The case of the $6.7million phantom cocoa improvement project, part V

There are lots of things that JMD does well, and maybe the reason it has had such success in Aceh is because it is so small, and has such a clearly defined focus: sustainable livelihoods for people in nearly-inaccessible places.  And by inaccessible I mean too far away from the capital for large NGOs to make it worth their while, too far into territory where ex-combatants are still pretty furious about the short shrift they’ve been given by the government, and too remote for government departments to visit very often.  As soon as we had addressed emergency housing and health issues in Aceh Jaya, the epicenter of the 2004 tsunami, JMD went inland, to those areas that had been ravaged not only by the tsunami but by the conflict as well.  So the agency became quite familiar with what needed doing in the northeastern part of the province, and we let the large international agencies continue to work around the fringes of the capital and, to some extent, in the central highlands, where JMD acted as implementing partner for an Arabica coffee improvement project. 

But JMD’s forte was its intimate knowledge of districts included in AAA/Keumang’s cocoa farmer improvement proposal: Aceh Timur, Pidie, Pidie Jaya, Bener Maria, Aceh Utara.

That was one of the reasons we though we could be helpful: staff knew the local leaders, and were familiar with the current projects and local NGOs implementing them.  It would be relatively easy for us (if we secured a small amount of funding) to take AAA’s final report and conduct a program/activity monitoring evaluation. Obviously, Keumang, having left the province, and AAA, no longer working in Indonesia, could not provide this.

When I wrote (twice) to AAA, however, and called (twice) their corporate offices, I was met with silence.  Not “no thanks.”  Not “It’s really not necessary, but how kind of you.”  Nothing.  Zip.  It was as if, with that offer, the agency had decided I was too much trouble to even communicate with. Or did they just hope we would go away and not bother to evaluate what was appearing to be more and more of a mere phantom program?

So we decoded to find out what type of narrative document was on file with World Bank at the PMU (Project Management Unit).

Now, the PMU of any project strikes fear in the hearts of most implementing agencies.  It’s kind of like the IRS: they exist in some shadowy but very real way, they demand lots of paperwork, and stern-looking, overdressed people make visits when things are really going south, but you never really know to whom they contractually owe their allegiance. Whose side are they on?

In the case of the EDFF funds, the PMU were World Bank employees (as always) but they seemed to have a much larger role in program implementation than in other countries—possibly because the “capacity,” as some like to say, of the recipient agency and its subcontractors was not up to par with WB regulations.  So even large agencies like AAA and IOM and World Wildlife Fund had PMU members trotting round after them because let’s face it, no one had ever been to post-tsunami, post-conflict Aceh before, or had worked with suddenly-flung-together local NGOs or, for that matter, been given so much money in such a short span of time. And neither had any World Bank Branch.  As one World Bank manager told me last year, “No one in that office had ever dealt with that much money.  There were a lot of, well, competence problems.  But the weird thing is, most of those people who were with the PMU, and all of World Bank in Indonesia, were promoted to positions in other countries, just because the amount of money they were given to manage was so huge.  It didn’t have anything to do with how good they were at their job—it was just that they got to say, ‘Look, I handled a $50 million portfolio’ and up the ladder they went.”

Comforting, huh?

But I wanted to make sure that there really weren’t any more documents, or evaluations, or monitoring visits conducted for the AAA program on file at World Bank or whatever passed for the post-EDFF entity in Aceh.

So I asked our Aceh staff to see if they could contact someone at World Bank in Jakarta to find out where they had what I assumed was an enormous database of projects. 

What we discovered was that a) no one at the PMU in Jakarta would talk to us, and b) a staff member’s associate, who had been on the PMU during the height of the EDFF funds dispersal, told him (before he stopped talking altogether) that there was no database, there were no records, and that the PMU was basically a bunch of badly-trained wannabe bureaucrats who had all left the province, and that we’d never get anything out of World Bank, programmatic document-wise, so we should just stop looking.

