Models for Service Delivery in Conflict-Affected Environments

International Rescue Committee U.K. Post-Conflict Development Initiative

Models for Service Delivery in Conflict-affected Environments

Drawing Lessons from the experience of the Ushirika/GBV Partnership Programmes in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo

Funded by the Povery Reduction in Difficult Environments team of the U.K. Department for International Development

Dennis Dijkzeul (Consultant)

January 2005 Acknowledgements

This study was carried out by the International Rescue Committee U.K. (IRC UK) as part of a learning exercise co-ordinated by its Post-Conflict Development Initiative (PCDI). The research, analysis and drafting were undertaken by Professor Dr. Dennis Dijkzeul.

We are extremely grateful for the support of the DFID Poverty Reduction in Difficult Environments (PRDE) team, who granted the necessary funding to undertake the study as a contribution to their development of policy on service delivery in difficult environments and provided comment and insight throughout the exercise.

Thanks are also due to IRC colleagues in the Great Lakes region and internationally, partner civil society organisations and communities in eastern DRC, and those representatives from other international and national NGOs and other bodies who took part in the study.

Contacts

IRC UK 11 Gower Street London WC1E 6HB Tel.: + 44 (0)20 7692 2727 Sebastian Taylor, Director [email protected] Liz McBride, PCDI Director [email protected] Sue Russell, Programme Officer (Great Lakes) [email protected]

Prof. Dr. Dennis Dijkzeul The Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV) NA 02/29 Ruhr Universität Bochum 44780 Bochum Germany Tel.: ## 49-(0)234-3227932 Fax: ## 49-(0)234-3214208 Email: [email protected] Webpage: www.ifhv.de

2 CONTENTS

ACRONYMS...... 5 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ...... 6

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 10 2. BACKGROUND TO THE CONFLICT IN THE DRC ...... 11 3. IMPACT OF THE CONFLICT ON VULNERABLE PEOPLE, PROVIDERS, AND POLICYMAKERS...... 14 3.1 Introduction...... 14 3.2 Vulnerable People...... 14 3.3 Providers ...... 16 3.4 Policy makers...... 18 4 SERVICE DELIVERY INITIATIVES AND OUTCOMES IN THE DRC: USHIRIKA/GBV...... 19 5. SERVICE DELIVERY INITIATIVES AND OUTCOMES IN THE DRC: FIVE NGOs ...... 29 5.1 Direct to Community/Individuals ...... 30 5.1.1 Women for Women International ...... 30 5.2 Working with local government institutions...... 33 5.2.1 Food for the Hungry International (FHI)...... 33 5.3 Working with Non-State Providers...... 36 5.3.1 The CARE-CAP Programme...... 36 5.3.2 Christian Aid...... 39 5.3.3 Malteser...... 43 6. LESSONS LEARNED...... 47 6.1 Capacity building process...... 48 6.2 Replication and scaling up...... 51 6.2.1 Internal aspect ...... 52 6.2.2 External aspects ...... 52 6.3 Transition ...... 54 6.4 Impact ...... 55 7 IMPLICATIONS ...... 57 7.1 Introduction...... 57 7.2 IRC CSDU ...... 59 7.3 IRC Bukavu...... 60 7.4 IRC DRC...... 60 7.5 IRC Globally...... 61 7.6 Partner organisations...... 61 7.7 Donors...... 62 7.8 Governmental institutions...... 63 7.9 Local communities...... 63 7.10 Other INGOs...... 64 8 CONCLUSIONS...... 64

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 64

3 ANNEX I: IRC CAPACITY BUILDING PROCESS IN DETAIL ...... 72 ANNEX II: Terms of Reference...... 89 ANNEX III: Code of Conduct/Guidelines...... 92 ANNEX IV: Lists of Umbrella Grant Project Partners ...... 95 ANNEX V: Schedule of Research Activities ...... 101 ANNEX VI: Methodology...... 104

4 ACRONYMS

AED : Action pour l’Education aux Droits AFDL : Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Liberation du Congo AMI : Aide Medicale Internationale CAP : Congo en Action pour la Paix CBO : community-based organisation CD : country director CELPA : Communauté des Eglises Libres de Pentecoste en Afrique CODESA : comité de developpement et santé CSDU : Civil Society Development Unit DFID : Department for International Development DDR : de-mobilisation, disarmament, and re-integration DCI : Development Cooperation Ireland DRC : Democratic Republic of the Congo FARDC : Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo FHI : Food for the Hungry International GASAP : Group d’Actions Socio-Agro-Pastorales GTZ : Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit GBV : gender-based violence HIV : human immune-deficiency virus HJ : Heritiers de la Justice IDP : internally displaced person IRC : International Rescue Committee INGO : international non-governmental organisation MONUC : United Nations Mission to the Congo MRND : Mouvement Républicain Nationale Démocratique NGO : non-governmental organisation OFDA : US Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance OTI : Office of Transition Initiatives PAR : participatory action research PCDI : Post-Conflict Development Initiative PNPF : Programme National de Pisciculture Familiale PRA : participatory rural appraisal QIP ; quick impact project RCD : Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie SENASEM : Service National des Sémences SGBV : sexual and gender-based violence SNV : Service National de Vulgarisation STI : sexually transmitted infection TNG : Transitional National Government TOT : training of trainers UG : umbrella grant UGP : umbrella grant programme USAID : United States Agency for International Development VAS : violence d’aggression sexuelle VAW : violence against women Watsan : water and sanitation WFP : World Food Programme WWI : Women for Women International

5 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The increasing number of chronic crises in developing countries make it necessary to establish new ways to build local capacities in order to improve services to (increasingly) vulnerable populations. This study draws the conceptual and practical lessons from the IRC Ushirika/GBV partnership programmes in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Both programmes build capacities of local organisations to deliver services and sustain themselves. The study also compares the IRC approach with other approaches by Women for Women International, Food for the Hungry International, CARE-CAP, Christian Aid, and Malteser. The key issues identified in this report are:

Capacity building makes it possible to integrate relief, rehabilitation, and development. Due to the wars in the DRC, the already poor state services and infrastructure have broken down, economic life has deteriorated, and new needs, for example due to gender- based violence, have been created. Capacity building for service delivery by local NGOs and CBOs offers an alternative way to improve local service delivery and the living conditions in eastern DRC. This requires flexible combinations of humanitarian and developmental work by international NGOs. The degree of success of capacity building depends on establishing a dialogue that both supports the aspirations of partner organisations, while making rigorous demands on them based on mutual agreements. This study shows that such capacity building is possible, but difficult at times, because much depends on the nature of the conflict, civil society, and the capacities of the donors and supporting organisations. In addition, there is no substitute for peace. Ending the war would be the best contribution to strengthening local service delivery. If the conflict in the DRC continues, which is likely, the supporting organisation needs an in-depth understanding of political and socio-economic context, in particular of the application of humanitarian principles, the nature of civil society, and the parties to the conflict.

It is highly useful to combine tight management control with capacity building. The Ushirika and GBV programmes offer no simple “one size fits all solution”, but they constitute an innovative approach to service delivery, because they combine intensive managerial and financial control with capacity building, which can lead to results in a relatively short period of time. Put differently, accountability and capacity-building are tightly linked. The approach also combines technical with administrative aspects, for which it uses several types of formal and informal training. The selection and redesign processes are forms of informal training. During the implementation period, informal training is often carried out in conjunction with control of indicators and financial processes, in particular of the narrative and financial reports. Put differently, informal training is usually connected with monitoring implementation progress, which facilitates establishing links between theory and daily practice. The programmes have improved access and inclusion of extremely vulnerable groups and built more sustainable service delivery by local organisations.

6 Local partners rarely fully understand capacity building approaches immediately. Many partner organisations find the IRC requirements and tools daunting to apply, particularly at the beginning of the partnership. While most partners bemoan the heavy workload at first, they generally perceive the IRC to be a real partner that comes to the field regularly and helps them learn rapidly. They appreciate that their management skills and organisational capacities improve over time. Some have been able to work with other funding organisations, and have maintained IRC tools. Over time, the reporting requirements can become less strict, if the partner functions well, for example the narrative report can become a bi-monthly report. The IRC technical training resembles that of most other actors. Its greatest strength is simultaneously strengthening the financial and managerial (technical aspect, project management, organisational structure, etc.) capacities of its partners, which it is able to do in a remarkably short period of time.

Capacity building for service delivery must take place at all levels of the service delivery system. Capacity building for service delivery in chronic crises requires capacity building at all levels of the aid system. If the supporting organisation cannot build up the combination of tight managerial control and capacity building, the quality of its support to its partners may decrease rapidly. Put differently, a supporting organisation should not just build the capacities of its partners, it should also simultaneously build its own capacity on the ground.

Implications The IRC can capitalise on its experience by:

• scaling up its current activities in eastern DRC, but it should be careful not to grow too rapidly as good programme staff are hard to find and it takes time to develop quality programmes and procedures; • considering how it could diversify its approach to capacity building. In particular, it should contemplate whether it can work with other types of organisations than CBOs and officially legalised non-profit organisations. It could adapt its procedures and tools for working more with local cooperatives, government services, CBOs that express the desire and the potential to develop the capacity to become legally recognised non-profit partner organisations, and quick impact projects; • finding ways to integrate capacity building further into the other IRC Bukavu health and water and sanitation activities; • searching for ways to incorporate government organisations and traditional leaders into its activities to facilitate programme execution. This does not have to be capacity building per se, but information exchange, decision-making about various programming aspects, for example selection or evaluation, as well as promoting community involvement will be useful; • helping local partner organisations in their fundraising and contacts with other international organisations; • creating a permanent structure for regular information exchange among former and current partner organisations so that they can learn from each other and

7 reinforce each other’s capacities without direct Civil Society Development Unit (CSDU) involvement; • working with the other actors in the aid system to foster upward accountability through project committees, evaluation, monitoring (e.g., monitoring kits), participatory action research, participatory rural appraisal, and field visits; • continuing to develop its tools for capacity building, in particular in the area of impact measurement at the community and sectoral levels; • developing exit and hand-over strategies for those partner organisations that have become professionally self sufficient. The IRC should study whether it can adapt the current contract/MOU approach, with less intensive supervision for partners that function well, as a phase-out strategy.

Even if the IRC is successful in following up on the suggestions above, the different approaches by donors and others INGOs, as well as competition, can lead to fragmented and perhaps unsustainable social service systems in different parts of the country.

Donors Donors deeply influence the activities of the supporting organisation they sponsor. The rules and regulations of OFDA and OTI, for example, strongly determined capacity building activities. Through its influence, good donorship can transcend regular funding in at least three areas, namely:

1. Flexible funding arrangements: Supporting organisations generally prefer funding to be continuous, or at least long-term. They also favour flexible changes in the allocation of money as the context changes over time. The donor requires safeguards that the money is well spent. The best way to address these differing demands is to institute a strategic learning partnership with supporting organisations to invest in capacity building for service delivery in difficult environments. This partnership should be evaluated at fixed intervals. Building such a partnership entails a shift in donor attention from the project or programme level to the organisational and sectoral levels. 2. Cooperation with the national government: The donor can sometimes also work with the national governments and warring factions to promote certain policies or activities, for example, if it possesses some degree of influence over international peacekeeping forces, (threatens to) impose sanctions together with other governments, or promotes sector-wide approaches. 3. Preventing, or at least addressing, fragmentation of service delivery systems: If the government is weak, and both the international aid system and local service delivery are fragmented, the donor could take the initiative to overcome such fragmentation, especially if it already funds several different organisations in the same region, by sector-wide or national initiatives.

8 Donors:

• could mainstream capacity building for service delivery in its intervention strategies, and together with other donors and the national government, coordinate approaches to improve service delivery; • could together with the national government, institute longitudinal system-wide evaluations of service delivery per sector and/or region to see how fragmentation could be addressed and select well-functioning approaches; • should foster cooperation among the different supporting organisations it funds on evaluating different approaches, developing joint strategies and common standards and procedures, as well as information exchange; • could assess how far it could integrate its work with these international supporting organisations in its activities for backing government institutions (in policy making, coordination, and service delivery), as well as aiding the peace process. In cooperation with the national government, it could, for example, sponsor and disseminate government-led sectoral strategies to the supporting organisations; • could develop a set of options for responding to programming problems of the supporting organisations due to insecurity in order to standardise and expedite responses to changing conflict conditions.

All parties evolved in capacity building should work with the parties in the aid system to foster upward accountability through evaluation, monitoring, local project committees, and field visits.

In conclusion, there is a large demand for more capacity building to improve services in the eastern DRC. Capacity building, however, cannot be done overnight. It takes time and effort to build the internal capacity in the supporting organisation. Its effects also depend on the strength of civil society, donor support, and the conflict context. This study has found that the IRC approach towards capacity building is original and effective. The IRC should gradually scale up its activities in the DRC and replicate its approach in other chronic crises.

Guide for Reading

This is a comprehensive report. Those readers that only have a limited amount of time available can concentrate on sections 1, 3, 4, 5.6, 6, 7, and 8.

The annexes provide further background material for the interested reader.

9 1. INTRODUCTION

This study aims to draw lessons from the experience of the Ushirika/GBV partnership programmes in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is part of broader attempts by both the Department for International Development (DFID) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to improve the effectiveness1 of models for service delivery in conflict-affected environments.2 Both programmes build capacities of local organisations to deliver services and sustain themselves. The study also compares the IRC approach with other approaches: one relatively new, two finalised, and two ongoing service delivery initiatives by respectively Women for Women International, Food for the Hungry International (FHI), CARE-CAP, Christian Aid, and Malteser. Together, the six supporting organisations studied are active in health, education, gender, water and sanitation, micro-enterprise, agriculture, micro-credit, environmental protection, human rights, and humanitarian aid, including shelter, to war-affected populations.

The DRC has experienced one of the most deadly protracted conflicts of our time. The complex political economy of this war is characterised by illegal resource extraction, interference by neighbouring countries, international interventions, and ethnic conflict in a chronically weak state. Service delivery mechanisms alone cannot address all aspects of this war, nor should they be observed in isolation of the broader political context. The protection of human rights, restoration of democracy, and rebuilding of a functioning state are preconditions for more effective service delivery and, ultimately, peaceful development. The international community must continue to invest diplomatically and financially in the DRC in order to achieve such development. On the one hand, this must include international diplomacy and formal negotiations with belligerents, as well as more informal contacts and discussions. On the other, this must contain specific activities, ranging from stemming illegal resource exploitation and arms trafficking to human rights advocacy.3

This study took place in three stages – a visit to the eastern DRC from 25 September to 24 October 2004, a writing period in Germany from 26 October to 21 November and another visit that included a workshop on the evaluation report in Bukavu, DRC from 22 to 28 November. During the first stage, considerable effort was put into identifying organisations that actively built service delivery capacities of local partners, and studying in detail the impact of the Ushirika/GBV umbrella grant programmes (UGP) on partner organisations and communities. The workshop on 26 November 2004 focused on fine tuning the analysis and recommendations of this report. It led to a final rewrite. In addition, during the workshop visit to Bukavu, the section on the five other organisations were also checked and improved upon.

1 Building on the DFID Nepal report, this study defines effectiveness as the extent to which the different approaches to service delivery are able to impact on vulnerable people with regards to access, social inclusion, and sustainability. 2 See Annex I for the Terms of Reference of this study. 3 See Bourque, 2003, p. 8.

The main limitation of this study stems from the relative scarcity of quantitative evaluation studies by the participating organisations. Although this lack is commonly noted in the literature, it remains a shortcoming of humanitarian assistance4 and aid to transitions from war to peace. The limited time available for this study also made it hard to consistently assess the opinion of all beneficiaries and partner organisations in detail. In addition, the research had to make a trade-off between a focus on impact and a focus on replication. Focusing on impact centres on results, which can be hard to measure; while focusing on replication centres on how the results were achieved. Hence, the latter concentrates more on process than on results.

This report partly follows the set up of the DFID Nepal study5 and consists of seven sections. The second chapter explains the background and dynamics of the conflict. The third studies the impact of the conflict on service delivery initiatives among communities, providers, and policy makers. The fourth chapter focuses in detail on IRC Ushirika/GBV UGP service delivery. The fifth concentrates on five other service delivery initiatives. Chapters four and five together assess service delivery in terms of modality, capacity- building process, accountability, impact concerning access, inclusion, and sustainability, as well as replication and scaling up. The sixth chapter distils the lessons learned in this study. It focuses on approaches towards service delivery from three perspectives, namely the actual capacity building process, the conditions for replication and scaling up, as well as the transition from relief to development. Next, it focuses on the impact of the capacity building in terms of access, inclusion and sustainability of the services provided. The seventh chapter shows the implications for the various actors involved. Finally, chapter eight draws the conclusions of this study. The annexes include full details of the IRC Capacity Building Process in detail, and details IRC’s project partners.

2. BACKGROUND TO THE CONFLICT IN THE DRC

The DRC is the quintessential failed state. When, in the 1980s, Mobutu came under increasing pressure from the Bretton Woods institutions and donor governments to rein in the national budget deficit, he decided not to curtail his personal expenses and patronage system. Instead, he cut the budgets for health, education, infrastructure, security, and other government services. As a consequence, service delivery systems deteriorated rapidly. In the early 1990s, attempts to institute democracy in the Congo failed. With Mobutu’s “divide and rule policies,” the already dire economic situation deteriorated further and ethnic tensions worsened.

As a result of the Rwandan civil war and genocide in 1994, approximately 1,000,000 refugees passed through eastern DRC, which severely tested local capacities to deliver services to both refugees and the local population. The refugee crisis also intensified tensions among eastern Congolese population groups, led to serious environmental

4 Hoffman, et al, 2004. 5 DFID, 2004A.

11 degradation, and prompted an influx of international humanitarian organisations. The refugee camps were also used as bases for re-armament and attacks on Rwandan soil.

Laurent Kabila’s Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Liberation du Congo (AFDL) overthrew Mobutu in May 1996 with strong support from the Rwandan and Ugandan armies. The Rwandans ostensibly intervened to foster the return of the refugees and attack the génocidaires. Over the next one and a half years, however, the alliance between Kabila and the Rwandan Army fell apart. Most Banyamulenge, Congolese Tutsis, many of whom used to co-operate with Kabila in 1996, sided with the Rwandans. In August 1998, the Banyamulenge dominated Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), with support from the Rwandan, Ugandan, and Burundian armies, started another war to displace Kabila’s regime. This war soon reached a stalemate. Kabila received support from Angola, Zimbabwe, Chad, and Namibia, while Uganda and Rwanda grew apart over their differing economic interests and supported different rebel groups. As a result, the country was divided into roughly three parts.

The Front de Liberation de Congo (FLC) led by Jean Pierre Bemba, and supported by the Ugandans, occupied the northern part of the DRC. Some of the people close to Bemba also had close ties to Mobutu. The RCD – supported by the Rwandans – maintained control over the eastern part, and the Government Forces controlled the western and southern part. In the meantime, the Interahamwe6 continued to destabilise and loot parts of eastern DRC. The Mai-Mai – originally local self-defence groups or parts of local communities that fought against foreign occupation, increasingly turned into armed bandits who also raped and looted – was also active in RCD- and FLC-held territory.

The different warring factions and their international supporters generally became more interested in economic exploitation – for example of diamonds and coltan – than in ending the war, so that it increasingly became unclear who was fighting whom.7 Ugandans and Rwandans fought each other in Kisangani. The relationship between RCD and the Rwandans was also unstable.8 Moreover, local ethnic conflicts – for example the extremely deadly struggle between the Lendu and the Hema in Ituri – were spurred by Rwandan and Ugandan armaments. As a result, the Congolese war has broken down into “dozens of overlapping micro-wars … in which almost all the victims are civilians.”9 Economic activity has deteriorated rapidly and extreme poverty has increased sharply. The mortality rate has skyrocketed and eastern DRC has become an “unchecked incubation zone for diseases.”10

6 Interahamwe literally means “those who stand or attack together” in Kinyarwanda. The term officially referred to the youth wing of the former ruling party in Rwanda, the Mouvement Républicain National Démocratique (MRND), but it came to describe all militia participating in the genocide regardless of party affiliation (HRW, 2002, p. 8). 7 See United Nations, S/2001/357. 8 In 2002, the RCD worked with some Mai-Mai groups with which it used to clash, while continuing to fight other Mai-Mai groups. 9 Economist, July 4, 2002. 10 Roberts, 2000, p. 3.

12 At the national political level, progress is very slow. In 1999, an unarmed UN peacekeeping force (MONUC) was placed close to the frontline, and the warring factions partially withdrew, with the Namibian and Chadian forces pulling out completely. The Burundians remained for some time but only to fight “their” rebel forces across their border. The Ugandans withdrew some of their troops, but later returned, while the Zimbabweans and Rwandans did not pull back.

The assassination of Laurent Kabila in January 2001, and the subsequent replacement by his son, Joseph Kabila, led to renewed diplomatic interventions to implement the Lusaka agreements of 1999. These agreements included the withdrawal of foreign forces and political negotiations to establish a transitional government and a process towards multi- party elections. MONUC forces increased in size over time.

In the spring of 2002, the inter-Congolese dialogue between the main parties to the conflict in Sun City broke down, but the Kabila government and the FLC were able to reach an agreement so that approximately 70 percent of the country’s territory came officially under control of the Kinshasa government. In Pretoria in July 2002, an agreement was reached with the Rwandans about their withdrawal in return for renewed efforts by the Congolese government to facilitate repatriation of ex-FAR and Interahamwe irregular forces. By the end of 2002, most foreign forces had left the DRC, which considerably facilitated the peace process.

In December 2002, the inter-Congolese dialogue led to the Global and Inclusive Accord “between the government in Kinshasa and the RCD and the MLC rebel groups. This set out a framework for the establishment of a Transitional National Government (TNG),”11 with four vice-presidents representing the three warring factions and civil society. The TNG was inaugurated in July 2003. It is an internally divided government, but the process of national reunification that it represents is popular among most Congolese and the international donor community.

Despite diplomatic progress, sporadic, but intense violence continued especially in the eastern part of the country. In 2004, fighting between FARDC and troops of a renegade Banyamulenge General led to widespread looting and further gender-based violence.12 Such fighting by regular and irregular (proxy) warring factions may re-occur in the near future. Recently, Rwanda has probably re-intervened covertly.

11 DFID, 2003. 12 Gender-based violence (GBV) is a major public health and human rights problem throughout the world. The two priority areas in GBV work are: 1) violence against women by an intimate male partner or ex- partner, which is known as domestic violence against women. This category includes physical and sexual violence, emotional abuse, and a range of coercive and/or controlling behaviours; and 2) sexual violence, which includes rape and other forms of sexual coercion, either by partners or by others. These two areas are not mutually exclusive because, in the first, the focus is on the perpetrator, while in the second, the focus is on the type of violence (see http://www.who.int/gender/violence/en/). Extreme GBV by different armed groups is common in the eastern DRC.

13 3. IMPACT OF THE CONFLICT ON VULNERABLE PEOPLE, PROVIDERS, AND POLICYMAKERS

3.1 Introduction

Service delivery is broadly defined as a process between a provider and a client or target group that creates benefits by facilitating either a change in the client(s), a change in their physical possessions, or a change in their intangible assets.13 This study focuses on social services in such areas as health, education, watsan, (transport) infrastructure, and agriculture. The current section studies how the conflicts in the eastern DRC have affected service delivery to vulnerable people. It studies the impact of these conflicts on communities, service providers, and policy makers, as well as the impact on the relationships amongst these three groups.

3.2 Vulnerable People

Since the Arab slave trade, the population of eastern DRC has virtually always suffered from exploitation, exclusion, and many cycles of inter-locking conflicts.

The first and main impact of the recent conflicts is the devastating combination of violence, malnutrition, morbidity, and mortality. The latest IRC mortality survey estimates that 3.8 million people have died due to the war, with over 41.000 excess deaths a month between January 2003 and July 2004.14

Second, the conflicts have also caused considerable internal displacement and curtailed freedom of movement. Since 1994, the already weak security services have broken down further and the different fighting forces are often more cruel to unarmed citizens than to each other. Individuals and communities have been targeted by armed groups, as well as by police and military authorities, and subjected to various forms of torture, rape, extortion, looting, and unlawful detention. Consequently, people living close to forests, where the rebels are hiding, no longer tend their fields or fetch water for fear of being attacked. They often spend their nights hiding in the forests or places farther away, where they hope to be safer from looting and rape – but then often become exposed to the elements and parasites. At the same time, those who were able to leave have gone and there has been a brain drain to neighbouring countries and to the West. Many have become IDPs and moved to the big cities, which generally do not have the facilities to support such rapid population growth. In addition, many men have moved away from their families to take up illegal mining, for example, of coltan. These forms of

13 Ushirika/GBV began their operations in a humanitarian context. They focused on the needs of victims of war. In the eastern Congo these are almost invariably also extremely poor people. Some groups, such as abandoned children, pygmies, raped girls and women are especially vulnerable and poor, due to discrimination, rejection, and stigmatisation. They often fall outside traditional social structures that provide at least a modicum of protection. In contrast to the DFID Nepal Report, this report will generally use the term vulnerable people, which includes the overlapping concepts of poor people and victims. 14 Coghlan (et al) (2004).

