Monitoring and evaluation can often seem like the less glamorous younger sister of exciting implementation, who comes first, steals the show, is effortlessly photographable and charms everyone around her. As a CWS staff member whose job starts when the implementers go home, however, I’m here to tell you that monitoring ensures that implementation becomes something more than superficial AND has a certain charm of her own!
Today we have a very special blog post, written by our wonderful Assistant Project Manager, Shak! Here’s what Shak has to say about the past couple of weeks in the field:
Frequent visits are really helping a lot in the communities.
And I am happy everyone is liking our system.
People [keep] telling us how they are having good changes in health as compared to the past.
And I am happy with our team and our management in the office.
We work according to the moto.
-Shakun Ibrahim, CWS Assistant Project Manager
We have settled into a nice routine here in Tamale. We visit a handful of houses and check up on the treatment center in each village once every week or two. Even in the new villages our faces are familiar by now! And speaking of faces: I am trying my best to get pictures from each village so that those of you at home who remember your community can see how everyone is doing.
The tricky thing about routines, though, is how easily they are broken! This was also definitely a week of firsts as well.
In Kadula, a runaway tractor (incredible mental image) got away from its owner after being ‘bathed’ in the dugout. It ran downhill and (naturally) hit Kadula’s treatment center. Luckily only the stand suffered any damage.
The silver lining to this unfortunate incident is how well the community is doing literal damage control. When I arrived on Tuesday to speak with the chief and elders, they already had a plan for repairs and some new rules for vehicles around the dugout. I will keep you updated on their progress!
In Jagberin, Ayesha and Fulera decided that it was time to clean the polytank, so when we visited on Thursday we talked them through the process. In this split community each village ‘side’ takes a turn filling the blue drums, but this time they both pitched in to get everything cleaned quickly. We were pleasantly surprised to find the center up and running the next day.
– Kathryn
The rainy season has begun here in Northern Ghana! This means a lot of things for village life:
Farming!
Villager’s days, (storms permitting), are comparatively busier than during the dry season.
Shea Butter!
Shea nuts were collected and dried before the rains started, and now many afternoons are spent churning this delicious-smelling paste by hand.
Green Growth!
It is incredible how fast things grow now, and the villages are almost unrecognizable for those of us who remember them from January. TJ and I actually got lost on the way to Kushini’s dugout because the grasses had grown so much since our last visit. Good thing we were able to snag Nash here as a guide!
Rain! (obviously)
Traditionally during the rainy season, many villagers switch over to rainwater collection so they don’t have to mess with turbid dugout water. In villages with lots of tin roofs, like Yipela, Cheko, Kpalbusi, Gidanturu, and even Tacpuli or Kushini, this means that people are able to use their safe storage containers to capture funneled rainwater. However, in other villages, like Zanzugu-Yipela, Gbateni or Kpalguni, there aren’t enough tin roofs to go around, so many people still rely on the center for drinking water. Needless to say this is a difficult time for monitoring, as some centers remain almost empty (settled blue drums standing by should scooping be necessary) while others deal with even higher demands (Wambong villagers seem to drink even more when it rains). It is also the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, so people aren’t drinking during the day anyway. Lastly, CWS suggestions about healthy rainwater collection take a while to reach every house, so we often find a few empty buckets whose owners weren’t aware that they could use their containers for saa khom (rainwater). This all sounds a bit complicated, but household visits help us feel out village patterns and make it easier to go with the flow. To see how the rain impacted center operations in your favorite villages, check out ghanawaters.crowdmap.com at the end of the month!
As for Shak, TJ, Peter, Wahab and myself, we are just happy when we wake up to roads dry enough to get out of town and into the field!
– Kathryn
This week, CWS staff had the chance to spend some quality time in villages new and old.
In Kpalbusi, we checked in on the village’s Fulani community. The Fulani are a group of people with a really different lifestyle than the farmers that make up the majority of our villages. They specialize in raising and herding cattle and live a more nomadic lifestyle, and therefore are a little less settled and a little more transient than most of CWS’ customers. Their settlements are often removed from the central village space, which makes them an interesting challenge for follow-up monitoring! Even so, it is worth taking the time to track the Fulani down. They always offer a unique perspective on village life and CWS’ water treatment operations specifically.
Since the rainy season began, polytank opening hours in Kpalbusi have become less scheduled. Unfortunately this means that the nine Fulani households have had a difficult time getting to the polytank when it is open. After discussions with the Fulani, Zillifau (one of Kpalbusi’s center operators) and Sachi (Chief) Mohammed alHassan, we all agreed to establish two days with set center hours to help the Fulani with planning. Great teamwork all!
