Our little girl turns 21

Dear friends,

Today 21 years ago my wife Mary did that amazing job only women can do.... give birth to our daugther Hilary. It was a busy Friday evening on March 27, 1992, in the hospital in London, Ontario, Canada and I needed to sit down on a chair not to faint during the delivery while Mary was joking with the medical team. Shows who has the real stamina...!

Tonight Mary has a sushi dinner with Hilary, a few of her friends, our son Mark, and some of his friends. Of course it kills me not to be able to "beam me over, Scottie" .... Just texted with Hilary and Mary and they send me this photo:

For those who don't know Hilary, she is the second to the right. Our son Mark is on the left.

Hilary, big kiss from Bogota! Next year I am going to be there again!!!

Tomorrow the ACCC team will submit the revised PIP to CIDA (for all these acronyms, read my previous post). Then I am going a few days to a small town called Salento in the Colombian "Zona Cafetera". So early next week a post with a few photos of that environment...

Project Implementation Plan

Today a post without photos but with a few updates on the project I am working on here in Colombia with the SENA ("Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje" -  a National Training Agency, sort of a national "super college" servicing 6 million Colombians each year with free vocational training programs from as short as 40 hours and as long as two years). This project is financed by Canadian tax payer contributions through CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency.

CIDA will soon stop to exist as a seperate agency, and it will be integrated in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT). The new name of this government agency will be DFATD = Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade & Development. Many Canadians have been writing about this change the past week. Many writers are worried about this fusion; some are carefully positive. For me the worry is that it will do no good to the image of Canada as a country in the eyes of the international community. This change will very clearly mean that all Canadian foreign aid and development funding is now 100 % tied to its international trade strategies. So assistance will only be given if there is also "something in it" for the Canadian government.

Most donor countries have used "tied aid" forever, so Canada is merely expressively joining that group of countries. A small amount of donor countries tries to keep its international development and aid money seperate from its national agenda (un-tied aid), and Canada was leaning for a long period to that strategy. Canada was a leader in international development in issues such as peace-keeping, the environment and gender mainstreaming projects. But the past 5-10 years Canada has moved away from such international leadership. The majority of Canadians who voted for the Harper government agree with its policy to first focus on the financial housekeeping at home, and only then at what happens in the rest of the world. One can argue for a long time about the "pro's and con's" of such a policy. In the end it is determined by one's ideological opinions.

The process of getting funding from CIDA (soon-to-be DFATD) is a long one. In my project the implementing organization is the ACCC (Association of Canadian Community Colleges). ACCC submitted a "concept paper" about four years ago, which was approved by CIDA. The idea for the EFE Andes program (Education for Employment) was in line with earlier approved EFE programs in Africa (Senegal, Tanzania and Mozambique) and the Caribbean (9 island states, Belize, Guyana and Suriname). The EFE Andes program will have project actvities in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia.

A contract was signed between CIDA and ACCC, and the program started in April 2012 with a few fact finding missions to the three countries by ACCC staff in April and May, followed by visits of delegations from the three countries to Canada in June. The ACCC hired three Technical Advisors in July, and I was the lucky one to be chosen for the task in Colombia. The three of us (Roger Mailhot in Bolivia and Sylvain Goudreau in Peru) received training in Ottawa in September and our contracts started in November. I joined two ACCC staff members on a second fact-finding visit to Colombia in November, and in December I did further planning and research from Canada.

I started the work "on the ground" in early Jaanuary, and on January 18 we submitted our PIP for the Colombia EFE program (PIP stands for "Project Implementation Plan"). This is a document of well over 100 pages with in-depth country research & data, program logic & justification, and a variety of tables related to project implementation planning. The main purpose of the PIP is that the project is made "transparent, accountable and measurable". The implementing organization commits to a variety of project outputs & outcomes with measurable indicators and targets per indicator. The PIP also has a risk management plan with mitigation strategies.

CIDA experts review the document and ask questions when things are not clearly explained. This is of course an iterative process. In early February we had a "regional" meeting with participants from CIDA Ottawa and ACCC Ottawa together with project stakeholders from Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. At the end of the three day session we agreed on a number of improvements to be made on the PIP, and we have been working on those during February and March.

I visited our project pilot communities (where we will implement increased and improved training programs in small scale mining & agriculture) during the past 4 weeks which gave further details for our indicators and targets. On March 28 ACCC will submit its final PIP and hopefully CIDA can agree with our revisions and additions. Of course the revised document still needs to be in line with what was submitted in the original "concept paper", but we have now more realistic information and we can define better what reasonable and measurable indicators and targets will be.

It is a lot of work before one can actually start the implementation of the program; almost one year of the five years funding is spent on it. However, without having the funding to do this work, the implementing organizations would not be able to undertake serious projects and programs. And without well defined outputs, outcomes, indicators and targets, a project/program will be difficult to evaluate at the end of the funding period. The Canadian tax payers deserve optimal transparency and accountability for how their money has been spent overseas. There is no discussion about that.

The challenge for a good PIP is that the situations where we try to assist with sustainable aid & development, is never an "easy" situation. If it were easy, the people locally would already have solved the problems. The situations are complex and it is not so easy to define realistic outputs and outcomes. Once you have agreement on thosee, then it is even harder to define realistic indicators and targets which at the end can be measured (the situation at the end compared to the situation at the start of the project/program). In the context of our Colombia EFE program we hope to change some of the "informal economy" into formal economy. In an informal economy you can not find many data and oficial statistics; an informal economy basically does not exist in the formal "books" of the country. We will start at "zero" for most of our indicators, and we have to be realistic how much we can change through training, awareness buidling and citizenship creation.