14 displacement limit the economic opportunities for the local population, which consequently lacks the means to access the (remaining) services.

Third, the conflicts and accompanying economic decline limit the opportunities of the population to make a living, while simultaneously destroying services that were already compromised. DRC’s long economic decline has diminished the role of plantations, mining, transport, trade, and industry. Instead agriculture – including subsistence agriculture – which is primarily destined for domestic consumption, is the region’s main source of income.15 Most of the population has also resorted to informal activities. Large parts of the population suffer from malnutrition and chronic shortages of food. In addition, deforestation and desertification are hampering food production in some areas of the Kivus. City agriculture has become a common coping strategy. Finally, people who have joined the rebel groups rarely have alternative economic opportunities, making demobilisation a difficult goal to achieve.

Fourth, marginal groups, such as the pygmies, women and street children, have been marginalised further, while social cohesion has declined. Street children were uncommon only a few years ago, but since then many children have been abandoned by their parents or other caretakers. Many are killed, abused, or accused of witchcraft. In addition, many women and children suffer from widespread sexual and gender-based violence.

The pygmies are especially vulnerable because their position as a minority was already weak, and their traditional way of life as hunter-gatherers has become impossible since they have been forced out of the forest. They still prefer to live close to the forest, but this makes them vulnerable to frequent attacks by rebel groups that hide there, such as the Interahamwe. Among the pygmies, many adult males have been killed so that only the young, old, and infirm remain. Many of the women have been raped, causing great problems with STIs and unwanted pregnancies.16

In sum, poverty, malnutrition, and general vulnerability have increased. “The gulf between the [tiny] wealthy minority, closely linked to those in power, and the vast majority of the population that struggles for survival on a daily basis, has widened.”17 People increasingly fend for themselves, and when possible resort to their ethnic groups or families, although these are also under strain. In some places, the conflict has totally disrupted these institutions. For example, the tactics of the fighting forces that systematically pillage and gang rape have undermined families, when one or more family members were killed or forced to participate in rapes of other family members. On a larger scale, relationships among some ethnic groups have polarised. In general,

15 ALNAP Global Study, 2003, p. 34. 16 In a very different way, the position of the Banyamulenge is also precarious. They have become internally divided about their relationship with the Tutsi regime in Rwanda. Although a few Banyamulenge possess considerable political and military power at the moment, the widespread hatred towards this ethnic group may make them vulnerable in the future. Simultaneously, their uncertain Congolese citizenship status may bring them into conflict with other ethnic groups and their traditional leaders, for example, concerning land entitlements. 17 Ibid.

15 corruption is rife, insecurity high, and even if peace will be attained, the effects of war are likely to linger on for a long time.

3.3 Providers

“Providers include both those who are working directly to get a service to people (doctors, nurses, teachers, water technicians, etc.) and … the organisations and institutions which support those frontline staff (including international agencies).”18

When government services still function in eastern DRC, their quality tends to be limited and they often fail to reach the most vulnerable. At the provincial or municipal level, the remaining government institutions are often weak. Officials may still work, but they generally have received little or no pay in a long time. As a result, they have to take on additional jobs, raise fees, or take bribes in order to survive. Their skill base has also deteriorated. Despite all these difficulties, they still keep some services functioning at a low level. In particular, the health system has maintained a semblance of functioning, but the wars have created new needs, related to malnutrition or (sexual) violence, that it struggles to address. In particular, people outside the big cities lack basic services in health, water, and education.

The conflict hampers access to rural areas. Postal services, road infrastructure, and telecommunications have either disappeared or function at a very low level. This has given rise to thriving mobile phone businesses, four-wheel drive imports, and booming air traffic for those parts of the population and organisations that can still afford these. However, problems in other social sectors cannot easily be circumvented. Water and sanitation, as well as gas, electricity, and other infrastructure can only slowly be replaced. Currently, some railroad and river connections are being restored.

After its abandonment by the central government, the health system generally used a fee system so that patients had to pay for their care. However, “the underpaid, poorly trained, and demoralised staff … are incapable of operating their under-equipped, neglected, and often pillaged or damaged facilities in a manner that responds to the needs of the populations they serve.”19 In addition, people frequently lack the economic means to buy its remaining services, or they have access problems due to the insecurity and long distances involved. In the past, the weakened health system has insufficiently succeeded in addressing epidemics without international support.

The quality of the education system has also declined considerably. The system has become increasingly dependent on contributions by parents and students. Often, teaching staff work at several institutes, or have additional jobs to make a living. The lack of quality at the elementary level causes and aggravates quality problems at higher levels of education. In addition, the professional training of teachers and research exchanges have come to a virtual standstill, unless the education institutions have close ties to either

18 DFID, 2004A, p. 10. 19 IRC DRC, 2002, p. 4.

16 international donors or educational organisations, such as the Université Catholique de Louvain. As a result of the decline in education, people’s capacities to perform services, create livelihoods, improve their health, and participate in social life have also declined.

Additionally, the underpaid and weakly controlled police and military, which ideally should play a key role in ensuring the security and protection of the population, are often identified as the perpetrators of violence or oppression in the areas they control. They are often unwilling or unable to withstand other forces, such as the Mai-Mai and Interahamwe. The population has thus lost most of its confidence in these institutions.20

Similarly, the legal system has almost ceased to function in many areas and is greatly affected by the – sometimes corrupt – influence of local authorities and some traditional leaders, leaving many, especially the poor, more disadvantaged than protected in legal processes and rendering the law, at best, ineffective in helping wronged civilians.21

Still, the eastern DRC has a vibrant civil society. In fact, it is often referred to as the “cradle of Congolese civil society.” Local organisations, such as community-based organisations, women’s groups, churches or related organisations, medical or education professionals, and local human rights organisations attempt to respond to the multiple unmet needs. These organisations are either specifically founded to respond to the consequences of the conflicts or they are older and have adapted their activities. In addition, local health committees, parent or alumni associations have frequently made an effort to improve health and education services or at least to keep them going. While the work of these local organisations is important as a social safety net, these organisations and committees often lack the financial means and managerial capabilities to address the multiple unmet needs in a sustainable manner or scale up their services.

Given the wars and the decline in service delivery, it is not surprising that many humanitarian organisations have entered the fray. Many of these organisations came in during the Rwandan refugee crisis but stayed to help the local population once they realised the population’s extremely difficult situation. The recent outbreaks of violent conflict in the East have also expedited the entry of several other international organisations. Simultaneously, developmental agencies have either withdrawn or adapted their programmes into an emergency mode. The emergency interventions traditionally focus on short-term survival of the population by bringing in resources. They thus focus on such activities as the provision of food, water, shelter, and medicine. If a previously insecure area opens up, humanitarian organisations often attempt to move in. “The criteria for effectiveness of [these] centrally managed, materials-focused aid systems include speed, accountability to outside donors, and of course, receipt by individuals and groups deemed to be most needy. The role for local people – those seen as ‘victims’ – to manage any aspect of this aid system is [often] minimal or nonexistent. Concentration on the delivery of things to these people, rather than on problem solving with them, places the beneficiaries of aid in a passive, accepting role.”22 This traditional system of

20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Anderson, 1998, p. 140.

17 humanitarian assistance implicitly assumes that the humanitarian crisis will not last long and that other actors, in particular the national government, will be able to foster more regular development.

Many of the organisations increasingly feel that this traditional modus operandi only addresses the symptoms of the chronic crisis and have started to look for ways to combine humanitarian and developmental work. Yet, in so doing, they face several problems, namely:

• Considerable uncertainty exists concerning the best operational way(s) to make the transition(s) from relief to development. • Maintaining the traditional humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence becomes harder as these organisations are increasingly perceived as actors with their own agendas that become part of the local conflict context. • Insufficient clarity exists on how and at which levels to negotiate with warring factions and their representatives about freedom of movement, access, and staff security. Intimidation and violence seem to be increasing in frequency. • Difficulties (methodological, cultural, or otherwise) occur in assessing and addressing the needs of (sometimes divided) communities and the broader local context. • Scaling up activities is expensive, while the regulatory framework that could facilitate or guide such expansion is often either underdeveloped or missing.

Many organisations, IRC included, undertake activities to establish coherent approaches to address these five issues,23 but they face difficult policy and coordination problems that are customarily considered the state’s purview. The different approaches by the donors and INGOs, as well as competition, can lead to fragmented and perhaps unsustainable social service systems in different parts of the country, which can obstruct rebuilding and even hamper the post-war viability of the Congolese state.

For most poor people, security services (police, military, and judiciary) health, education, and (transportation) infrastructure are their main contact points with the state (or what remains of it); if these function well, they can help in rebuilding so that the state may regain some legitimacy, which can contribute to maintaining peace.

3.4 Policy makers

Currently, the Kinshasa government cannot fulfil its mandate in the eastern provinces, and the rebel groups (and their foreign supporters) that exercise de facto power have failed to adequately support services that address the population’s basic needs.24 Policy, regulatory, monitoring, and coordination functions concerning national and international actors are either non-existent or weak. Even if sound laws and policies have been

23 The IRC PCDI and this study are examples of these efforts. 24 See IRC DRC, 2002, p. 4.

18 accepted, their implementation leaves much to be desired. Many existing policies and guidelines are outdated. In response, donors are currently looking into ways to strengthen the national government’s functioning. With their help, the TNG is instituting a process of decentralisation, which may in time improve administration in regions far from the centre, such as the Kivus and Katanga.

There are no strong labour unions or political parties that could constitute a countervailing power for state weakness. In its post-independence history, political parties in the DRC have often been used as vehicles for obtaining personal power and collecting spoils for certain individuals or ethnic groups. The churches, to some extent, fulfilled this countervailing role, especially in regard to providing social services in the areas of health and education, but are neither strong enough nor well suited for taking over other governmental tasks, such as security and policy making. In specific areas, such as reproductive health, their positions are also frequently disputed by other actors.

At the moment, it is doubtful whether the TNG is sufficiently effective; its members are jockeying for position and are still lacking in policy capacities. Although the local population looks forward to the elections – “I am fifty and have never voted in my life and now finally I will able to cast my vote”25 – many outside observers fear that it may lead to new rounds of violence.

In comparison to the three basic parties for service delivery in regular development situations, which are the policy-makers, providers, and poor people themselves,26 the service delivery processes in war-torn societies can be characterised by the addition of at least three additional parties. The warring factions make the population more vulnerable. Their fighting and other activities often necessitate new services – e.g., to address gender- based violence – and destroy the institutions able to provide services. In addition, international (humanitarian) organisations and their donors come in. As a result, service delivery often becomes more complex and diverse.

In general, fighting corruption and establishing legitimate and accountable local institutions with and for the Congolese population will take time. The challenge is not just in rebuilding a state, but also in formulating a new social contract on the rights and responsibilities of the Congolese towards one another and the state. No standard recipes exist to tackle this challenge. Hence, such a contract may be established through a process of trial and error in which setbacks can easily erase earlier progress.

4 SERVICE DELIVERY INITIATIVES AND OUTCOMES IN THE DRC: USHIRIKA/GBV

IRC has been active in eastern DRC since November 1996.27 Its initial intervention was designed to meet the urgent needs of refugees attempting to repatriate to Rwanda, while

25 Field interview. 26 See World Bank, 2004. 27 For a more detailed overview of IRC capacity building, see Annex I.

19 also serving the rehabilitation needs of local communities. It addressed the damage caused by the Rwandan mass exodus and the looting by departing armies and other armed factions.

In 2000, the IRC published its first DRC mortality survey, which estimated that 1.7 million people had died from the war in the eastern part of the country. Suddenly, the DRC gained strong media attention and became a higher priority for the US government and other donors. Subsequently, IRC was under a great deal of pressure from the US Government to submit proposals to respond to the crisis. OFDA funding for DRC grew significantly, and funding to IRC tripled from the previous year. OFDA mentioned its strong interest in umbrella grants (UG) to the IRC. An umbrella grant is essentially a sub- grant mechanism. The supporting organisation that receives the umbrella grant can subdivide it for financial and technical assistance to local partner organisations. Such an umbrella grant provided an opportunity to start building local capacities for better service delivery.

Modality IRC submitted a programme proposal with the purpose to decrease the vulnerability of displaced and war-affected populations through the improvement of health services and promotion of food security. Later, the IRC also developed a proposal to address the horrific problems due to extreme gender-based violence in eastern DRC.

The Ushirika and GBV UGPs aim to support and strengthen local associations, NGOs and CBOs active in the South Kivu, North Kivu and (North) Katanga provinces of eastern DRC.28 Since its official launch in March 2001, Ushirika has developed partnerships with 24 local non-profit organisations. In turn, the GBV programme has developed partnerships with nine local non-profit organisations, as well as 23 CBOs.29

Project Direct Indirect Amount in Approximate Phase Beneficiaries Beneficiaries subgrants in amount per USD beneficiary in USD30 Ushirika I 30,186 45,064 234,809.00 5.00 Ushirika II 49,925 91,359 315,734.47 3.00 Ushirika III ongoing ongoing ongoing NA GBV I (NGOs) 4,606 14,718 176,293.40 12.00 GBV I (CBOs) 724 NA 7,007.25 10.00 GBV II (NGOs) 9,068 30,858.00 269,206.45 9.00 GBV II (CBOs) 590 NA 8,108.80 14.00

28 The Ushirika programme has received three phases of funding. Grants from the US Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) covered the first two phases. The third phase has received funding from Development Cooperation Ireland (DCI), OFDA, Comic Relief, SV/TMF, and EUROPEAID. The GBV programme has received two phases of funding by USAID. Its third phase, which is currently being started, is funded by USAID and UNICEF. 29 During Ushirika I, the IRC estimated that about 24 percent went directly to its partners. During Ushirika II this was about 65 percent. However, Ushirika I lasted about 20 months and not 13 like Ushirika II. The difference also shows that building up internal capacity takes time. Greater experience as well as cost- sharing with the GBV programme may also have led to synergy effects during phase II. 30 The CBO partners receive cash and in-kind contributions.

20 GBV III (NGOs ongoing ongoing ongoing NA and CBOs)

The IRC hoped that the umbrella grant model would foster closer cooperation with local organisations. In principle, working with these partners would be more cost effective and could greatly expand the number of projects that could be implemented. The design of their projects and communication methods would be more appropriate culturally and, hence more readily accepted by the local population. Local partners would also be able to access geographical areas that international NGOs could not because of insecurity and lack of local knowledge. Finally, it was hoped that the long-term benefits to the population would be greater, as local structures, institutions, and actors were strengthened.

Capacity-building process The Ushirika programme phase I officially began in February 2001 but did not really get going until June 2001 when the programme manager arrived. The programme team faced a central challenge: how to establish a dialogue that both supported the aspirations of its (potential) partners, while making demands on them based on agreements concluded with them.31 At the same time, it had to take the complicated and dangerous local context into account. Specifically, selecting the right organisations in the volatile socio-economic context that fostered opportunistic management was difficult.

To obtain a clearer picture of the local needs and capacities, the team carried out several preliminary assessments: an overview of local organisations in South Kivu, an overview of international organisations working in partnership with local NGOs in eastern DRC, and, finally, an overview of humanitarian needs in South Kivu. Building on existing IRC contacts and the regular humanitarian coordination meetings, the Ushirika team was able to establish an extensive network of contacts with local NGOs and local umbrella NGOs, as well as with other international agencies. In this way, it stressed (potential) cooperation and complementarity, and it marketed the project to the humanitarian community in the province.

The team also conducted a participatory design workshop with civil society organisations, international and local NGOs, as well as other IRC staff members in September 2001. The workshop participants further refined the overview of the existing humanitarian needs. They also evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of local NGOs. The earlier assessments and results of the workshop ensured that the programme was rooted in field realities as seen by the various stakeholders (local organisations and international organisations involved in partnership projects). By synthesising the data generated, the participants were able to develop the skeleton of the programme’s logical framework and monitoring and evaluation system. The programme would consist of two main components:

1. Financial Support:

31 See Bergström, 2002, p. 8.

21 Selected local NGOs would receive sub-grants support to develop and implement emergency service delivery projects in priority areas and for target groups that were difficult to access.

2. Capacity Building: Selected NGOs would receive accompaniment and support to improve their technical, managerial and financial capacity of local NGOs through training and accompaniment. The team planned to hold special training sessions on basic financial management and internal control systems, as well as on project management (project proposal review, budgeting, collection of baseline data, as well as monitoring and evaluation systems). The selected organisations would also receive technical support in the areas of food security, environmental health, and livelihoods.

In addition, the team planned the programme activities. In particular, it developed an Ushirika programme cycle that consisted of five key stages:

1. Call for proposals As a first step in the selection process, the Ushirika team developed a call for proposals guide, which was widely diffused using radio announcements and a network of international NGO partners and civil society platforms. The guide outlined eligibility requirements for organisations and projects, as well as guidelines for proposal submission. Response to the call surpassed initial expectations: local organisations submitted over 340 proposals.

2. Project and partner selection The Ushirika team further developed a multi-step approach to selecting partners and projects. The first step in the selection process required programme staff to evaluate proposals based on the eligibility requirements and their adherence to the guidelines outlined in the call for proposals guide. They used a checklist that was developed in- house to determine this adherence.

The second step involved carrying out a technical assessment of those project proposals meeting eligibility requirements. Several members of the Ushirika team then organised a selection committee, which also included other technical staff from IRC and representatives of UN agencies and NGOs. At the end of the selection process, twelve organisations were chosen (See Annex IV).

3. Project redesign and signature of a memorandum of understanding Once partners were identified, the team felt that it was essential to work with them to strengthen their project design. The team and consultants paid particular attention to improving project quality and developing measurable indicators. IRC then signed an MOU with each partner organisation, outlining key aspects of the sub-grant projects and the roles and responsibilities of each party, based on the key documents prepared during the redesign phase.

4. Project implementation, monitoring and training

22 During the project selection process and the redesign phase, the team set up a training programme for all partner organisations. The initial training session focused on administrative, financial, and project management skills necessary for implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.

5. Evaluations and audits Evaluation of partner projects was conducted twice during the cycle: mid-way through project implementation and at the end. These were an opportunity to assess both project implementation and impact on target communities. Improvements in partner organisational capacity were also assessed at the end of the programme, using a questionnaire.

Finally, four financial audits were also conducted on sub-grants received by an IRC expat finance manager. The sample of only four out of the twelve partner organisations was taken due to time and budgetary constraints.

The GBV UGP built on the Ushirika experience by further developing its procedures. It worked with a similar programming cycle. It also set up specific tools for working in the difficult area of GBV. In addition to Ushirika-like capacity-building with formal organisations, IRC also instituted a new, smaller and more simplified type of umbrella grant for grass-roots organisations: the so-called community-based micro-projects.

Thinking in the IRC about the needs and transition process in eastern DRC also evolved. The IRC decided to progressively integrate the Ushirika and GBV UGP into a civil society development unit (CSDU). The GBV manager was promoted as CSDU coordinator in May 2003 and began working on merging the two umbrella grant teams.

GBV II simplified its management process considerably when it decided to continue with its eight programme partners so that no call for proposals and selection process were necessary. All partners designed projects based on their previous evaluation and the knowledge they acquired during the first phase.

Currently, the IRC is executing phases III of the Ushirika and GBV umbrella grant programmes. For these phases, CSDU increasingly emphasises institutional capacity, in particular improving the quality of services and management structures of the partner organisations. It focuses in particular on strengthening the role of the administrative boards to improve financial accountability to their members and their interaction with their target population. It plans to conduct more community-rooted advocacy to promote better service delivery and it is initiating community-led project management committees to actively participate in each stage of the project cycle and engage in advocacy. These project committees also participate in designing their own MOU with the partner

23 organisation, which can strengthen the interaction between the partner organisation and its members on service delivery.

Accountability mechanisms The programme finance team requested monthly financial reports, which it analysed for compliance with standard administrative and financial procedures, especially with regards to procurement, book-keeping and human resources management. Based on justifications provided for disbursements made the previous month and treasury plans presented for the next period, new disbursements were made to partners for the following month of activities. Regular coaching meetings to discuss financial reports also provided an opportunity for finance staff to reinforce certain key concepts and provide individualised training to partner accountants in appropriate financial management.

At first, the relatively inexperienced partners had difficulty in producing satisfactory reports, but all sub-grantees showed significant improvement in the quality of their reports by the end of the project cycle.

IRC CSDU staff also conducted, when possible, field visits to assist partners in strengthening their administrative and financial systems, as well as their project execution. Reports were written and shared with each partner after each visit, including observations and recommendations. In effect, this was a hands-on course in organisational and project management. IRC learned that building capacity of partners is a long-term process that is best achieved through a mix of training, accompaniment, and hands-on support. Financial control and capacity building thus mutually reinforced each other.

With GBV II, the monitoring of project and partner progress changed with the outline of the narrative report was based more strongly on the logical framework of the project. The set up of the evaluation and auditing processes remained essentially the same. Later, the

24 work with the project committees constituted an original form of bottom-up accountability.

Both programmes will continue building on earlier experiences. They have developed an institutional analysis tool, and they are now developing more tools for assessing partner capacity in civic education, advocacy, counselling, agriculture, and so on. In this way, the IRC wants to assess both partner capacities and community capacities. These tools can then be used for collecting baseline data and later impact assessment.

Impact The Ushirika and GBV selection processes focused more on assessing the capacities of local organisations than on carrying out baseline studies of their target populations. That the humanitarian needs were severe was documented in preparatory reports, but no exact studies on, for example, the prevalence of GBV were carried out. Although the level of insecurity and taboos surrounding GBV partly explain this absence, such studies would have made it easier to assess impact quantitatively. Ushirika and GBV have tended to focus their monitoring and evaluation on three partly overlapping aspects, namely:

1. the IRC CSDU management process itself; 2. the capacities of the partner organisations; 3. the community, which could be the whole community, the family, or the individual.

IRC CSDU management process Most IRC CSDU reports to donors focus on process indicators, output indicators, and narrative description. The reports clearly show that IRC did what it set out to do in its original plans. When deviations or implementation problems occur these are well explained.

In line with their selection processes, both Ushirika and GBV evaluations tend to emphasise the capacities of the partner organisations more than community impact. Only limited information on impact indicators has been collected. When the programmes concentrate on the local population, GBV focuses more on the individual and family levels than Ushirika, because the individual victims constitute the starting point of their activities. Generally, staff at IRC CSDU are positive about the progress they have made in setting up their unit, developing its tools, and strengthening its partners.

Capacities of the partner organisations The IRC has made solid progress in impact assessment at the partner organisational level: its institutional analysis is a useful tool for studying the managerial strengths and weaknesses of the partner organisations and their interaction with their members. It can function both as a baseline survey and a monitoring/evaluation tool to check later progress, as well as a teaching and discussion tool.

In addition to the financial and narrative reports, the monitoring and evaluation of partners also stresses process and output indicators. Moreover, in their evaluations of

25 partner organisations, Ushirika and GBV qualitatively collect the opinions of the local management, stakeholders, often traditional leaders and teachers, and beneficiaries. In addition, these evaluations detail the strengths and weaknesses of the organisations and their service delivery projects. The project summary of OPIFET provides examples of process and output indicators at both the partner and the project level.

Without any exception, all the partner organisations interviewed mentioned that their management had improved, sometimes dramatically. Capacity building in financial and narrative reporting had often been tough in the beginning but paid off later. They feel that their credibility as organisations has increased and that they are more professional candidates for funding by other organisations, which several have obtained.32 “Many cited the fact that other funding or operational partners have been impressed by their growing capacity in design, monitoring and evaluation in reporting and financial control.”33 This was confirmed by three other international NGOs. Some organisations, such as DOCS, have applied IRC procedures in their affiliated organisations.

Project Summary OPIFET works with female porters. These women carry huge loads for many miles each day for local traders. Even very young girls carry such loads on their backs. The work can exhaust the women and cause severe health problems, for example, with pregnancies. The porters generally work on a daily basis. They are paid so little that the population considers them to be a type of slave. The social status of these women is so weak that can get no redress when pay is refused to them. Many of them are IDPs and suffer from sexual violence and other forms of aggression. In addition, competition among them is fierce, which drives down their income. OPIFET submitted a micro-finance proposal to Ushirika that would enable the women to leave their work as porters and start their own small scale informal activities. IRC gave a lump sum to OPIFET, which carried out a micro-credit programme. Project Description Value of Indicator Funding period 6 months Total number of beneficiaries 301 Women Amount financed by IRC $ 20,000 Amount granted after first six months $ 12,670 Maximum amount of micro-credit loan $ 10 - 50 Credit time granted to the women 10 Months Net profit rate for the micro-credit grants to the women 1% per Month Reimbursement of credit by the women 92.8% Credits reimbursed later 7.2% Credit amount paid back by 21 August 2002 (5 months) $ 3139,09 Benefit gained from amount granted to women by 21 August 2002 $ 335,03 Reimbursed amount and benefit gained by OPIFET by 21 August $ 3475,02 2002 Project results after six months 301 women have changed from being porters to conducting small trade and commerce 2,331 persons are able to eat twice a day (1,800 children, 301 women, and 230 men) The income of the 301 households has gone from $ 0.5 to $ 1 per day 900 school age children who had abandoned school, have resumed classes at the beginning of the 2002-2003 school year

32 Six out of the fourteen current Ushirika partners have also obtained funding from other donor institutions. In addition, at least two of the first 12 Ushirika partners are also funded by other donor institutions. Similar information for the GBV programme is currently being collected. 33 Condor, 2003, p. 18.

