Part VI:EDFF, the Multi-Donor Fund, and the case of the vanishing databases

When I first started doing projects in Aceh in 2005, all of us (the NGOs, the community groups, everyone) were told that we had to enter all our programmatic and financial information on a database called RAN. 

As you remember, BRR (Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency of Aceh and Nias) was established to coordinate the recovery program and to jointly administer the reconstruction funds ($7 billion) with World Bank acting as fiduciary, through its Multi-Donor Trust Fund program. BRR’s mission was “to restore livelihoods and strengthen communities in Aceh and Nias by designing and overseeing a coordinated, community-driven reconstruction and development program implemented according to the highest professional standards.”

One of the things BRR (or rather, its well-paid international consultants) did very, very well was create impressive hundrd-page documents outlining the proojects, heralding their successes, and making even their failures (“lessons learned”) sound positive and hopeful. (their 16-book, 3,200 "BRR Books" series is a marvel.) One of the shorter documents  at 23 pages was a Power Point Presentation on the RAN Database.

Here is what BRR said about it:

What is the RAN Database?

•RAN Database is a system for collecting, tracking, analyzing and displaying project  and funding information.

Who will use it?

•NGOs, donors, BRR, local government, media and the public will have access to RAN Database and to paper based reports.

How will RAN Database benefit the reconstruction effort?

•RAN Database will provide up to date, transparent and accountable information on  the recovery process in Aceh and Nias.

•RAN Database will be used by BRR to coordinate more effectively, pinpoint gaps

and overlaps in the recovery process and resolve bottlenecks and issues.

•RAN Database will enable all organisations to plan and coordinate their projects with

other actors working in the same sectors and locations.

Sounds great!! 

But let me tell you, even in its heyday, with IT personnel at their battle stations, and money flowing like wine, none of us could wrestle this multi-tentacled monster to the ground.   Still, the developer (Synergy) touted it as a godsend: “The RAN Database won the Innovative Government Technology Award in the Information Management category at the 2008 FutureGov Summit. RAND was . . . recognised as an innovative model of information management that has successfully promoted improvement in public services, modernisation of government administration and efficiency of public sector management.” 

And just as soon as it appeared, with a halo round its head, it disappeared.

Well, that's not entirely true; the website still exists, with a helpful list of 500+ recipient agencies.  But every link is broken and no one is maintaining the site.

http://rand.bappenas.go.id/RAND/rc?requesttype=html&topmodel=[AM_MonoFrame]&now=1413834974744&sessionid=141383497335656&clickedModelId=*54# 

I do have to say, however, that its Help section and instructions for using the thing, were it live, are quit extensive, so I am sure that the database itself exists.

Just not in Aceh.

http://rand.bappenas.go.id/RAND/Documents/help/Application/index.htm

 

It has no backup that anyoe knows of.

It stopped being used after 2 years.

Why?

First and foremost, because of the same bloody thing that I have been harping about in this space for over 5 years: no one ever thought, with all their money and all their wonderful ideas, to teach Acehnese survivors how to implement the projects that were supposed to “save” them.

So when the highly paid IT people left, no one knew the system, including government employees, BRR, Bappenas, Bappeda, World Bank’s PMU, etc.

I wish I could think that this was just a horrible oversight.

But I can’t.

Those in charge simply did not care about sustainability.  They operated a reconstruction program in recovery mode, and because of that, the province has neither recovered nor been reconstructed.

But I digress.

The BRR document goes on to say that “Within the RAN Database, Synergy developed a number of other systems to build the capacity of the Government to track tsunami reconstruction and enhance the management of the work-flow processes. These included a Donor/Partner Profiles Module and a Concept Note Submission and Approval Module for organizing the bottom-up and top-down budget planning process of the reconstruction. The Concept Notes online submission and approval process involved the entire NGO community in sharing data on their planned activities for better coordination.  

Ahahahahahahahahahaha.  

 The RAN has become the central coordinating database for Tsunami recovery data in Indonesia, tracking 1700 projects and a total of USD 3.7 billion in commitments.  

And nobody bothered to use it or maintain it .

“Synergy worked with the government of Indonesia to define Sector specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring progress of reconstruction at various levels including the project level and overall sector level.”

If these KSI’s existed in document form, they are in the wind now.