We will take a nice jaw-dropping pause here, and a moment of silence to reflect upon $7billion worth of international assistance and no centralized database of programs, activities, or evaluations.  Financials, yes.  There were enough fiscal outlay justifications and balanced budgets to sink a container ship.  But not one document stating that yes we saw the health clinic building, or the 5 fruit transport trucks, or the vastly improved lifestyle of the new shrimp farmers.  I’m not saying that the implementing NGOs themselves did not have in their own offices --and subsequently online--volumes and volumes and exhaustive exit study after exit study of their projects and their fabulous effects on the province and their (get me the vapors) “lessons learned.” But the projects had no independent evaluation component, and the fiduciary (BRR/WB) did not require one, or, after a while, any project/activity narrative.

There’s certainly more to this onion than the outer layer I’ve peeled off here, so next time I will tell you about the RAN database and its spawn of other brainstorms from the (very well-funded) Good Idea Fairy, and why they all went belly-up, leaving me and JMD wondering how we could ever hope to find out if it was true that AAA/Keumang had mishandled a good portion of their allocated $6.7 million, or if indeed anyone cared.

(And by the way, if anyone reading this has some information that can demonstrate to me why I am dead wrong about this, please get in touch with me because I would dearly love to believe that all these funds were appropriately spent and  these projects that we cannot find really do exist and are doing well.  Nothing would please me more.  I'm not in this for the yellow journalism, believe me.)

Part II: Preface to the $6.7million cocoa improvement project that wasn’t

The 2006 NGO Impact Initiative: An Assessment by the International Humanitarian NGO Community (preface by Bill Cinton) stressed the failure of the international community in Aceh to include local NGOs in the recovery and reconstruction process.

“International NGOs should expand efforts to recognize and promote the leadership of local communities, local aid groups, and, where appropriate, affected governments in recovery from major disasters; they should also make the strengthening of local capacity in recovery from an emergency a priority equal to that of service delivery.”

As many of you know, I’ve been blathering on about sustainability in this blog because I really have come to the conclusion that the word has lost all its meaning and is just trotted out in grant proposals and political speeches to get people to like whichever project or business or candidate or product is marketing itself.  To us, in Aceh, sustainability means the continuation of a practice long after outsiders have left.  It’s carried on by future generations, who decide to stick around instead of escaping at the earliest possible opportunity from a life that has always been too hard, too poor, too boring, too dangerous.

One of the things JMD keeps asking its women cocoa farmers is: do you think your kids will want to do this?  Not only do the farmers in Aceh Timur have to want to follow tradition, they have to re-invent that tradition after its nearly 30-year coma. 

Imagine if all during your childhood you were told that your family were fishermen, but the ocean was off limits and your parents never went out on the water.  You heard about it all the time from your grandparents.  Then when you’re 30, the ocean becomes open for business, someone points you to the family boat (up on blocks and rotting) and says “okay, go continue the tradition.”  You want to.  You know it’s your legacy.  But you don’t have a frigging clue.  

Welcome to cocoa farming in Aceh Timur.

As Field Officer Robert said, “The only reason people are still here growing cocoa is that their families really loved growing cocoa.”  It’s one of the most labor-intensive crops on the planet, and if it doesn’t show you an increased return, well, after a while you just have to give it up--if not for you, for the sake of your kids. 

So ever since the 2004 tsunami, JMD has been helping people across Aceh with small projects that the communities thought were important. and then we leave, and come back every year or so to see how everyone’s doing, and if they are still doing it, or if if they have modified it to respond to natural or demographic changes, then it’s still sustainable. 

When we came back to Aceh Timur in 2009 after giving an integrated agriculture training the previous year, there had been an incredible flood that washed out one of the beekeeping projects.  That’s when the first group of women approached us and asked for some help re-starting their cocoa fields.  Since then, the projects have been community-led: JMD doesn’t decide what people want; they tell us, and we see if it’s manageable, and we develop a model that can be replicated in other parts of the district or the province, because we figure, if it plays in Peoria, it might find success somewhere else.