We also spent some time this week in Tacpuli, a Summer 2011 Fellowship village. On Wednesday we spoke to Lashiche who reports that the villagers are all doing a good job of visiting the center regularly. She had one complaint: the polytank had a leak which was making filling difficult. So we came back the next day with materials and showed her how to fix leaks in the future.
If your favorite village did not get mentioned in this post, don’t worry! CWS has started using this awesome new web platform that will allow you to follow your village’s monthly ins and outs online! Check it out at ghanawaters.crowdmap.com. Set up alerts to get email notifications of your favorite village’s status, or peruse any and all reports at your leisure. Now you don’t have to wait for blog updates from the field – real time village information is at your fingertips!
– Kathryn
Its hard to believe that its been two whole weeks without the fellows here! Shak, Peter, Wahab, TJ and I really miss their help and insight and entertainment. Luckily all groups did a wonderful job implementing, so monitoring the new seven has been a breeze.
We’ve also spent a lot of time back in the older villages, which we didn’t get to see much of during the fellowship period. In Zanzugu-Yipela, we constructed a rainwater catchment center that will help the village with its first rainy season (pictures to follow as soon as camera malfunctions are dealt with), and everybody is really excited about the new addition! Gbong’s rain catchment center is also up and running – just in time for the big storms that blow through now. We have also been having community meetings in many of the older villages, to talk about everything from rainwater collection to group problem solving, and it has been great to get to know familiar faces from the villages a little bit better.
In my first couple weeks on the job, I’ve really been struck by the profound impact the fellows in particular have on their adopted villages. Kids in newer villages are still doing the handshakes and back-flips the Summer 2011 Fellows taught them, and the people I meet doing household visits in older ones still can remember the excitement of opening day and tell me the importance of a special drinking water cup. Many of the older fellowship villages have asked about fellows by name and have hilarious stories to tell us about implementation. As a fellowship alumnus myself, its good to know that the tremendous energy fellows and locals alike put into passing out buckets and transcending language barriers and problem-solving in traditional committees has been channeled into something that seems to be lasting.
– Kathryn
Hey there from the Village Elders,
We and our translator T.J. opened our beautiful new water treatment center at Gbanteni this past Friday and have since then been making trips to our village to check up on them! We’re lucky we implemented when we did because with the rainy season coming and the precarious spots on the rocky dirt road, travel to our village will soon be nearly impossibly (unless you swim). On the up side, since it is so far out in the country, it is one of the prettiest villages and we loved working there! Here’s what we’ve seen over the past few days:
We have been around to talk to all of the households to inspect their buckets to ensure that they are full of only clean water, there are no problems with the buckets, and they are happy with the new water. We’ve seen all of the usual suspects: broken and leaky taps, people who haven’t filled their buckets, people filling ‘illegal’ buckets (aka unclean buckets without a lid and a tap), and people hesitant to buy more water. However, after 3 days of thorough monitoring, we believe we have ironed out all of the kinks. We were proud when our chief suggested and our village agreed to implement a flat monthly fee rather than a pay per fill fee in order to solve some of these problems! We are hopeful this system will work for them. People have even bought extra buckets so they can have clean water when they are out at the farm for extended periods of time. Everyone’s been raving about how much the new water has made them feel better already! Word about the water has gotten out and a neighboring village has come to check it out and wants it in their village too; they were quickly added to the CWS list of villages and will hopefully get clean water soon!
We are confident that the women selected to run the center will do a wonderful job. They are respected in the community and were familiar with the use of alum (one of the chemicals used to clean the water). They have successfully been treating the water since opening day. They seem committed to working at the center and are even stronger than the man in our group; they can carry 30L buckets on their heads and Javier couldn’t quite master that one… In fact, one of the women managed to fill all 3 of the 200L buckets today by herself!
Even the children are learning a lot about clean water! While somewhat shy when we first arrived a few weeks ago, they now run to the car when we arrive and follow us around the village wherever we go. It was also customary at first to see them drinking dugout water but there is nothing more exciting than seeing them drink clean, clear water from the center out of a water bottle we gave them. Just yesterday, we saw a girl with a bottle of dugout water and we disciplined her in English and although she couldn’t understand our language, between the gestures and the kids understanding why we are there, the group of kids told the girl to dump out the dugout water. They really are beginning to understand the importance of ONLY DRINKING CLEAN WATER!
