IMAGINE the Japanese embassy financing the building of a house at Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo for victims of gender-based violence but a few kilometres down the road Malaleni food market traders continue to sell their commodities in an open space with no shed to protect them from rainfall and the sun. At Murewa business centre, high level government officials celebrate the opening of a mortuary when the local community is desperate for aggregation facilities that can enable them to earn more income from their horticulture.
Elsewhere in Zvishavane, the Provincial Affairs and Devolution minister officially opened a clinic that was built without asking local people about their priorities.
Should funders continue to set development agendas and local priorities?
The above are examples of countless cases across Africa where funders, development organisations and government interventions use their financial muscle to shape development agendas, set local priorities and determine how funding intended to improve people’s lives is allocated.
Such top-down strategies continue to undermine the potential to address the most significant challenges in the right sequence. Whoever brings money sets the agenda and can easily impose gender-based violence as an urgent issue when building a local market economically empowering local communities is the best way of restoring social harmony and economic fortunes.
When communities have their own funds, they can deploy adequate resources at opportune moments as opposed to waiting for funders who have their own agendas. The story is the same for African countries whose priorities continue to be set by big international funders that bring large-scale dam construction and irrigation systems which destroy local biodiversity and micro climates. In Africa, Rwanda and Eswatini are the only two countries where external funders are told what to fund in line with national priorities.
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Value of consolidated knowledge platforms
Unless African governments establish robust knowledge platforms responsible for consolidating all interventions and funding from outside, chaos will continue to prevail at the expense of genuine transformation. Research has shown that more than 70% of transformations fail due to poor communication with potential users and beneficiaries of the transformation.
It takes comprehensive knowledge to implement community projects in the right sequence that ensures sustainable impact. A knowledge platform led by smart knowledge brokers can mobilise shared intentions among partners and funders to rebalance power dynamics and transcend silos so that all interventions are rooted in common understanding of local situations to inform proper sequencing of activities.
If creatively set up, the knowledge platform can foster openness in questioning the status quo and aligning with local values. While bringing together several actors may make it difficult to scale or replicate some of the emerging solutions, collective ownership of interventions will prevent cases where funders and their NGO partners advance strategies focused on solving narrowly defined problems like over-investing in rural irrigation schemes when there is no market for commodities produced.
There is a tendency to focus on results that can be easily measured such as number of nutrition gardens and boreholes while neglecting the more complex and pressing predicaments like the need for a market which can prevent gender-based violence and rural to urban migration.
Development has been undermined by too much giving happening in silos
It is unfortunate that donors continue to prefer investing in results that are tied directly and concretely to their funding, even when it means limiting their potential for large-scale transformational change. They continue to bring already developed strategies with pre-existing priority areas or preferred approaches and only looking to fill their funding pipelines with grantees that conform to them.
With pre-existing strategies in hand, the funders seem to presume that they should determine what work should or should not move forward on agendas they care about. They are not receptive to local perspectives or supporting partners that deviate from their priorities.
However, there is increasing recognition that systemic change requires more and better funding in general and that too much giving has occurred in silos and has focused on short-term results. Many funders, who are interested in systems-change, revert to conventional approaches for developing strategies in part because they do not see a clear alternative or have support to pursue it.
This tends to reinforce existing power imbalances, often positioning the funder or groups of funders — rather than local communities and their partners — as final arbiters of what work should receive support. As part of correcting this situation, more spaces can be created where stakeholders can come together and jointly shape their respective strategies.
Such spaces like African territorial markets can neutralise power imbalances and encourage participants to communicate, confront hard truths, build trust and develop common understanding in way that break current silos.
Harnessing the power of public engagement
Best practices can be obtained from African territorial markets which are public national assets that bring together farmers, traders, transporters, consumers and people from diverse walks of life. For example, Mbare market in Zimbabwe brings together people who are proud to be associated with Zimbabwean food, culture, identity and tradition.
Following a fire incident that destroyed part of Mbare market on October 8 this year, efforts to rebuild the market are taking into account the fact that people who frequent the market are a key part of the public who contribute their aspirations, knowledge and perspective on how the market should function going into the future.
To that end, public engagement is enabling investors rebuilding the new Mbare market to share narratives that bridge the gap between where farmers, traders and other market actors are and where investors/financiers of the market rebuilding want to take them.
An overlap is being found between the investors’ business goals (for example, establishing a more efficient market operating model) and considerations of market actors such as their roles, entrepreneurship identity, incomes, ways of working, work environment and new opportunities for growth. This approach is giving Mbare market actors a reason to believe in the transformation and enhance a desire to play a role in advancing the new transformation.
- Charles Dhewa is a proactive knowledge broker and management specialist