The Numbers Game

Project documentation has a funny habit of over-estimating the number of households the project will be able to reach. When questioned on the achievability of the 372 000 households one project was expected to reach, an employee of the donor agency responded “Oh, that’s just a number that was estimated as the project was being designed. Don’t worry about that.”

But I do worry.

To give you an idea of how outrageous this number is, here’s a little math:

One Agricultural Extension Agent (AEA) using EWB’s Agriculture as a Business program can do a good job of effectively strengthening about one farmer group every two months while still carrying out their regular work. If we estimate that there are 250 active AEAs in Ghana’s northern region, and 10 households represented in each group on average, it would take 24.8 years to reach 372 000 households assuming every AEA worked constantly until the job was done.

Obviously, taking the EWB approach is not going to fit the requirements of most projects. Instead, to reach all these households, I’ve seen most projects adopt the Training-of-Trainer approach to outreach.

What this looks like on the ground is that the project hires an agency, who recruits multiple local NGOs in all the project’s operational areas.  Then the agency trains the local NGO employees to train MoFA staff to train farmer groups.

After this training of trainers, the local NGOs go into the districts and train the MoFA staff to strengthen farmer groups. Then the MoFA staff head to the field to meet with and train the farmers.

Each step in that long chain takes a chunk of the project’s budget thus diverting donor funds away from the intended beneficiaries. In the end, the result is:

• Very little money is left to pay MoFA and the AEAs to get to go the field and actually train the farmer groups;
• Training techniques and topics that are mandated by the project are diluted at each level as the skill and understanding of the facilitator decreases; and
• The training farmer groups receive is time-limited due to the emphasis on quantity over quality.

So what’s the answer to all this?  Simply put, projects need to do a better job of setting goals that are in line with the time, people and resources available to them instead of trying to make the project sound better than is realistically possible.

For example, this could mean limiting the geographical area covered by the project to maximize field time and make sure it’s spent with intended beneficiaries instead of on the road.

Additionally, projects need to have stronger ties to the ground to ensure quality.  One way is to hire enough field staff to work directly with the intended beneficiaries and/or management could make it their core responsibility to understand what’s happening on the ground and push for constant improvements and changes in implementation based on what is learned in the field. To impact a household, field staff need to have a connection and understand the beneficiaries. Their strengths and weaknesses should be well known and accounted for and the overall strength of this connection needs to be valued by management.

Related to the above, there needs to be more emphasis on knowledge management and upward feedback.  No, this doesn’t mean more forms and reports for field staff to fill out but rather management needs to push their staff to share what they are learning and ensure they fully understand what is working and what isn’t, make informed decisions based on this information, and remain flexible to changes as implementation realities at the field level are better understood.

“If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well.” – This is the attitude we need to adopt. So let’s forget about trying to impact hundreds of thousands of people and doing it poorly and instead focus on doing a great job of supporting a few.

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