26 301 women can afford one bar of soap to wash clothes every two days 10 households out of 301 have improved their dwellings 301 women can buy lamp oil every day 301 women have improved their physical well being 8 households, which had lived separately, have reunited 301 women have time to rest and participate in community life 120 women have restarted their kitchen gardens 301 women have said that they have restored their dignity

Capacity building programmes run the risk that the partner organisations become more accountable to the supporting organisation than to the communities they serve. The supporting organisation can by and large prevent this by stressing the activities – in project and financial management – that the partner organisations must carry out for its members or the community at large.

The community level In line with their selection processes, both Ushirika and GBV evaluations tend to emphasise the capacities of the partner organisations more than community impact. Although the project summary and logical frameworks show that some quantitative impact indicators can be tracked, this should be done more systematically by using baseline studies. To some extent, this means that the IRC should pull its collected information from its logical framework and evaluations together in a more structured manner, as for example the project summary above. The IRC normally documents the overall impact of the projects on such issues as income, social cohesion, family life, health, and well being in qualitative, narrative form.34

1. Access Even without elaborate quantitative information, it is clear that the partner organisations are able to extend their reach to regions and provide types of services that would otherwise not have been provided to populations in need. For example, the Baraka-Fizi area became only recently accessible to international NGOs, but local organisations have been operational there for many years and the last two years as IRC CSDU partners. In a similar vein, the incorporation of micro-projects in the GBV programme has facilitated incorporation of community-based organisations.

Security problems have caused delays and added to project costs. At times, pillaging and rape have eliminated earlier project gains and projects had to restart or operate at a lower level of activity, for example when animals of in-kind credit schemes were looted.

2. Inclusion Many of the sub-grant projects address the needs of marginal groups, such as raped women, female porters, and pygmies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that working with local organisations can sometimes guarantee culturally appropriate strategies. At first

34 As stated, GBV focuses more on the individual and family levels than Ushirika, because the individual victims constitute the starting point of its activities. For example, GBV programme reports mention psychological, physical (medicine, reconstructive surgery), and social improvements (families reunited after rejection, support from other women) in the target group.

27 glance, this seems logical as local people know other locals best. However, in specialised areas, such as GBV, culturally accepted norms, such as rejection of raped women by their husbands, may actually cause great problems and necessitate cooperation between international and local organisations. Currently, the incorporation of CODESAs and setting up project management committees may facilitate further inclusion of the local population. If these function well, they may in the future also foster accountability and sustainability from the bottom up.

3. Sustainability In this respect, Ushirika and GBV differ from traditional humanitarian activities. They show that it is possible to build technical, project management, and administrative capacities in service delivery in a relatively short period of time in situations of chronic crises, when alternative government services do not exist. The IRC also claims, but cannot yet prove, that providing services through local partners is cheaper than doing so itself. The GBV programme’s focus on the individual make it more expensive than Ushirika which centres more on the whole community.35

In any case, those organisations that have ensured additional or new funding sources have shown their institutional viability. In a similar vein, the rotating in-kind micro credit systems (for example pigs and guinea pigs) continue and have been able to involve new beneficiaries. Moreover, beneficiaries are being trained to help new beneficiaries with in- kind micro credit and training. The rotating mechanism and the demands made by non- beneficiaries can be seen as bottom up mechanisms to ensure a higher degree of sustainability in service delivery.

Impact measurement process The Achilles heel of both programmes is that, although they likely have improved the lives of the local population, it is difficult to prove the actual change beyond output indicators and qualitative description.

GBV and Ushirika currently face a two-fold challenge in improving impact measurement. First, they need to intensify their impact assessment in order to show that they are achieving the desired outcomes of the services delivered and/or are aware of the negative side effects of their programmes. This implies more baseline and prevalence studies. Perhaps the IRC can also develop special kits for self-monitoring by the beneficiaries/project management committees, which can be a learning tool for the community members and allow for the continuation of monitoring and evaluation when insecurity is high. In the past, the IRC has carried out innovative quantitative surveys of the impact of its health activities on local mortality and morbidity. It should now do the same for its Ushirika/GBV programmes. It has already made some important progress in this respect, as for example, with the institutional viability analysis.

Second, both programmes need to think through the influence the warring factions, governmental institutions and international organisations have on their functioning.

35 This is partly offset by the higher level of services provided to each individual. Put differently, the cost of services may offer a better basis for comparison than the cost per individual survivor.

28 Partly, this is already being done through the assumptions and risks section of the logical framework and strategic planning.36 It will be useful to measure this in more detail.

Scaling up and replication The numerous reactions to the calls for proposals indicate that there is scope for scaling up activities to meet the needs of other population groups, areas, and partner organisations in the eastern DRC. The IRC should study whether it could diversify its capacity building for different partner organisations. At the moment, it works with legalised non-profit organisations and CBOs. The integration Ushirika/GBV elements into its health sector activities is an interesting form of scaling up that should be monitored closely.

Impact measurement could bring both programmes one step further in thinking whether and how they should engage more directly with other types of organisations that influence service delivery. For example, the Ushirika and GBV programmes can strengthen their sustainability further if local government institutions can contribute more directly to its programmes – for example, to prevent coordination and fragmentation problems – by instituting more regular information exchange and involvement in the partner organisation’s activities. Ushirika and GBV need to consider building the capacity of governmental services (also as a next step in building service delivery platforms and promoting good governance.) In a similar vein, AED, a partner that provides legal support to GBV victims, works with traditional leaders. Both programmes should consider how they can obtain stronger support from these leaders, who have considerable influence. In addition, some partner organisations are cooperatives. Before the war, these played an important role in the local economy. Perhaps, IRC should reflect on developing its support for cooperatives further as a way of working more with private enterprise.

Finally, IRC should now create a proper exit strategy with its partners. It can use MOUs that specify the outcomes that the partner should achieve, while decreasing the frequency of financial and narrative reporting. This would amount to a management by contract approach. Alternatively, IRC could transfer tasks concerning its partners to regular development organisations or the government. Its future interventions could feed into capacity-building partnerships for local service delivery that foster constructive engagement between civil society, local government, and private commerce – in which government structures could increasingly re-establish their policy-setting and public decision-making role inside a context that promotes civic involvement and mixed forms of implementation.

5. SERVICE DELIVERY INITIATIVES AND OUTCOMES IN THE DRC: FIVE NGOs

36 Workshops were conducted in Bukavu and Kinshasa that included mapping root causes of conflict and actions necessary to move DRC forward toward sustainable peace and development.

29 This chapter compares the service delivery initiatives and entry points of five organisations active in eastern DRC. These initiatives are grouped according to the modality they employ (individual/community development, supporting government services, and partnering with non-state actors). Given the weak government services it is not surprising that most supporting organisations work together with local NGOs. The approaches to selecting partners and building capacity differ considerably among them.

5.1 Direct to Community/Individuals

5.1.1 Women for Women International Women for Women International (WWI) is a young organisation, which works directly with local women in chronic crises and countries recovering from war. It may cooperate with local organisations, but it does not provide them with direct financial support.37 Instead, it partners with individual women and provides them with tools and resources to move out of crisis and poverty into stability and self-sufficiency. WWI arrived in Bukavu in April 2004, just before fighting broke out. As a consequence, it almost immediately had to delay its activities and restarted its orientation phase in June. Its programming activities began in August 2004. WWI DRC is currently working with over 600 women in Bukavu and plans to expand to helping at least 1,500 women over the next year.

Modality WWI operates a sponsorship programme not unlike the better known child sponsorship programmes. The Wellspring Foundation provided a grant to start up the WWI DRC Chapter office. An estimated 80 percent of WWI’s resources come directly from individual sponsors and institutions. The size of WWI’s budget therefore largely depends on individual donor support and can change over time.

Women who donate money establish direct contact with their “sisters” who receive support through letters and sometimes visits. For some women, this becomes an important source of emotional support. The sponsorship gives immediate, direct financial aid and bridges the gap between relief and development at the level of the individual. The supporting sister donates $25 every month. This sum is allocated to four categories of activities:

• $5 goes to office expenses (mainly for exchange of letters); • $5 is used to provide vocational training skills and right awareness skills to women during the period she participates in the programme. (The programme trains in traditional and non-traditional work/vocational skills and teaches women’s human rights and leadership development, women’s role in civil society reconstruction, as well as business and business management); • $5 is allocated to a savings account, which is donated as a lump sum to the women after a year of training;

37 In Iraq, however, WWI has a project that directly supports women organisations. The sponsorship/rights awareness/vocational training skills programme is always its signature programme in whatever country it works.

30 • $10 goes as direct support to the sponsored woman, which allows her to obtain basic necessities, such as food, clean water, medicine, school-related expenses for her family, or to invest into income-generation activities.38

Capacity-building process Upon arrival the WWI representative visited most international organisations in Bukavu to see what these were doing for women. While setting up her office, the representative also worked with local leaders as “the gatekeepers of norms”. In particular, the representative explained WWI’s mission, what the programme was offering, and criteria for participation. WWI, in collaboration with the local leaders and other members of the local community, conducted a poverty assessment to identify the most socially excluded women who could benefit from the programme. It measured their degree of vulnerability, for example in terms of health.

After a poverty assessment, WWI selects the individuals that will participate in a one- year training programme. Sponsored women form groups of not more than 20 members to share ideas and support. Prior to joining the programme, each woman must complete an enrolment from (given her level of literacy, each women is assisted by WWI staff in completing this from). This form serves as a collection of base-line data on each programme participant.

In addition to identifying women through the poverty assessment, the WWI DRC Chapter office works in collaboration with other organisations, such as GTZ,39 and the Communauté des Eglises Libres de Pentecoste en Afrique (CELPA), providing medical and psycho-social assistance to victims of rape and other sexual violence. These victims constitute another group of socially excluded women. WWI estimates that about 40 percent of its participants are rape victims and 60 percent are other socially excluded women from some of the poorest communities in the programme areas.

For its training, WWI has worked with CELPA. This organisation approached WWI knowing that it would not receive any financial support, but it could facilitate training that its female members would otherwise not have received. In this sense, WWI can fill in gaps that other organisations cannot address.40

38 WWI plans to establish a micro-credit lending programme in 2005-2007 – assuming it is able to obtain funding. It considers its current activities a strong basis for a successful micro-credit programme. 39 GTZ supports the Panzi hospital (with funding from UNICEF). 40 Recently, WWI has begun to implement the “Men’s Leadership Training/Addressing the Communal Impact of Violence against Women (VAW) in Eastern DRC.” To complement its core programme, WWI is implementing a multi-level local men’s leadership and traditional leaders training programme to respond to the varied impact of violence against women at the community level. The specific objectives of the programme are to: 1) train and educate community and traditional leaders on violence against women and its impact on the community; 2) enhance the capacity of community and traditional leaders to develop strategies to address the varied impact of violence against women; and 3) strengthen community structures to better respond to violence against women through changed attitudes and perceptions on sexual violence and women’s rights. Training helps community leaders better understand that GBV, especially rape, is not the fault of the women. This will also help the leaders to recognise the community’s responsibility to reach out and help women become active citizens and participants in community processes.

31 Accountability mechanisms Women for Women International operates with an intensive administrative system to facilitate the individualised sponsorship and training programmes. It conducts a base-line evaluation study, such as the poverty assessment, and collects information on the social- economic conditions of each participant based on the enrolment forms. It also carries out mid-term evaluations of the programme. Direct contact with the participating women, as well as the exchange of letters, are also essential accountability mechanisms.

Additionally, WWI considers it very important to capture and document the stories of the women it supports. These stories constitute essential emotional support and acknowledgement of the strengths these women have shown in times of adversity. They also help assess what the impact of the programme has been on the participating women. These stories are shared with the sponsored sisters in the US and elsewhere. They also help with fundraising and advocacy.

Impact Since Women for Women International is still a young organisation, a full assessment of its impact in terms of access, inclusion, and sustainability cannot yet be carried out. Yet, it argues that assistance to female victims has proven positive. The victims of rape, who participate in the rights awareness and empowerment programme, have started to regain confidence in themselves and have begun to recognise their human value as important members of society.

1. Access As with all organisations in Bukavu, the security problems have delayed operations. At the moment, WWI only works in and around Bukavu. The organisation is looking to extend its operations depending on the improvement of the security situation. The organisation could probably facilitate its access to the field if it could cooperate with one or more other organisations. The organisation is now assessing the feasibility of such cooperation.

2. Inclusion WWI emphasis on local leaders and communities, as well as its poverty assessments ensure the participation of the most marginalised women. It will be interesting to see how fast WWI can scale up its activities. As the example of CELPA shows, it can achieve synergy with other organisations quite easily. No other international organisation in this research worked as directly with sponsoring local women in such an individualised way.

3. Sustainability It is too early to assess WWI’s sustainability. In the early and mid-1990s, direct sponsorship programmes for children received considerable criticism. It will be interesting to see whether WWI can prevent such criticism in its work with women. In this respect, WWI’s main strategic decisions will be when and how it will work together

32 with other local and international organisations in order to establish synergy and obtaining better access in areas outside Bukavu.41

Scaling up and replication Women for Women’s activities in the Congo are an example of replication. The organisation is already active in countries such as Iraq, Bosnia, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. It is currently scaling up its activities in eastern DRC.

5.2 Working with local government institutions

5.2.1 Food for the Hungry International (FHI) FHI has been active in eastern DRC since 1996. It provided seeds and tools as a form of relief to the population in newly accessible areas, and then usually moved on to other areas opening up. But FHI noticed that the cycle of agricultural production of planting and harvesting had been broken due to the conflicts, displacement, lack of access to fields, and pillaging of stocks, tools, cattle, and produce. As a result, local agriculture needed to be rebuilt and FHI shifted its attention from food aid to food security. FHI argued that it needed to strengthen the quality of the seeds, local agricultural techniques, as well as monitoring and evaluation.

Simultaneously, the Service National de Vulgarisation (SNV), a government service, worked with extension workers that were present in areas that FHI could not reach on its own. Furthermore, SNV staff were already trained in evaluation techniques, local mobilisation, and training. However, SNV staff had not received their wages in a long time. A former SNV staff member, who worked for FHI, suggested that the two of them should work more closely together.

Modality FHI did not want to provide aid to SNV, but preferred to establish a mutual exchange. SNV did not receive any state support, but it could still provide technical support to FHI beneficiaries. At the same time, OFDA favoured distributing seeds and tools, as well as emergency preparedness training, over more developmental forms of training, for displaced people and returnees. Hence, FHI and SNV decided to help displaced and extremely poor people in (rapid) rehabilitation techniques. The project focused on three different groups of final beneficiaries: farmers in rural areas for seed and tool distribution, families of malnourished children, mainly in urban areas, and cooperatives rehabilitating fish farming activities through cleaning and restocking fish ponds.

Capacity-building process The project started in August 2002 in Katanga and was extended to South Kivu in July 2003. SNV staff frequently possessed differing levels of knowledge and needed refresher

41 Another aspect of WWI sustainability is its emphasis on building local staff capacity. Each office operates as a local chapter office, while strategic decision and leadership will remain with headquarters in Washington DC. Eventually, after two or three years, the office will be managed by a highly skilled and competent Congolese national. WWI offices in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Nigeria are successfully managed by nationals from these countries.

33 training. In addition, the two organisations developed an incentive structure of $50 a month, a bike for transport, and a raincoat for each extension worker. FHI also provided some stationary and other small equipment, such as notebooks and tape measures.

FHI agronomists then gave bi-weekly trainings to the SNV agents on different agricultural themes throughout the agriculture season. Based on the number of beneficiaries for each area, FHI and SNV selected a group of approximately 100 SNV extension workers for weekly training. SNV extension staff that were not selected could participate in the training, but did not receive the incentives.

In turn, the SNV monitors trained the beneficiaries, for example in seed multiplication, general agricultural techniques, the use and production of vegetables for improving nutrition, and fish farming.42

Through SNV, FHI also worked with the Service Nationale des Sémences (SENASEM). This government service also lacked the financial means to continue its regular work. Officially, SENASEM is supposed to do inspections of seed multipliers’ fields and test seed germination. If all goes well, it “certifies” improved quality seed. SENASEM monitors local acceptance, as well as the methods farmers use to plant and grow seeds. FHI wanted to improve seed quality so that farmers would obtain a higher price for them. SENASEM carried out training of farmers, which was a supplemental task for which FHI paid a stipend per day. During implementation, SENASEM monitors usually visit the farmers three times during the growing season and take a sample during the harvest. FHI provided transport to its sites of activity so that SEMASEM could make follow-up visits, which enabled the organisation to decide whether to certify the seeds of the partners or not.

Accountability mechanisms The incentive structure, including the bikes and other equipment, was detailed in a MOU between FHI and SNV. This document stipulated the FHI inputs, the joint activities and responsibilities for the project, as well as the evaluation guidelines. Village-level committees established lists of qualifying families for seed and tool distribution. FHI field monitors than verified each list through visiting a random sample of the families listed. If a significant portion of the sample was disqualified, the list was resent to the committee to be redone. The second list was then verified using a larger sample of families.

The monitors of SNV and SEMASEM followed their regular monitoring and evaluation procedures. The higher prices for better quality seeds, as well as the support for improving agricultural practices, also provided an incentive for the farmers to cooperate. However, FHI faced the problem of how to monitor the monitors. Full-time FHI agronomists would follow the monitors on a regular basis. The main difficulty was to

42 In peacetime, SNV staff regularly received training from the Programme National de Pisciculture Familiale (PNPF) for improving fish farming. This system had broken down, but with support from FHI it was reinstituted by supporting 20 cooperatives. FHI provided a stipend to PNPF staff when they trained the members of fish cooperatives and when they made an occasional visit to supervise the reception of fish.

34 determine a course of action if FHI agronomists raised concerns about the performance of one of the monitors. FHI did not want to build up a parallel structure.43 Individual extension workers and the SNV provided monthly reports on the training given to beneficiary farmers, the population movements and challenges faced by returning and displaced families (and other agricultural statistics as deemed necessary).

Impact Measurement The impact in the field was probably higher for local beneficiaries than for the government organisations themselves because the financial support did not continue and they did not receive additional government money. Their skill base however did improve.

1. Access The government services were active in areas that were either difficult or impossible to reach, and the extension workers lived among the population. With the exception of health services, international organisations in eastern DRC rarely gain access to the population through directly supporting government services. In this sense, the project was an original effort to improve government services.

2. Inclusion Government services and officials were reactivated during the programme. Their knowledge and practice improved again. Approximately 20,000 farmers received training. For South Kivu, over 8,000 families were trained at the nutrition centres and over 20 fish cooperatives were trained and more than 93 fish ponds rehabilitated. The project showed that local agriculture could be restored to achieve a higher output. Different agricultural services benefited from international support.

3. Sustainability Several farmers associations could certify their seeds, which helped them to earn more money. Most associations distributed the seeds among their members. One problem was that no market existed for improved seeds. In this sense, the war has disrupted an institution on which both farmers and government services could have relied to achieve a higher impact.

Unfortunately, OFDA sent an issue letter to FHI stating that its policies did not allow for training SNV extension workers, so FHI only continued its activities at nutrition centres. When support to the SNV and SENASEM was ended, their service level declined again. In this sense, the project indicated that it was possible to improve services, but it did not lead to a continuously higher level of services.

Scaling up and replication

43 Within FHI, a programme coordinator supervised programme activities, as well as the general management of the operational sites. A site manager/assistant coordinator handled bureaucratic issues, assisted the finance officer with petty cash expenses and was responsible for the day-to-day management of activities. An agronomist advised on technical agricultural aspects and assisted in the organisations and supervision of the seed and tool distributions, agricultural extension training, and seed multiplication.

35 Within FHI, staff differed in opinion about the results of the project. On the one hand, they feared creating dependency within the government. How far should an international NGO go in supporting government services? On the other, they noticed that it was relatively cheap to work with still existing, but weak, government structures. They also noticed that some parts of the government that had not received support did not cooperate sufficiently and sometimes indicated that they would only cooperate if they would also receive support. In this respect, FHI staff felt that it was important to ensure cooperation from officials higher in the government hierarchy. Perhaps bilateral donors could focus on these levels through a sector-wide approach and ensuring broader funding. FHI also felt that it was too small to address the multiple needs of the population alone.

5.3 Working with Non-State Providers

5.3.1 The CARE-CAP Programme CARE and the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) signed a two-year cooperative agreement in September 2002 to implement a national peace-building programme in the DRC for a total amount of $5,926,954. This programme was called Congo en Action pour la Paix (CAP).44

OTI is part of USAID. It works in political and democratic transitions. It calls itself “a non traditional donor”, because it becomes involved in the day-to-day management of the projects it funds. To some extent, CARE thus functioned as a contractor implementing a project broadly defined by OTI – unlike implementing a project designed by CARE and funded directly by USAID. OTI implements rather similar programmes/projects in about eleven countries.

Modality The programme used a sub-grant mechanism to work with civil society organisations, communities, and other groups – such as the mayor and staff of Bunia city hall – in implementing small-scale projects. The absence of a well-functioning government necessitated a focus on these organisations, because they would at least be able to deliver resources and services to the people who need them. In particular, OTI wanted to strategically provide grants to help civil society organisations to enhance their outreach and participation in the peace process, develop advocacy skills, and connect to like- minded organisations throughout the country and Diaspora. “Depending on the type of project, sub-grants consisted of a mix of cash and in-kind contributions and were of relatively short duration (from less than one week to 12 months).”45 However, based on

44 OTI was providing funding to CARE under a cooperative agreement, whereas most other projects in this evaluation were funded under grant agreements. A grant agreement generally outlines specific objectives, activities, indicators, and outputs to be accomplished within a specified timeframe and then allows the recipient to implement the project quite independently with regular reporting. A cooperative agreement generally lies out the overall goals, objectives, and strategies to be achieved, but the specific activity plans and even outputs are left open to a certain extent. The donor will get involved in the day-to-day management of the project by defining and approving specific deliveries in the course of the project, in particular during the start-up phase and with regards to sub-grants. 45 CARE-CAP (2004) Final Evaluation of CARE Grants, March/April 2004, in mimeo, p. 1.

36 the cooperative agreement, CARE was required to shift grant to 100 percent in-kind contributions. The programme had three related objectives which determined the different sub-grant categories:

1. To increase availability and access to balanced information; 2. To increase public participation in informed dialogue on issues of national importance; 3. To increase linkages among communities.

Many projects focused on peace events, river and telecommunication connections, reconstruction of roads, bridges, schools, and markets, as well as radio broadcasts.

Capacity-building process After the signing of the programme agreement, CARE immediately began implementation. The programme director started in October 2002 and established offices in Kinshasa, Bukavu, Kindu, and Kisangani. In early 2003, OTI recommended that the programme expanded to Ituri and CARE established an office in Bunia in March.

Partner organisations could submit proposals to CARE-CAP. In contrast to Ushirika I, CARE-CAP did not work with a call for proposals, but sensitised local communities to its purpose and activities. As a result, many local NGOs contacted CARE-CAP on their own initiative. However, local NGOs frequently were unable to write a proper proposal or successfully implement a project. In a sense, CAP had to take its partners by the hand and find a middle-way between efficient implementation and establishing the paperwork for organisational control. In addition, OTI wanted to execute short-term projects, otherwise it would need too much staff, and it wanted to keep its funds rolling. In comparison with the IRC, CARE-CAP worked with a higher number of partners, but for a shorter duration. In this sense, its projects were more like quick impact projects (QIPs).

Between August and October 2003, OTI instructed CARE to stop the disbursement of cash and shift to in-kind grants exclusively and CARE struggled to procure and deliver goods throughout the Congo, given the lack of a functioning transportation infrastructure. In addition, the Congolese transition process evolved, making the original set-up of the programme less relevant. Due to the Pretoria agreement,46 OTI wanted to play a larger role in de-mobilisation, disarmament, and re-integration (DDR). It feared that former soldiers could become rebels or criminals, if DDR was not properly implemented. In addition, cell-phone, river transport, and road connections among different population groups were improving. At the end of 2003, OTI shifted its objective to one dealing with marginalised children and, particularly, including children who were coming out of armed groups. It thus re-directed its programme and looked for a new implementing partner. Nevertheless, it continued the media component of CAP.

