Helping People Help Myself

After the fun part (field visits and deep discussion with project teams), we had to strategize an approach to communicate with Ministries (Ministry of Finance, Agriculture, Water and Local Governance - a total of 4 ministries) while developing "Aide-Mémoire" (an agreement document including some recommendations to be signed by both lender (Bank) and borrower (country).





After the fun part (field visits and deep discussion with project teams), we had to strategize an approach to communicate with Ministries (Ministry of Finance, Agriculture, Water and Local Governance - a total of 4 ministries) while developing "Aide-Mémoire" (an agreement document including some recommendations to be signed by both lender (Bank) and borrower (country). During the field visits, some issues were observed such as temporary relocation space and transition of markets, longer duration of tendering/procurement, communication with targeted beneficiaries (farmers, vendors and traders). However, the most difficult part was found out - too slow implementation of irrigation component under one of the projects and super delayed procurement under another disease control project.





Here is a national/local politics between ministries come in. While Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) is supposed to carry out the irrigation component, it was revealed that Ministry of Water (MoW) had better performance so far. Of course, MoA didn't want to give it to MoW, which clearly shows its relative incompetency in front of MoF. We knew it, for sure and that's why we had to meet first MoF and MoW before communicating our recommendation - reallocate the irrigation component from MoA to MoW!





Only after ensuring a concensus with MoF and MoW, we met the Minister of MoA who became upset and insisted to retain the component as it was. She even mentioned "you may not want to get in a trouble". But, the proeject was already in a trouble and needed a quick fix to achieve the intended results.

On the following day, we again met MoW and MoF to share the meeting result with MoA and it was decided to issue a president letter to authorize this reallocation.





Developing and fine-tuning the Aide-Mémoire was dynamic process to incorporate all feedback from projects teams and ministries. We; however, managed to finalize and put it in a good shape before carring the hard-copy to a senior official at MoF for his signature. It was very helpful to have this person because it was himself who proposed the president letter which enabled us to move on.





Apart from the political negotiation and developing the final agreement, I had to visit all projects offices to have more discussions on financial management. It was found out to be varied regarding quality of internal control, record keeping, future financial planning and monitoring etc. Although I tried to resolve issues on the spot but I had to include some remaining ones in the Aide-Mémoire along with the action plans which I and project teams jointly developed during the 2nd week.





Monitoring and supervising 5 projects at the same time was, in my view, efficient but intensive, even a bit tiring......For this mission, my "3" weekends were gone due to transport from Tunis to Uganda (both ways) and report writing while in Kampala. Arriving in Saturday mid-night at Dubai and flying back to Tunis in the evening on Sunday. I would like to propose traveling on week days for the next mission. It was, nevertheless, very worthwhile experience and valuable time I had on the field.


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