Sand Dams & Food Security Update

I know it has been some time since I wrote on the topic of sand dams and food security which are the crux of my work (Joel) here in Mozambique. I have had to maintain a very disciplined line between work and home life, something which can be very grey within MCC. it can quickly encompass one's entire life. I think that is the way of missions. We treat it a bit different than normal life, or at least I do, with a higher set of ideals and scrutiny. If it is work, we can define the work place and the home life. If it is on the mission field, there is no division, all of life is mission, or at least I think that is what we tend to think. Why is that? Well in anycase, I have learned that definitely in order to survive you have to divide the time in your mind so you and your family do not go crazy. Thus, since I do most e-mailing at home on our blog, I do not write a lot about work.

In any case, a lot has happened in the last year to rejoice about. As many know we moved to Maputo so that I can join a team of people within CCM at their national offices. There has been incredible interest in the work of sand dams and conservation agriculture, both from people who donate money, local organizations and government wanting to build them for Mozambican communities as well as communities who have seen the benefits of improved lives and want dams built for themselves.

Now, what many people see when they give to MCC is that MCC takes that money and somehow magically a dam appears in a community on the otherside of the world. What people do not know is what all has to happen in between to make that happen. It is not as simple as giving money to some needy person and they build a dam. If that were the case, this all would be simple. We would just function like Western Union and tranfer money right to the people that need it. But we know the world is not that simple. There are many things that need to happen. There needs to be good planning by the local organization building the dam so that the money is well spent and people are helped. There needs to be information going back to those who gave money such as stories and information on results, so that everyone is held accountable and so that people who gave know that they really did make a difference. MCC needs to see the results so they can raise more moeny. Local organizations need to be able to connect to donor agencies, like Canadian Food Grains Bank, Life Water, USAID, CIDA and others who can fund the kind of work they hope will benefit people. Local organizations need to be able to fill out grant applications in a way that actually encourages other organizations to fund their work and they need to report in a way that builds and maintains trust.

But there is a big problem. Because we work in a under-developed country, education levels are a lot lower than ours and skills are lacking. The lack of education and skills in society means, though the people in local organizations and communities have skills, they may not have the skills or resources needed to do the kinds of things like reporting, collecting written stories of the difference it is making in people's lives. They do not have the skills to plan efficiently, fill out convincing grant applications and so on. These are the kind of things that determines whether your project will recieve funding or not and whether you can maintain the trust of funding organizations. When a project is not funded, it is the people in the communities that could benefit from a dam that suffer because there is no money to build the dam or teach agriculture skills. Vice versa, this means that the type of information that agencies like MCC need to give back to people like you and me who donate money is often lacking. What happens when MCC cannot give that information to people who donate? Well, we scrutinize missions pretty well. If we don't like it we stop giving or go elsewhere to an organization that we think will do it better. Or we form our own organization or grant which is not necessarily better because the problem is not with MCC or any other funding agency but with the lack of education systems within the countries in which we work. This all means less money for the work that we would like to do to help people. Make sense.

So a few years ago CCM was asking MCC and CFGB to expand the work in other provinces beyond the work that was already happening. Communities were asking for dams. Governments were asking for training for their personnel. Churches were asking for training in conservation agriculture. We were too few in MCC to handle all the in between work. So really the biggest constraint to building more dams and doing more agriculture is the capacity and skills to do the necessary stuff in between including the people and structure to make it happen. So what do we do? Well, that is why I am in Maputo. MCC Mozambique is concentrating on building a team of people whose challenge is to create the conditions within the local organization so the following happens:

1. The provincial bodies of the local organization have the skills to manage these projects well.



2. The provincial bodies have the human resources and technical skills necessary both in management of projects and in agriculture and water collection technologies..



3. The NGO and its provincial bodies have the ability to report on the results in the communities and pass that on to funding agencies and constituents in the West.



4. Good relationships are built and maintained between the NGO and the myriad of funding agencies in the rest of the world so there is sufficient money, training opportunities and technical resources to do the job well.



5. Expansion of the sand dams and conservation work into 4 more provinces in the next 5 years, helping many more communities get food and water for themselves.

So this takes a lot of work and organization and our team has charge of organizing a structure that will facilitate training in technical skills (in water collection and agriculture techniques and approaches, engineering, finances, reporting, project management, etc), learning exchanges with other organizations with experience, building reporting and accounting structures that are efficient and transparent, providing direction and strategy for the program, handling the transfer of money and building the program such that it can be done in a completely new province who has no experience yet with sand dams and conservation agriculture. To move to a different province is not as easy as it seems. There is a huge amount of experience and technical skills and tools gained over the past 4 years. Our team has to start getting together documentation on the processes, such as dam construction and conservation agriculture, technical surveys, tracking sheets, contracts, technical teachings, organizational structures and so on. All these things are needed so we are able to communicate this to people in another province who have never, ever built a dam before. It is not as easy as just telling them how to do it. There is a lot of training (build capacity)that needs to happen and we do not want them to have to start from scratch nor repeat the mistakes we made. It is just not necessary nor an efficient use of money, time and effort.

We have come a long way. We have 4 team members and they are learning their roles. We are planning projects in 4 provinces, 2 more than those already constructing dams. We have program goals and are developing policy, plans and budgets. We are collecting documentation tools in the field and planning trainings. If we do our work well, we will earn the trust of funding agencies and maybe even you who give money to us.

It is not that there is not need nor money to give. There is plenty of communities waiting for dams and plenty of people wanting to help. What is needed is the machinery to make it happen well, transparently, efficiently and productively. If we can pull it off, the end result will be a multiplier effect and will last for many years to come and transform the local church organization into something better.

I have tried in so many ways to describe what I do or am involved in. This is the closest I can come without people wondering why an agriculture worker is living in the big city. That is why I moved to Maputo. That is why we are doing what we are doing.