It's a beautiful Summer evening in Kigali. There is neither even a whiff of a breeze nor a cloud in the sky as the Sun heads swiftly for the Horizon, glowing bright red as it does the closer you are to the Equator. Being as close to the Equator as Kigali is (2 degrees south) the days don't vary enormously in length from Summer to Winter. At their longest, as they are now, the Sun sets at around 6.20pm. In Winter closer to 5.30pm. Which means no long, sunny evenings to sit on a terrace having a beer during the Summer (as I recently enjoyed back in New York, London and Toronto) nor does it mean mood-destroyingly short days during the Winter. At the other end of the day, the Sun is always up by 6am and the Rwandan people on the move not long after. This is still a country that walks to work even in Kigali. Only the elite and the taxi drivers have cars. Some can afford to take the little mutatus ("bus" in Swahili lingo, exactly the same little vans were in use in Lima and were called "micros"). Otherwise as you drive to work in the morning or home in the evening you see lines of people walking along the sides of the roads, which are frequently lacking in pavements / sidewalks. The reason that activity starts so early here is that everyone is in bed very early. After darkness descends only 28% of urban residences and a very low 2% of rural ones have electricity to make use of. What else is one to do but sleep? Or that other activity which the Rwandan government is actively discouraging in order to bring down the 5.5 fertility rate amongst Rwandan women.
In case anyone happens to be interested in further stats on Rwanda, mostly related to health, check out the newly released Interim Demographic and Health Survey (http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs/pub_details.cfm?id=936&srchTp=home). If you're a geek like me, it makes for fascinating reading. It has its drawbacks as a survey (much of the data is self-reported and impervious to verification and there is little comparison to previous years for trend analysis) however it's still for the most part pretty good as an indication.
As for work it never sits still. When I arrived three new people had been hired all starting the same day as me who would form the team I would manage. Two of those have now left, one to do a masters in Belgium and the other on loan to our sister organisation Partners in Health. What's more we're on the verge of hiring nine or ten additional people who will all have the misfortune to be managed by yours truly. It's exciting. I'm engaged in three broad areas: advising the Ministry of Health in Kigali on policy and planning; working in one of the 30 districts of Rwanda to help them manage their health system, consisting of a district hospital and thirteen health centres; perhaps most interestingly of all developing a large-scale data collection, storage and analysis tool/engine which will collect several hundred data points on every health facility in the country (450 and rising) every six months and allow every level of the health system (from rural, isolated health centres to the Ministry of Health in Kigali) to manage their investment and operational decision-making. This last piece of work is all the more fun because it's probably one of the first to be developed on the continent and is being built with one eye on other countries where we could deploy it. Right now we're going through a certain lull as most CHAI (Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, just one of several initiatives run by the Clinton Foundation) staff are out on vacation. However the storm clouds are clearly visible and due to arrive in the first couple weeks of August. From then until Christmas, and beyond, work is going to be wild. Our donors and the Ministry expect.
Showing posts with label Life in Rwanda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Life in Rwanda. Show all posts
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
A New(ish) Beginning
Four and a half months into my life in Rwanda and I’ve managed to say virtually nothing about my life here so far! My intention was to round out my experience working on the Obama campaign with one further entry detailing the micro-managed, super-focused, hugely rewarding and in the end massively successful two months that I spent in Las Vegas but the task of writing that piece has seemed so overwhelming that all I have to show for it is two months of silence. So I’ve decided to skip that and move on to the present.
Where to start? Let’s begin with the personal. That large house I referred to a few posts ago which was one of two options I was considering to move into is now my home. My bedroom, whence I’m writing this, is large enough for a huge bed and could comfortably accommodate a table tennis table and a pool table besides. I’ve no doubt this is the largest bedroom I will ever inhabit and would probably compare favourably in size to the entire flat I lived in before leaving London. It’s ridiculous. I share the house with three people, all girls and all Canadian. That they are all girls is entirely unsurprising; the NGO crowd here is overwhelmingly female (clearly not a problem, at least not for the minority gender). That they are all Canadian is much more so albeit that they’re an interesting mix: one Scottish-Canadian; one Eritrean-Canadian; and one US-Dutch-Canadian. In Kigali though one mostly comes across Americans, Belgians, Germans and Brits. And virtually no French. For those who don’t know the history, these last have not entirely covered themselves in glory in their dealings with this country and continue to shoot themselves in the foot diplomatically by pursuing government officials for war crimes and generally being on the wrong side of the argument. However I’m teetering into the political sphere about which I will unfortunately have to be less talkative than I was in Peru. (Incidentally the trial of Alberto Fujimori which I discussed a fair amount over a year ago is due to come to a close very shortly. A conviction is likely assuming the trial doesn’t collapse on the technicality that he’s in ill health and his absence from the courtroom for 12 days would entail starting all over again.)
