World Bank's response re: AAA/Keumang raises more questions than it answers . . . and $6.7 million still unaccounted for

Last week I wrote a letter to World Bank, addressed to one of the compilers of the 65-page EDFF Completion report expressing shock and surprise that it had left JMD out of the final EDFF report as the DSF subcontractor for IOM’s Arabica coffee project (2009-2011).  I was stunned, I tell you—there it was, big as life on the chart: “IOM had no local partner.”  How many hands and eyes did that report have to pass (including IOM’s), and still they omit JMD’s name? Especially considering that one of the requirements of getting EDFF funding was that a foreign NGO MUST have a local partner.

I also asked some slightly pointed questions regarding the AAA/Keumang project, which the report had rated as “moderately unsatisfactory.” 

No, really?

Well, knock me over with a feather, I received a response from their Jakarta office of External Affairs this week, apologizing for the oversight and promising to include JMD in its amended report, and offering some additional (but not much) information on the ill-fated $6.7 million project that never materialized.

The email stated in part that “With regard to your query about the Action Aid Australia and Keumang Foundation sub-project, the Implementation Completion Report has indicated that this project faced a number of implementation delays and procurement issues (page 49), and was scaled back as result of extensive project monitoring. We attach below the link to the report for reference:

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/05/17816499/indonesia-aceh-economic-development-financing-facility-project.

I thought this was cute as the dickens, since my email to them had quoted this very report and mentioned this very page.  So their answer was to quote me back my question.  Probably because the question's subtext went something like this: “You would have only attributed ‘the project’s failure to a number of implementation delays and procurement issues’ and labeled it ‘scaled back as a result of extensive project monitoring’ if you had never visited the project site or did any comprehensive examination of reports.”  I do believe that ‘scaled back as a result of extensive project monitoring’ really means “worked like mad to figure out something different since the original scope was impossible from the outset, the banks were never on board with the scheme, the implementing partner was crooked, and the lead NGO had little idea of what it had gotten into.”  But that would mean that $6.7 million was not well spent, and that just wasn’t something that anyone wants to admit, not at this late date.

The email went on, however, stating that “in February 2014, the World Bank Group announced the debarment of Mr. Yusri Yusuf, Director of the Keumang Foundation, . . .  for a minimum period of five years, in response to allegations of fraudulent and coercive practices under the Aceh Economic Development Financing Facility (EDFF) Project.” The link explains that “an investigation by [the World Bank’s] Integrity Vice Presidency reveal[ed] evidence that Mr. Yusuf submitted fraudulent expenses and made threats in an effort to have the fraudulent expenses paid.  The debarment represents the first sanctions resulting from coercive practices.”

The AAA/Keumang project ran (if you can call it that) from 2008-2009.  Why did the World Bank take 5 years to make the announcement? Why has AAA been so loathe to rat out what was clearly a horrible agency (whose name still makes people spit on the ground every time JMD staff mentions it)?

My response to the folks in External Affairs:

Dear Ms D----

Thanks so much for your prompt reply.  We appreciate your amendments to the EDFF final report, which will now state that JMD was the subcontractor for IOM's Arabica coffee improvement project in Central Aceh.

We are still interested in the AAA/Keumang project, in that we had written to AAA and World Bank several months ago offering to conduct a monitoring and evaluation visit based on AAA's final report to World Bank/EDFF, a copy of which was forwarded to us by AAA. (We were going to seek a small amount funding for this evaluation from either USAID, WB or another interested donor, and wanted to make sure that it would be a useful addition to EDFF's closeout documents.)

JMD was interested in this project for two reasons: 1) it had been conducting a small but successful cocoa improvement and integrated farming project in the same area since 2009, and was hoping to build on AAA's existing work, and 2) JMD had been asked by a cocoa processing company to provide specific IPM trainings to farmers in some of the locations indicated in AAA's report as containing their beneficiaries.  In March 2012 and again in early 2013 and 2014, staff traveled to those areas to determine the extent of the AAA/Keumang project's completion, to avoid duplication of services.

With very few exceptions, staff could find no evidence of any of the project goals as being completed in terms of construction, materials/equipment, or pre-paid services such as 5-year advance payments for rental facilities.

Since Keumang was tasked with, among other things, participatory rural appraisal and developing baseline data, we understand that it is difficult to gauge the extent to which these particular services were delivered and the funds legitimately allocated to this component.  But as a small agency that was not given the opportunity to bid on this project, and who could most likely have completed it successfully for far less than half of the $6.7million total cost, JMD is interested in learning where exactly  that $6.7 million went.  AAA reports that it spent all of its allocation, and yet both your report and theirs state that many interventions were "scaled back." 

We were not allowed to see the financials for this project, and so have had to make some assumptions based on information which may be incomplete.  However, to date we have not encountered anyone acquainted with that project who knows of any part of it, save one-half of a co-op's construction, that was completed. 