46 The agreement made provisions for the new TNG, withdrawal of foreign forces, integration of the different military forces, DDR, and peacebuilding,

37 “By the time the decision was made to close project activities, CARE had initiated 65 [sub-]grants across the five sites.”47 Due to the wide geographic range of the project sites, different project encountered different levels of violence. On several occasions, violence caused delays and logistical constraints.

Accountability mechanisms To some extent, the joint improvement and writing of project proposals was already a form of both capacity-building and organisational control. USAID/Care signed an MOU with each local partner. Each CAP project also worked with a standardised budget form. In addition, CARE-CAP used financial reporting, disbursement, and procurement forms for each project. Most projects only lasted a few weeks and only needed an (final) evaluation. If the project lasted longer the partner organisation had to send in an evaluation and reporting forms as indicated in its MOU.

Before each grant signature, each project was visited by CARE-CAP staff. Depending on the duration, distance, access, and specific characteristics of a project, it could be visited between once a week to once during its execution. If the project had a final event – and some projects were one-day events – project staff made an effort to attend.

Local staff of the partner organisations worked with the logical framework, but often in a poor manner. When the tools were adapted in 2003, the logical framework was dropped because it was too difficult to apply. Although it did not work out properly, CARE- CAP’s effort to procure goods was in principle also a way to ensure accountability for project execution.48

USAID/OTI also produced several information sheets that it could share with interested parties. A database helped the Washington office, the Congolese office, and local offices share information with each other.

Impact CAP was only active for a relatively short period of time, which makes it harder to assess its impact.49

1. Access CAP improved access, partly by helping to rebuild infrastructure, partly by reaching marginalised groups. For example, bringing project goods to one pygmy community took 20 days per boat.

47 CARE-CAP, 2004, p. 1. 48 CARE staff wondered whether this was the best way to ensure accountability. The IRC does provide in kind and cash sub-grants. OTI’s main argument is that sub-grants in cash are too difficult to monitor, whereas IRC’s experience shows otherwise. Nevertheless, the types of projects of both organisations are different. In all likelihood, the length of the project, intensity of cooperation and control, and the quality of the staff of both the supporting and sub-grant receiving organisations determine the opportunities for in- cash grants. This would be a point for further research. 49 The best way to evaluate CAP’s outcomes is to review them as a set of QIPs. Unfortunately, it is outside the scope of this research to review the individual grants.

38 2. Inclusion As stated, the programme focused on marginalised groups as well as isolated communities. Its focus on radio broadcasts is, of course, an effective, low-cost to reach many disparate groups in the same way.

3. Sustainability A final evaluation report stated that it was “difficult to evaluate the sustainability of outcomes, though the sustainability potential appears … to be more evident among projects involved in direct communication. This is where we are most likely to find ideas for future continuation that do not wholly depend on further structures or equipment. We can see this tendency in comments coming form the documentation centre in Kindu: ‘we will now continue to provide the best information to the people.’ Similarly from the brochure distribution project, also in Kindu: ‘new themes and strategies are being developed; the acquisition of the materials gives the desire to continue.’ Comments such as these suggest that the seed has been well planted and that there exists good internal potential for its continued fertilisation.”

The report continued “The majority of the grantees plan to complete the work begun or continue the initiative in new directions. In most cases this means looking for funds elsewhere, but there are mentions of self-funding at least in part: according to a spokesperson for the Hoho market in Bunia: ‘It’s with our own funds that we will achieve the completion of the market.’ And with regard to the Dele school (Bunia), the coordinator of Terre des Enfants asserts: ‘We are determined to go on. We count on the population of Dele and we will look for other funders.’”

Scaling up and replication OTI/CARE-CAP did not have an explicit aim to build capacity; they focused more on peacebuilding and saw their partners as intermediaries for delivering services to communities.

Although the programme was terminated earlier than planned, and OTI continued with another executing agency, both OTI and CARE remained active in the Congo. Since, as stated, OTI is active in about 11 other countries, its approach has already been replicated several times. The CAP experience shows how important it is to have a well-functioning civil society and build up as quickly as possible a high-quality programme team. That is not just important for replication and scaling up, but also for the continuation of existing programmes. Based on her experience with the Congo follow-up programmes, the OTI representative nevertheless mentioned that she hoped that DFID would also support small-scale grants, because these could be very effective in helping a war-torn society rebuild itself.

5.3.2 Christian Aid Christian Aid has been carrying out peacebuilding programmes in eastern DRC since 1999. Based on the lessons learned from an earlier peace and reconciliation pilot phase funded by DFID between May 2001 and October 2002, Christian Aid wanted to strengthen local peacebuilding capacities in South Kivu further.

Modality The goal of the programme was to contribute to peace, stability, and democratisation in the Great Lakes area. The key objectives were:

1. To promote democratisation, peace, and human rights within civil society, the political, administrative and military authorities and the judiciary in DRC; 2. To support lobbying activities for peace at national, regional, and international levels. This will be done through national and regional civil society networks as well as catholic and protestant churches with which CAFOD and Christian Aid have close links; 3. To strengthen the capacities of North and South Kivus’ NGOs and churches to resolve conflict and contribute to the promotion of peace and human rights.

Four local NGOs based in Bukavu participate in this phase: Heritiers de la Justice (HJ), and Action pour l’Education aux Droits (AED), which are human rights organisations, Group d’Actions Socio-Agro-Pastorales (GASAP), a rural development organisation, and Centre Olame, a catholic women’s organisation, that currently plays an important role in supporting raped women.50

In addition to helping individual victims, the organisations also organise community activities, such as irrigation, sports, and rotational credit activities in which different ethnic groups come together, as well as advocacy/awareness creation, such as human rights denunciations, special publications, peace and human rights education, and radio broadcasts.

DFID provided “start-up” funds for the period between the end of the former project phase and the beginning of the new project phase. This helped the partner organisations to continue their work. The total adjusted project costs of £666,305 cover the period from January 2003 to the end of June 2005.

Capacity-building process The planning of the new phase, in particular joint work on the logframe, strengthened the project planning and reporting capacities of the four partners. During the first six months, the partners also further developed their (relatively weak) monitoring and evaluation systems. Four of the partners have their offices in Bukavu, which facilitates regular contact.

Christian Aid regularly organises meetings with its partners to facilitate exchange and collaboration.51 It also carries out a monthly monitoring visit to the field (so that each partner’s field activities are visited once every four months), as well as training sessions

50 This phase also includes the “Chaine de Solidarité Agissante” a network of the Justice and Peace commissions of the Catholic, Protestant, Kimbanguiste, and Orthodox Churches, based in Kinshasa. 51 Within Christian Aid, a project co-ordinator is responsible for overall project management, monitoring and reporting, co-ordination, capacity building with partners for monitoring and evaluation systems, information access, and lobbying.

40 and other reflection, cultural, or information-sharing meetings. Occasionally, other organisations are invited to attend these meetings.52

Due to the fighting in May/June 2004, GASAP’s staff members of Banyamulenge origin decided to flee. At one stage, its staff members were located in Cyangugu (Rwanda), Bujumbara, and Bukavu. In spite of the troubles, they nevertheless kept their organisation going and remained in regular contact with the other organisations in the programme. All the staff members of GASAP have now returned to the DR Congo and are currently based in Uvira.

Accountability mechanisms In the earlier project phases, the partner organisations used monitoring forms to assess peace and human rights education in schools and peace clubs, as well as project outputs, such as drawings sketched by members of peace clubs and letters and articles by teachers to monitor and record the implementation and impact of activities. However, due to lack of time, knowledge, and resources, no systems had been formally set up to analyse and process all this information and thus demonstrate overall impact. Partners needed support to develop detailed indicators and gather baseline data to be able to systematically collect, assess, and use relevant information.53

Christian Aid did not use MOUs when this programme started. Programme agreements are currently being introduced by Christian Aid throughout its International Division. Currently, the partners produce six-monthly narrative reports and three-monthly financial reports, including a budget for the next three months as laid out in the grant letter agreed between DFID and Christian Aid. Christian Aid consolidates these reports, requesting clarifications and further information from partners when necessary, and sends them to DFID. The consolidated report together with any feedback from DFID is then shared with the partner organisations. The project coordinator noted that AED had made progress through its work with the IRC and suggested that a form of cooperation with the IRC could also be beneficial for the other partners.

At the end of the first project year, a local consultant facilitated the internal evaluation of three of the four Bukavu based partners (GASAP instead organised several review meetings during the months following the May-June conflict). During the final three months of the project, local and international Christian Aid staff, as well as a DFID representative, will carry out a final evaluation.

The Christian Aid interim reports also describe the monitoring and evaluation systems that the partners now have put into place for working with their counterparts and local communities. AED has collected baseline data on abuses of human rights in the detention centres from its regular visits since the first phase of the programme. Fifteen such monitoring visits were carried out to police station and detention centres from January to

52 Christian Aid has also built up a national network of partners to formally establish and pursue collaboration. 53 Christian Aid (2003) Project Proposal of Peace and Reconciliation Strengthening in DRC, Bukavu, in mimeo, p. 11.

41 June 2004. AED has also carried out the self-evaluation in which a sample of beneficiaries and other people affected by the programme participated. Centre Olame has recorded information on incidents of rape and other violence reported by women. This database has become an important resource for combating GBV.54 Olame also holds feedback session with local communities that are also attended by men. GASAP collects qualitative and quantitative impact information on the ethnic composition of groups with which it works. HJ now links the provision of funds for peace education to the receipt of satisfactory 3-months reports from the teachers involved. This ensures that regular information is received from the participating schools and peace clubs. It also carried out a self-evaluation assisted by the teachers, pupils, and parents involved in the project.

Impact One report about the pilot phase, enumerated the many activities undertaken by the different organisations. It also self-critically argued “taking into account the relatively small number of beneficiaries reached, particularly in rural and isolated areas the project impact is still limited. It is also limited in terms of its influence on the overall national political and military context as very few project activities were actually targeting military forces, rebel groups, and local authorities, whereas they are key for the restitution of peace and respect for human rights.”55 As all the other organisations, Christian Aid stated the outcomes of its activities mainly in qualitative terms, e.g., “in areas where AED, HJ, GASAP have worked, there has been a reduction in the frequency of conflicts at the community level and human rights violations by justice and police officers/inspectors that have been trained by AED.” The organisations are rarely able to provide quantitative proof of the outcomes.

1. Access The conflict at times severely hampered access. Reliance on local church structures has helped the partner organisations to gain access, for example through parishes. Specific services, such as OLAME centre’s work with raped women, have to cope with more than double the demand expected.

2. Inclusion The peacebuilding activities bring together people from different ethnic communities and help to educate youngsters and other participants. The work with victims of sexual violence, who often suffer from social exclusion, is very demanding. Putting the right structures in place and ensuring quality of services are challenging tasks.

3. Sustainability In general, the insecurity renders progress fragile. The organisations can only exert limited influence on the wider conflict dynamics. Surprisingly, children who have received peace and human rights training are “prepared to defend the rights of others, for example, 9 children in Uvira approached the military authorities to report an abuse of human rights after seeing soldiers arbitrarily arresting some agricultural workers. They

54 Centre Olame is in close contact with Malteser on addressing GBV. 55 Ibid, p. 8.

42 returned with the military commander who subsequently freed the workers.”56 Whereas this example is inspiring, the actual long-term effects of peace building and human rights education remain difficult to assess.

Scaling up and replication A similar programme has been carried out in Northern Ireland. Hence, the programme itself is partly a replication. In all likelihood, it will be useful if the project can be scaled up to reach more beneficiaries to help build peace from the bottom up.

Although practical service delivery was an important component of the programme, it emphasised more peace building than capacity building for service delivery. In this respect, the project coordinator rightly suggested the possibility of stronger cooperation with the IRC for improving the partner’s internal control with more frequent financial and narrative reports.

5.3.3 Malteser Malteser has been active in eastern DRC with health and nutrition activities since 1994. In October 2003, it instituted a mobile clinic, as due to the war regular health centres had been destroyed and looted. With this mobile clinic, Malteser noticed that many patients had been affected by GBV.57 In response, Malteser established medical assistance for GBV victims in 28 selected health centres. This medical approach, however, did not suffice to address the psycho-social problems associated with GBV. Therefore, Malteser also established partnerships with 16 local NGOs, located in the areas of the supported health centres, to address the medical and psycho-social GBV problems in an integrated way.

Modality ECHO provides funding of approximately €280,000 for the period from January 2004 to December 2004. The programme aims:

1. to provide free medical care to GBV victims (using the existing health system) in four health zones; 2. to provide psycho-social support; 3. to reintegrate the victims of sexual violence into their communities.

In March 2004, a coordinator arrived to build up the necessary internal structures and to professionalise working with GBV victims.

Capacity-building process Malteser helped improve the working procedures of its partners (registering patients, monthly reporting, and interview reports) of its partner NGOs. Every local partner NGO staff member receives $17 a month for their GBV work.

56 Christian Aid (2003) 1st Interim Progress Report (July-December 2003) of Peace and Reconciliation Strengthening in DRC, Bukavu, in mimeo, p. 9. 57 Malteser does not use the English term GBV. Instead, it works with VAS, which stands for victime d’aggression sexuelle.

During the implementation of the programme, Malteser became increasingly concerned that many local NGOs perceived the issue of GBV as a growth market, although the actual outcomes of their work were weak. Many of these NGOs had good intentions, but lacked the appropriate skills to work with GBV victims. It also feared that some NGO staff members wanted more to benefit from the international support than to help the victims. In particular, some heads of the organisations gave the impression that they were looking more after their own status and financial interests than after the victims.

In July 2004, the GBV project team carried out a mid-term evaluation of the project, in which they also assessed the existing partnerships. Many NGOs’ staff members had received too little training in psycho-social support, medical treatment and reference, and community education. The team checked the medical forms to see which medical tests and treatments had been carried out and how the reference system functioned. Most NGOs appreciated the evaluation as a form of support; a few health workers felt that they were controlled.

Malteser noted that many partner organisations stressed the economic needs of the victims, but paid insufficient attention to the overall well-being of the victims. The danger of focusing too much on economic benefits is that people fake being a victim in order to obtain these benefits or that it fosters corruption among partner NGOs, for example, with handing out food. In response, Malteser realised that only those organisations that could show results for the victims could remain. Six partners left the programme and a new one was added. It also stopped providing economic aid, e.g., non- food supplies, but emphasised the victims’ (re-)integration into local communities through, for example, community education or brought them into contact with organisations that specialised in economic support to the whole community.

Malteser and the Provincial Health Inspectorate also started a six-month awareness raising campaign against GBV among the population, police, and military. Such a campaign indirectly supports the psycho-social work. Malteser also provided training in the appropriate – and confidential – use and analysis of medical and reference forms.

Finally, it started thinking about the possibility of working through another service- delivery modality. Instead of working with NGOs, local health committees or individuals who are held in high esteem can also help victims. These local committees and individuals – dubbed relais communautaires – live close to the victims and are already fully integrated locally. They can more easily reach the victims – which they often already know – directly in their communities and they do not require as much institutional support and do not have expensive hierarchical structures, thus lessening the chances of corruption or incompetence. The important benefit of such a new modality is to work more directly with local staff and victims. At the same time, the relais need to work closely with the existing health (reference) system.

44 Accountability mechanisms Malteser established an MOU with each of its partners, which outlines the goals, responsibilities, and forms of payment. All narrative reports are accompanied by financial reports. As part of its monitoring, Malteser visits every partner organisation once or twice a month, for example, to check the health information system and drugs, and to reflect professionally on work progress and discuss how to improve support to the victims.58 The results of these monitoring visits have been part of a “pre-final” evaluation, which has been used as a basis for the project proposal for 2005. A final report is due in April 2005.

The GBV project carries out the evaluations together with local health partners and local partner NGOs under the responsibility of the Malteser Bukavu/South Kivu programme coordinator. Malteser currently also plans training on project management and evaluation for its senior national staff.

At the moment, the first comprehensive statistics are coming out on the prevalence of sexual violence per region and forms of treatment. This system will constitute a quality control system for the treatment of victims.

Impact The full impact of Malteser’s GBV work cannot be assessed yet. Nevertheless, many individuals are able to function better again in society. Communities and husbands have gained a better awareness of the problems associated with GBV and ways to address them. Local partners and the health system have ostensibly improved their functioning. From February 2004 to October 2004, 9,149 GBV survivors have received medical and psycho-social assistance from health structures and local NGOs supported by Malteser.

One growing danger, according to Malteser, is that other international organisations now attempt to come in, because they can gain funding that way. They do not notice that several organisational networks already exist. Local NGOs have started to send out lists of – supposed – victims to international NGOs, thus making a mockery of confidentiality, which is often crucial to the real victims. In this way, international donors and NGOs can intensify the already existing problems in addressing GBV. As a result, the joint sector- wide outcomes can be sub-optimal when all these organisations go their own way without a sector-wide approach, including evaluation.

1. Access Malteser has handed over its GBV project activities in the Nyangezi and Nyantende health zones to a local partner in September 2004, and is expanding its activities into the Walungu, Kazibe, and Shabunda health zones, where no other international actors are carrying out similar activities.

2. Inclusion Victims of sexual violence have often been marginalised within their communities. Psycho-social support, family mediation, and community education are important tools in preventing rejection by husbands, which re-traumatises the victims and weakens their

58 Open questions often help to establish which partners work professionally.

45 economic position, and helping the victims participate fully in their communities. Malteser’s support has also strengthened the local health system in its zones of activity.

3. Sustainability With GBV it is important to distinguish between changes at the individual and the organisational/institutional level. Malteser is a health organisation, whose main priority has been working with victims. Put differently, although it was important to help build service-delivery capacity of partner organisations, it has so far not been the primary focus of its activities. In 2005, its capacity-building activities will increase.

Scaling up and replication With the extension of its activities to newly opened health zones, Malteser is already scaling up its activities. The organisation has not yet replicated its Bukavu GBV activities in other countries.

This box below shows general problems and differences in perspectives among organisations that focus on GBV activities in eastern DRC: The area of GBV programming, in which IRC, WWI, Christian Aid, and Malteser operate in differing ways shows that a donor needs to be aware that different approaches can have their own validity. Different organisations hold different opinions on the effectiveness of their respective approaches.

• Should an organisation first and foremost focus on capacity building of local service-delivery organisations? Or does this imply too much attention to the organisations (and their management) and too little to supporting the victims? • Would alternative ways of reaching the victims through respected community leaders be cheaper and faster? • Are the organisations able to improve the skills of national project staff and project partners fast enough? • What is the actual prevalence of GBV, especially in areas that are opening up? Some organisations hesitantly state that it may be less than originally assumed. • Now that GBV activities have become a growth market, how to ensure that opportunistic organisations – international or local – do not disrupt the work of more serious organisation? • How to foster cooperation among the different international and local organisations to improve the quality of their work at the sectoral and regional levels? • What if success is achieved in changing attitudes concerning raped women, so that, for example rejection has become less common and victims and their families know their rights better? Such an outcome can be considered a success, but it also means that the focus of GBV activities can change to other awareness raising and community activities. What if the organisation does not make this transition? Or if other organisations fail to acknowledge its success? • What if food and non-food distributions foster corruption among some partners and employees? Or if they provide an economic incentive for women to pose as a victim of sexual violence and for organisations without skills to become involved? At the same time, the dire, multiple needs of the population need to be addressed simultaneously. What is the optimal balance? And does this balance shift over time? • Is it wise to encourage survivors to seek justice when the organisations cannot ensure their protection against reprisals from the perpetrators?

Whereas these questions need to be answered by detailed research and could lead to the selection of alternative, more effective approaches, they also highlight the importance of understanding different assumptions behind the supporting organisations’ approaches. If an

46 international organisation emphasises immediate health and psychological aspects, it is less likely to appreciate long-term (multi-sectoral) capacity building and it will simply assess impact differently. If an organisation assumes that the war is going to last for a long time, it may focus more on immediate benefits than on building long-term local capacity for service delivery. If the organisation perceives itself as a health organisation, it may hesitate to take on broader capacity building work. Such different assumptions and concomitant impact assessments also play a role in the competition for donor funding.

Donors should understand these different assumptions. In addition, it is useful when the international supporting organisations make a greater to effort understand the various perspectives of the other organisations. In this respect, a sector-wide approach is needed to help bridge these differences. Donors could facilitate such an approach.

6. LESSONS LEARNED

The organisations studied differed in their approaches:

1. IRC focused most on capacity building, including the internal management capacity of its partners; 2. WWI worked directly with poor women, without setting up an elaborate (inter-) organisational system, but it cooperates with existing organisations and traditional leaders for training and other activities; 3. FHI reinforced existing, but weak, government services and improved local agriculture; 4. CARE-CAP strengthened short-term projects for a wide array of different civil society organisations; 5. Christian Aid improved the technical and peace-building aspects of five organisations through a long-term relationship; 6. Malteser supported public health services and partner NGOs and focused on medical and psycho-social support to the victims, as well as raising community awareness.

The organisations differ in their perspectives on the societal problems in the DRC, such as the continuation of the war and the importance of organisations in comparison with the local population. WWI does not provide support directly to organisations, although it cooperates with them. The IRC strongly promotes capacity building for service delivery in its own right. A potential risk of this approach is that it loses sight of the local communities. The potential risk of focusing on the local population is that it sees local forms of organisation only as direct service-delivery mechanisms so that insufficient long-term capacity is built for the period after the withdrawal of the supporting organisation. In sum, these different perspectives also lead to different approaches to, and evaluations of, the relevance and validity of long-term (sustainable) capacity-building for local service delivery.

FHI’s work with the government is an exception; the organisations studied rarely work directly through government services. Its experience shows that this is difficult, but if a donor fosters such cooperation, a higher degree of cooperation is possible. In addition, it is important to integrate the government in project activities with other local partners.

47 The organisations work sometimes with local cooperatives, but they usually do not engage with other private enterprises. No organisation works directly with the warring factions, but they and their partners all suffered from the insecurity.

Although the organisations mainly work with NGOs, Malteser also wants to work directly with local relais, which is an interesting alternative and comes close to working with CBOs and CODESAs. A great advantage of working with local organisations is that they have better access than the international organisations, because their staff members are living among the villagers or can rely on local structures, such as churches.

Together with their donors, the supporting organisations should carry out more quantitative impact studies. In fact, the necessary data is collected to some extent but systems for analysis are not fully in place. In addition, a sector-wide evaluation combining several international organisations and comparing their approaches would be useful.

6.1 Capacity building process

The IRC capacity building approach is based on an intensive and comprehensive linking of financial control with technical and administrative capacity building. It transcends the regular training of most capacity building programmes; instead it establishes an active ongoing dialogue in order to support the aspirations of its partners, while making rigorous demands on them based on agreements reached during selection and project design. This process reinforces the quality of the services provided and strengthens the local partner’s management and fundraising ability for future programming. The IRC CSDU capacity building approach can best be summarised by its programme cycle elements:

1. Call for proposals Although the call for proposals has played an important role in the Ushirika/GBV programmes and can increase transparency, the experience of the later stages and the other organisations studied have shown that it is at times more effective, and certainly less time and resource consuming, to select partner organisations through direct searches in cooperation with government, other partners, and international organisations. Such a search is facilitated by a fair number of Congolese organisations that regularly attempt to link up with international organisations for funding, even without calls for proposal.

2. Project and partner selection This is essentially an entry point selection. Those organisations that make it through this process already possess some skills and experience, and/or address unmet needs. If the IRC carries out this task well, it considerably facilitates project execution and service delivery at a later stage. At the same time, submitting proposals provides the potential partner organisation with the possibility to come up with its own initiatives and priorities.

Hence, the real choice that the supporting organisation has to make concerning the call for proposals and partner and project selection is which search method it considers the optimal one. If the organisation does not know local civil society well and is in the early

48 stages of building up its presence, it may issue a call. If it is already familiar with civil society, it may directly search for partners through a mapping process. After several years, the organisation may then look for new or additional partners by issuing another call.59 In any case, the organisation should make a continuous effort to gain firm knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of civil society organisations and their positions in the conflict.

3. Project redesign and signature of a memorandum of understanding Redesign offers an opportunity to impart new skills – negotiation skills, for example – and manage or better understand the expectations of the partner organisation in a participatory manner. In addition, it may help to strengthen the interaction of the partner organisation with its target groups through service delivery or advocacy. During the redesign process, IRC works individually with each partner to define an indiviudalised training plan based on the needs of the partner organisation and its target population. The signing of the MOU signifies both a moral and legal commitment by both organisations that facilitates mutual accountability.