That’s when a company called Cocoa Ventures from Medan contacted JMD and asked us to please replicate a really incredibly successful training we had developed, in what’s called IPM—integrated pest management.  Cocoa ventures wanted to purchase large amounts of beans from a group of villages to the east, almost on the border of Aceh Utara, where the land was exceptionally fertile.  Problem was, no one was helping those farmers with any type of cultivation, harvest and pest control assistance. They had lots of cocoa trees, but no idea how to recondition and maintain them.

This was a great opportunity—JMD could take its pest control clinic on the road—possibly even set up a duplicate project in the area around Pante Bidari.

First, however, JMD researched the possibility that there had been projects in that area.  If it was so fertile, if cocoa was so important a commodity, surely some of the post-tsunami Multi-Donor Fund money would have gone there.

And sure enough, we found a project, funded by EDFF/The Economic Development Financing Facility, which was the “umbrella” mechanism set up to disburse the remaining $50 million of the tsunami assistance Multi Donor Fund/MDF.  As its title suggests, it focused more on development and less on post-disaster reconstruction.  Its object was to disburse the remainder of the fund as quickly and as easily as possible, and so its allocations were in the $3-10 million range.

Gosh, I do go on.

But first, a word about the EDFF funds.  Like their big brother the MDF, EDFF funds were primarily allocated to large foreign NGOs such as IOM, Mercy Corps, Oxfam, DAI, World Wildlife Fund, etc., the rationale being that these agencies had large enough administrative and fiscal departments to adequately track the awarded funds and to file appropriate reports.  In other words, the MDF/EDFF did not trust any of the local Acehnese agencies enough to directly award them the funds.  Instead, one of two things happened: the international NGO would subcontract with a smaller local agency (IOM did this with JMD for its coffee improvement project), or it would simply poach staff from the existing local agencies, paying them far more than the local agencies could, gutting those agencies until they folded and then turning their Acehnese employees loose at the end of the project.   As far as we know, and we have done extensive research on this, there was never any money devoted to improving the administrative capacity of any local agency so that it could continue the work of reconstruction after the foreign NGOs had left. Why?  Because those NGOs had no intention of leaving until the last rupiah was extracted from the World Bank’s coffers.  And there were billions and billions—not of rupiah but of dollars.  “But we trained Acehnese staff!” they will whine, from their air conditioned HQs.  Yup, you trained ‘em all right.  And where will they go work now?  All the local agencies are gone.  So the best talent Aceh has . . . leaves the province because there is no agency there to support them.

So the EDFF has $50 million and JMD gets busy developing proposals, based on all the successful projects they’d done since 2005: an extensive goat fattening and dairy project, a sustainable livelihoods initiative in the protected forest, a cocoa improvement project for widows and fighting age males, a Robusta coffee revitalization project that included a professional coffee consultant.

And -–funny story--each of these projects was approved and adored.

They just didn’t want dinky old JMD to be the agency to get the majority of the funds.

So they took the dairy project model and gave it to then-governor Irwandi’s wife, who thought she’d like to do something like that; they asked Fauna and Flora International to implement a community forest ranger training program with JMD’s livelihoods model, they asked IOM to replicate JMD’s Robusta project, only in central Aceh and for Arabica, and they showed JMD’s model to an agency called Action Aid Australia (AAA), and gave them $6.7 million to implement a cocoa improvement project in five districts including Aceh Timur.  All of these projects have a story.  All of them made me seethe.  But the one that is so exquisitely sleazy, the one that is indeed impossible to believe, is the story of AAA and the $6.7 million that vanished without a trace, and how no one seems to be too worried about that.  I’m going to tell you about all of them.  But tomorrow we’ll start with AAA and the 3,000 imaginary cocoa farmers.