It will be great to have the PIP delivered at CIDA/DFADT the coming week..... :-)

Food in Bogota

OK, a post specially for Kyla, Kevin and Sue Dolan.... :-)

Look at that display of nice Colombian regional dishes. In the bottom a delicious bean soup (which made me "you know what" for days...). To the right and left of that two traditional chicken & corn soups, served with rice and avacado.In the top a vegetable soup with all sorts of stuff in it with a nice grilled fish & sauce. We had this lunch on the occasion of a two day visit from colleagues of the Nova Scotia Community College, Katie Orr and Zoran Kondali. We hosted them together with my colleague Sandra Castañeda of SENA, and Derek Gaudet, graduate from Niagara College's degree program International Commerce & Global Development (2010). Derek is networking in Colombia at the moment because he would like to start a career in international commerce in Spanish.

The next day I took Katie and Zoran for another typical dish co-hosted by Diana Osoris, a training manager of a local chamber of commerce. We went to a place called "Patacones", which serves sort of "Colombian pizzas": instead the Italian dough we used to see under the pizza toppings, here you gate the baked platane bananas as the "base". Delicious and something very different.

Katie and Zoran tried the "campesina" patacon with all sort of "stuff" on it:

And Diana and I tried the "thai" version: a bit of Asia on top of Colombian good stuff... :-)

Till next time...

Barrancabermeja and its petro-chemical industry

Back from the two day visit in Santa Rosa del Sur we were hosted by the SENA training center in the city of Barrancabermeja. This city's main industry is driven by a few large petro-chemical processing plants. Here a few photos of the plants (in the distance) and the town of about 300,000 people:

The city is located along the Magdalena river and almost at sea-level: super hot & humid tropical climate. Not an easy climate, but since it is at a central location of a lot of the regions oil exploration, it has been growing. Because of the presence of a few large companies, the local SENA training center has build good partnerships with that industry for whom it trains many technicians and technologists. It is well equipped. Let me show you around at this training center with some photos:

A couple of interesting outside training "labs" such as this "high altitude" work platform with a focus on worker's safety and good practices. Below a few of the electricity training outside labs:

And a traing terrain for heavy equipment training (hope you can make out the Caterpillar machines out there on the photo). The center has a variety of electrical programs. Joe Vandenboom and our son Mark (possibly going into that direction of engineering) will like these photos. The center has some excellent state-of-the-art laboratories and training & simulation equipment:

Termal heat exchange simulation plant and solid waste seperation simulation plant:

Well organized dangerous materials training. The campus has also a constant message everywhere for safety and environmental awareness, such as recycling bins. However, just putting the bins there does not right away result in changed behaviours. The "green bin" was full of plastic bottles and other waste. But then again, at Niagara College I am always angered by the parking lots at the end of the day with lots of litter of people opening their car door and simply tossing garbage on the ground (while there are plenty of garbage bins at just a short walking distance at all parking lots). Laziness and related behaviour is not easy to change...

This sign says: "You can live withoout food for two months, and without water for two weeks, but you can only live without air for a few minutes". A daily reminder to reflect on. The campus has a variety of mechanical programs with basic work-bench training to sophisticated CAD-CAM (Computer Aided Design & Manufacturing) and CNC (Computer Numeric Controls) machines:

They had just received a 3D prototype copy machine ("printing" 3D plastic prototype products directly from the computer technical drawings to see if the design is good enough to make on the work-bench and/or CNC machines). I think some Canadian colleges would love to have training equipment like that. The students are from all age groups and it was nice to see a fair amount of young female students in these technical programs:

A production simulation applied research laboratory of state-of-the art level. Also excellent chemical labs and a library with inspiring photos for the student's employment environment upon graduation. The full-time programs students all have different "uniforms" (like we saw at the Medellin training center with the students in different health programs). They also have their personal names on the uniform; a touch which I liked and I think stimulates the students to think in a professional way already during their training programs

The center has a fully equipped video conference room with capacity for 20 people. I think we will use this center sometimes for our EFE program for linking with colleagues in Canada. Most centers have a video conference room, but this one looked really nice and its location is centrally between the EFE project regions of the south of the Bolivar province and the north-east of Antioquia province.

The campus has a "job center" (Centro de Empleo) open for the public and its students. There is also a consultancy office for start-up entrepreneurs (with some room for business incubators):

"Emprendete" is a popular way to say: "why not start your own business?" (it is a national program in Colombia in which SENA participates). They offer a wide variety of services very much comparable to what the community colleges offer in Canada.

While we walked around we saw a community session on human rights and a training program for adults working (or interested to work) in the telecommunication sector. Such a variety of activities every day at this campus; again, very similar to what one can find at Canadian community colleges. And of course also some room for sports on campus:

On our way back to Bogota I had a nice suprise: we flew back in a Fokker 50 aircraft, produced by the company I worked for in "sales & marketing" from 1983 to 1988. Sweet memories and nice to see these planes still in "active duty" (Fokker stopped production of new aircrafts in 1996). A bit of Dutch "past glory" on display next to the current giants of Boeing and Aircraft: