It was one of those rainy, January 2006 days in Kampala – less than four months after I had joined the World Agroforestry Centre as Programme Officer for its African Highlands Eco-regional Initiative (AHI). I had just finished tucking my files away and with my laptop computer strapped over my shoulder, angrily rambled out of my 1st floor office off Luthuli Avenue.
It hadn’t been quite a good day, having taken a bloddy hell of thorough grilling – along with my colleagues of course, from the World Bank Science Council mission. We had been harassed for “slipping into intellectual slumber” and not doing enough to churn out “International Public Goods (IPGs)” (research papers, working papers, policy briefs and so on) out of the watershed management studies our research teams were conducting in the ecologically fragile highland regions in East and Central Africa. We had also been roasted for having lost not only concentration but also a sense of direction as an Eco-Regional Programme of the CGIAR/World Agroforestry Centre.
The Science Council repeatedly challenged us to demonstrate in emperical terms, to what extent we had achieved our goal of "arresting environmental degradation in fragile highlands of East and Central Africa" to which we inadequately responded. Each time the challenge was posed, Chris Opondo who had led the presentations, would unconfortably drift his gaze from me, to our boss Laura German, to Tilahun Amede, to Tanui Joseph and back to me; hoping to get "reinforcements" and rescueing arguments. Poor Chris, none of us volunteered any appealing ideas so he ended up being crucified much more painfully than the rest of us. Aparently everybody feared crossing the path of the angry Science Council missioners - so we unwillingly gave up Chris Opondo as the sacrificial lamb! Throughout my long integrated conservation and rural development career, I had faced several “hostile” donor evaluation missions, but this particular World Bank Science Council grilling left me physically and emotionally bamboozled.
When I agreed to join AHI of the World Agroforestry Centre in October 2005, I already knew that the institution faced a credibility crisis due to prolonged lack of visibility and programme impact; and a management vacuum to some extent. I however believed that given my intense inclination to impact-oriented project management principles, I would gradually influence an institutional shift in orientation to focus at more programme visibility and relevance to people’s livelihood priorities. Sadly, I could not engineer this envisaged shift as fast as I had hoped, owing to a rigid programme management structure and a restrictive “programme mandate” which placed emphasis on IPGs rather than tangible livelihood outputs.
When the Wold Bank mission arrived, we quite frankly expected some hard talking although not at the magnitude we eventually witnessed. AHI had faced numerous challenges in meeting its targets in the previous two years. Our stakeholders within East and Central Africa were unanimous in their view that “we only hear about AHI but don’t see it;” while farmers with which we worked to “test” watershed management models were increasingly getting disillusioned with our bla –bla “pen and paper” approaches. Donor support for our watershed research programmes was precariously wobbling and this had imposed a severe strain of the institution’s financial base. No body on the AHI team doubted that indeed, we needed to turn over a new chapter, to engage in “business unusual,” and apply “cutting-edge science” to meet our IPG targets, arrest environmental degradation and catalyse livelihood improvements in ecologically fragile highlands of East and Central Africa. The million-dollar question though, was HOW!
In my mind, I was in no doubt as to how we could achieve this. Essentially, we needed to:
1.Mainstream our watershed research activities with development work supported by governments and other non-government players
2.Strengthen the involvement of farmer institutions in identifying their priority watershed research questions
3.Not only to focus on producing IPGs, but also collaborate with and support knowledge, information and technology disseminating institutions to package and scale out our research findings
4.Put more passion in the way we promoted our innovative programmes such as Landcare, which we had hitherto left to run without proper follow up mechanisms, lesson-learning regimes, and institutional capacity building input
5.Collate lessons learnt and feed them into government and private sector agricultural extension support systems
I recall sharing these points with my colleague Chris over a bottle of beer at Rhino Pub (don’t get us wrong – we only wanted something cool after the grilling) and while we agreed that these were loaded suggestions, we pondered over whether the programme structure and senior management would be flexible enough to embrace those suggestions. We resolved that whatever the outcome, we had to present them to the rest of the AHI team for discussion. It’s indeed amazing what the cruel heat of the Science Council grill could do: hearts had gotten soft, cohesion and collective thinking among the team had increased, opposition to livelihood focus had waned. The the team consequently accepted our proposals without ado! We agreed on a roadmap for reforming the African Highlands Eco-Regional Initiative and set out to do what we believed would make a difference.
I would have loved to witness the AHI reforms unfold but I painfully couldn’t resist a call by UNDP in June 2006, to go and serve the battered communities of Afghanistan as their Capacity Building Specialist for Green Afghanistan Initiative. I was at the World Agroforestry Centre for only six month, but I learnt a mountain of lessons worth more than six months. No wonder I have nostalgia for AHI! I hope some body still on the team will loop me sooner, into how the reforms we initiated are going.
Denis Mutabazi
August 2007
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