Monitoring and Evaluation

I am writing this in a hotel in the political capital, Yaounde, coming back from a trip to Bamenda in the English speaking North West. I have been working with the VSO Cameroon monitoring and advisory group which I applied to be in and was selected. I have the usual delay getting a train ticket up north (one train a day, only one route) and can not leave for two days. It is quite nice actually as I am here with the couple I had my second VSO selection training with and flew out with. They are returning to the UK probably not to return as they have found pre cancerous cells in her cervix. That means of the 18 or so of us who came out together, 3 remain, me in the Far North and Colin and Mary (an Australian) in the North West. I went and had dinner with her while I was in Bamenda.

I really found the monitoring and evaluation stuff interesting. What did I learn?

From the Director’s mouth (who is a VSO trouble shooter cherry picked for 3 countries to date) that Cameroon is one of the most, if not the most difficult, placement country in which VSO operate and the Far North is more difficult than the North West.
That the country programme’s strategic lack of focus and clarity about what their priorities are and how that then transposes down to operational level is what makes placements so nebulous and therefore difficult and meaningless to many volunteers.
Lots and lots of discussion about whether helping people to earn money should be a priority. Communities have little interest in democracy when they are hungry and yet something must be done to challenge the corruption in the bureaucratic structures.
Endless anecdotes about the impact that corruption has e.g. they had to airlift a volunteer couple out to avoid a national diplomatic incident because the husband had stood up and complained when the governor arrived 2 hours late at a meeting and did not apologise.

How that impacts on me at a micro level is for example with my attempts to get Bogo public toilets open. We are still in the middle of a cholera epidemic. The man who has the key is the 3^rd adjoint (probably second most important person in the council). I get invited to his mansion one evening for drinks and snacks. There is a committee for the toilets and he will give me the list of people who are on the committee and we can have a meeting and discuss how we can get them open, only he doesn’t have the list of names right then and we have to ring him later in the week for that. We ring on numerous occasions. Latest news he has now gone with the Lamidot (tribal leader) who has gone to France for essential surgery. There is no secretary, no person he would delegate this task to.