4. Project implementation, monitoring, and training IRC training combines technical with administrative aspects. It uses several types of formal and informal training. The selection and redesign processes are actually forms of informal training. Specific formal training includes:

• Organisational training, consisting of, for example,: o Finance management; o Procurement; o Legal regulations to be followed by local NGOs; o Common rules for security, communication, etc.; o Human resource management; o Participatory – often more informal – activities to reinforce knowledge between partners and to build a common understanding about major, crosscutting activities; o Institutional viability analysis. • Project management training: o Project design, logical framework, and fundraising; o Project monitoring and reporting; o SPHERE standards and codes of conduct; o Training techniques and methodologies, as training is a key activity in most sub-grantee projects; o Donor, IRC, and programme explanation; o Self-evaluation methodology. • Technical training, for example: o Counselling for GBV survivors (Training of Trainers (TOT));

59 The trade off is between fairness and efficiency – while a call for proposals is seen as giving everyone a fair chance, selecting partners without an open and public process may create tensions and impact negatively on the reputation of the supporting agency. This is especially true for areas of ethnic tension and conflict, or when a supporting agency is new to the local civil society scene.

49 o Community education (TOT); o Water and sanitation; o Agriculture.

Informal training was often done in conjunction with management control of indicators and financial processes. Put differently, informal training was usually connected with monitoring implementation progress in daily work, which facilitated establishing links between theory and practice.

• Ongoing support during implementation: o Financial analysis by an IRC finance advisor within the first month of activities; o Organisational audit by an IRC senior manager also during the first month. This provides a basis for institutional analysis during the mid-term self- evaluation and the final evaluation of the project. o On the job training: Full time technical advisors provide training to partners on technical aspects (e.g., counselling, well construction, community education/mobilisation, micro credit), project management (design, project data collection, monitoring, and evaluation), and financial skills. Such training in particular takes place during the monthly field visits, but can also take place on request of the partner organisations. o Monthly financial control: Each partner must submit a monthly financial report including an updated cash-flow sheet. Cash disbursements are made each month contingent on receipt and coherence of the financial reports. Documents, such as invoices, are required to certify that major internationally recognised accountancy rules, basic procurement policies, and regulations requested by the donor are followed. The financial report is discussed during a formal meeting between IRC staff and the local partner within one week after submission. o Narrative report: Each partner is also required to submit narrative reports that include updates on activities, indicators, and revised planning timelines. These reports are due after the first month and subsequently after every two months. The narrative report is also subject of a formal meeting within a week after submission. o Formal feedback: IRC provides written monthly feedback to each partner, which compiles observations and recommendations from reports and field visits conducted during that month. o Providing learning materials and opportunities: The CSDU unit has developed an impressive set of manuals for internal and external use (e.g., the sub-grantee finance manual). Other learning materials such as books and other documents are occasionally also provided to partners. Importantly, experience-sharing workshops and

50 exchange visits have also been set up. Every now and then, former partners ask the advisors for informal advice, which is normally being provided.

Most other supporting organisations focus more on formal training and only require reports every three or six months, which generally does not strengthen capacities sufficiently. Training the partner organisations in, for example proper needs analysis, negotiation skills with different parties, from the local government to war leaders, as well as the SPHERE standards, humanitarian principles, and codes of conduct, also creates a crucial added benefit. It supports professionalisation that also helps local organisations better understand humanitarian standards, and therewith retain and strengthen their neutrality and impartiality, so that they can determine their place in the conflict more carefully, which allows them to concentrate stronger on meeting the needs of local communities.

5. Evaluation and audits Each partner must organise internal mid-term and final evaluations for comparing progress with the original project documents, including its logical framework and indicators. As stated, the organisations receive training to this end. The same holds true for the independent audits that the organisations need to comply with.

It is no surprise that partner organisations find these requirements and tools daunting to apply, particularly at the beginning of the partnership. While most partners bemoan the heavy workload at first, they generally perceive the IRC to be a real partner that comes to the field regularly and helps them learn rapidly. They appreciate that their management skills and organisational capacities improve over time. Some have been able to work with other funding organisations, and have maintained IRC tools. Over time the requirements can become less strict, if the partner functions well, for example, the narrative report can become a bi-monthly report. The IRC technical support resembles that of most other supporting organisations. Its greatest strength is simultaneously strengthening the financial and managerial (technical, project, structure, etc.) capacities of its partners, which it is able to do in a remarkably short period of time.

The above capacity building process summarises the IRC CSDU approach. It flexibly combines humanitarian and developmental service-delivery components. These core activities can be replicated in other contexts or scaled up in eastern DRC.

6.2 Replication and scaling up The ease of replication and scaling up of Ushirika and GBV programmes depend on six characteristics, namely the capacities of the supporting organisation, the type of conflict, the characteristics of civil society, the capacities of the government, the sectors in which the partner organisations are active, and the role of the donor organisation. For each characteristic a different type of organisation needs to be tracked.60

60 As noted in section 3.4, in conflicts is characterised by an increase in types of actors that can impact both negatively and positively on local service delivery. Ideally, impact assessment should measure both direct and indirect, as well as the intended and unintended effects these organisations have on service delivery.

6.2.1 Internal aspect The first aspect concerns the institutional capacities of the supporting organisations that link up with local partner organisations to improve local service delivery.

1. Supporting organisation IRC’s internal management processes including selecting the right staff members, developing procedures for reporting, project selection, regular field visits, and financial control may not be easily replicated. It took IRC time and effort to build its support structures and determine its strategies and procedures. No other organisation has built up such an extensive field presence. If the supporting organisation cannot build up the combination of tight management control and capacity building, the quality of its support to its partners may decrease rapidly. Put differently, a supporting organisation should not just build the capacities of its partners, it should also simultaneously build its own capacity on the ground. In this respect, the IRC has developed an impressive array of tools, such as training manuals, internal procedures, reporting and evaluation guidelines that can be used elsewhere.

IRC’s own institutional capacity building, for example, has created positive conditions for scaling up and replicating its activities, but this should not be done too fast. The tools are there, but experience has shown that setting up additional offices, hiring more experts, and managing such enlargement should be done carefully and takes time. Managing growth is a skill in itself.

6.2.2 External aspects The external aspects focus on the context in which capacity building takes place. The first four are predominantly local. The last one concerns the crucial role of international donor organisations.

1. Types of conflict The type of conflict determines the level of insecurity, the methods of plunder, the level of destruction, and thus the magnitude and kinds of needs of the population. In cases of open, violent conflict all organisations studied for this evaluation had to interrupt, cease, or scale down their activities. When such pillaging and violence towards the local population becomes systematic, it is extremely hard to continue activities. In particular, when the material resources that these services use or provide are specifically targeted for pillaging, project progress and sustainability are hampered. Often the organisations studied had to revert to their traditional humanitarian mode of operations or start anew. Hence, during violent conflict service delivery, as well as capacity building for such delivery, are bound to be disrupted.

However, even if open, violent conflict recurs regularly between armed factions, it generally does not last for a long time. And even in bloody wars, there are usually pockets or periods of tranquillity during which some level of capacity building for service delivery is possible. In all other scenarios of conflict, be they latent conflict, ceasefire, negotiation, or demobilisation some level of capacity building will be possible.

2. Characteristics of civil society War or other forms of violent conflict generally do not destroy civil society completely. At times, civil society actors may be specifically targeted because they pose a threat, morally, economically or otherwise, to the interest of the warring factions. At the same time, several of the partner organisations studied for this research, were actually founded to respond to the consequences of the conflict.

In all likelihood, the vibrancy and size of civil society before the war determine to a large extent the possibility for capacity building during and after the war.61 The more organisations present, the more likely that some organisations will be able to take the initiative and deliver (some) quality services. In addition, different local organisations may together be able to execute complementary activities (e.g., addressing basic needs, human rights, and return of foreign forces). It then becomes somewhat easier to select a set of partner organisations that are perceived as being independent. Put differently, selection should gauge the way in which the potential partner organisation functions: Does it work on all sides of the conflict? Does it work against or with certain ethnic groups? Which tasks can it leave to other organisations? Can traditional leaders be involved? If so, how?

In those cases, where civil society is either small or absent, capacity building will be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, possible alternatives would then be to focus on remaining government institutions, CBOs, individuals, or to start from scratch with building local organisations.

3. Government capacities Government capacities are crucial in three ways. First, in cases where the government is (seen as) a party to the conflict and has thus lost its legitimacy (to a certain extent), it may be wise to steer clear of the government and engage it first in peace negotiations. Second, in cases where it has retained (most of its) legitimacy, the government itself may be an important capacity building partner and/or a facilitator. Third, if the government is weak, it may not be able to coordinate or steer the different NGOs, which can lead to fragmentation of health, education, and other service delivery systems as the NGOs all promote their own approaches. As a result, it is possible that the international NGOs promote good quality work at the micro level, but that outcomes at the macro level are sub-optimal. Donor institutions and international organisations should come together to develop joint strategies at the local and national level to address this issue.

4. Sectors of intervention Some sectors are easier to address or cause less resistance by warring factions. Activities in health, education, water and sanitation, agriculture, micro-enterprise/credit, and humanitarian assistance usually do not compromise the neutrality and impartiality of the supporting organisations. Sometimes, warring factions may actually support activities in these areas because they or their family members benefit from them. Activities that

61 As one programme official noted “even a few 100 kilometres to the West in Kisangani, IRC would have had much more difficulties implementing the same project,” because civil society was weaker there.

53 directly challenge power relations or economic interests pose greater risks. Especially, advocacy, good governance, civic education, human rights, and political awareness can become contentious.

5. Donor institutions The donor institutions constitute a diverse group. They can include ministries or departments of development, offices for disaster assistance, UN organisations, large private funding organisations, and so on. Their conditions for funding determine how much leeway the supporting organisation in the field has for capacity building. Donors can considerably help the organisation if they provide funding outside the traditional categories of development or humanitarian assistance, because most capacity building in difficult environment constitutes a mix of developmental and humanitarian work. Similarly, humanitarian funding often operates on a short time frame, whereas longer funding periods greatly facilitate building up services.

At times, state-based international donors and organisations can also play a useful role in the political negotiation and reconciliation processes at the national or international level. If they really decide to play such a role – and other (parts of their) governments cooperate – the supporting and partner organisations can more easily keep their distance to the warring factions and concentrate on delivering services.

Understanding these six characteristics is crucial for facilitating replicability and scaling up. Replication, however, is complicated by the fact that these conditions do not remain stable over time. This brings up the issue of linking relief, rehabilitation, and development or transition as it is also called.

6.3 Transition

Ideally, donor, supporting, and partner organisations have similar expectations on the six characteristics. However, these characteristics change as a society transitions, often haltingly, towards peace. As a result, capacity building is a continuous learning process for all parties involved in which strategies (through funding, MOUs, training, and tools) regularly need to be updated. Put briefly, all parties need to keep building their own institutional capacities.

Traditional humanitarian assistance focuses on direct survival of the population by bringing in a limited set of services with tangible outputs, such as the provision of food, water, shelter, and medicine. Concentration on the delivery of material goods to people in need often places the beneficiaries in a passive role. It is service delivery to the local population, not service delivery with the local population. The humanitarian organisation carries out a considerable part of the work in the field by itself.

It should be clear that in the short term (immediate service delivery to final beneficiaries), this traditional system of humanitarian assistance has important advantages over capacity building of local service delivery systems. It is fast, direct, and relatively cheap when

54 compared to the process of local capacity building. Thus when time is of the essence in saving lives, the traditional system generally takes priority over capacity building.

Sustainability does not figure prominently in traditional humanitarian assistance. The longer term effects belong to the realm of other actors, such as the national government and international diplomats engaged in peacemaking. But in chronic crises the question comes up whether traditional assistance does not have negative side-effects, such as fostering dependency or passivity, disrupting local agricultural or service delivery systems, or missing opportunities to create longer term benefits. In situations of chronic conflict, the question becomes whether aid should be conceived and assessed in a broader way. Does aid build local capacities for service delivery in the long term?

In Congolese practice, these questions have partly been answered. Capacity building is considered necessary as it generates the potential for better local service delivery over the next decades. The best approach to do so, however, is less well established. At times, as with GBV, it is even disputed. Nevertheless, this comparative research has shown various possibilities to improve local service delivery.

The organisation that builds capacities faces different challenges over time. In particular, it has to move from a hands-on role in the delivery of humanitarian assistance, in which it directly executes and/or monitors activities to a strong monitoring and supporting role when it starts capacity building and consequently, and finally, to a more a facilitating role as local organisations develop their capacities.

As local organisations and their communities become more self sufficient and independent, the supporting organisation should take on a more facilitating role, for example the MOUs could become more goal or outcome oriented, so that the supporting organisations could manage more on the basis of goals achieved and decrease the frequency of financial and narrative reporting. Or the supporting organisation should focus on a select set of weaknesses of its partners. To do so the supporting organisations should develop process, output and impact indicators for MOUs that reflect the change during this transition process.

6.4 Impact

In principle, impact measurement is an important tool to understand both the local context and the outcomes of the activities of the international organisations. The impact of capacity building for service delivery can be measured and understood in various ways. First, differing perspectives on sustainability, the roles and costs of humanitarian aid, the continuation and intensity of the war, the importance of quantitative and qualitative benchmarks, can all contribute to different types of assessment. Second, the level of possible impact assessments differs from the individual beneficiary, to the local community, to the capacities of the partner organisation. The Ushirika and GBV programmes, for example, cannot always be evaluated in the same manner. In GBV activities, for example, the mental and physical health of the individual plays a larger role

55 than in Ushirika, which concentrates more on the outcomes for the whole local community. Third, long-term impact may be hard to assess due to many intervening variables.

1. Many approaches The only way in which capacity building would be judged positively by traditional humanitarian standards is that it extended the reach of humanitarian assistance to previously inaccessible areas. However, as mentioned above, in a chronic crisis it makes sense to employ additional criteria that focus on improved capacities and broader impacts, such as inclusion of marginal groups and improvements in sustainability of service delivery.

Still, different organisations hold different opinions on the effectiveness of their respective approaches, for example, in the area of GBV programming. While the quality of these approaches need to be substantiated by further research and could lead to the selection of alternative, more effective approaches, they also highlight the importance of understanding different assumptions behind the approaches. The international supporting organisations present in eastern DRC should make a greater effort to understand the various approaches of other organisations.

Government

Warring Factions Donor Institutions

Private Partner Enterprise Organisation

Supporting Organisation

Local Community

Figure 6.1 Impact for different organisations involved.

2. Many indicators

56 Impact measurement should concentrate more on broader (quantitative) indicators concerning well being, health, income, and social cohesion, as well as knowledge, attitudes, and practices of local communities/population groups. The collection of baseline information should become a regular facet of capacity-building programmes. In addition, impact assessment could pay more attention to unforeseen consequences and (possible) negative effects.

3. Many organisations, one system Only studying the impact of one organisation is not enough for understanding how whole service delivery systems are evolving. A broader conceptualisation of impact is necessary. Impact indicators should ideally be developed to show the progress in the transition from emergency relief to peaceful development as reflected in the changing roles and activities of several organisations. This means that several partners should be added to the impact assessment, in particular governmental partners, private enterprise, donor institutions, as well as a more diversified look at the local communities (e.g., individual level, family level, community level).

For each organisation, process, output and impact indicators can be developed that document the change during the transition. As local organisations and their communities become more self sufficient and independent, the supporting organisation should take on a more facilitating role, for example its monitoring could decrease and the MOUs could become more goal and outcome oriented, so that the supporting organisations could steer on the results achieved and decrease the frequency of financial and narrative reporting.

In a similar vein, it would be ideal (but difficult), if the supporting organisations and donors could track how private enterprises, warring factions, and other international organisations impact on capacity building. For example, are partners are making progress in the transition from emergency relief to peaceful development by strengthening the interaction between partners and government services? Answering these questions implies that several types of organisations should be added to the impact assessment, in particular governmental partners, but also private enterprises and donor institutions.

Finally, the organisations should foster impact measurement at the local community level as a form of upward accountability. To some extent, the IRC is already doing this through the general assemblies of the members of its partner organisations, project committees, and its evaluation tools. The organisations could also develop so-called monitoring kits for self evaluation by local participants.

7 IMPLICATIONS

7.1 Introduction

All organisations involved in improving service delivery in difficult environments face several challenges that are hard to solve:

• Capacity building is most needed, but also most difficult, in those regions where local capacities have been destroyed the most. • Understanding the local political, security, and socio-economic context is essential, but no organisation alone can have an overview of the whole conflict in all zones. Simultaneously, understanding the conflict takes time and resources that cannot be spent on improving actual service delivery. • The organisations involved should cooperate, but frequently favour different approaches. In addition, coordination and cooperation among the organisations also has opportunity costs that cannot be spent on improving service delivery. • The government should ideally take part in strengthening service delivery systems, but it is often limited in its own capacities for service delivery, as well as in coordinating other actors involved in service delivery. In addition, its policy making capacities also tend to be weak. • Many of the organisations involved cannot or only have limited influence on warring factions and other parties benefiting from the violence. Yet, these parties influence service delivery deeply. They do so directly when they kill, pillage, and rape. They do so indirectly through hampering economic growth and obstructing peace and reconciliation. • All organisations should be flexible and work with an array of approaches to do justice to the different types of local organisations engaged in service delivery, but maintaining such flexibility takes up resources that are not spent on actual implementation. • Capacity building is necessary to ensure quality service delivery in the long run. Yet, traditional centralised delivery of humanitarian goods by outside humanitarian organisations is often cheaper in the short term. • Even if all the organisations involved achieve good results with their partner organisations, the overall result may still be sub-optimal at the country level because service delivery systems have become fragmented within or among sectors (such as health and education), or local service delivery organisations have started competing with government institutions.

These dilemmas reflect that all the actors remain dependent on a haphazard process towards peace that they cannot directly influence themselves and will require regular organisational adaptation to unforeseen events. In addition, bridging humanitarian and developmental work is a relatively young field without agreement on standard approaches.

Nevertheless, this study shows that the organisations can improve their effectiveness in improving service delivery and that in some areas, they can – or should – establish forms of cooperation that create more conducive conditions for improving service delivery and, hopefully, make the transition towards peaceful development.

Capacity building for service delivery in chronic crises requires capacity building at all levels of the aid system. If the key to capacity building is the establishment of a dialogue that both supports the aspirations of its (potential) partners, while making demands on

58 them based on agreements concluded with them, then it would be ideal if this could be done at all levels of the aid system. This chapter highlights the main implications for the management of organisations involved in capacity building for better service delivery.

7.2 IRC CSDU

IRC CSDU is now a strong and experienced player in capacity building for service delivery in eastern DRC. It can capitalise on this leading position by:

• scaling up its current activities and thus expand the CSDU and its reach, but it should be careful not to grow too rapidly as good programme staff are hard to find and it takes time to develop quality programmes and procedures. Moreover, partnerships constitute long-term labour-intensive investments that take time to mature; • considering how it could diversify its approach to capacity building. In particular, it should contemplate whether it can work with other types of organisations than CBOs and officially legalised non-profit organisations. It could adapt its procedures and tools for working more with o local cooperatives; o government services; o CBOs that express the desire and the potential to develop the capacity to become legally recognised non-profit partner organisations. o quick impact projects. It should not undertake these activities simultaneously, but see how these can be phased in, while building on its experience from other IRC sectors and earlier Ushirika/GBV experience; • finding ways to integrate capacity building further in the other IRC Bukavu health and water and sanitation activities. The IRC health experts already work with the local health and development committees (CODESA). Such links could be developed further, for example, in cooperation with current partner organisations; • searching for ways to incorporate government organisations and traditional leaders into its activities to facilitate programme execution. This does not have to be capacity building per se, but information exchange, decision-making about some programming aspects, for example selection or evaluation, as well as promoting community involvement will be useful. Some traditional leaders may also be able to influence some warring factions, especially Mai-Mai, in ways which can facilitate service delivery by partner organisations; • helping partners in their fundraising and contacts with other international organisations; • creating a permanent structure for regular information exchange among former and current partner organisations so that they can learn from each other and reinforce each other’s capacities without direct CSDU involvement. Staff from one organisation can function as advisors and consultants for another, which will also be useful for (joint) advocacy and community mobilisation. This can partly be done in conjunction with the regular training sessions.

59 • distinguishing technical and political advocacy. The IRC CSDU and its partners need to make trade-offs between advocacy for better service delivery and advocacy for political change, because this will influence how the local population and warring factions perceive their neutrality, impartiality, and independence. It seems logical that political advocacy is more possible towards the end of the transition; • working with the actors in the aid system to foster upward accountability through evaluation, monitoring (e.g., monitoring kits), Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), and field visits; • continuing to develop its tools for capacity building, in particular in the area of impact measurement at the community and sectoral levels; • developing exit and hand-over strategies for those partner organisations that have become professionally self sufficient. The IRC should study whether it can adapt the current contract/MOU approach, with less intensive supervision for partners that function well, as a phase-out strategy.

7.3 IRC Bukavu

In line with the IRC/CSDU implication, IRC Bukavu should also:

• consider, promote, and select ways to implement and evaluate the integration of CSDU activities into its other sectors of activity; • help the CSDU in its interaction with other international organisations in Bukavu on a sustained basis so that differences in programming and capacity building approaches are detected early on and can be addressed rapidly; • flesh out models for community-driven reconstruction, integrating service- delivery aspects with issues of good governance, which means involving local government institutions.

7.4 IRC DRC

The IRC DRC in Kinshasa can:

• work with several parties in the aid system to foster upward accountability through evaluation, monitoring, and field visits; • consider expanding the Ushirika/GBV umbrella grants to other parts of the eastern DRC, while taking the different strengths and weaknesses of local civil society into account; • institute similar UG programmes in other parts of the DRC, when the security situation and quality of civil society initiatives allow this; • implement CSDU training and capacity building tools into its other activities, for example, in its health activities;

60 • consider building a technical assistance partnership with a key government ministry, where there is demonstrable interest in and commitment to transitional programming (e.g., health, youth, peace and reconciliation); • build up governance programmes – whether based on community-driven reconstruction or technical assistance in specific service sectors – that link humanitarian service delivery and transitional development programming. Put differently, IRC should not just build capacity of civil society organisations, but also that of (selected) relevant government functions and structures, by establishing links between them for the inclusion of civil society voices in public services and resource allocation, as well as mixed private/public models of service delivery.

7.5 IRC Globally

The Post-Conflict Development Initiative (PCDI) should:

• build up a pool of staff with experience in capacity building; • build a repository of tools and an evaluation database for similar programmes around the world; • promote similar CSDUs as a coherent multi-sector instrument in addressing chronic crises; • develop an organisation-wide fundraising and marketing strategy for civil-society and service-delivery UG programmes to targeted donors as either a stand-alone investment or as a reinforcement of other types of programmes (e.g., DFID, SIDA); • assess in how far it possesses the institutional capacity and funding to institute similar IRC capacity building programmes in other parts of the world; • work with the parties in the aid system to foster upward accountability through evaluation, monitoring, and field visits.

IRC headquarters should:

• consider making unrestricted funds available to bridge (brief) funding gaps of UG programmes or fund activities that donors are unlikely to fund; • develop a clear international policy on capacity building for long-term service delivery in chronic crises, including a fundraising strategy; • provide more resources to PCDI for support to civil-society development managers, coordinators, and other staff members in the field. This will facilitate replication and scaling up.

7.6 Partner organisations

Partner organisations should:

61 • create regular forums/structures for information exchange and mutual support. The organisations could at times initiate joint awareness raising projects, identify other governmental or international organisations that could help on specific activities that the IRC does not cover and find ways to optimise their relationship with local government institutions; • communicate ways to improve interaction with local communities, for example with project committees. They should work with all parties in the aid system to foster upward accountability through evaluation, monitoring, and field visits; • obtain support from traditional leadership to improve local services; • develop, together with IRC consultants, monitoring kits for the local communities.

7.7 Donors

Donors deeply influence the activities of the organisation they sponsor. The rules and regulations of OFDA and OTI, for example, strongly determined capacity building activities. Through its influence, good donorship can transcend regular funding in at least three areas, namely:

1. Supporting organisations generally prefer funding to be continuous, or at least long- term. They also favour flexible changes in the allocation of money as the context changes over time. The donor requires safeguards that the money is well spent. The best way to address these differing demands is to institute a strategic learning partnership with supporting organisations to invest in capacity building for service delivery for several chronic crises simultaneously. This partnership should be evaluated at fixed intervals. Building such a partnership entails a shift in donor attention from the project or programme level to the organisational level. 2. The donor institutions can sometimes also work with the national governments and warring factions, for example, if it possesses some degree of influence over international peacekeeping forces or economic sanctions. 3. In addition, if the government is weak and both the international aid system and local service delivery are fragmented, the donor could take the initiative to overcome such fragmentation, especially if it already funds several different organisations in the same region, by sectoral and/or national initiatives.

