higher end consumers thus attracting more up-scale buyers and expanding the market
• Support an input supplier to manage their inventory better so that they can profitably operate stores in more rural locations (improves farmer access to inputs)
• Link farmer groups to a buying company that needs a specific quality of product and is willing to provide the training and the market for it
• Initially buy-down the risk to rural banks (with cash or, better yet, with activities such as building trusting relationships with the farmers and/or supporting extension staff to provide quality collection services) so they become more willing to lend to farmers at reasonable interest rates
• Provide tools or methods to help farmers practice good money management and investment of their own funds where applicable to reduce the interest payments from loans which cut into their profits
• Expand the market for locally grown produce or products by helping a company develop an informative radio advertisement campaign
• Expand the market and promote proper use of fertilizers and pesticides by cost-sharing an educational promotional event for an input supplier
• Support a private company to supply reasonably-priced veterinary services where government support is inadequate or unreliable

The point is, you can’t know that these opportunities exist when the project is being planned.  These are market opportunities that appear during project implementation and require projects to be adaptable to take advantage of them.

So, if any of the well-intentioned folks who make their living writing project planning documents happen to be reading this, I would love to know if it’s possible to hold a project accountable to it’s flexibility and responsiveness to market opportunities instead of basing the evaluation of project success on how many needs-based trainings and IPB meetings it holds.

In conclusion, let’s avoid implementing the ‘Paper Tigers’ that get approved solely on the merits of their written participatory and sustainable approaches. Practicality and flexibility, especially with regards to recognizing and responding to failures, learning and opportunities, are just as vital to a good project plan.

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