Seizing Windows of Opportunity and Jet Lag

My  life as a consultant often involves too many plane routes and travel schedules. It is less glamorous than it sound. Pack and unpack, do the laundry in less than a few days. Adjust to different time zones with little time to recover. Still get the job done. During the trips, the waiting area in an airport or  the little “desk/tray” in the plane - when the person in front does not recline  their seat- are  potential temporary offices where work competes with movies, sleep, and time to grab a meal. The beginning of this project was no exception. Check out how thinking on this project happened in real time. 

20+ hours on the road (Johannesburg, South Africa / Sao Paulo, Brazil / Buenos Aires, Argentina)

As you may have read in a prior post, a  window of opportunity for  learning had opened up for the PSAM regional learning community in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. When I said goodbye to colleagues at  Bulawayo’s airport and O.R. Tambo, I had no certainty about whether that window would effectively remain open.

I took 3 flights and a six hour road trip to get “home” and  all I could think was “the clock is ticking” to grab onto this opportunity.  I had  “lots of time” – although it never seems like enough – to think about what could make or break the agreement to embark on a regional learning pilot. 

I  kept going over all my notes from Bulawayo as I stepped in and out of planes. My head was spinning around how to best work with a community of social accountability practitioners that has identified a need to get better at learning and doing together?. A complex puzzle to put together, many pieces. How could we identify all the relevant  partners’ urgencies and interests and put together  a shared roadmap that made sense overall and for all?

2 weeks to come up with a roadmap (Santa Fe, Argentina)

Clock ticking indeed. In two weeks, I had to come up  with the broad parameters of a joint roadmap that would help the partners we met in  Bulawayo (now working in their homes across Southern Africa) decide to join in.  We needed to build on our conversations, but think beyond Bulawayo. Would this roadmap help people convince bosses and colleagues at  “home”  that a leap of faith and potential benefits of learning were worth the risk and costs of joining the pilot?   
So... what were the make or break issues that the roadmap needed to consider and how to balance concerns?

2 weeks and a recurrent thought: Is there anybody out there? (Rosario, Argentina / Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) 

Lots of work went into creating a living document, open to comments and modifications to make sure we were on the same page with all (or found good enough compromises for all).  In the document we invited PSAM’s partners to send us expressions of interests were they willing to experiment with us.
A temporary sense of relief  came to us when this tentative roadmap was off. The wheels were turning. We are starting to move forward. But of course, relief is short lived when the clock is ticking.
Then, we faced THE question. Will we receive any expressions of interests to actually implement the roadmap? How will our proposal be taken? Would it meet the expectations of the people in Bulawayo?  You’ll have to come back to learn what happened next.



Florencia Guerzovich

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Learning About Learning

Coming into the position of MEL officer and learning about social accountability was not  my ‘forte,’ but since embarking on this learning journey there are few lessons that I have picked up that I wish to share.

In civil society we are constantly battling the tension between having a lot to learn and a limited amount of time in which to learn. Civil society schedules are packed full of activities and deadlines driven by one thing only - achieving results. By the time all is said and done, there is just too little time or energy left for learning.  Why set aside time to learn because others say we should when we could be using that time to achieve results? Time is precious, we need to put it to use wisely and no one can argue with that!

Being in civil society myself and having worked as an implementer before taking up a learning position, I remember being a worker bee, constantly on the go with my eye on the results. As I delve deeper into this Learning Pilot project, my job involves setting aside significant amounts of time with partners, helping them to reflect on all their hard work with the end of goal of improving social accountability practices for achieving results (note that the achieving results still remains central part of what we do). I have come to realize learning is by no means an academic exercise for those interested in developing pie-in-the-sky theories. Learning is an important exercise even more so for implementers because the barrier between them and the next level of achieving results may be the inability to value learning and the inability to set aside sufficient time to learn.

Another obstacle to learning I have discovered is the risky thinking that as experts or implementers in our field we have learnt it all, so why keep learning? As we have discovered as a program, after a decade of training on social accountability and doing in country work on social accountability, we can’t stop learning. There is still so much to learn because contexts, times, people, policies are always changing and bringing with them new challenges. The only way to maintain the edge and expertise is to always be learning. By continuously seeing the value in learning and setting aside time and resources to do so as an organization helps us.