The donor:

• could mainstream capacity building for service delivery in intervention strategies, and together with other donors and the national government, co-ordinate approaches to improve service delivery; • could together with the national government, institute longitudinal evaluations of service delivery per sector and/or region to see how fragmentation could be addressed and select well-functioning sector-wide approaches; • should foster cooperation among the different supporting organisations it funds on evaluating different approaches, developing joint strategies and common standards and procedures, as well as information exchange;

62 • could assess how far it could integrate its work with these supporting organisations in its activities for backing government institutions (in policy making, coordination, and service delivery), as well as aiding the peace process. In cooperation with the national government, it could, for example, support and disseminate government-led sector strategies to the supporting organisations; • could develop a set of options for responding to programming problems of the supporting organisations due to insecurity in order to standardise and expedite responses to changing conflict conditions; • could work with the parties in the aid system to foster upward accountability through evaluation, monitoring, and field visits.

7.8 Governmental institutions

No matter how weak, the government will always play a role in peace talks, policy making, and NGO coordination. Hence, all capacity building initiatives must confront sooner or later the question how they can engage with governmental institutions. Currently, some political will exists to tackle the huge problems, but capacity is either weak or lacking.

In addition to investing in the peace process and controlling its military, the main challenge for the national government will be finding ways to coordinate the international organisations, while simultaneously regaining its legitimacy and building its own service delivery capacities (including paying government employees), especially at the local level so that its policies will filter through to this level. To this end, the government should:

• further pursue its decentralisation policy; • foster sectoral co-ordination, in co-operation with donors; • conduct sectoral monitoring and evaluation studies that feed into policy making; • work with the parties in the aid system to foster upward accountability for itself as well as all international partners.

7.9 Local communities

During the interviews and focus groups, many Congolese made clear that they expected the conflicts to be resolved by outsiders. They often feel dependent on outside support. In one discussion, a member of the local partner organisation expressed surprise on learning how democracy and accountability could work. Awareness creation and mobilisation to make the local population demand, participate in, and contribute directly (i.e., voice) to quality services are perhaps the most difficult parts of local capacity building. It would be ideal if they could utilise evaluation methods that foster upward accountability. If asked whether they thought the programme should be replicated, they always answered yes and then stated that more support should be given to other parts of the Congo.

63 7.10 Other INGOs

INGOs should exchange more information on their respective capacity building approaches. At the very least, they should be able to agree to disagree on their approaches, while fostering (local) government coordination. They could also carry out sectoral evaluations together with donors and governmental institutions. This will probably require some donor pressure.

8 CONCLUSIONS

Improving service delivery is not a substitute for achieving peace. Yet, the increasing number and longevity of chronic crises render it useful to look for new ways to build local capacities in order to improve services to the (increasingly) vulnerable populations. Such capacity building for service delivery requires flexible combinations of humanitarian and developmental aspects. In this respect, many humanitarian organisations in eastern DRC have moved from more traditional humanitarian service delivery to the incorporation of developmental activities. Various agencies have experimented with new capacity building approaches.

The degree of success of capacity building depends on the process of reaching agreement on the goals and methods between the local partner and the supporting organisation, and then rigorously following up on these agreements. This study shows that capacity building is possible, but difficult at times, because much depends on the nature of the conflict, civil society, and the capacities of the funding and supporting organisations.

The Ushirika and GBV programmes offer no simple “one size fits all solution”, but they constitute an innovative and effective approach, because they combine intensive hands-on management control with strong capacity building. Put differently, the accountability mechanisms, capacity building process, and daily activities of the partner organisations are closely linked, which can lead to better service delivery in a relatively short period of time. This approach marks a rethinking of humanitarian assistance and linking it to rehabilitation and development. It has improved access and inclusion of extremely vulnerable groups and built more sustainable service delivery by local organisations. The IRC should gradually scale up its activities in the DRC and attempt to replicate its approach in other chronic crises.

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OTI: OTI (2003) Field Report # 16, DRC, August 2003, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Democratic Republic of the Congo, FY 2004 Budget, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Democratic Republic of the Congo, FY 2005 Budget, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Transition Awareness and Participation Program, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Synergie d’Education Communautaire et Appui à la transition (SE*CA), Community Focused Reintegration, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Monthly Report, DRC, September 2004, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Hot Topic: Eager Students Force Early Opening of School before Completion, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Hot Topic: Boat To Support Delivery Of Humanitarian Relief Launched, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Hot Topic: USAID Administrator visits SE*CA Training Site, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Hot Topic: Community’s First Encounter with the outside World, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Hot Topic: Official Ceremony to Commemorate the Publication of The Organic Law on Elections, Kinshasa, in mimeo. OTI (2004) Hot Topic: Communities and Their Leaders Enthusiastically Welcome the Launch of Training Program for War-Affected Youth, Kinshasa, in mimeo.

Women for Women International: Banerjee, Neela (2004) Iraqi Women’s Window of Opportunity for Political Gains Is Closing, New York Times, 26 February 2004, p. A12. Beard, Alison (1997) Small Loans Net Big Results for Enterprises, Washington Times, 10 August 1997. Burke, Alison (2003) Women for Women—The Grassroots Organization Women for Women International Helps Individuals Recover from Wartime Atrocities, The World & I, June 2003, pp. 122-129. Jaworski, Margaret (1996) Worlds Apart—Women Helping Women, Family Cycle, 19 November 1996. O, the Oprah Magazine (2005) Postcards from the Edge, O, the Oprah Magazine, February 2005, pp.95-96, 98. Poblete, Pati (2002) Sisters Samaritans, Bay Area Women Find International Connection with Those in Need, San Francisco Chronicle, 27 January 2002, pp. E1, E4. Salbi, Zainab (2003) On the Line from Baghdad, A Family’s Stoicism and Fears, Washington Post, 23 March 2003. Shepard, Robert (1994) ‘Sisters’ to War Victims, Chicago Tribune, 16 October 1994, pp. 1, 9. Slevin, Peter (1996) Mail Brings Comfort to Bosnian Women—American Group Keeps Checks, Letters Flowing, The Dallas Morning News, 28 July 1996, pp. 1A, 31A. Women for Women International (2002) See What You Can Do to Make a Difference Today, leaflet. Women for Women International (2004) Democratic Republic of Congo Chapter Office, Bukavu, in mimeo. Women for Women International (2004) Outreach—A Periodic Newsletter of Women for Women International, Vol. 11, No. 1, Washington, March 2004.

70 Women for Women International (2004) Outreach—A Periodic Newsletter of Women for Women International, Vol. 11, No. 3, Washington, September 2004.

71 ANNEX I: IRC CAPACITY BUILDING PROCESS IN DETAIL

Introduction The Ushirika and GBV umbrella grant programmes are two of the twelve IRC programmes currently carried out in the DRC. This annex describes the IRC activities in eastern DRC, the origins of the Ushirika programme and its functioning and development, including its impact on and integration with the GBV UG programme.

The Ushirika and GBV UGPs aim to support and strengthen local associations, NGOs and CBOs active in the South Kivu, North Kivu and (North) Katanga provinces of eastern DRC. Since its official launch in March 2001, Ushirika has developed partnerships with 24 local non-profit organisations. In turn, the GBV programme has developed partnerships with nine local non-profit organisations, as well as 23 CBOs.62

Project Direct Indirect Amount in Approximate Phase Beneficiaries Beneficiaries subgrants in amount per USD beneficiary in USD63 Ushirika I 30,186 45,064 234,809.00 5.00 Ushirika II 49,925 91,359 315,734.47 3.00 Ushirika III ongoing ongoing ongoing NA GBV I (NGOs) 4,606 14,718 176,293.40 12.00 GBV I (CBOs) 724 NA 7,007.25 10.00 GBV II (NGOs) 9,068 30,858.00 269,206.45 9.00 GBV II (CBOs) 590 NA 8,108.80 14.00 GBV III (NGOs ongoing ongoing ongoing NA and CBOs)

The IRC in the DRC IRC has carried out programmes in eastern DRC since November 1996. Its initial intervention was designed to meet the urgent needs of refugees attempting to repatriate to Rwanda, while also serving the rehabilitation needs of local communities. It addressed the damage caused by the Rwandan mass exodus and the looting by departing armies and other armed factions. Between 1996 and 2003, IRC operations in eastern DRC were managed separately from those in western DRC (where interventions started in 1998), with a director and senior management team based in Bukavu.

In reaction to the civil conflicts, IRC has focused increasingly on the local population and has expanded its activities in eastern DRC. It responded, for example, to the cholera, meningitis, and measles epidemics in South Kivu, as well as to the volcanic outbreak in Goma in 2002. It has, in particular, worked to improve health care in several health zones and implemented water and sanitation projects in the Kivus and northern Katanga.

62 The Ushirika programme has received three phases of funding. Grants from the US Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) covered the first two phases. The third phase has received funding from Development Cooperation Ireland (DCI), OFDA, Comic Relief, TMF, and EUROPAID. The GBV programme has received two phases of funding by USAID. Its third phase, which is currently being started, is funded by USAID and UNICEF. 63 The CBO partners receive cash and in-kind contributions.

72 The director of the eastern DRC office in Bukavu had already gained experience with capacity building and civil society organisations in Bosnia. He liked the idea of trying similar projects in eastern DRC, where civil society was extensive and quite dynamic, but the first donor reactions to his proposal were tepid at best.

Then, in 2000, the IRC published its first DRC mortality survey, which estimated that 1.7 million people had died from the war in the eastern part of the country. Suddenly, the DRC gained strong media attention and became a higher priority for the US government and other donors. Subsequently, IRC was under a great deal of pressure from the US Government to submit proposals to respond to the identified crisis. OFDA funding for DRC grew significantly, and funding to IRC tripled from the previous year.

There were numerous meetings in Washington DC bringing together politicians, USAID/OFDA staff, and UN representatives on how to respond in DRC. IRC was even called to attend several high-level meetings to discuss potential interventions.64 OFDA mentioned its strong interest in umbrella grants to the IRC. Consequently, the IRC director explained that he had a proposal on file for four years but that he needed to update it. However, in discussion with OFDA, he finally decided to submit the proposal with minimal changes. It was simply important to get a proposal to OFDA as quickly as possible to demonstrate the interest in this type of activity. IRC updated the basic background information and adjusted the budget to include additional funding for international NGOs, which was not in the original programme proposal. Since OFDA could only fund humanitarian activities, IRC had to cloak its interest in capacity building in a humanitarian mantle. Pure capacity building would have been considered a developmental activity. IRC consequently justified its activities as humanitarian service delivery with a capacity building component. It took as its overall programme purpose: to decrease the vulnerability of displaced and war-affected populations through the improvement of health services and promotion of food security. The programme had three main components, namely:

1. funds for local NGO projects (200k); 2. funds international NGO projects (500k); 3. capacity building for local NGOs.

The IRC staff was prepared for more discussions and challenges to their umbrella grant programme, so that they could fine tune it further. However, much to their surprise OFDA responded very quickly and said that they would fund the programme. IRC Bukavu did receive an issues letter, but this did not fundamentally challenge the main components of the programme. In general, the OFDA field representative was very supportive of the programme.

First Steps The programme officially began in February 2001 but did not really get going until June 2001 when the programme manager arrived. The complete programme staff consisted of two senior level programme coordinators, two financial accountants, a capacity building technical advisor, and a support staff-member. The team also attracted local consultants to work with partner organisations on strengthening technical aspects of the projects. After its formation, the team increasingly got into the nuts and bolts of setting up the programme. They quickly proposed to remove the international NGOs from the programme and focus only on supporting local ones, because they felt that managing the range of activities and many sub-grants between international

64 In one of these meetings it seems that the idea of an umbrella grant was discussed as a mechanism to get significant amounts of funds out to both international and local NGOs. It seems that some congressmen supported the idea and were pushing it hard.

73 and national partners was unrealistic given the time frame and staffing structure. IRC submitted a request to OFDA to realign the budget. OFDA agreed to two main changes:

• Extend the programme by 11 months with no additional funding (to allow adequate time to fund projects and implement them and to adjust for the delayed arrival of the project manager); • Realign the $500,000 that was budgeted to fund international NGOs towards other project costs.

The IRC argued, or at least hoped, that the umbrella grant model would foster closer cooperation with local organisations. In principle, working with these partners would be more cost effective and could greatly expand the number of projects that could be implemented. The design of their projects and communication methods would be more appropriate culturally and, hence more readily accepted by the local population. Local partners would also be able to access geographical areas that international NGOs could not because of insecurity and lack of local knowledge. Finally, it was hoped that the long-term benefits to the population would be greater, as local structures, institutions, and actors were strengthened.

Developing the Umbrella Grant Mechanism The program manager and her team faced several challenges. They had to further develop the project strategy and underlying principles, while pushing the project forward. Even without the grants for the international organisations, they had to use their limited means in a focused way, because capacity building can be a labour intensive, time consuming and therefore costly exercise. IRC management also had to find a way to strengthen capacities without being overbearing. The central question was how to establish a dialogue that both supported the aspirations of its (potential) partners, while making demands on them based on agreements concluded with them.65 At the same time, they had to take the complicated and dangerous local context into account. Specifically, selecting the right organisations in the volatile socio-economic context that fostered opportunistic management was difficult. They considered several aspects while developing the project:

1. The programme wanted to try and have as broad a geographical base as possible, so as to not focus the benefits of the programme in only one or two geographic areas. 2. IRC wanted to focus on “humanitarian” type projects to meet the needs on the ground and align projects with donor guidelines. This meant prioritising health, water/sanitation, food security and nutrition, non-food distributions, etc. Providing technical support and overseeing service delivery in so many sectors would no doubt be challenging for the programme. 3. IRC wanted to address gender issues and make sure that women were adequately represented and served by this programme to empower them as much as possible. 4. The programme wanted to be sure that its benefits were not unduly weighted towards one ethnic group or another given the growing ethnic tensions in eastern DRC. This was particularly important given the local “perceptions” of IRC as an “American” NGO. Put simply, most Congolese perceive that the US supports Rwanda, and they believe the IRC to be in the DRC to support Rwanda’s efforts, and by proxy to support the Banyamulenge. The team absolutely wanted to prevent feeding into such perceptions. 5. The team discussed trying to work with a range of local partner NGOs. Ideally, the IRC wanted to work with a few very strong local NGOs, a few very weak NGOs, and a few

65 See Bergström, 2002, p. 8.

74 NGOs somewhere in between these two extremes.66 The organisation needed a few good partners so it could be sure of showing at least some outputs/impact with the beneficiary populations. But IRC staff also strongly believed in capacity building and wanted to work with NGOs that showed potential but might be weak in certain areas. If it only worked with strong partners, it weakened the rationale of the project, but if it only worked with weak partners, it risked not being able to show much of an impact. Hence, the staff decided to try and find an acceptable balance.

To obtain a clearer picture of the local needs and capacities, the team carried out several preliminary assessments: an overview of local organisations in South Kivu, an overview of international organisations working in partnership with local NGOs in eastern DRC, and, finally, an overview of humanitarian needs in South Kivu. Building on existing IRC contacts and the regular humanitarian coordination meetings, the Ushirika team was able to establish an extensive network of contacts with local NGOs and local umbrella NGOs, as well as with other international agencies. In this way, it stressed (potential) cooperation and complementarity and it marketed the project to the humanitarian community in the province.

In June 2001, the team launched an internal competition among IRC staff to come up with ideas for a name for the UG programme. This gave the team the opportunity to market the programme to IRC staff and clarify what it wanted to achieve. After receiving a large number of suggestions, it chose “Ushirika.” This Swahili word, which means partnership or communion, has a strong connotation of cooperation and participation. The team felt that it best reflected the programme’s principles: respect for local communities, active participation of stakeholders, and local capacity building.

4. Financial Support: Selected local NGOs would receive sub-grants support to develop and implement emergency service delivery projects in priority areas and for target groups that were difficult to access.

5. Capacity Building: Selected NGOs would receive accompaniment and support to improve their technical, managerial and financial capacity of local NGOs through training and accompaniment. The team planned to hold special training sessions on basic financial management and internal control systems, as well as on project management (project proposal review, budgeting, collection of baseline data, as well as monitoring and evaluation systems). The selected organisations would also receive technical support in the areas of food security, environmental health, and livelihood.

In addition, the team planned the programme activities. In particular, it developed the Ushirika programme cycle which consisted of five key stages, namely:

66 IRC worked with local NGOs, because in many areas government services were vestigial at best.

1. A call for proposals; 2. A multi-step project/partner selection process; 3. The redesign of projects with selected partners and the joint signature of MOUs; 4. Project implementation by partners with support from the umbrella grant team, including a training program; 5. Evaluation and auditing of partner projects and institutions.

1. Call for proposals As a first step in the selection process, the Ushirika team developed a call for proposals guide, which was widely diffused within South Kivu using radio announcements and a network of international NGO partners and civil society platforms. The guide outlined eligibility requirements for organisations and projects, as well as guidelines for proposal submission. Key criteria for inclusion were:

• legal statute of a non-profit association and legal recognition by the authorities of the province in which it intervenes; • operations in South Kivu for at least 24 months; • implementation of concrete projects in the field and on a work site; • mobilisation of material or financial support in the past for the realisation of a project in the field; • expertise in at least one of the service delivery sectors of the programme.

Project eligibility criteria included:

• targeting at least one of the priority intervention sectors for the programme; • demonstrating community participation in project design and implementation, particularly that of women; • being no longer than 6 months in duration; • including strategies for ensuring project sustainability; • having a budget of less than $25,000.

With these criteria it was possible to weed out organisations that either lacked a proven track record – and could have been created just to receive donor funds – or were already independent and large enough. In the end, over 2,000 call for proposals guidelines were distributed. Response to the call surpassed initial expectations: local organisations submitted over 340 proposals. Still, many of these organisations had a hard time fulfilling the paper requirements. In the DRC, lack of financial means and lack of copiers can already make submitting five copies of a fully documented proposal, including copies of statutes and reference letters, an arduous task.

2. Project and partner selection The Ushirika team developed a multi-step approach to selecting partners and projects. The first step in the selection process required programme staff to evaluate proposals based on the eligibility criteria mentioned above and their adherence to the guidelines outlined in the call for proposals guide. They used a checklist that was developed in-house to determine this adherence.

The second step involved carrying out a technical assessment of those project proposals meeting eligibility requirements. IRC staff with expertise in the target sectors conducted a review of each proposal based on the pertinence of the problem outlined and of the strategy proposed to address it. They also assessed other criteria including community participation in the project, the

76 sustainability of the initiative, the level of security at the proposed intervention sites, and the degree of neutrality of potential partners. At least two evaluators reviewed each proposal using a scoring system. Many NGO candidates did not meet the eligibility criteria or submitted projects that did not follow the programme guidelines. The proposals with the highest average scores were pre-selected for further review.

Several members of the Ushirika team then organised a selection committee, which also included other technical staff from IRC and representatives of UN agencies and NGOs. At the end of the selection process, twelve organisations were chosen (See Annex IV). The organisations focused mainly on displaced populations in volatile contexts.

All applicants received a letter indicating whether their proposal was approved or rejected, with a simple explanation as to the reason for their rejection. Every organisation was invited to come and meet with the Ushirika staff who would explain to them why their proposal was not selected. This was no mean feat given the number of proposals. While the rejection of proposals was of course received negatively by the applicants, this transparency generated a great deal of goodwill amongst the local NGO community in that they could see that the selection process was fair and unbiased.67

• a project logical framework which detailed project objectives, results, and activities as well as indicators and means for verifying them; • a schedule of activities, including responsibilities; • a project budget; and • a training plan detailing key competencies to be developed.

IRC then signed an MOU with each partner organisation, outlining key aspects of the sub-grant projects and the roles and responsibilities of each party, based on the key documents prepared during the redesign phase.

4. Project implementation, monitoring and training During the project selection process and the redesign phase, the team set up a training programme for all partner organisations. The initial training session focused on administrative, financial, and project management skills necessary for implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. It also provided further explanation of the Ushirika set-up and methodology. IRC resource persons and Ushirika staff carried out this training and two representatives from each organisation participated. Later, locally recruited consultants provided training in various technical areas: water and sanitation, agriculture, micro-credit, and animal husbandry. The partner organisations’ representatives often considered the time for exchange during the sessions too limited, because there were generally many topics to tackle and thus insufficient time for informal exchange. Participants often expressed a desire to extend training sessions beyond the usual three days scheduled for each workshop.

67 Some people interviewed, however, stressed that the dissatisfaction of not being selected left a larger impression. Some local organisations were angry about the difference between 340 proposals submitted and twelve selected, despite the fact that the call for proposals had clearly explained the competitive process.

Ushirika programme staff also conducted monitoring visits with, when possible, support from the consultants. Unfortunately, the insecurity limited the number of field visits, but all projects were visited at least once. On one occasion, team members had to take a helicopter to visit the Minembwe project site in the Mulenge hills. During these visits, they monitored project progress and provided partners with technical assistance and training to ensure that projects were carried out in accordance with minimal standards of quality and with the proposed time schedule. Fortunately, holding regular meetings was easier at the IRC office throughout phase I, where staff worked with partners to develop monitoring tools and to identify methods for data collection.

Moreover, the programme finance team received monthly financial reports, which they analysed for compliance with standard administrative and financial procedures, especially with regards to procurement, book-keeping and human resources management. Based on justifications provided for disbursements made the previous month, and treasury plans presented for the next period, new disbursements were made to partners for the following month of activities. Regular coaching meetings to discuss financial reports also provided an opportunity for finance staff to reinforce certain key concepts and provide individualised training to partner accountants in appropriate financial management. At first, the relatively inexperienced partners had difficulty in producing satisfactory reports, but all sub-grantees showed significant improvement in the quality of their reports by the end of the project cycle. Ushirika accountants also conducted, when possible, field visits to assist partners in strengthening their administrative and financial systems.

Partners were also required to submit brief monthly monitoring (narrative) reports detailing activities implemented during the previous period and those planned for the coming months, as well as levels of achievement regarding indicators set at the start of the projects. The mix of expertise within the Ushirika team facilitated obtaining an overview of the changing project situation. Individual meetings were organised with each partner after reception of their monthly report to discuss progress in meeting project objectives and the day-to-day management of activities and funds. Each partner received verbal feedback and recommendations for the continued implementation of projects. Written feedback was then sent to partners following each session. This close monitoring allowed IRC to gather lessons learned and quickly adjust projects with partners when required. The presentation and quality of these reports significantly improved as the projects progressed. In effect, this was a hands-on course in financial and project management. IRC learned that building capacity of partners is a long-term process that is best achieved through a mix of training, accompaniment, and hands-on support. Management control and capacity building thus mutually reinforced each other.

The team also wanted to institute a programme of exchange visits among partners, so that they could learn from each other. However, insecurity frequently obstructed these mutual visits at the last moment.68

Internally, the Ushirika team organised weekly internal technical meetings to discuss the evolution of each partner project and the whole Ushirika programme. These meetings provided an opportunity for staff to identify weaknesses and problems in the execution of projects and develop strategies to assist partners in achieving project objectives.

68 Ushirika staff members also presented about the programme and its partners to the weekly inter-agency meetings (that brought together UN agencies and international NGOs) to ensure that all organisations were briefed on the humanitarian situation in areas where Ushirika partners had access. Often, there was little knowledge as to what the local population(s) were experiencing in these areas since they had been cut off during the war.

In the meantime, IRC had begun to discuss another cost extension for the project, but the donor environment was quite different. The DRC was less in the spotlight and political interest had waned. OFDA staff doubted whether the Ushirika project really fit into their priorities. They liked the project, but also considered that they should be investing their money in more “classic” emergency type responses. In the months leading up to the IRC’s request, the general message was not very encouraging. In response, IRC emphasised first how Ushirika helped extend the humanitarian reach to areas where IRC could not go due to security concerns, and second how the sub-grant projects were humanitarian in nature. Fortunately, visits by OFDA representatives were very positive and their recommendations helped provide continued support for the programme.

As a result, the programme received a three-month no-cost extension from 1 December 2002 to 28 February 2003, which allowed Ushirika to continue. However, capacity building activities had to take a backseat as they did not fit with OFDA’s priorities.

The Gender-based Violence Umbrella Grant When Ushirika I was in full motion in early 2002, the western IRC country director – at that time there were still two IRC country offices – heard of a USAID project on victims of torture for the DRC. In principle, USAID would have an amount of $500,000 available for a strong project. The western DRC country director was not planning such a project, but decided to ask his eastern counterpart whether he would consider such a project.

At the time, the eastern director was receiving more and more information from IRC supported health centres on the severity and spread of the problem of sexual violence, which no international or state organisation was really prepared to address.69 In response, he decided to ask USAID whether GBV survivors could also be considered as “torture victims” – rape was widespread and commonly practised as a weapon of war. Given the severity of the problem, USAID decided to support this idea. The team sent in a proposal, which indeed was approved. The proposal planned to execute GBV activities separately from the Ushirika umbrella grant. Its overall goal was to improve and expand community-based services for populations affected by sexual and gender-based violence in North and South Kivu provinces.

