May 14: first day in the office

I arrived in Sudan at 4:30 AM after a quiet flight. The temperature was already a refreshing 30C (!). I arrived to the Acropole hotel at almost 5:30 and slept until 10 or 11 AM. By 12:30 I was already in the office.

It was great to meet good friends again; some are new though. Some people are in Darfur in a workshop about blacksmiths and something else I do not remember right now. People from other local offices like the Kassala Office Coordinator (Magdi) are attending this workshop. I missed my dear friend Hashim who is also there.

It was great to see Shibby again. We talked for a while and had a coffee. He prepared a very detailed agenda of our days in Khartoum, which we reviewed together. No major changes were made. We will wait for Khalid (the Hibiscus project manager) to arrive to define the details of the agenda in Kordofan.

I will attach the agenda later.

I talked with Shibby about the spirit of my visit, and discussed about a key part of it: the integration of project managers/officers (from now on PMs) in the international learning dimension of the team. He was very happy to hear that and very supportive of the idea.

Shibby and I also talked about his visa to Peru and travel arrangements.

Visa: Shibby has tried to get in touch with the senior staff of the Peru Embassy in Cairo. Shibby has sent him a couple of emails explaining his intentions to process the visa sending it through DHL or TNT. Some initial attempts to communicate were unsuccessful due to mistakes in the spelling of the email address. We tried to get in touch with them again via phone. Shibby tried twice to get me in touch with the senior officer (a Peruvian), to see if I could communicate the issue better in Spanish. Both times, he was in a meeting. Shibby explained to the person on the phone about the email he sent to them and the person said that she will pass it to the senior officer. Shibby sent the email again. When I left the office there was no reply from the Consulate. If tomorrow there is no answer, I will call directly and insult the person in Spanish to see if now they pay attention (just kidding). I’ll keep you posted.

The travel arrangements have been like this: BA has a longer and more inconvenient route than KLM. The former goes via Cairo, London, Madrid and in the way back goes via Florida. Shibby feels that being a Sudanese citizen he will not have a very good experience in the US. And listen to this: BA are not willing to give out a price until you decide to buy the ticket, due to price variations! KLM goes via Amsterdam (both ways), which is more convenient in terms of time and peace of mind. Shibby needs to get a transit visa that will take approx 15 days to process, and the Dutch government will not grant the visa unless he has a Peru visa. This means that we need to get Shibby’s Peru visa urgently in order to move ahead with the Dutch one. Shibby and I will work on this intensively. Wish us luck.

Whilst Riffat (the PM for the Women Development Associations and livestock projects in Kassala) arrived, Shibby and I went through the Support Plan. I updated and clarified some points with him and the plan helped us to improve the agenda for these days.

Some key points that came out from the support plan are (additional to the points already included in the original agenda):

- STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT:

• Annual reviews for livestock and WDAs will happen after I have left the office (around the 27th of May).
• Annual review for hibiscus is likely to happen whilst I am here! This was Shibby’s idea and I think it would be great for me to be able to participate in this space where representatives of the beneficiaries and other stakeholders of our projects meet to talk about progress and challenges.

- PROJECT DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN:

• Shibby wants to discuss with Mike about the initiatives of ‘integrating farmers to markets in Darfur’ and ‘from handouts to markets’ (using humanitarian aid resources to kick-start mkt dev) before he goes to Peru (please visualise Shibby in Peru to help us pave the way for his visa).

- PROJECT SUPPORT:

• Shibby mentioned that Khalid has passed the hibiscus study to some members of the Hibiscus Forum but he recognised that this is not enough. He wants to present the study to the HF in a formal event. I will go through the study with Khalid and Shibby to identify the key messages and the implications for mkt dev policies and strategies. (No worries Ali, I remember that one of them is the issue about hibiscus quality and the value that some buyers give to the fact that hibiscus in Sudan is grown organically). Any other issues you want to highlight?
• There is an urgent need to rethink the strategy in terms of WDAs development for the future. Comic Relief has funded this initiative like three or four times already and we are still there. Shibby thinks that this is the last time we will get funding for it. The current grant will finish in March 2008. Given that Riffat is managing this initiative as well, I will try to make sure that we use the principles and concepts of Participatory Market Systems Development (PMSD) to move towards a more sustainable horizon for the WDAs.
  