Work at the Clinton Foundation is fantastically fun and extremely rewarding. And constantly in flux. Amusingly in some ways it’s very similar to what I was doing at Goldman Sachs, i.e. sitting in an office working with Excel all day. In important ways though it’s very different. Whereas my work at GS for six years was almost entirely inward facing, here I am daily in meetings with Ministry officials and every couple of weeks am out in the field meeting with regional health managers. At GS it was always difficult to explain to people what I did, particularly to those who didn’t work in finance, which led some to think I really worked for the intelligence services, but here it’s essentially very simple. We are here to help the Rwandans build up their capacity to successfully manage their own affairs and to do ourselves out of a job.
Unfortunately success isn’t going to come rapidly and someone will likely still be doing what I’m doing by the time I’m considering retirement but you would go mad in this line of work if you didn’t consider and accept the long view. And in Rwanda things happen. I’m constantly hearing from my NGO colleagues who work across African countries that there’s a level of thought, coordination and direction here that isn’t to be found anywhere else on the continent. From the Big Man on down there’s a will to pull this country up and to do so in a systematic, government-driven and clean way. It’s impressive to behold even for someone as inexperienced as me who has nothing with which to compare it. Of course the Rwandans have no resources. There’s very little to drive tax revenue so the country is massively dependent on foreign funding. And as previously said, this will not change anytime soon. But there is the will and there is the understanding of how to do it even if with other people’s money. It’s extremely exciting to be a part of. Over time I want to talk more about the challenges and the opportunities, the hopes of this tiny little over-populated country, the expectations of the international community and the tensions that result when the two rub each other the wrong way. There are endless anecdotes that constantly have us thinking about how to improve and make more effective our work to help Rwanda. The goal is nothing short of colossal.
Where to start? Let’s begin with the personal. That large house I referred to a few posts ago which was one of two options I was considering to move into is now my home. My bedroom, whence I’m writing this, is large enough for a huge bed and could comfortably accommodate a table tennis table and a pool table besides. I’ve no doubt this is the largest bedroom I will ever inhabit and would probably compare favourably in size to the entire flat I lived in before leaving London. It’s ridiculous. I share the house with three people, all girls and all Canadian. That they are all girls is entirely unsurprising; the NGO crowd here is overwhelmingly female (clearly not a problem, at least not for the minority gender). That they are all Canadian is much more so albeit that they’re an interesting mix: one Scottish-Canadian; one Eritrean-Canadian; and one US-Dutch-Canadian. In Kigali though one mostly comes across Americans, Belgians, Germans and Brits. And virtually no French. For those who don’t know the history, these last have not entirely covered themselves in glory in their dealings with this country and continue to shoot themselves in the foot diplomatically by pursuing government officials for war crimes and generally being on the wrong side of the argument. However I’m teetering into the political sphere about which I will unfortunately have to be less talkative than I was in Peru. (Incidentally the trial of Alberto Fujimori which I discussed a fair amount over a year ago is due to come to a close very shortly. A conviction is likely assuming the trial doesn’t collapse on the technicality that he’s in ill health and his absence from the courtroom for 12 days would entail starting all over again.)
Work at the Clinton Foundation is fantastically fun and extremely rewarding. And constantly in flux. Amusingly in some ways it’s very similar to what I was doing at Goldman Sachs, i.e. sitting in an office working with Excel all day. In important ways though it’s very different. Whereas my work at GS for six years was almost entirely inward facing, here I am daily in meetings with Ministry officials and every couple of weeks am out in the field meeting with regional health managers. At GS it was always difficult to explain to people what I did, particularly to those who didn’t work in finance, which led some to think I really worked for the intelligence services, but here it’s essentially very simple. We are here to help the Rwandans build up their capacity to successfully manage their own affairs and to do ourselves out of a job.
Unfortunately success isn’t going to come rapidly and someone will likely still be doing what I’m doing by the time I’m considering retirement but you would go mad in this line of work if you didn’t consider and accept the long view. And in Rwanda things happen. I’m constantly hearing from my NGO colleagues who work across African countries that there’s a level of thought, coordination and direction here that isn’t to be found anywhere else on the continent. From the Big Man on down there’s a will to pull this country up and to do so in a systematic, government-driven and clean way. It’s impressive to behold even for someone as inexperienced as me who has nothing with which to compare it. Of course the Rwandans have no resources. There’s very little to drive tax revenue so the country is massively dependent on foreign funding. And as previously said, this will not change anytime soon. But there is the will and there is the understanding of how to do it even if with other people’s money. It’s extremely exciting to be a part of. Over time I want to talk more about the challenges and the opportunities, the hopes of this tiny little over-populated country, the expectations of the international community and the tensions that result when the two rub each other the wrong way. There are endless anecdotes that constantly have us thinking about how to improve and make more effective our work to help Rwanda. The goal is nothing short of colossal.
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