Although humanitarian organisations had some experience with GBV problems in refugee camps, they had virtually no experience in addressing these in large, insecure areas where access to victims was often limited. In addition, discussion of sexual violence and its consequences could rather put victims at greater risk. This made it challenging to define a strategy and determine what services IRC would like or would be able to provide. IRC considered the need for capacity building within local organisations, because these would have access that INGOs lacked. In

69 A little later, a Human Rights Watch report detailed the egregious and widespread abuse against women and girls in the eastern Congo. See HRW, 2002.

79 addition, a significant number of local NGOs, originally created for other purposes, had begun GBV activities with little or no skills and money. The plan was that partner organisations would have grass roots counsellors and community activists throughout their geographic areas to link survivors with the necessary services.

The IRC set out to recruit new GBV staff members with proven experience and competences in the field, who had lived in tough environments before. The budding GBV team worked hard on establishing a confidential approach to working with rape victims that was adapted to the Congolese cultural context. They developed a framework that sought to address survivors needs in an integrated fashion. The key needs that they identified were:

1. primary health care; 2. specialised gynaecological surgery; 3. psycho-social support (counselling); 4. family and community mediation; 5. assistance in food and non-food items; 6. economic (re-)integration; 7. legal advice and assistance; 8. HIV/STI testing.

USAID funding would be provided as an umbrella grant. Staff also looked at how the GBV team could build on Ushirika’s experience. The GBV team used comparable programme and capacity- building tools. It also established similar criteria for the selection of partner organisations. In addition, the GBV team developed specific forms enabling the IRC to better track outputs of each partner and aggregate data for the entire programme. The GBV team also received multiple requests by smaller grass-roots organisations or groups of volunteers to carry out GBV services that focused on easing the day-to-day challenges that survivors were facing and to provide them support in terms of not feeling isolated or rejected. Larger local NGOs were not providing enough of such services. Hence, in addition to Ushirika-like capacity-building with formal organisations, IRC also instituted a new, smaller and more simplified type of umbrella grant for grass-roots organisations: the so-called community-based micro-projects.

1. Call for proposals In November and December 2002, the call for GBV proposals went out and the first phase, including the community-based micro-projects, was launched. This time, the IRC focused on North and South Kivu, because it already had experience with health and capacity building projects in parts of these provinces, in which GBV was a severe problem. 102 organisations responded with proposals.

2. Project and partner selection The IRC short listed 31 potential candidates. In addition to the regular selection criteria, the team had established specific criteria to ensure quality care for the GBV victims. The prospective organisations should already have experience in the area of GBV or at least be in the process of establishing GBV services; they should carry out specific activities, such as medical, psychological, economic, or legal support; and be able to prove acceptable technical quality; they should ensure respect and confidentiality; they should have women involved at organisational and programmatic levels; and they should strive for community involvement.

The GBV project team conducted field visits to all pre-selected NGOs in spite of security constraints. These visits helped gain a clearer understanding of the associations’ organisational structure and of how the project emerged. Questions of feasibility and organisational and

80 technical capacity for project implementation were also addressed, as were their capacity-building needs. A summary analysis report was produced following each visit.

Finally, a committee made up of IRC staff members, OCHA, FAO, and WFP representatives selected 8 organisations (see annex IV). Most organisations focused on psycho-social support and economic reintegration.

WFP also agreed to support the programme with food distributions (oil, salt, corn flour, and beans) so that 1) the partner organisations could receive survivors and feed them; 2) partners could provide economic re-integration services and food to the survivors to help them preserve their capital (seeds, pigs, etc.); 3) partner organisations working with looted pygmy communities could provide emergency items as “tangible” deliveries to facilitate the acceptance of “soft” GBV activities in these communities. Generally, basic household tasks and daily survival were usually extremely challenging because the perpetrators of sexual violence often systematically pillaged too.70

3. Project redesign and signature of a memorandum of understanding Staff members helped the selected organisations strengthen their project set up and administrative capacities. They also provided more explanation about the IRC GBV methodology.

In addition, IRC established – when feasible – a reference system among partners, allowing various beneficiaries from one partner to be referred for services provided by another. In this way, various survivors were able to access psycho-social, medical, and legal assistance through the network, thus optimising resource allocation for all partners together.

4. Project implementation, monitoring and training During GBV I, IRC stressed capacity building on technical GBV activities, such as counselling techniques, community education, and family mediation. It thus focused mainly on training partners and ensuring quality approaches and services, because counselling, medical reference, and family mediation are skills that cannot be taught overnight. Staff of the partner organisations needed to advance its knowledge, attitudes, and practices, while working with the victims. It was often difficult to find well-suited local staff, which led to delays in appointment of the counsellors and community educators within partner organisations as well as the IRC. In terms of monitoring project and partner progress, the outline of the narrative report was changed. It was based more strongly on the logical framework of the project.

The counsellors and community educators – either paid staff or volunteers – played a crucial role in providing initial information and emotional support to survivors and in escorting and referring them to their centres, where they were received by trained personnel. The network of partner organisations, their staff, and health institutions also contributed to the level of acceptance and protection of survivors at a family and community level.

In addition to further developing the Ushirika activities for organisational capacity building, staff members helped the organisations to set up a confidential documentation and referral system for victims of gender-based violence. They also promoted community education to stop the rejection and prejudices towards raped women and girls. Sometimes, this involved providing information to or asking for support from local authorities.

70 FAO and UNICEF also made contributions.

81 In August 2003, during the execution of GBV I, UNICEF also began supporting a project for a local counselling organisation in the Uvira health zone. The project supported eleven Maisons des Femmes in which three to four assistants provided basic psycho-social support (counselling and family mediation), distributed non-food items (cooking sets, jerry cans, and blankets), and referred survivors to health centres in the vicinity run by AMI, a French NGO, and Caritas. WFP and FAO also helped with providing food and non-food items (hoes and seeds) to the survivors. The houses were equipped and prepared to house survivors for up to three nights at a time during the period that they received or awaited medical care. The Uvira house hosted survivors on their way to Bukavu for specialised medical care at Panzi Hospital.

In August and September 2003, GBV programme partners received training on proposal writing and project management so that they could develop projects for a new round of funding and avoid gaps in service delivery.

5. Evaluations and audits More than Ushirika I, the GBV programme used mid-term and final evaluations, as well as audits, to assess and strengthen the organisations and their activities. The mid-term evaluations provided an opportunity for partners to put into practise the new self-evaluation training they received. They organised one-day workshops to which all project staff, representatives of beneficiaries and key stakeholders were invited. Together, they reviewed the project as it was originally conceived and as it was being implemented. Observations and recommendations were made to update budgets and improve results. Participants also used participatory methods to identify project and organisational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. They then prioritised key objectives to be reached by the end of the project cycle, as well as an action plan for achieving this. GBV I closed in November 2003. Partner NGOs served 4,606 survivors, many more than the 3,485 initially planned for in their projects. OFDA and DFID provided additional funding (and extension) to support the Panzi hospital until January 2004. The UNICEF supported project would continue with a three month extension until 10 May 2004.

Simultaneously, strategic thinking within the IRC, in particular in the PCDI, evolved. The Pretoria agreement had stated that the Rwandan Forces would withdraw from the DRC. Despite great obstacles, it looked increasingly likely that the eastern Congo would achieve at least a modicum of peace. Given these changes and IRC’s increased emphasis on civil society and civic capacity building, the Bukavu office decided to look to create more synergy between the GBV and Ushirika programmes. This was supported by a study conducted in January 2003 on IRC’s capacity building programmes in the DRC, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Sudan. Hence, the IRC decided to contribute more strategically to the transition from humanitarian to developmental activities in the DRC. In particular, IRC staff members considered the virtual absence of strong state institutions and the vibrant civil society initiatives in the Kivus. They decided to build up a Civil Society Development Unit (CSDU) that could combine Ushirika and GBV activities. The GBV manager was promoted as CSDU coordinator in May 2003 and began working on merging the two umbrella grant teams into the CSDU.

Ushirika II When Ushirika I ended in February 2003, no immediate funding was available for the second phase. As a result, two key staff members had to be laid off and were hired by other NGOs. The planned administrative merger with GBV helped alleviate some of the problems, because the finance team was transferred to GBV, which established some synergy between the two programmes. When in April 2003, Ushirika II was launched, the program initially “scrambled to

82 hire new staff and recapture programme momentum.”71 For Ushirika partners, it had become painfully clear that they had to diversify their funding base.

Phase II of the Ushirika programme received less funds from OFDA than Ushirika I had. OFDA preferred not to engage in developmental activities and wanted Ushirika to pay more attention to the sub-grants than to capacity building. The Ushirika team changed several aspects of the original Ushirika strategy in phase II, namely:

1. the expansion of the programme to cover both South Kivu and northern Katanga; 2. an increase in the total number of partners from twelve to fifteen, in accordance with the increased sub-grant funds available. The new number of partners was not determined beforehand, but based on the availability of funds and the quality of proposals;72 3. the identification of five key sectors of service-delivery intervention for the programme based on an assessment of the priority humanitarian needs in the region: food security, water and sanitation, community health, emergency aid and assistance to particularly vulnerable populations; 4. an emphasis placed on project quality and utilisation of Sphere minimal standards for humanitarian interventions as indicators of project quality throughout the programme cycle; 5. the simplification of the call for proposals process to reduce the time and resources invested by local associations in submitting proposals; 6. close monitoring of partner projects and provision of on-going technical assistance by full-time in-house technical advisors instead of consultants, which meant an increase in Ushirika personnel and capacities;

1. Call for proposals Given the relatively large gap between the two phases of the programme and the changing nature of the humanitarian situation in eastern DRC, it was decided to launch a new call for proposals. This time, the UG team diffused 1,500 calls in South Kivu and northern Katanga provinces. The IRC had already begun an ECHO-supported health programme in this region, which facilitated Ushirika access. All non-profit associations and NGOs intervening in the humanitarian assistance sector provinces were invited to submit proposals. Partners from the first phase could once again submit new proposals to the programme. IRC received 350 replies.

2. Project and partner selection Just as with the GBV UGP, all pre-selected candidates were visited in the field. Subsequently, a selection committee was organised comprised of members of the Ushirika team, other technical staff from IRC and representatives of international agencies and organisations such as Food for the Hungry International (FHI), WFP, and Malteser. In July 2003, a selection committee meeting was held during which members reviewed the field visit summary analysis reports and debated the merits of each of the 30 candidates. The committee identified 15 partner organisations and made recommendations on the grant amounts for each partner. It selected 10 organisations from South Kivu and 5 from northern Katanga. Of these fifteen, three were partners from the first phase of the Ushirika programme. The projects selected were more post-conflict in nature and reflected improvement in the security situation. With fewer displaced people, Ushirika II focused more on returnee communities (see Annex IV). Partner sub-grant projects were officially launched in August 2003.

71 Condor, 2003, p. 16. 72 This procedure had already proven its utility with the GBV UGP.

83 3. Project redesign and signature of a memorandum of understanding Once again, redesigning projects offered opportunities for participation and capacity building. MOUs were signed based on project log frames, time schedules, budgets, and individualised training programmes.

4. Project implementation, monitoring and training The programme worked with and updated the capacity building processes and tools of its predecessors. The team decided to distribute the technical and financial monitoring responsibility for partner project monitoring amongst the Umbrella Grant staff. The individualised training programmes constituted an important part of capacity building. The initial training took place in July 2003.

Three technical training sessions for partner organisations took place in October 2003. These sessions aimed to strengthen the capacity of partners in executing their projects with respect to certain norms and minimal standards for quality. The first training targeted the 6 sub-grantees conducting food security projects. Despite the diversity of projects implemented by these partners, they all had one approach in common which was the practice of a rotating in-kind credit scheme to reach a maximum number of beneficiaries.73

The second training session reinforced the technical capacity of partners in implementing their water and sanitation projects. Twelve representatives of six partners were invited for this training which objectives were to: train participants in carrying out thorough analyses so as to provide appropriate responses to meet the water and sanitation needs of local populations, provide them with the technical capacity necessary to construct and maintain water and sanitation structures and introduce different techniques for community mobilisation and ownership by the community. During each stage of the training, reference was made to Sphere minimal standards for quality in relation to water and sanitation projects.

The third training session concerned awareness raising and mobilisation techniques and involved all sub-grantees. All programme partners carried out some activities in these areas. It was therefore considered important to present them with appropriate techniques and methodologies for creating change amongst their beneficiary populations. Methods for community implication, steps in mobilisation and approaches to community sensitisation were amongst the themes addressed.

A workshop in December 2003 aimed at preparing partners for the self-evaluation of their projects at the midway mark. They were given theoretical approaches to evaluation and then spent two days doing a practical exercise which entailed evaluating the Ushirika program. In early February 2004, a final training session on institutional viability addressed six themes:

1. institutional identity: mission, mandate, principles and values; 2. project identification and development: key approaches and tools;

73 Each of the partners had established a system of distribution of supplies (fishing nets, boats, pigs, seeds, etc.) to beneficiaries which were subsequently reimbursed at the end of the project, to be redistributed to other beneficiaries. Partners expressed a need for training. Although they had used in-kind micro-credit in the past, they had very little experience in developing tools for monitoring beneficiaries and tracking reimbursement. During two days, 13 partner representatives were able to develop basic notions about in- kind credit, learn about norms in the management of this credit, and improve their knowledge of management tools and monitoring methods.

84 3. fundraising: contacts and negotiations with funding organisations, presentation of project proposals; 4. project management: administrative and financial management, monitoring, and evaluation; 5. institutional organisation: structures, human resources and asset management, communication; 6. preparations for final evaluations and audits.

The team made some adaptations to reduce the heavy administrative workload for its partners and strengthen project management. The monthly narrative report became a bimonthly affair. The team also contracted a monitoring and evaluation officer, who assisted the partner organisations of both UGPs. Similar to the GBV programme, the organisations were provided with a guide for preparing the narrative reports which was presented to them during the initial training session before launching their sub-projects. The reports were analysed by the different team members, including the technical advisors responsible for the respective sector, the sub-grant accountants and the monitoring and evaluation advisor, so that capacities were built as much as possible from several separate, but integrated perspectives.

Providing appropriate and consistent support to partners in North Katanga proved difficult. These organisations were weaker than their counterparts in South Kivu because the violence there had lasted longer, local public service structures were devastated, and civil society was less vibrant. These partners, though technically experienced in implementing humanitarian assistance projects in their areas of competence, were less experienced in day-to-day project management. In addition, the distance and relative inaccessibility of certain project sites in this region complicated monitoring. These factors caused delays in project execution. In response, it was decided to recruit a partner support officer for North Katanga, who started in November 2003.

Projects were initially planned to be implemented over a six month period. Following a no-cost extension from OFDA, MOUs with partners were extended to cover a seventh month until March 2003. A total of $325,000 was disbursed directly to partners (average budget of $20,000 per partner). This amount represented 65 percent of the total budget for the programme. 15 percent of the total budget went to IRC operating and administrative costs.

5. Evaluations and audits The partners carried out a mid-term self-evaluation with inputs from the team members. This evaluation was important to strengthen the projects and keep them on course. During the final evaluation, the team used an innovative institutional analysis, which was partly based on older questionnaires to assess the capacities of the organisation.

In contrast to phase I, independent auditors reviewed the participating organisations. Three local auditors, based in South Kivu, were identified through a competitive bidding process to undertake these audits. The Ushirika finance team worked with its partners to prepare staff for the audits. The findings of the auditors were on the whole satisfactory; however, one partner was given an opinion with reserve. Audits and evaluations reflected the continuous training technical capacity building inputs for project execution, which partly indicated the donor’s project focus. Partners and IRC staff argued that all in all there had been too little formal training on institutional capacity building. Generally, partners had made significant efforts in applying standard financial and administrative procedures, but there remained problems of internal control caused by the accumulation of key functions by some staff members and an absence of control and accountability by the executive team in some partner organisations.

85 Ushirika II officially ended in April 2004, but staff continued with preparing final internal and external donor reports. With OFDA permission it received additional bridge funding from a realigned IRC health project and some functions continued because these were shared with the GBV programme. Due to the violence in June 2004, ex-pats were briefly evacuated and local staff was not able to continue working. In July, some activities restarted in order to consolidate lessons learned. Staff also carried out monitoring and preparations for the next phase. As a consequence, when Ushirika III was launched officially in October 2004, there had been no disruption comparable to the ending of Ushirika I.74

GBV II GBV II was able to continue directly after the ending of GBV I with funding from USAID and UNICEF. Staff could thus stay on board. GBV II simplified its management process considerably when it decided to continue with its eight programme partners so that no call for proposals and selection process were necessary. As stated, all partners had designed projects based on their previous evaluation and the knowledge they acquired during the first phase.75 In essence, redesigning the project and signing subcontracts became part of the ongoing evaluation and administrative support system to strengthen the organisations and their impact on the target groups. The GBV II projects were mainly extension of old projects or the implementation of similar activities in new sites. The narrative and financial reporting system essentially followed the same procedures as during phase 1.

In November 2003, the GBV team added a counselling trainer and in January 2004 a second community-based micro-project officer. Eight new micro-projects had been selected in the Walungu and Kalehe territories, because these areas had suffered from massive attacks. The GBV team trained the partner organisations in community education and self-evaluation.

During this phase, staff continued visiting the project sites for project monitoring and on-the-job training to provide tailored support and feed back as well as reinforce partner’s technical and organisational capacity. Reports were written and shared with each partners after each visit, including observations and recommendations.

Unfortunately, the fighting in May and June of 2004 caused a temporary cessation of activities. In Bukavu alone, 66 people died, 77 were injured, 31 raped, and 147 houses were pillaged. Verified data for the surrounding areas was not available, but many partner organisations working with micro enterprise/credit were raided. Expatriate staff was evacuated, and local staff was unable to resume implementation of the project until the end of June, when most partners were able to recommence at least parts of their activities. The events, of course, caused more than a month’s delay in execution.

Ushirika III and GBV III At the moment, IRC Bukavu is in the early stages of Ushirika III and GBV III. The integration of the two programmes is progressing. The CSDU is now integrating the finance and organisational support functions for both programmes.

74 DCI funding received in August 2004 and preliminary stakeholder analyses and development of partner assessment tools were initiated. IRC signed contracts with Europaid and Comic Relief in October 2004. 75 In principle, the USAID grant made it possible to add more partners after the first six months. But after 6 months the programme was renegotiated an additional funding was secured for Phase III. IRC would select new partners in this new phase.

86 During a strategic planning exercise, CSDU staff members of both programmes increasingly noted that the IRC is changing. They had always felt that health, water and sanitation played centre stage. However, the IRC water and sanitation department is currently much smaller than it used to be and works closely with CSDU. And the dominant role of emergency health activities may also slowly decrease. In contrast, the CSDU may play a larger role in the future as it addresses questions of peace and stability. The new CSDU strategy has emerged from IRC DRC’s mission statement in the governance sector, which seeks to “facilitate the reconstitution of functional public, private, and civil society structures, and strengthen social cohesion at community level as a means of promoting stability, peace, and socio-economic development. The CSDU uses two related approaches: civil society development and community-driven reconstruction for linking service interventions with capacity-building support to nascent civic and governance structures. In this way, its staff members have developed a shared vision on their role in a “functional” society and they have deepened their knowledge of development programming. They increasingly stress the commonalities between GBV and Ushirika approaches and attempt to achieve a higher degree of synergy. In addition, both Ushirika and GBV staff would like themselves and their partners to play a stronger role in civic education and advocacy alongside service delivery during their third phase.

Both programmes will increase the number of partner organisations to achieve a higher degree of coverage. But they do not intend to use a call for proposals. For Ushirika III, staff members carried out a partner mapping exercise, which was essentially a survey of civil society, that will facilitate selecting additional partner organisations in South Kivu.

The GBV III programme, which has secured funding from USAID, will continue support to its partners and increasingly focus on improving the quality of medical support for survivors of GBV through support to local health structures. This includes training, medical inputs, and supervision by IRC health personnel. In its advocacy and civic education, for example with the Ministry of Health, it wants to promote better recording and reporting on GBV incidences. This might encourage health and other authorities to consider GBV a higher priority in the provision of health services. In addition, such records would greatly assist in providing accurate estimates for the incidence of GBV.76

Whereas the former two phases led to significant improvements in financial administration, technical skills, and project management of the partner organisations, CSDU now increasingly emphasises institutional capacity, in particular improving the quality of services and management structures of the partner organisations. It focuses in particular on strengthening the role of the administrative boards (conseil d’ administration) to improve financial accountability to their members and their interaction with their target population. It plans to conduct more community- rooted advocacy to promote better service delivery and it is initiating community-led project management committees to actively participate in each stage of the project cycle and engage in advocacy. These project committees also participate in designing their own MOU with the partner organisation, which can strengthen the interaction between the partner organisation and its members on service delivery.

Both programmes will continue building on the Ushirika II and GBV II procedures. Similar to the institutional analysis tool, they are now developing more tools for assessing partner capacity in civic education, advocacy, counselling, agriculture, and so on. In this way, IRC wants to assess both partner capacities and community capacities. These tools can then be used for collecting

76 In addition, top-level advocacy work with the Ministry of Health on this issue would also be helpful.

87 baseline data and later impact assessment. The set up of the evaluation and auditing processes remain essentially the same.

In addition, the integration of CSDU approaches into the other IRC health and water and sanitation activities is becoming a central question. In the health system, IRC health staff has always worked with local health and development committees (CODESAs). The IRC health experts now strengthen these CODESAs using CSDU tools. In addition, two partner organisations, PIDP and APED, are being strengthened to play a larger role in the health sector. They are, for example, involved in fighting a cholera epidemic in Kalehe. Thus, capacity-building support to local civil society organisations is in turn strengthening delivery capacity for core services.77

77 The IRC health team worked with PIDP and APED to address a cholera epidemic in Kalehe. When the team realised that the epidemic was growing too fast for the relatively inexperienced partners, it became more active in direct implementation. Nevertheless, it was still able to involve its local partners in training and execution in stemming the epidemic.

88 ANNEX II: Terms of Reference

Models for humanitarian service delivery in conflict-affected environments: drawing lessons from the experience of the Ushirika partnership programme in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Introduction

The IRC Post-Conflict Development Initiative (PCDI) exists to support the agency and the humanitarian community in the research and development of policy and practice in modelling international interventions from emergency relief to post-conflict transition. As part of this work, PCDI has been in discussion with DFID about the possibility of undertaking a focused research study on the ongoing Ushirika (‘together’) partnership programme operated by IRC’s mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The Ushirika programme provides an interesting model of humanitarian service delivery through capacity-building partnerships with local civil society organisations, operating in a volatile, conflict-affected environment within an emergency relief paradigm. Active since 1999 in the provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and northern Katanga in eastern DRC – an area described by leading policy analysts the International Crisis Group as ‘the forgotten crucible of conflict in the DRC’ – Ushirika has worked alongside cumulatively over 50 Congolese community-based organisations (CBOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in delivering vital humanitarian services to displaced and other war-affected communities in access to clean water, sanitation, food security, public health issues, empowerment of minorities and particularly vulnerable groups, and rebuilding of livelihoods. In addition, IRC has systematically invested in building the technical and institutional capacities of CBO and NGO partners and in developing community-level participation in project design, monitoring and evaluation.

Ushirika has now reached a new phase in its own development. Responding to the identified needs of our partners, the programme has gained core funding support for a new, three-year engagement with 18 CBO and NGO partners, taking forward the development of humanitarian services, stronger civil society, and local partnerships for poverty reduction. The umbrella grants mechanism employed by Ushirika has also been applied to a complementary partnership programme working on issues of gender-based violence (GBV). In addition, further funding proposals currently lodged with various donors would begin to develop capacities for community- led advocacy on resources and services as the DRC peace process broadly moves forward, local government is re-established, and issues of post-conflict development come to the fore.

The study

This stage of programme, partner and contextual development therefore provides an opportunity to learn from the experience of Ushirika in its work to date. Based on previous discussions with the Service Delivery in Difficult Environments (SDDE) policy team in DFID, it was proposed that a focused, short-term practical evaluation of the programme – looking at both its humanitarian services and GBV components – would be beneficial in drawing out key lessons for such interventions and for models of service delivery policy and practice in volatile, conflict- prone environments.

The aims of the study are to:

89 • Undertake an external evaluation of the Ushirika humanitarian services and GBV partnership programmes operated by IRC and our Congolese civil society partners in the provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and northern Katanga, focused upon assessing the value-added of the model and modalities employed in providing access to core humanitarian/public services for vulnerable populations in conflict-affected areas; • In accomplishing the above, analyse the Ushirika model of service delivery comparative to other models or services prevalent in the target areas of eastern DRC within the context of the programme’s operation, in order to both help assess the IRC model’s added value in such a setting and to explore and elucidate any co-ordination mechanisms or linkages for service delivery during protracted emergency and transitional periods; • Draw out practical ‘lessons learned’ from the programme experience to date and outline any elements, approaches or components which may be replicable in other, similar conflict-prone environments, including an analysis of how humanitarian service delivery models such as Ushirika inter-relate with agendas for strengthening institutions of governance and provide access points during protracted emergency settings for more developed programming in governance and community-driven reconstruction during post-conflict transition.