Today was a bittersweet day. It was our last visit to Gbateni and while we are ecstatic that they are becoming self-sufficient regarding clean water, it was very hard to leave these people we have come to know so well over the past few weeks. When we first arrived the chief said “I would offer you some water but we only have dugout water.” We left them today knowing they have a clean, safe, sustainable source of water for their community. The chief, his wife, and everyone who saw us off were beyond grateful. We took some final photos by their brand new CWS sign! We gave them a few photos and small gifts and plan to mail even more! It was wonderful to work with a village that was so enthusiastic about clean water and health and we will definitely be tracking the progress of our village in the future.
-Kelsey. Javier, Jess and Kendra
P.S. We’ll also miss T.J. tons. His singing, dancing, smiling, tardiness, and willingness to eat all the time (particularly bread with us on the road!).
Hello from Team Six, better known as Team Kasi or Team Sixey. We have been working for the past couple weeks in Kudula, a fairly large village of just over 100 households and two schools, about a half hour away from Tamale. So far we’ve had a pretty smooth ride, except for a few days where the villagers were at the market or the farm. This caused us to have to push back our opening day to Friday June 10th as opposed to the original Thursday celebration. However, since we were already ahead of schedule it wasn’t a problem. Our team faces the challenge of reaching out to every household in our particularly large village, but luckily we have Lukeman, our wonderful translator, and our fantastic taxi driver Hamza who also happens to speak English to help us along the way. When we opened yesterday, we only saw about 30-40 buckets being filled out of our 100+ that we had distributed, so we went to the village today for our first day of monitoring and household visits ready to do some sleuthing to find out why only some of the village came out.
We were very pleasantly surprised today to see that all the households that we visited had filled up their water containers! It turns out that most of them came in the evening after we had left. Kudula is officially a success! The houses that we visited were all very pleased with the water taste and very grateful for the work that we had done in Kudula. We will be back tomorrow to fix a few leaky taps and do some more random household checks. In each household we took water samples to bring back to the office to test for coliforms.
Sana and Abibata are our two women who run the station. They’ve been doing a fantastic job and seem to really be catching on quickly to everything we’ve told them. We have full faith in them and their abilities to continue the station after we leave!
It’s amazing how quickly the polystand goes up! Just a few days ago it looked like this:
During our down time in the village we’ve really gotten to know the kids and their individual personalities. They have endless energy and are so fun to be with. We will miss them so much when we go!
We even got to try our hand at the local method of carrying water-on top of your head!
We look forward to seeing more results of all of our hard work when we continue to do more household visits and monitoring in the next few days.
The countdown until the start of the 2011 Summer Fellowship Program is officially in single digits! The Fellowship Leaders arrive in Tamale on Sunday and the Fellows are just a few days behind them. We can’t wait!
This week I finished up my visits to all of the CWS villages,tagging along with Shak and Peter as they checked-up on Nyamaliga, Chongashe and Gbong.
This week I also met with Unicef and a representative from the Central Gonja District Assembly who updated me on our Unicef-CWS villages, Kampong, Alipe, Mile 40, Gilanzegu, and Nyanguripe. One of Unicef’s goals in partnering with us and the Central Gonja District was to “build the capacity of the local government”. One way that we have tried to do this was to pass on the monitoring of these water businesses to the District Assembly. Handing over this responsibility to the government has been challenging for CWS because we are very invested in our communities and like to know that the water businesses are succeeding. We have learned a lot over the past three years about how to successfully monitor our businesses and are used to being the ones in control! Despite these challenges, we recognize the importance of engaging the local government and are glad that Unicef has been able to facilitate this partnership. The District reported that for the most part, these 5 villages are doing well. The few problems that they are experiencing are all things that CWS has dealt with before and we hope to help the District solve them over the next few months. A big thanks to Gerry and Judy O’Connell, the Medfield Fit Girls, The Nolan’s, The Reids, and CWS Facebook Causes Team for sponsoring these villages – I’ll hopefully have some new pictures from them shortly!
On Monday, I headed out with Wahab and Peter to celebrate my birthday in the field! We checked-up on Chanaayili, Gidanturu, and Kpallabusi. Besides some fallen signboards, all three villages were doing well and have been consistently selling water each week. Chanaayili can’t wait to see Annie and Hannah in a couple weeks and when the chief of Kpallabusi found out that Kathryn would be back in Ghana soon, he could not hide his excitement! Here are some pictures from our visits:
