Back to School at the African Rural University for Women

On the topic of customer-led strategy and innovation, I’m really sorry to be missing the opening week for the second year of the African Rural University for Women (ARU) in Kampala, Uganda. Last year, this innovative educational institution welcomed 30 young women to begin their three-year training as Community Transformation Leaders. This year, an additional 30 young women have entered the program. ARU is based on an already thriving campus that is a showcase for customer-led innovation and grass roots integrated rural development. You can learn more about ARU and its parent organization—the 20-year-successful Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT) at http://www.urdt.net.

Since my current client work has kept me from helping to kick off the school year, I sent along some much valued supplies: 60 “thumb drives” for the students to use to be able to keep their own work and share files with one another using the campus’s rudimentary computers (about 20 for the entire 500-person campus!) and Internet connection. I would love to be able to send computers for each student and teacher, but we’ve discovered that it’s more cost-effective to buy computers, laptops, networking gear in Kampala than it is to try to ship them over. So, what’s currently needed are back to school funds to cover the costs of teachers’ salaries ($500/year!), computers, pens, notebooks, classrooms, and dormitory space (all the campus buildings are designed on campus using AutoCAD and built by graduates of the vocational institute on campus). The food is grown by the students, who learn the latest organic farming techniques. Electricity is provided through a local generator and solar panels which the students learn to assemble and maintain in the field.

Each University student has to scrape up $70 U.S. per year to pay her tuition, room, and board. This amount doesn’t come close to covering the costs of the remarkable educational program that’s being offered, but it’s the most that anyone can possibly muster from friends and relatives. We’d really appreciate any support you can offer to help these young women change the future of rural Africa. You’ll find information about making a donation at: http://urdt.net/donate.html.

To give you more background about why this remote project is worthy of your support, here’s an excerpt of an article that was written by Bryan Smith and Sue Simington. Bryan is a Canadian consultant in visionary leadership and sustainable development who is currently working on a new book with Peter Senge. He is also on the ARU Council with me. What you’ll notice (I hope) is the similarity in the visionary/innovative approach that this group teaches to the customer-centered innovation approach that we practice with many of you.

Excerpted from:

Creative Development in Rural Africa, by Bryan Smith and Sue Simington, published in 2006, in a book entitled “Learning for Sustainability,” by the Society for Organizational Learning.

“When Nabasita Felicita was born 15 years ago, in a small village in the ‘lost counties’ of Kibaale district in Western Uganda, her family of four lived in a two- room mud and wattle hut. As she grew up, her days were spent walking for miles barefoot to attend a poor quality state school, listlessly sweeping their hut, weaving baskets to make a little money, or helping dig in their meager garden. Usually they would cook cassava [a starchy root] in the morning and eat it throughout the whole day, often cold.

In 1996, the parents of Felicita (‘Nabasita’ is her surname) and her two siblings abandoned them, leaving their grandmother to find a way to keep the family together and alive. It was a subsistence life; there was no hope for finding a way out of her family’s grinding poverty. Graduating from primary school was the end of Felicita’s formal education; the best future she could hope for was that she would be married off into a more prosperous family.

Today, fifteen-year old Felicita is a thriving high school student at a school for girls founded by an extraordinary locally-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) called the Uganda Rural Training and Development Program (URDT). Indeed, Felicita’s change of fortune parallels the successful work URDT has been doing to change the fortunes of all the people in a district where there had been nothing but desperation, conflict, poverty, and many other seemingly insurmountable problems—a place of ‘silent violence,’ as described by the three founders, Silvana Veltkamp, Mwalimu Musheshe, and Ephrem Rutaboba.

Born just after URDT began its field operations in 1989, Felicita’s brighter future is a direct result of URDT’s 17 years of steady growing impact on her community. What is most notable about Felicita’s experience is that as a student of the URDT Girls’ School (established only 5 years ago), she is now the change agent and leader for her family, teaching her grandmother and siblings how to initiate specific development projects for themselves. Her education represents the first real hope for the family’s future.

In the two years Felicita has been a student at the URDT Girls’ school, her grandmother has been invited to come to the school near the end of each term and attended workshops for parents on a range of subjects. Like most parents and guardians, she has made her own way to the school, often on foot, to attend—motivated by her pride in Felicita. She has learned about visioning, planning for the future, entrepreneurship, innovation skills, developing home and farm improvement projects, and business development. Like other students, Felicita leads workshops for her grandmother and other parents on agricultural practices and home improvement techniques she has learned at school. Then they sit down together at the school and plan projects for the family to do back home. Her grandmother Aidah, enthusiastically describes how their lives have been transformed, and how they have participated in this transformation:

‘Now we can cook many different foods. We cook three meals a day, at breakfast time, lunchtime, and dinnertime, and eat them warm. We eat many vegetables, like dodo (a kind of spinach) and eggplants, and fruits like pineapples. URDT has been guiding the whole development process of this family, through parents’ workshops and the home visits made by the school-community liaison person. I have learned to work together as team, and how to improve on our agricultural practices. My granddaughter helps in guiding me on what to do and how to do it best.’

Such activities are emblematic of how URDT’s approach takes a sharp turn away from the approaches of typical development agencies or community-based NGOs. URDT’s philosophy is built on the theory that economic development won’t happen, much less be sustained, by aid handouts: Sustainable economic development must come from creating locally self-reliant individuals and communities. This means reducing dependency on grants by building up local income-producing businesses. Local people, not outsiders, envision the economic and social development goals they want to achieve, and work together to learn and practice the skills to achieve these goals. Typical aid-based development strategies may profess to tackle problems of poverty in a systemic way, but in reality, traditional projects, such as electricification of villages, harvesting medicinal plants, or managing groundwater quality, are often conceived in a piecemeal fashion. In contrast, URDT has built an integrated development model designed with an understanding of the synergies and interdependencies among every initiative.

Perhaps the most compelling piece of Felicita’s story, and the affirmation of the effectiveness of the URDT model, is that her family’s accomplishments represent the beginnings of their emergence from the poverty trap. Western governments and multilateral institutions invest billions of dollars in aid and subsidies in emerging economies, but in Sub-Saharan Africa 600 million people still live on less than $3 per day. Here is a poor Ugandan family who has a vision of how they will sustain themselves over the long term, all because of the successful intervention and support of one small intensive local development program.

Aidah’s vision:

‘I want to start a poultry project soon and I have already built the structure for it. Thieves stole my chickens the first time I tried to start the project, but I will start again. The URDT Human Rights officer helped me get the local police to investigate and let the suspected thieves know they are being watched. I don’t think my chickens will be stolen again. I also want to be involved in a business in farm projects and start a piggery. At the end of every term, I make sure that I am doing something to advance my situation.

I want to have a permanent structure for our house and to have cattle. I have joined a parents cooperative savings groups to help put Priscilla (my other granddaughter) into school. I want all my grandchildren to be in good schools. I will do this by saving with a parents’ group and doing well in business.’

Felicita’s vision:

‘If I study well, I expect I can be a doctor in the future.’

The Five Disciplines in Rural Development

Established in 1987, URDT is the first NGO in Africa to apply the vision-based and holistic organizational learning and systems thinking approaches to human development. These disciplines were adapted for Uganda from the work of the American consultant Robert Fritz and Innovation Associates (IA), the consulting firm co-founded in the 1970’s by Peter Senge

URDT’s founders, Mwalimu Musheshe Sr., Ephrem Rutaboba, and Silvana Veltkamp, all with deep local roots in Uganda and dedication and passion for doing rural development work there, spent time in the United States in the 1980s receiving training from Robert Fritz and IA. Mwalimu and Ephrem were young graduates from Makarere University who originally volunteered to join the project when Silvana and her husband decided to create it in Uganda. Silvana, born in Italy, raised in Africa and living in the U.S., was an experienced development professional with the UN.

Silvana chose to co-found URDT with her husband Han, after concluding that most aid programs were simply not working. She believed that with a different approach, real progress could be made. Silvana was particularly insistent that URDT would be an indigenous voluntary organization that Ugandans would create and lead. She and Han provided early seed money and ensured that URDT’s future leaders received training in a powerful way to think and take action—by working in the U.S. with Robert Fritz on Personal Mastery and with IA to learn the organizational learning disciplines. No one could imagine then how powerful these concepts would become in the hands of the talented Ugandans who returned to their country and diligently applied what they learned, transforming the concepts to work at a household, village, and district level in Kibaale district, with a population of approximately 400,000.

Starting with villagers’ energy and vision, URDT began the engagement of villagers in matters of greatest interest and concern to them. In 1989, they began holding informal gatherings evolving to 3-day workshops following the visionary leadership and planning approach that IA had developed. They began with brief introductions to the concepts of personal and shared vision on day one, then immediately applied them so that the villagers created their initial vision for the village. The next day was devoted to explaining the concept of current reality, and assessing what they had to work with in relation to their vision. The third day was focused on action planning and leadership: how were they going to work together to bridge the gap between their current reality and their vision, and who in the village was going to lead the various practical initiatives they conceived. Villagers initially attended these workshops expecting to get the usual hand out, but they never did. URDT stuck to its belief that they could only ‘teach people to fish.’ That is, they persisted with the idea that ‘no one can develop you until you make the choice to develop yourself.’

Most of the villagers in Kibaale District were deeply enmeshed in the “poverty trap.” They lived hand to mouth—because they had very poor nutrition and bad water, they were unhealthy. This meant they had very little energy to take initiatives for improving their lives. This made them even more reactive, and stuck in a hand-to-mouth existence. ‘We would drink unboiled water. The children used to become sick with stomach diseases. I had an interest in my grandchildren going to school, but I was disadvantaged and didn’t know how I would afford school fees or requirements (such as uniforms and school supplies),’ Aidah recalled.

Felicita described how it felt for her, ‘I had no vision. I would just study. I never thought about where I would get money. I never imagined I would go to secondary school because our income was low.’

URDT worked with this reality by helping the Nabasita family and many others like them focus on what would stop their energy loss (such as clean water and better nutrition). They also help the villagers get energized by giving them a systems view of their circumstances and a positive view of the resources they did have to create new visions for their families and their community.

After learning a new systemic perspective, villagers determined the basic actions that they needed to take to be healthy and begin pulling out of the poverty trap. For example, they had always been told by health workers ‘you must boil water,’ but they often did not. When the villagers investigated the situation systemically they realized why the significance of boiling water, or the fact they were not doing it, was not as simple as the act itself. Boiling water as a routine practice required the right pots, fuel for boiling, skills and knowledge on boiling, a proper fireplace, containers to keep the boiled water clean, and money to buy or make the pot and containers. With the guidance of URDT, other related basic interventions selected by villagers included spring protection, digging wells, growing vegetables, and new sanitation practices.

From here, URDT worked with villagers to go further: what did they want for their lives beyond better living conditions? They engaged villagers to build roads from their villages into Kagadi Town—in which URDT participated together with the local government in planning and organizing so that it would become the ‘boom town’ it is today. ‘In 1999, Kagadi sub-county was estimated to have a population of 3,000. In 2004, the best estimate was over 25,000 residents. URDT training of local people has opened opportunities for many new businesses, often financed by local Savings and Credit Societies that URDT helped get started and continues to support. Hundreds of new shops have opened and many new small business buildings are under construction. Confidence in the future is demonstrated everywhere.’ (Quoted from the URDT website, http://www.urdt.net.)

URDT started to build its own organic demonstration plots, and eventually an 80-acre organic farm to show farmers how to develop their land better and grow cash crops. URDT staff have worked out the cost/benefit and breakeven points on every crop; they teach local farmers how to use small plots to maximize yields while working within the environmental constraints they face.

The district was rife with disputes over land ownership issues and the villagers wanted peace. In response, URDT established the Land Rights desk to facilitate peaceful resolutions. The villagers wanted ways to earn a living that did not depend on land ownership: a vocational institute was created with a microfinance bank for graduates and small borrowers to get started on new business enterprises. Human rights became a focal point for villagers as they drew upon new energy to stand up to injustices within families and villages. URDT’s human rights desk and the URDT KKCR radio station—the first community station in eastern Africa (today it has 2 million listeners)—were established to educate, sensitize, and resolve human rights issues between villagers. It is also the easiest way for villagers to access crucial learning on ways to improve their quality of life.

Aidah describes how these programs have affected their lives:

‘We listen to KKC Radio for the education programs, agriculture programs, and the human rights program. Since coming to URDT, we have built a new house and improved the drying rack and toilets. The new house has a tin roof, instead of thatch, and four rooms. Now we boil our water. The children are not falling sick as frequently.’

The URDT Girls’ School established in 2000 is a direct effort to address an economic development barrier created by a gender-based imbalance in opportunities in the community. As in other districts of Uganda, girls and women were clearly the most underprivileged sector of Kibaale District—parents put their sons through school if they could afford school fees at all and the quality of any girls’ schools was very low. URDT could see that there were no options for orphaned and very poor girls to get an education. The award winning URDT girls’ school is a direct response to this. Alida Bakema-Boon joined the original co-founders to create the school, and design it with multiple purposes to fit their strategy of integrated rural development. They challenged the myth that poor people don’t have the same aspirations or capabilities as people with more means to create wealth for themselves and their children. They knew that parents, even when deep in the poverty trap, can be counted on to take pride in their children’s accomplishments and hope for a better future for their children. Based on this assumption, the Girls’ School is developing girl students as change agents who bring life and energy back into the family from their experience at school. By teaching their parents how to plan and implement projects at home, the girls are pulling their families out of poverty. At the same time, the gender inequalities for girls and women are being shifted to a more positive view of the value of a girl child in the home. Now girls like Felicita are seen as people who can create economic value instead being seen as a liability.

The creation of an African Rural University for Women (ARU) is the most recent new facet of the URDT vision. With the success of the secondary school and so many other thriving projects, in July 2003, the URDT Board of Directors recommended that a planning group begin serious work on making the ARU a reality. This will be the first rural university for women in Africa where young women will prepare to become entrepreneurs and leaders of rural development projects, using the creative orientation, visionary approach to planning and all the other capabilities that have been developed through experience over the years. The graduates from the university will have the capacities to expand the impact of URDT, not only in Uganda but also in other African countries. This represents the model coming full circle in a sustainable cycle of growth. The beneficiaries of URDT’s approach will teach others to do the same for themselves, building a sustainable cycle of growth and opportunity for poor rural communities.”

(End of excerpt.)

Comments

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