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..... :-)