The study is therefore expected to cover the following ground in undertaking the evaluation:

• A thorough examination and analysis of any programme or relevant contextual policy documents, reports, internal evaluations or other publications pertinent to the operation of Ushirika humanitarian services and GBV components; • Focused interviews with key IRC staff (inclusive of past and present staff involved with the Ushirika programme, senior country programme management, regional management, expatriate and Congolese staff both in Bukavu and Kinshasa); • Focused interviews and focus groups with a representative sample of past, present and future Ushirika humanitarian services and GBV civil society partners, both in Bukavu and in other field sites; • Focused interviews/focus groups with a representative sample of past and present beneficiary communities in North Kivu, South Kivu and northern Katanga; • Undertake a comparative analysis of the position of Ushirika within the context of other service delivery agents active in the eastern DRC during its period of operation (whether State institutions or non-governmental), using document research, interviews and focus groups as appropriate; • Focused interviews/focus groups with a representative sample of other stakeholders at provincial level, including local government, Congolese civil society, traditional leaderships, DFID and other donors, and international NGOs and inter-governmental organisations; • Facilitate a participative self-assessment/reflection workshop for Ushirika and GBV programme partners and IRC staff and other key stakeholders, to allow input on interim conclusions and a further opportunity to input perspectives on the programme model as a humanitarian service delivery agent; • Use the information gained from the study and from other sources to assess linkages between Ushirika-style humanitarian service delivery programming and transitional governance and community-driven reconstruction programmes, in order to map possibilities for seamless emergency/relief to post-conflict transition interventions which effectively deliver services while building capacities at grass-roots, civic and State institution levels; • The production of interim and final reports, subject to consultation with and approval from IRC and DFID SDDE.

90 It is anticipated that the above will take some 56 days to complete to final report. The current timetable envisages completion by end November/early December 2004 (security situation permitting), so the selected consultant should be able to start immediately and retain flexibility should the security situation dictate postponement of some activities or components of this study. Some 30-35 days of the study will be spent in DRC (timing of these days are subject to consultation and agreement between IRC, the selected consultant and DFID). IRC will provide all logistical and administrative support on the ground in DRC, including security analysis and support, transportation, arrangement of interviews and field site visits, provision of programme staff to accompany the consultant, provision of office facilities, provision of board and lodging in Kinshasa and Bukavu, and provision of interpretation support if necessary.

91 ANNEX III: Code of Conduct/Guidelines

PRINCIPLES OF ENGAGEMENT FOR EMERGENCY HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

INTRODUCTION

The worsening humanitarian situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in particular in the eastern part of the country, together with increased security risks both to the personnel and assets of humanitarian agencies, made it necessary to seek consensus on a common approach to the delivery of humanitarian assistance, based on the application of a set of agreed principles. This set of principles aims at increasing the efficiency and the pertinence of the delivered aid and maximising the humanitarian space for the relied community.

The set of principles is addressed to the international Humanitarian community as well as to the political and military authorities. General overarching principles are defined under 1) while some general protocols, mainly on accessibility, security and types of interventions, monitoring and evaluation are mentioned under 2).

1) OVERARCHING PRINCIPLES

The present document, together with the “Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief”, which most assistance in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its guiding principle is… “The right to receive humanitarian assistance and to offer it is a fundamental humanitarian principle, which should be enjoyed by all citizens of all countries. As members of the international community, we recognise our obligation to provide humanitarian assistance wherever it is needed. Hence the need for unimpeded access to affected populations, is of fundamental importance in exercising that responsibility. The prime motivation of our response to disaster is to alleviate human suffering amongst those least able to withstand the stress caused by disaster. When we give humanitarian aid, it is no a partisan or political act and should not be viewed as such”… (Reference: Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in disaster relief, 7/9/98, p. 2).

Impartiality: Aid will be delivered without discrimination as to ethnicity, religious beliefs of political opinion. Humanitarian assistance should be provided solely on the basis of needs.

Neutrality -Apolitical nature of humanitarian aid: Aid agencies will be neutral in providing humanitarian assistance and must stress the apolitical nature of humanitarian assistance. The action of aid agencies will not imply recognition of or confer legitimacy of the authority in control of the area in which humanitarian assistance is provided.

Independence: The assistance provided will be depended solely on needs, giving priority to the most urgent and stressing situations, and will not be influenced by political, economic or military considerations.

Human Rights: The promotion of human rights is an essential part of humanitarian assistance and may range from passive monitoring of respect for human rights to pro-active human rights advocacy. These

92 activities will be guided by International Human Law and by the mandates given by International Instruments to various humanitarian organisations such as OHCHR, UNHCR and ICRC.

Participation: Beneficiaries, local partners and local structures should be involved, wherever possible, in the need assessment, provision and monitoring of humanitarian emergency assistance, so as to provide sustainability in the long term.

Coordination: Participating agencies commit themselves to enhanced coordination and mutual support using the existing coordination mechanisms.

Transparency: Humanitarian programmes and aid agencies operating in the country must be totally transparent in all their workings and dealings with relevant authorities. Transparency should be achieved through the regular flow of information to the relevant authorities and vice versa. This principle should be applied without prejudice to the security of the beneficiaries.

Accountability: Implementing partners hold themselves accountable to both those they seek to assist and those from whom they accept resources.

2) PROTOCOL

Freedom of access: Parties to the conflict should ensure unimpeded access for assessment, delivery and monitoring of humanitarian aid to potential beneficiaries. The assistance to affected areas should be provided in the most efficient manner and by the most accessible routes.

Security: The relevant authorities are responsible for creating conditions conducive to the implementing of humanitarian activities. This must cover the security of local and international staff as well as all assets. The restitution of requisitioned assets is an essential indication of the goodwill of the authorities. Agencies look to the local authorities to take responsibilities for ensuring the return of assets wherever possible. The security of the civil population in conflict zones is the responsibility of the relevant authorities.

Escorts: Armed escorts should only be used as a last resort for the delivery of humanitarian assistance in areas of serious insecurity. The coordinating body should evaluate the need for an armed escort on a case by case basis.

Joint assessments and types of intervention: Where possible, basic humanitarian needs and beneficiaries will be identified through joint assessment missions, which would also define the necessary package of assistance to mitigate and prevent life threatening situations. Interventions will involve local communities, wherever possible, and be designed to strengthen existing local capacities.

Monitoring and Evaluation:

93 Monitoring and evaluation of humanitarian assistance will be jointly undertaken by aid agencies and local partners, in cooperation with donors. Mechanisms will be put in place to monitor compliance with the principles of engagement.

94 ANNEX IV: Lists of Umbrella Grant Project Partners

LIST OF USHIRKA UMBRELLA GRANT PROJECT PARTNERS – PHASE I Sector Name of Organisation Project Title Geographic Project beneficiaries Principal Activities Funding zone allocated ($) Micro Credit AMALDEFEA – Association Integration of teen Commune of 60 teen mothers - Awareness-raising and training of 15,877 des mamans qui luttent mothers, widows and Kadutu, 160 widows teen mothers and widows on income- contre la délinquance abandoned children in the Bukavu 180 orphans generating activities; féminine et pour society 140 under-privileged - Assistance to orphans and under- l’encadrement des enfants children privileged children: medical care, pre- orphelins et abandonnés school programme and community canteen. CEMADEV – Centrale Assistance to vulnerable Bukavu 318 vulnerable women - Small credit disbursements with 22,823 d’Enseignement pour le female-led households in cost-recovery; Développement the town of Bukavu - Training on micro-commerce management and leadership. HALTE AFRICA Material assistance to Fizi 38 fishermen and their - Distribution of fishing equipment 21,235 members of the Tobongye families (280 people) (nets and boats) on credit with Ekeci de Baraka reimbursement to the cooperative; Mwandika fishing - Training on management, treatment cooperative and conservation techniques. OPIFET – Œuvre de Assistance to female Bukavu 301 female porters - Small credit disbursements for 20,031 Promotion des Initiatives porters at the Muhanzi (women who earn their micro-commerce activities; des Femmes Beach Market living carrying heavy - Training on micro-commerce Transporteuses sacks of agricultural management; products, construction - Construction of shelters for female materials, etc.) porters. Food CIM-BUSHI – Conseil Inter- Cultivation of marshland Walungu 1,400 women - Distribution of agricultural entrants 19,818 Security Marais du Bushi to improve agricultural 400 men (equipment and seeds); productivity and - Technical training on improved household revenues of agricultural methods; populations affected by - Assistance to displaced populations the war wanting to return to their villages. CME – Centre Mère et Community chicken Commune of 100 vulnerable women - Distribution of entrants (mangers, 6,389 Enfants farming to increase the Bagira, Bukavu hatchers, chicks, etc.); revenues of women - Training and installation of a affected by the war community management committee.

95 GISDG – Groupe Improvement of the food Kabare 280 families (1,680 - Distribution of agricultural entrants 24,284 d’Intervention pour la Santé security of households people) and genitor guinea-pigs; et le Développement Global with malnourished - Installation of household fields for children through guinea- cultivation; pig raising and market - Training on agricultural methods; gardening activities - Home-based nutritional follow-up of malnourished children.

GRENIER – Groupe Support for the increase in Walungu 600 rural women - Acquisition of cultivable land; 16,869 d’Education, Nutrition et food and seed production - Training on new agricultural Intensification des Elevages of vulnerable rural women techniques; Ruraux in Kamanyola - Creation of a seed bank. PROVAH – Promotion des Distribution of seeds and Uvira 2,403 displaced and - Distribution of tools and seeds to 19,354 Valeurs Humaines agricultural tools to returnee families (approx. encourage a return to normal displaced and returnee 12,015 people) agricultural activity; families in the Ruzizi plain, - Creation of a seed bank; Uvira territory - Peace-promotion talks. VAS – Volontaires Support for agricultural Bunyakiri 1,500 households - Food distribution 21,623 Autochtones Solidaires and livestock activities of (approx. 7,500 people) - Small rotating credit disbursements homeless and displaced for the purchase of goats, seeds and populations in Kalonge agricultural tools; - Training on animal rearing. Emergency Groupe MILIMA Emergency assistance to Uvira 350 displaced families - Distribution of food and non-food 22,823 Assistance displaced and returnee (2,369 people) items, blankets, clothes and kitchen populations in the high sets; and medium plateaus of - Peace promotion talks. North Uvira. Watsan PDIP – Programme Community health Idjwi 335 pygmy families - Construction of springs providing 23,683 d’Intégration et de promotion in Pygmy (approx. 1,675 people), potable water ; Développement du Peuple villages in South Kivu 250 non pygmy families - Training of IEC community workers Pygmée au Kivu (approx. 1,250 families) (Information, Education and Communication); - Training on artisan soap-making and hygiene promotion. Total direct project beneficiaries 30,428 Total funds allocated to partners 234,809

LIST OF USHIRIKA UMBRELLA GRANT PROJECT PARTNERS – PHASE II Sector Name of Organisation Project Title Geographic Principal Activities Beneficiaries Subgrants zone disbursed

96 FOOD AMF – Action contre la Promotion of pig-raising Kabare - Distribution of pigs and agricultural tools; 200 families (total 24,536.00 SECURITY maladie et la faim amongst particularly (South Kivu) - Training of pig-raising; of 1,000 people) vulnerable families in - Training of commercialisation activities; Kabare - Promotion of pork consumption. APED – Action pour la Assistance to fishermen Kalehe - Distribution of fishing nets on credit in 5 villages; 100 fishermen and 21,797.00 paix, l’éducation et le and their families in (South Kivu) -Training on fishing techniques; their families and développement Kalehe - Sensitisation of fishermen about protection of clients of fish- waters used for fishing; sellers (total of - Training of women about the management of the 13,553 sale of fish. ARM – Action pour la Promotion of Kaziba - Distribution of seeds and tools; 220 families (total 24,560.00 réinsertion des agropastoral activities (South Kivu) - Distribution of pigs on credit; of 1,284 people marginaux amongst vulnerable - Training on agricultural and animal rearing families in Kaziba techniques; - Promotion of pork consumption. CAPEK – Coopérative Promotion of cereal and Kabalo - Distribution of seeds and tools to farmers; 150 farmers and 15,193.50 agricole, pêche et market-gardening (North Katanga) - Training on agricultural and conservation their families and élevage « Tout activities in Kabalo techniques; families with Kabalo » - Promotion of vegetable consumption. malnourished children (total of 1,330 people) HALTE AFRICA Material assistance to Uvira, Baraka - Distribution of fishing equipment on credit to 135 fishermen and 24,792.00 fishermen and to (South Kivu) fishermen in 5 villages; female fish-sellers vulnerable women in - Training of fishermen on the management of their and their families Tanganika fishing activity; and clients (total of - Training of women on micro-commerce 22,675 people) management. OPIFET – Œuvre de Promotion of small- Outskirts of - Distribution of guinea-pigs and rabbits to female 372 women and 14,522.78 Promotion des animal husbandry Bukavu transporters on credit; their families (total Initiatives des Femmes among female porters (South Kivu) - Training on small-animal raising, and the of 1,985 people) Transporteuses on the outskirts of commercialisation of their activities; Bukavu - Sensitisation of beneficiaries about health and nutrition.

WATER & CPP/Bunyakiri – Centre Rehabilitation of 4 water Bunyakiri - Rehabilitation of water systems; Total of 10,308 24,537.00 SANITATION de promotion paysanne provision systems in (South Kivu) - Sensitisation of the local population about water people de Bunyakiri Bunyakiri conservation; - Training of maintenance committees and distribution of maintenance kits.

97 PIDP – Programme Community health Kabare and - Construction of 5 springs providing potable 656 pygmy and 20,968.31 d’Intégration et de promotion in Pygmy and Kalehe water ; non-pygmy Développement du non-Pygmy villages in (South Kivu) - Distribution of water containers and maintenance households (total of Peuple Pygmée au Kivu South Kivu kits; 3,630 people) - Construction of 10 model latrines; - Training of IEC community workers (Information, Education and Communication); - Sensitisation of the local population about the importance of prenatal and pre-school consultations. PFG – Projet Fondation Construction and Kabalo - Construction and repair of wells; 2,400 households 23,455.70 Grâce rehabilitation of 6 wells (North Katanga) - Sensitisation of the local population about (total of 11,500 providing potable water hygiene and water conservation; people) to the habitants of - Training of maintenance committees and Kabalo distribution of maintenance kits; - Distribution of water containers. SAGRAMOC – Sable, Construction of public Uvira - Construction of public latrines in 3 markets; Total of 19,806 24,531,00 gravier, moellon, latrines in 3 markets in (South Kivu) - Installation and training of sanitation committees; people construction Uvira - Distribution of maintenance kits; - Sensitisation of market users about health and sanitation. HEALTH BDC/EAC – Bureau de Rehabilitation of 3 Idjwi and - Rehabilitation of health center buildings; Total of 1,259 24,542.00 développement health centers in Idjwi Kabanda - Construction of latrines and showers and direct users of the communautaire de and Kabanda (South Kivu) installation of a system for collecting rainwater; health centers l’Eglise Anglicane du - Purchase of medical equipment; Congo - Training of health center personnel and management committee. PRODECOT – Projet du Rehabilitation of the Kalemie - Rehabilitation of the main health center building ; Total of 1,515 24,436,50 développement Kituku health center (North Katanga) - Purchase of medical equipment and medicines; direct users of the communautaire du - Training of health center personnel and the health center Tanganika management committee. PARTICU- ADIPET – Association Social reinsertion and Kalemie - Payment of school fees for orphans outside the 196 orphans and 21,750,00 LARLY pour le développement psychological (North Katanga) school system or at risk of abandoning their their foster families VULNERABLE de l’éducation dans le rehabilitation of orphans schooling; (total of 796 GROUPS / Tanganyika in Kalemie - people) EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE BOJ – Bureau d’œuvre Rehabilitation and Nyunzu - Building repair; Approximately 500 1,496.00 parmi les jeunes equipment of a socio- (North Katanga) - Equipment of the library; students and éducatif center serving - Provision of means of transport to facilitate book- teachers war-affected students in lending services Nyunzu

98 VICO – Villages Cobaye Reinstallation of 3 villages in - Construction of houses; 34 homeless 24,615.00 homeless female-led Walungu - Construction of family latrines; families (total of households victims of (South Kivu) - Distribution of non-food items. 218 people) the war in Walungu - Small rotating credit disbursements for the purchase of goats, seeds and agricultural tools; - Training on animal rearing. Total project beneficiaries 91,359 315,734.47

LIST OF GBV UMBRELLA GRANT PROJECT PARTNERS – PHASE I AND II

NGO PARTNERS Organisation Project Geographic Zone Beneficiaries Main Activities Budget Accompagnement psychosocial des femmes et filles victimes des - Kalehe territory 1,804 survivors - Counselling ADIF violences en territoires de Kabare et de Kalehe - Kabare territory of GBV - Family mediation 47,950.00 (gender-based - Medical referral Train 15 community-based educators to identify and provide emotional SOUTH KIVU violence) - Community education support to survivors of gender-based violence, as well as to educate - Economic support community members on the issues related to gender-based violence. - Food distribution

Appui juridique aux femmes et filles victimes des violences dans la - Bukavu and 263 survivors - Mediation AED ville de Bukavu et ses périphéries. surrounding of GBV - Legal assistance 42,461.00 territories - Medical referral Provide legal assistance to survivors of GBV with the goal of educating them - Educational radio on their rights and on the justice system in order to support them during the SOUTH KIVU programs decision-making process of whether or not to press charges. Assist those who decide to go forward with legal charges in the formal and/or traditional legal systems.

« Guéris mon peuple 2 » - Goma 1,970 survivors - Counselling DOCS - Masisi (health zone) of GBV - Medical referral 58,049.00 Train 40 community-based counselors throughout 2 zones to provide - Voluntary HIV testing emotional support to survivors who request it, as well as to identify their NORTH KIVU - Surgery immediate medical needs and refer them accordingly. Provide free surgical intervention to victims who require it. Act as a referral point for the other partner organisations.

99 Accompagnement psychologique et prise en charge médicale et - Bukavu 3,073 survivors - Counselling HOPITAL chirurgicale des FFVVs accueillies à l’Hôpital de Panzi. - territories of South of GBV - Voluntary HIV testing 48,341.00 DE PANZI Kivu - Surgery Improve the conditions in which survivors are received and taken care of in the hospital, in particular those who require surgical intervention and long- SOUTH KIVU term hospitalisation. Provide optional counseling services for all survivors who present themselves. Act as a referral point for survivors who have been seriously injured and identified by the other partner organisations.

Sensibilisation des communautés et assistance aux femmes victimes - Goma, Butembo, 658 survivors - Community education SOPROP des violences au Nord-Kivu Beni of GBV - Counselling 48,127.00 - Medical treatment and - Nyiragongo, Masisi, referral Train 35 community educators to improve the populations’ understanding of and Rutshuru - Vocational training the issues related to gender-based violence, as well as to identify and work territories directly with survivors to facilitate their referral to appropriate services available in the area. Provide medical services to victims who present signs of NORTH KIVU physical trauma and refer those who are seriously injured to the appropriate service provider.

Protection des femmes et filles des communautés pygmées contre - Nyiragongo territory 711 survivors - Community education UEFA les violences sexuelles - Masisi territory of GBV - Counselling 49,882.60 - Kabare territory - Family mediation Protect 556 pygmy families in 21 pygmy communities from acts of gender- - Kalehe territory - Medical referral based violence by means of implementing educational programs within and - Bunyakiri territory - Economic support around their communities. Empower pygmy women to adopt economic - Humanitarian aid activities geared towards reducing their exposure to potential acts of SOUTH AND NORTH violence. Provide counseling services and medical referral to survivors. KIVU

Développement du CENTRE ESTHER pour la détraumatisation et la - Walungu territory 1,452 survivors - Counselling VISION paix - Kabare territory of GBV - Family mediation 42,790.85 TEQOA - Medical referral Support a counseling center in Bideka (Walungu), as well as an existing SOUTH KIVU - Community education network for community mediation and information-sharing throughout the Ngweshe et Nindja areas.

100 Réinsertion socio-économique des FFVV et les membres de leurs - Walungu territory 874 survivors - Counselling VODIMIR ménages affectés dans les zones de Walungu et Mwenga. of GBV - Medical referral 51,914.40 SOUTH KIVU - Micro-credit Facilitate the reintegration of 719 survivors identified in 5 sites in Walungu by - Community education means of providing emotional support, and medical referral and payment for any necessary treatment. Provide economic support to survivors and train them on improved agricultural and animal husbandry techniques. Educate the 5 communities on their role in the reintegration of survivors back into their families and communities.

IFDAP Réseau des maisons des femmes au sud du Sud Kivu Uvira, Nundu and Fizi 2,854 survivors - Counseling 56,034.00 territories - Family mediation, Install 11 ‘Women’s centres’ in the Southern area of South Kivu, providing - medical referral counseling, family mediation, community education, legal and psychosocial SOUTH KIVU - community education support services to survivors. - legal assistance Total 13,659 $445,549.85

CBO PARTNERS No. Of Budget Types of projects Geographic Zone Beneficiaries Main Activities Organisations 18 Support to small grass-roots women’s groups in better assisting - Kabare and 1,602 - agropastoral $15,116.05 survivors who have suffered pillaging and rejection, living in extreme Walungu territories survivors - micro-credit (cash and in- poverty - payment of school kind) SOUTH KIVU fees - distribution of clothing and basic household equipment

ANNEX V: Schedule of Research Activities

Monday 27/09 Tuesday 28/09 Wednesday 29/09 Thursday 30/09 Friday 01/10 Saturday 02/10 AM Arrival in Bukavu Review of programme Review of programme Meeting at OCHA: Participation in Field visit to Kaziba documents documents action plan for South CSDU internal (ARM)

101 Kivu evaluation and Discussion with Isatou Discussion with Isatou planning meeting PM Meeting with IMC Review of programme Review of programme Participation in Sunday 03/10 Briefing by Isatou documents documents CSDU internal (CSDU Coordinator) Meeting with War Child evaluation and Phone conversations Establish programme for Meeting with planning meeting with Xavier Bardou & Meeting with UNDP coming weeks Plateforme Diobass Karin Wachter

Meeting with Malteser Monday 04/10 Tuesday 05/10 Wednesday 06/10 Thursday 07/10 Friday 08/10 Saturday 09/10 AM 9h Visit Panzi Hospital 8h30 Field visit to UEFA DENNIS SICK! 8h30 Meeting with 8h Visit to MRC 8h30 Visit to VICO and focus group with and focus group with CEMADEV and focus project (Katana) and focus group with beneficiaries beneficiaries group with beneficiaries beneficiaries Meeting with head of VAS CSDU finance unit 12h Meeting with IPS Malteser

PM 14h Meeting with World Meeting with Christian Meeting with 16h Visit to APED Sunday 10/10 Vision Aid WORLDVISION 16h Departure to 15h30 Meeting with BDC Meeting with Women Meeting with ISDR Goma for Women International Monday 11/10 Tuesday 12/10 Wednesday 13/10 Thursday 14/10 Friday 15/10 Saturday 16/10 AM Meeting with SOPROP Meeting with CAPEK and Meeting with PFG and Meeting with and focus group with Travel: Goma-Bukavu- focus group with focus group with Travel: Kabalo- AMALDEFEA beneficiaries Kabalo beneficiaries beneficiaries Bukavu PM Meeting with DOCS and Meeting with Meeting with local Meeting with local Meeting with FHI Meeting with OPIFET focus group with administrative and local administrative and administrative and beneficiaries leaders traditional leaders traditional leaders Meeting with Malteser Tour of waterholes Monday 18/10 Tuesday 19/10 Wednesday 20/10 Thursday 21/10 Friday 22/10 Saturday 23/10 AM Review of programme Meeting with Ministry of Meeting with Christian Aid Meeting with DFID documents Rural Development Travel: Bukavu- Travel: Kinshasa-

102 Kinshasa Meeting with Anitha Nairobi- - Meeting with Ministry of (Ushirika I) and Amsterdam Agriculture Meeting with Heritiers other staff de la Justice members PM Meeting with Meeting with Isatou Planning for workshop in Feedback to CSDU staff Meeting with IRC USAID/OTI November on study Country Director Meeting with IRC Country Director

103

ANNEX VI: Methodology

The following data gathering methods were used during this consultancy:

1. Briefing(s) with and presentations to IRC staff 2. Semi-structured interviews with IRC staff 3. Structured and informal interviews with (groups of) partner local NGO and CBO key staff 4. IRC documentation review 5. Field visits to programme sites in and around Bukavu, Goma, and Kabalo, including project site visit and explanation, structured and informal interviews with target population groups (Individuals and groups, CBO & NGO management, as well as stakeholders (traditional leaders, teachers, etc.) 6. Meetings with INGO counterpart organisations 7. Interviews with donors (DFID, USAID, USAID/OTI) in Kinshasa 8. Final workshop in Bukavu with IRC CSDI staff