The Work
The work I did in Somalia can be divided into two periods. During the first period, I was a consultant to the mission, working on the five year Somalia Family Health Project which had just been funded by Washington. The work was preparatory to bringing in a consulting organization to run the project on the ground, which was a major part of my job during the second phase. In other words, as a consultant to the mission, I learned a lot about the project and what the mission wanted in the consulting organization, so that I was able to work with URC to win the project and a project management position with URC to continue my work with the project.
The Somalia Family Health Project
This project like most of USAID’s development projects was developed by a Washington-based team that came out to the country specifically to develop the project design and write the Project Paper (PP), the official project blueprint. The PP was developed in consultation with Somali counterpart agencies and with heavy direction and input from local USAID staff with oversight and direction from Washington. The process took one to two years until the PP was officially approved and although based on “local needs,” the project components tended to be similar across countries. Since the US government bore most of the project costs, and the countries benefitted by project jobs and commodities, USAID played a dominant role in defining local needs ( of course in consultation with local agencies and professionals) and project scope.
Phase 1
The project which was designed to address family planning, was euphemistically referred to as The Family Health and Child Spacing project as family planning was not culturally acceptable to the Somalis. Since this was the first such project of its kind in Somalia and it faced an up hill battle culturally, the project designers specified a multi- organizational design to avoid “putting their eggs in one basket” and to help create a more favorable long-term environment for child spacing. Although that made sense theoretically, the project was more complex than made sense in a country with so little experience with USAID projects and joint or collaborative efforts, and so little organizational capacity and infrastructure. Also, the initiatives that each agency was funded to carry out did not easily mesh with each other nor fit coherently into a larger strategy. The project design, however, took a long view by seeking to build capacity and gain support for the overall goal of child spacing from key institutions.
Since this was a bi-lateral project (a collaborative US and Somali government project) the design had to be approved by the Somali government and so undoubtedly a lot of horse-trading went on to get the government’s support and sign-off.
The project involved collaborative work with 6 agencies, all contributing some small piece to improving the environment and services for family health/child spacing. The agencies included:
The Ministry of Planning which was supported by the project to undertake a national census of the population. The support included equipping the census office with computers, training staff in conducting a census, overseeing the conduct of a census and the preparation of a report on the results;
The Somali Women’s Democratic Organization (SWDO), the women’s arm of the Somali Democratic Organization, the political party in power. The project supported SWDO to undertake outreach efforts to mobilize and educate women about the pernicious effects of female circumcision;
The Women’s Education Department (WED) of the Department of Education, to develop programs for strengthening the education (both formal and informal) of women;
Youth Department of the Ministry of Education, to support the incorporation of materials on family health in health and science textbooks that were to be developed during the course of the project by the Ministry. The project would also pay for printing the textbooks.
The Department of Maternal and Child Health in the Ministry of Health (MOH), who were supported to establish a child spacing service which would train MOH nurses to educate women about child spacing and provide contraceptives, and
The Somali Family Health Care Association (SFHCA), a new organization that would be established and staffed to provide child spacing/family planning services through the non-governmental sector as well as information and education on child spacing for the public. SFHCA would be affiliated with the international planned parenthood federation (IPPF) and ultimately would receive assistance from them. The project paid for equipping a family planning clinic in Mogadishu, as well as equipment for producing information materials (e.g. posters, pamphlets, etc) for the project.
Because of the project’s complexity, the project paper called for the creation of a project coordinating committee, comprised of representatives from each of the agencies to coordinate activities and trouble shoot problems. The committee would be chaired by the Minister of Planning.
My initial job ( as consultant to USAID) was to help bring this project coordinating committee (PCC) to life; develop ( and gain agreement on ) by-laws and operational procedures, prepare the meeting agendas, present project implementation issues for discussion, follow-up ( and resolve) issues raised and then help form a secretariat for the PCC so that ultimately it could continue to function on its own. I served as staff to this committee working closely with the Minister of Planning ( Mohamed Elabe) who chaired the meetings. I also worked closely with Margaret Neuse, the USAID person responsible for project implementation, in determining the implementation issues the committee needed to address, and in strategizing the best ways to gain consensus from the participating agencies, each of whom had turf they wanted to protect or expand, and priorities and activities they wanted to propose.
It meant a lot of listening to the heads of these agencies and finding the common ground for meeting agendas. I also provided assistance to the Executive Director of SFHCA, the agency designated to serve as the secretariat to the committee. My scope of work as a consultant involved lots of process and not very clear results.
However, I had my fingers on the pulse of the project and that proved invaluable when it came time for consulting groups to respond to USAID to become the group responsible for overall technical assistance and on-the-ground implementation. Armed with that information I approached URC, a consulting company that I had worked for previously, about bidding on the project. I had left URC on very good terms a couple of years earlier to work for the American Public Health Association, and Carolyn Davis, a good friend and colleague worked for URC in new business development and knew they were interested in getting into international work. So we agreed that I would work with them as a consultant and help them develop a project proposal in response to the USAID RFP. URC was successful and I then became manager of URC’s Somalia Family Health Project, which was a part of the larger USAID effort.
Phase 2: The URC, Family Health Project
The URC/Family Health project called for providing technical assistance to the implementing agencies noted above, through long term resident advisors and short term consultants. URC recruited and fielded three long term advisors, a chief of party and communications advisor, a training advisor and an advisor for research and evaluation. (all this was determined by the AID RFP). Each advisor had a Somali counterpart and was based at one of the Somali organizations to assist that organization to carry out the activities specified in the original project plan.
My work included recruiting, orienting and assisting each of the advisors to relocate to Somalia; getting them oriented to their counterpart agencies and jobs, and then overseeing and facilitating their work. Specifically, it involved helping them develop an overall project workplan and schedule ( which needed AID approval) fielding short term consultants to assist them to carry out specific activities, assuring that project equipment (including project vehicles) and commodities were purchased and shipped, and coordinating between the field project, USAID and URC. Since this project took place in the 1980s (before skype and the internet), communications between Washington and the field were difficult so 3-4 trips a year were made to carry out my management and coordination responsibilities.
Each advisor was required to work with his counterpart agency to implement activities called for in the project plan and to develop local capacity to implement family health information and services. For example, the training advisor, based at the Ministry of Health worked with Ministry staff and the Somali Family Health Care Association to train health personnel in family planning services and to ensure that the necessary supplies and equipment were in place. The communications advisor coordinated with these agencies to develop informational campaigns to inform the public about the importance of child spacing and the availability of services. He also assisted the Somali Women’s Democratic Organization in developing informational materials and campaigns on female circumcision, which they carried out with their members. The research and evaluation advisor, conducted small studies to support the project activities. We also had short term consultants ( who I recruited) with specific expertise required to supplement the work of the long-term advisors.
The URC project was into its third year of a five year project, when the president of Somalia, “the old man” died and the country became destabilized, and all consultants and advisors were withdrawn.
As the civil war spread, Somalis who could, fled to Kenya and then onward, some to the US and some to Europe. Two women that I worked with in Somalia made it to the states, one from the MOH and one from SWDO. The MOH physician ( Asha Mohamed) went to work in DC for one of the international agencies and we often saw each other at meetings. Her husband who was imprisoned for his opposition to the government joined her a few years later. For a few years, there was an active grapevine from which I could learn who had survived and who was where. Many of the Somalis were able to get refugee status as they were political opponents of the new regime. Often I thought sadly about the fact that nothing remained of our efforts, except for the personal and professional friendships we formed. I thought about the AV and materials room which was equipped with the latest printing and audio-visual equipment; the clinics we had equipped and all the project vehicles we had driven