“RAN provides a tool to analyze trends of KPIs against baseline and target values, as well as financial and other project data. The RAN was also integrated with the Regional DAD that includes information from other Tsunami affected countries including Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Maldives. “

Could be.  Haven’t chatted with  Maldives yet. But over the past year when I have quizzed former colleagues working with both NGOs and directly with the Indonesian government regarding this and other possible locations about programmatic information concerning any of the MDF/EDFF projects, no one has mentioned this database as being an information archive .  It appears to have been a multi-million dollar boondoggle from right out of the gate, global prizes notwithstanding.  Don't get me wrong--I think Synergy developed a bang-up program.  I don't know whether it was charged with teaching anyone to use it, however.  Someone kind of fell down on the job on that one.

So counting on RAN as being the receptacle of any further information on AAA’s cocoa improvement project, or Keumang’s community development/participatory rural appraisal work in the five districts, was pretty much out of the question.

Happily (in a surreal, mildly hysterical John Waters sort of way), EDFF, MDF and the World Bank had not run out of money to spend on phantom databases.  I was next introduced to something called KNOW--the kinder, gentler reconstruction database.

Since there are no appropriate photos to accompany this post (unless photos of me crying into a big handkerchief and gnashing my teeth in frustration will do), I’ll stop here.  More tomorrow!

RAN Database gush-fest:

http://www.recoveryplatform.org/assets/meetings_trainings/international%20forum%20on%20tsunami%20and%20earthquake/c3.pdf

Would you like to see a list of projects that assisted 2004 tsunami survivors? Tough luck!

 When I start to get really good and steamed about how the reconstruction money was spent, JMD staff will try to soothe me.

They sit me down, give me a cool drink, and madly try to think of projects that have been helpful, and that are still functioning.

They usually come up with The Road.  The 104km Banda Aceh to Calang (Aceh Jaya) road was completely washed out in the tsunami, and one of the first infrastructure projects attempted was its reconstruction, funded by USAID to the tune of about $200million.

It was an impressive project and involved an inordinate amount of activity other than just engineering and construction.  Parts of the road had to be re-sited due to the erosion caused by the tsunami; I think that over 3,000 separate land use/right-of-way agreements had to be finalized.  So I’m not saying that this task was not herculean in nature and did not serve an incredibly useful and vital purpose.

Some of the final audits of the project happened as late as 2009.  But by this time, and what the audits do not report, is that great sections of the new road were already falling apart.  Even after the roadbed was moved, the edges were still prone to erosion.  And whether the donor never verified this or the government just fibbed, there was never any money available for the maintenance and repair of this road.  So this was a $200million short-term emergency measure. 

I’m saying, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, call it a duck—not a wonderfully sustainable addition to Aceh’s legacy 10 years later.

So after I natter on about the road for a few minutes, the staff tentatively suggests . . . housing?  Knowing that this will really tee me off, because when I arrived in Aceh in early 2005 this was what I did—I helped build houses in Rumpet, Aceh Jaya, the epicenter of the disaster.  

I asked how I could help and people told me, we need houses. And I learned the hard way—but quickly—that you don’t build people a house that you think is nice, you build a house that people will live in.  And there are hundreds of MDF-built houses on the west coast that are still vacant, because none of the NGOs ever asked the Acehnese where they wanted the houses or what constituted good housing (hint: indoor bathrooms are considered disgusting.) 

 

“ . . . Community consultation about basic decisions such as whether the tsunami survivors wanted health clinics, new, wide escape roads, and even drainage . . .  was a very time consuming process. And on closer inspection there was a major miscalculation of local needs. ‘Aid organisations were under pressure to spend the money,’ says Muslahuddin Daud, reeling off a list of empty facilities spread across the province. [schools, health clinics, water treatment plants, etc.]”  (http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jan/27/banda-aceh-community-spirit-peace-indonesia-tsunami)  

But after the emergency phase of assistance, what was the rush?  Well, I know one reason: many aid agencies were frightened that the as-yet still active fighting between GAM and the Indonesian army would jeopardize worker safety, so they either left projects half-finished, hoping a local agency would step in (which is how we got our start), or they raced like mad to complete projects without a thought to the future consequences of the work. 

Remember, the audits of projects (by the international aid agencies who received the funds) were still being finalized as of 2010.  And already, things are beginning to fall apart.

