Ownership, accountability and sustainability

The need to show results and be accountable to donors is positive in many respects; focusing the energies of agencies on clearly defined goals, ensuring efficiency and one hopes, value for money.

Though the pressure from donors and internally from development agencies to also ensure the sustainability of an intervention will necessitate trade-offs in the process undertaken to deliver the defined project objectives. This dialectic is clearly evidenced in the delivery of livelihood and related natural resource management projects.

One of the accepted pathways to achieve sustainable development interventions is that individuals or communities benefiting from a project should participate in a meaningful way in the project design, its implementation and ultimately its monitoring and evaluation.

In principle, where the project team has the time, skills, value-orientation and experience to maximise participation, this can lead to a greater sense of ownership within the project. This ownership and sense of responsibility for the project outputs can help sustain the project outputs in the absence of external support.  In practice, this might require training of sufficient technicians and the establishment of a committee for the collection of fees to maintain water hand-pump into the future, for example.

Experiences in Liberia

Though, throughout rural Liberia, countless hand-pumps installed through the interventions of Non-Governmental Organisations are not working for a multitude of reasons.  Perhaps, the well is sunk during the prolonged rainy season and when the water table drops in the dry season, the water runs dry; spare parts are not available, skills are not available to fix the pump etc.  In many respects the pump is seen as the property of the NGO and when it breaks down, it is left to rust, another relic of failed development.

In the wider context of supporting sustainable livelihoods within a natural resource management project, the tensions between delivering timely results against a prescribed timeline and ensuring sustainability are acute.

In Liberia, the production of upland rice through shifting cultivation is the preoccupation of most farmers. This is recognised by many (mainly by outsiders such as Government and environmentalists) as environmentally destructive and ultimately unsustainable as land pressures increase in line with a rising population.  Efforts have been made for decades to encourage swamp rice farming in Liberia but invariably these swamps are soon abandoned after the project comes to an end.

While donors and partners have their financial year ends and project start and end dates, the farming calendar ebbs and flows in a continuous cycle.  Regrettably livelihood projects that focus on outputs i.e. rice harvest within a fixed period and not finding solutions to problems identified by the farmers are likely not to be sustained.  In reality, loss of rice harvest from birds and other pests are some of the most significant issues facing farmers or diminution in labour due to children attending school or outward migration of youth to urban centres.

STEWARD – supporting sustainable livelihoods in the Nimba Mountains Region

STEWARD, a program of USAID West Africa is piloting low- input rice and fish ponds in three communities close to the East Nimba Nature Reserve near to the border of Guinea.

These ponds offer the possibility of two rice and fish harvests annually and thus can contribute significantly to the food production and income sources of a family or group managing the resource.

What is now needed is to analyze over time the benefits of this farming system as against the alternative of upland rice farming and catching fish in the stream?  Can this technology be replicated at scale across communities and minimum cost by families or a number of family units cooperating together?  This has important environmental concerns as some local fishing methods are particularly destructive e.g. use of poison or small gauge nets used to catch the fish.

One time, one can assess whether; an increase in fish production at a centralised location will lead to a reduction in fishing in nearby streams or decreased demand for bush-meat? Given the seasonality of the fish harvest from the pond and the weekly if not daily requirement for protein, the impacts from the fish pond will likely relate more to increased income through the sale of fish rather than a reduction in pressure on local fish stocks.

Will an increased production of the swamp rice reduce pressures on the upland rice? If yes, this technology (in conjunction with other agro-forestry techniques) could reduce the yearly cutting down of secondary forest, lower the use of fire for clearing surrounding vegetation and lead to a reduction in soil erosion.

Though as farmers have practised upland rice cultivation for countless generations, one needs to be realistic about what can be achieved even in a four year program. Farmers will ultimately take a decision on what system to maintain or variation to make in their existing system with a cost benefit analysis of the variations in labour demands, rice harvest, and weed and pest prevalence from the two crop cultivation methods.

As STEWARD enters a four year program in 2011/ 2012, it can accompany communities on a journey to find viable alternative solutions to the problems they face in building sustainable livelihoods. By incorporating learning and capacity building as central elements of the project design and monitoring framework; the building blocks of sustainable development can be put in place – interventions that are continued in the absence of external support.

By supporting farmers to develop indicators of change they would like to see in the lifetime of the project, we can support learning and capacity building. In parallel, standard type indicators should capture numbers of persons trained, areas of land under better natural resource management practice that capture data required for reporting to external donors and ensure upward accountability.

In effect, an approach that finds a balance between the demands of producing time-framed results with a realistic assessment of the needs of communities and their capacities to adapt existing or learn new farming practices in a reasonable (however defined) time frame is needed.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or STEWARD.