Prior to making any claims of fraudulent activity regarding this project in the link you have provided, we wanted to see if we could pursue the matter through a formal evaluation to determine exactly what services were provided to the 4,000 farmers in north/east Aceh.  Our primary goal is to help these communities become economically self-sufficient stewards of the natural resources that surround them; encouraging production of this carbon-neutral commodity is beneficial to the entire province.   By highlighting the components of this project that have not been sufficiently addressed, we hope that possible future funding requests will be understood by the donor community as not duplicating an effort already addressed by EDFF.

Thanks again for your time and assistance.

See? I can be diplomatic when I want to be.

But it’s killing me, because still, nobody knows (or is telling) where that $6.7 million went. 

And next time, I’ll tell you something even more bizarre: reports that in 2012, supposedly long after this project closed and slunk away and AAA left Indonesia, AAA signed MoUs with Bappeda in Aceh for the same project . . . it’s like the Twilight Zone, I swear.

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.)

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

At last I am returning to the story of Action Aid Australia’s  $6.7 million EDFF project in 2009 called Improving Competitiveness of Aceh Cocoa Value Chain to Increase Farmers Income, Create Jobs and Alleviate Poverty, and their local implementing partner, Keumang Foundation, and how through a series of investigations worthy of an Indonesian version of Inspector Clouseau we discovered that the project never existed. 

I spoke of my emails to AAA, the documents they sent me indicating that they had never completed the project or done a follow-up, and that great chunks of the project that had been paid for up front were scrapped due to the “realization” after the fact that those components were never feasible.  And these were only the parts that were available through the incomplete document—the complete one, with financials, having been sent to the World Bank (we assumed).

You must go back and read my August 28 post; it really is a corker.

So the next thing we did, simultaneously, was scour the countryside for the implementing partner (Keumang) and contact AAA’s US headquarters, since they had disappeared from Indonesia.

What JMD staff on the ground found out about Keumang was that it wasn’t ever really a sustainable livelihoods agency; rather, it was a group of data collectors and participatory rural appraisers who had just finished a project for the Australian government’s agriculture research department called “Integrated soil and crop management for rehabilitation of vegetable production in the tsunami-affected areas of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam province, Indonesia.” http://aciar.gov.au/files/node/12948/fr2010_15__19567.pdf

Apparently they had performed adequately, and the 300+ page report states that they were in charge of basically getting the farmers together and helping the agency administer surveys. 

It may have been merely a case of biting off more than they could chew, but no RFP ever went out, so AAA probably just used them on the recommendation of this project, which was about the most lunkheaded thing I can think of to do, since what AAA was proposing was worlds away from community surveys: it was construction, fleet procurement, logistics, investment banking, training, co-op development, value chain improvement, actual agricultural knowledge . . . I have to lie down just thinking about what a bunch of geniuses this group was. 

But soon, as the final cocoa improvement report hints, AAA’s international people realized that they were being used by this sneaky faux-NGO, or else they just did not know how to control this big of a project with this incompetent a local partner, and so they justified all over the place as to why they had to spend the money the way they did.

Meanwhile, after I was taken off “hold” at AAA’s US headquarters, I was told that yes, indeed, they no longer had a presence in Indonesia, but that one of their Pacific representatives would get back to me.

Twice I called, and twice received the same message.

No one has any intention of getting back to me.

The representative who had returned my emails in 2013 (who had forwarded me the “final” 2010 report) had asked that we not use any of this information publically without contacting them.  Believe me, I tried.

What I wrote and asked her was what she thought of JMD performing the final program evaluation that AAA could not do because of the disappearance/demise of Keumang. World Bank blacklisted/suspended them in October 2013, at which point we fund out that they were NOT a local agency but ANOTHER international NGO (from Sri Lanka) posing as Acehnese.  Nice work!). http://www.treasury.gov.lk/notices/default-suspended-lis.html

It was clear at this point that AAA had washed its hands of Aceh and cocoa farming assistance, that no one was going to return any of that $6.7 million that was unspent, and that the only positive thing to do was to perform a post-project evaluation of the whole thing, which we were certain World Bank would love, and which the Provincial government would thank us for.  After all, weren’t bureaucracies always mad for those “lessons learned” documents that showed how to yank victory from the jaws of defeat?

Besides, by conducting this evaluation, JMD could do two important things: 1) learn a lot about the area in which it wanted to expand in terms of farmer assistance, and 2) network with communities that had been severely burned by this project, in order to re-establish their faith in civil society and non-profit assistance.  So we asked AAA if it would mind if we looked for additional funding to conduct this evaluation based on the report document we had.

I know you think you know what comes next, but you will be very surprised to learn just how convoluted things get, especially when this project that never existed refused to die even in the minds and on the books of Aceh government officials who still believe that it exists, much like the tooth fairy or Santa.   

More to come!