Small Wins

Every other Wednesday us fellows get together to discuss a reading we’ve all done on development, interact with some sort of development expert, or talk about our work in a solution-oriented manner, and then have a delicious DF-funded dinner. Although this is a compulsory activity, it’s something I always look forward to.

A while ago, my friend Mari led a discussion on Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and introduced the idea of ‘small wins’ as a way of achieving much larger goals. In the context of CLTS, a small win is a community recognizing the danger of poor sanitation; designing, building, and funding their own latrines; and eliminating open defecation. In the process, the community forges strong relationships and develops a sense of empowerment that helps the community solve other problems that it faces.

Earlier this week at Bhageerath I experienced my own small win, and it felt amazing! One of my colleagues, Jabshetti, is particularly energetic and opinionated. He’s a blast to work with, but often we have very different opinions. Jabshetti just launched the first part of his project, School, Domestic, and Community Sanitation (the title is something we don’t agree on), and we decided that it will be one of the projects I monitor and evaluate (M&E).

To effectively M&E the project, I need to fully understand it. The basis of this is understanding the project goals and project plan. Unfortunately, Jabshetti hadn’t thought about either of these things until I asked him about them. As a result, the goals he came up with were both all over the place (there was no clear focus) and way too ambitious (getting 100% of Karnataka to do a zillion different things).

As he was listing out the project goals, I continually asked him questions about them: Do you think this is realistic? How is this goal related to that goal? How do these goals fit into your vision for the project (the vision is something else we have to tackle)? What do you plan to do to help you achieve this goal? I told him I would look through the goals that night and see what I could synthesize; I asked him to do the same.

My overall approach while working at NGOs is not to tell them what to do, but to make suggestions and help them realize what to do themselves. Apparently it worked, because the next morning Jabshetti came in, dropped a book on my desk, and told me that the two of us needed to look through it, sit down, and seriously think about the future of his project.

Now, I know that thinking about the future of his project will involve some disagreements, a few crazy ideas, and delusions of grandeur, but knowing that I helped him to think more critically about his work made me really REALLY happy! Wahoo!