I am also finding that academic learning is very different from learning in the real world. Learning in the real world need not be a complicated, time consuming, exhausting or confusing. There is also no need to fear failing a test or exam- in the real world is there often is no right or wrong answers as nothing is ever black and white. We are dealing with diverse contexts and challenges, all we can do is experiment with strategies/activities, reflect on our actions, and adapt. You can learn and achieve a whole lot in the real world by simply being observant and reflective or thoughtful.

In closing, here are some tips I have picked up about learning in the real world so far:

·         Value learning and make time to reflect on what you are doing and why as lessons emerging from doing sometimes contain the ‘secret sauce’ to moving to the next level.

·         We are never expert enough to stop learning, there is always something new to learn. Always be learning!

·         Don’t be afraid to learn from failure, there is often no right or wrong answers in the real world, even what we consider as failures can’t really be failures if we make note of them and learn from them.

Yeukai Mukorombindo

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A Belated Intro to the RLP, Its SYSTEM Focus, and Its Whisperers

We have referred a lot to the RLP in our initial posts. Gertrude said it was called the Regional Training Program and it’s changed the focus to learning. If you are not part of the Community, apologies- we have probably not introduced the program and the team well enough! Here is a brief attempt, so that I can get to a point I want to make.

The Regional Learning Program and its Community is bigger than this pilot. Every year, several times a year, the team trains people (and those that would like to become trainers) on social accountability. I attended their Grahamstown Fundamentals course with a group of people from Malawi and Tanzania; Uganda and Mozambique. There were civil society individuals, a member of parliament, and a trainer, among many others. Sure I am forgetting many - so I am ready to hear about it in the WhatsApp group! Yes- months after the course, there is a VERY active WhatsApp group. Fundamentals is very intense - do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

You’ll probably hear about the course many times in this blog. For now this is what you should know: in Fundamentals it is all about getting and working the SYSTEM. Not a one social accountability tool or another; not just a focus on the budget or the integrity institutions. It is about juggling many pieces of the public resources management system, bringing them together and linking them so that they contribute to progressively achieve rights. In the two weeks of Fundamentals, you look at each part of the system with a magnifying glass and then you zoom out to get the big picture. Sneak peak in the graph.

Many - and I mean hundreds - from across Southern Africa have been trained in this course in Grahamstown. Also, there are localized versions of the courses that PSAM supports. I learned anecdotally that in some countries funders and civil society groups have been through the training and use its insights in other capacity building efforts. Question: directly or indirectly, how many people across the region have been trained in PSAM’s rights, systems approach to social accountability? Fear not Elsie and Yeukai, we are not head-counting in the pilot! As Gertrude says: “we should not focus our MEL systems on the number of seats trained and things that are relatively easy to measure over things like depth of engagement, improved understanding of PRM systems and the extent to which this deeper understanding is being used to develop more strategic advocacy interventions, the nature and extent of systemic change.”

If you really want to learn about it you should get in touch with the RLP’s training coordinator at psam.training@ru.ac.za

Training is a big part of RLP, but Gertrude also warns ““we and our partners need to avoid falling into a trap of becoming training focused in our strategies.” What else does RLP do? RLP also partners with organizations after they go off to apply the Fundamentals’ approach across Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a numerous and diverse crowd. Some RLP community members are INGOs, others national and local NGOs. Some are small organizations, others are the tip of the iceberg - leads of large networks of civil society groups who in turn mobilize others. They come from different country contexts. They use and navigate the system to realize different rights. Land? Check. Health? Check. Housing? Check ….

The RLP team has a regional community to continue learning - that is where we got the diagnostic and OK for this exercise. Yep, despite diversity there is common ground!

The RLP team also tailors partnerships with organizations and groups of organizations in countries. This brings me (finally!) where this blog post started: Gertrude and the RLP Program Officers. They are the ones who do the work of nurturing these partnerships day in and day out in Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively.