It is a good thing that large NGOs keep records.  Because BRR, the agency set up to administer the multi-donor fund, did not.  It started out trying to, but never could figure out that even if you spent millions of the reconstruction funds developing a database, when your non-Acehnese IT contractors and database managers left, without training any local staff adequately, the system would be useless.

We discovered this pile of useless million-dollar  databases when we tried to find out more about the  AAA/Keumang cocoa project from World Bank.  A colleague who works for WB but not in Indonesia told me that WB did in fact require NGOs to submit final financial accounting reports.  Programmatic reports, addressing proposed goals and activities, however, were apparently of no interest.  If you could account for the money  on paper that’s all they needed. 

In the beginning, when we were all starting this, there was a database called RAN (Recovery Aceh Nias).  Send me an email and I can direct you to the 500-page overview. It was a loathsome beast of a system and for those of us who struggled with it in the early days, it was a good reason to just give up and hope BRR wouldn’t take our funding back. The database was created by Synergy, a company that I am sure will never set tootsies in Aceh again, and designed to “collect, track, analyze and display project and funding information.” 

This is what Synergy had to say about their baby:

“Within the RAN Database, Synergy developed a number of other systems to build the capacity of the Government to track tsunami reconstruction and enhance the management of the work-flow processes. [No government official that I ever heard of had been trained in this.] These included a Donor/Partner Profiles Module and a Concept Note Submission and Approval Module for organizing the bottom-up and top-down budget planning process of the reconstruction. The Concept Notes online submission and approval process involved the entire NGO community in sharing data on their planned activities for better coordination.” Ahahahahahahahahahaha. 

“The RAN has become the central coordinating database for Tsunami recovery data in Indonesia, tracking 1700 projects and a total of USD 3.7 billion in commitments." And we couldn’t find it—it is offline and we don’t know whether any of the information that some of us had painstakingly entered in it is even in existence anymore.

What is interesting is that RAN’s creators say that it “won the Innovative Government Technology Award in the Information Management category at the 2008 FutureGov Summit . . . recognised as an innovative model of information management that has successfully promoted improvement in public services, modernisation of government administration and efficiency of public sector management.”

But when we talk with people who were in Aceh in 2005 and beyond, and ask them, “So, where’s the project database?” this turkey never comes up.  No one at BRR ever thought that when their agency folded, so would the database. (http://www.recoveryplatform.org/assets/meetings_trainings/international%20forum%20on%20tsunami%20and%20earthquake/c3.pdf

But wait!  It gets better!  Apparently hoping that no one noticed the million-dollar (dead) elephant in the living room, World Bank tries again and develops ANOTHER database in 2008, called KNOW.  Here is its description:

The BRR Knowledge Centre (KNOW) is dedicated to the preservation of data and management of information related to the rehabilitation and reconstruction programme in Aceh and Nias (2005-09). KNOW was established by BRR in June 2008 through support from the Multi Donor Fund and in partnership with UNDP. Its principle activities include the collection, cataloguing and classification of documents and other media formats and to enable this information to be accessed for research and reference purposes. 

There is no longer a working link to this site.  Former BRR officials admit that it was too complicated for anyone left in Aceh to manage. So it no longer exists.  World Bank officials (the current PMU in Aceh and Jakarta) will not comment on the status of any project, or whether any close-out evaluation was done.

A WB employee, not based in Indonesia but with knowledge of EDFF and MDF, recently acknowledged privately that “there was so much money” that WB officials in Indonesia could not track it, and many of those working on the MDF have now been “promoted” to other positions, precisely because of the amount of the reconstruction money, not because of its handling.

There does not seem to be any centralized (or even decentralized) accounting of projects, completion status, or post-completion monitoring and evaluation.  Bill Nicol, an Australian who worked with BRR and self-proclaimed “expert” on the reconstruction process, when asked about KNOW, said he asked his colleagues at WB and no one had ever heard of it. He himself had never heard of it, saying that he “had nothing to do” with monitoring or evaluation or follow-up.  Apparently, neither did anyone else.

So as you can see, it is very difficult to tell, on the 10-year anniversary of the tsunami, which reconstruction efforts were truly useful and/or sustainable.  

Next time: let’s examine all 5,000,000,000,000 pages of inter-agency “lessons learned,” shall we?