Sylvia's Journal

I read a brief study of two subsequent strategic planning processes at the ministry of education [briefing paper on capacity-building and policymaking in Afghanistan’s education sector]. It is an interesting paper about capacity building in complex organizations. Any public sector organization is complex because of its multiple stakeholders with their many and often competing agendas, but complexity here is a multiple of this. The paper shows some of the intended and unintended consequences of capacity building work started by foreigners.

Foreigners like me who come in as facilitators often make matters worse. We end up being complexifyers because of the philosophies and models we bring along from different countries, the different processes we invent as we go along, each new invention, new layer adding more complexity.

But when we train others we sometimes train for hypothetical simple organizations that don’t exist in real life. Topics like time management, meeting management, supervision, delegation are often taught as if there are no power dynamics and people gobble it up, exactly because of the illusion that things and people can be managed well, eh ‘simply. Poor coordination is treated like a root cause and the solution is sought in the establishment of yet another coordination mechanism. I could write books about the disconnect between what we teach and the capacity that is needed.

This morning I showed up a little before 10 AM at the office of one of the general directors. To get to him I had to duck below scaffolds and men in coveralls who appeared to have painted themselves first. Strong paint fumes permeated the poorly ventilated hallways and I wrapped my scarf tightly around my nose.

The building contains the two most central and also most under-served general directorates. There is reluctance from the donors to come to their aid because of the opaqueness of and alleged political interference in their processes.

Two dark-clad women scurried around the painters. They looked like they had stepped right out of a Grimm tale, hook-nosed crones, hissing between their bad teeth, a frightening apparition that made me wonder for a brief second, “where am I?”

The meeting we were supposed to be attending (he the Chair, me representing my project) was held at the other end of the compound in the office of one of the deputy ministers. We were late. We dashed out of the dark and dusty building into the bright morning sunlight, with the sun still visible beyond the dust. We ran across the inner courtyard as fast as we could, me limping behind with my arthritic knee that seemed to have gotten little benefit from the Dubai operation.

The meeting was about getting recognition for family medicine as a legitimate and badly needed specialty for Afghanistan at the district level. It was an impressive plea, well documented and well presented by a family doctor who is well known here and deeply committed to improve the health of the least and worst served segments of the population.

Only twenty minutes into this meeting I had to dash out to another meeting because times had shifted and then, an hour later, was back in the same office with a nearly identical cast of characters, about something else. This is the problems here, a thin layer of people does all the work and so you will meet with them all the time, dashing hither and thither with computer, diary and papers under the arm.

Missing lunch because of the commute back to the office for yet another meeting, I ate a few items from Doug’s MRE (Meals-Ready-to-Eat) birthday present to me which I keep in my briefcase for just such eventualities: a peanut butter desert bar and a piece of French Toast with ‘real’ syrup jelly inside. The 4 inches of chemical ingredients listed on the packages left me bloated and full without the pleasant sensation of a good meal – it was an emergency response and not one I want to repeat much.