I had to highlight the RLP Program Officers. When I think about Bulawayo there is this whisper that keeps popping up in my head: “I know my people”. Translating the whisper in context: you should pay closer attention to “my people”’s expressions. They are not really into this idea as they may seem to you. I know, I can be aware and resist but it is not hard to look like the Chapulin Colorado! Well, at least, listening to the whisper and putting it in perspective - that will come in handy in this rollercoaster ride. Different perspectives.

Want to know who helped out? If you are part of this community, you may have already guessed. If not, perhaps if you stick around you’ll figure out!

Florencia Guerzovich

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Thinking Our Way Out of the Headache of Learning...

If learning is as much a characteristic of being alive as breathing, then why do we need to bother asking tedious questions like ‘...What makes us learn? …How do we learn? …and How do we even know that we are learning?’ After all we don't ask ourselves on a daily basis: What makes us breathe? How do we breathe? And how do we even know that we are breathing? 

Believe me, I was as clueless as the next person when it came to answering the above questions. I probably still am. Yet the PSAM’s Regional Learning Programme (RLP), with my full support, has decided to embark on a two-year ‘learning journey’ in a bold attempt to try to marry our theory of change with the messy and non-linear playground within which we practice. Needless to say, we jumped into the exercise without a proper understanding of what we were getting ourselves into (which is probably for the best) but with a lot of enthusiasm for the end goal which was ‘to demonstrate to the ‘world’ that we are, in fact, ‘learning’ from our social accountability practice.

The PSAM is leading this journey as part of a community of practitioners who engage (or so we like to think) in systemic rights-based social accountability work. The primary thing that brought us together was that we all wanted to ‘learn’ from our social accountability practice. During our last meeting, as we sat in a conference room in Bulawayo - the second largest city in Zimbabwe for those of you who, like me, mastered the art of open-eyed sleeping in geography class- wondering what we had got ourselves into, this fearless woman from Argentina decided to yank us out of our comfort zones...before coffee even! 

This woman took us through an exercise that forced us to question some of the assumptions we had. I won’t go into the mechanics of the exercise but by the end of it, we were asking ourselves the types of questions that would leave anyone reaching for whatever drug would ease the inevitable migraine that was kicking in. To give you a taste of what I am talking about, here are a few of them:

1. Is our right to social accountability a process or an outcome? Are we only able to engage in contexts that are conducive for social accountability work or is our engagement a way of making the context progressively more conducive for the interaction between government and citizens? What influence does our perception of this have on what we learn from our social accountability journey and the reasoning behind the many decisions we will make along the way?
2. Yes, context matters! But to what extent? Under which circumstances? In what ways? When, how and why are practitioners’ experiences, adaptations, decisions unique and when, how and why are they they similar regardless of context? How do we define context in our interventions? Is it a geographical location, a cultural or linguistic grouping, a sector, or something else entirely? How does our definition of context determine what we learn and why?
3. Accountability is always a good thing when it is something we expect from someone else. While we were all very consistent about our expectations from government to justify and explain their decisions, did we see this as something that only applied to them or did this principle also filter into our own expectations of ourselves and of each other on the demand side as well? Are we as enthusiastic about the principle when it is an expectation imposed on us by government? What does this teach us about ourselves?
   

   
   
4. If I was to die on the job tomorrow and wanted to leave a ‘legacy box’ for my successor that passes on the most important lessons my journey has taught me without one having to have been on the journey with me, what would I put in the box and what would I leave out? How would I organize my box? How would I even make someone interested in keeping the box open long enough to learn my lessons with me?

So, do you have a headache yet? Don’t say I didn’t warn you. What I do want you to know, though, is that this was a turning point for me. I suddenly began to see the point of the questions I asked at the beginning of this blogpost. It also suddenly dawned on me this was going to be one of those exercises that made you feel terrified and exhilarated all at the same time. Although at that point I felt a bit more terrified than exhilarated, I became totally clear about one thing. 

Whatever the outcome, this was not going to be one of those marketing exercises where we show ‘the world’ how well we are learning. Personally, I expect this to be an enlightening and enriching experience for anyone who is brave enough to join the journey. If there is one expectation I have, it is that it leaves me with a new understanding of the social accountability ‘playground’ that I have been trying so hard to change for so many years. 

Gertrude Mugizi

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