- CROSS-AIM WORK:

• Shibby wants to deepen the work that started with the H+ DPAM project (the same one that I presented in the SEEP conference in 2006). He talked about this in our peer-assisted project review exercise in Blue Water in our ITM in Sri Lanka last year. He is aware that the positive impacts of water harvesting techniques and technologies in crop productivity in Darfur need to be linked to an increased ability of farmers to engage with mkt systems and with improvements in some areas of those same mkt systems. He still thinks that watermelon, sesame and dried tomatoes have a lot of potential (Indeed, the impacts in terms of watermelon productivity and farmers’ income due to watermelon sales seem to confirm this). We agreed that we will have a phone conference with Mohamed Sadig (the office coordinator in Darfur) to see what he has in mind and what kind of concrete actions we can identify to move ahead in this field.
• ‘WDA’s project is also under food-security programme of IA1’ (quote from the support plan). Discussing this point, Shibby mentioned something that prompted me to ask about the interaction between WDAs and Village Development Committees (VDCs), especially when it comes to coordination of activities in the ground. To my surprise, Shibby explained that many women who are members of the VDCs are also members of the WDAs; that ‘at the village level, they are working together’. In fact, they are so linked that they can be considered a single organisation in many respects. The thing is that when it comes to women-specific issues, WDAs constitute an appropriate space for women to meet and find solutions for their problems. I will ask Riffat to update us on the issue.
  

- QA MANAGEMENT:

• Shibby proposed something that I think is brilliant: can we use the international phone conferences to help us improve the way we use the Quarterly Reports? It would be great if we build the phone conf on the basis of the most critical issues coming out of each country in that quarter. Imagine if each TL selects ONE critical issues (can be success or challenge or mistake) and share it with the rest of the team in real time! Of course, this can only be done after each TL has shared with the rest that or other issues emerging from that quarter. I think we should give it a try.
• Sharepoint: We will meet with Widad (the person in charge of it) to see what are the problems and key things we can do to get Khalid and Riffat using the system better.

I then met with Riffat (it was almost time to go home). He is a great guy. He exudes happiness and enthusiasm. It was a great energy boost to see him again. Because Khalid was not there yet, I decided that it would not be a good thing to talk about the agenda too much (we were going to have to talk about it in Khalid’s presence anyway). I wanted to know briefly how he sees himself in the project. Listen to what he said (I almost cried of happiness):

‘I see myself as a facilitator; bringing all actors together [and he mentioned the three levels of the market map!] and helping them find their own solutions. When they find their solutions I will push to help them achieve them. I see myself as a gear within a machine. I want to help the other gears to move towards our objectives. I live in a very challenging context; where people are mainly farmers or pastoralists. I need to know the policy issues. I am a development actor in the region. I have formal and informal contacts with [local] policy-makers’. (Formal contacts relate to MoUs and Technical Agreements; informal contacts relate to personal conversations).

I then asked him more about the MoUs and Tech Agreements. Well… it is a fascinating issue indeed if you see it as very concrete mechanisms of institutional and organisational coordination of different market actors (e.g., farmers, Humanitarian Aid Committee, Ministry of Animal Wealth) and us. Thinking of our upcoming international single-issue paper on Interest Groups, and following the principle of engagement of PMs in our int’l learning dimension, Riffat agreed to write a short draft about MoUs and tech agreements as a coordination mechanism in mkt dev. We will see if Khalid has some experiences to contribute to and then Shibby and I will provide feedback and questions to help him (or them) produce a short paper that we can then share with the rest or the team and other int’l orgs. Exciting, isn’t it?!

Not bad for the first half day of work, uhm?