The day the gods paid communities' share of the capital costs for a water project at Asutsuare (part 1).

A Personal Experience in the field

By Oliver Frimpong, Participatory Trainer, Communications and Community Development Expert.

The day I was asked to go and work at Asutsuare in the Greater Accra region of Ghana my heart nearly missed a beat. The instruction from the boss was simple – without any ambiguity. "Oliver, can you use your rich field experience to try to mobilize the people of Asutsuare and three other communities to fully pay their share of the capital cost for a piped system which has been proposed and earmarked for the area?" he asked me. “All efforts to get the people to pay up their share of the capital cost within the past three years have rather not been very successful”

The prospect of undertaking the assignment was, to say the least, pretty scary - scary not so much because the people would be harmful or hostile, but because of the possible failure to meet the challenges involved. Not to mention the fact that Asutsuare and its surroundings had gained notoriety as an inhospitable and difficult place to carry out any meaningful community work. The people, I was told, are very difficult to work with. They lack the spirit of voluntarism and the high level of unemployment especially among the youth makes them apathetic to community activities. Both the old and the young tacitly believe in the outmoded concept that the government should be able to provide them with their needs. Politics and mutual political resentments sand chieftaincy disputers tear the communities apart to the extent that undertaking any public spirited activity depends on whose political interest is being served.

The project involved the provision of piped borne water supply system to a population of over 7.000 inhabitants of Asutsuare, Osuwem Lanor, the Factory area and Osuwem Gbese. Each member of the community was being asked to pay 20.000 cedis just once. However, to raise this money proved not to be easy. Those who did pay dragged their feet for a long time, ohers assigned their inability to pay to unemployment and a considerable chunk of the community shrugged their shoulders and said it was not their responsibility to pay for the piped system, but that of the government. Others just did not care because they were drinking potable water from a facility that had been installed when Asutsuare sugar factory was functioning.

Despite the initial fear, four positive forces drove me to Asutsuare one Wednesday evening when I arrived to undertake the assignment.

The first was my own experience and belief in the fact that there is nothing called ‘a difficult community.’ Experience had shown me that your acceptability and the co-operation of community members depend largely on a true, genuine and honest personal relationship. There is often the thought that good interpersonal relationship is an art that can easily be picked from textbooks. To some extent this might be true, but my own personal experience in the communities shows than this need goes beyond textbook knowledge and pretences It is rather anchored in being empathetic enough to make the communities’ interests and concerns your own through repeated informal association with them as much as possible.

The second was my own guiding principle and field experience that in the community prejudice does not lead to sound judgment. No, I have always refused to be judgmental in my interactions in the community with community members.

The third force was rather an impulse in the form of an uncanny feeling to revise the information and education activities and processes that were said to have been carried out earlier before I arrived. After touring, at dawn and dusk, every conceivable community covered by the project I discovered with dismay that information about the community provided during the project information session at the usual start up workshop had not percolated and had not gone down sufficiently to help community members to make informed decisions. There actually was the willingness and ability to pay attitude among these communities especially when they expressed their disgust over their unhealthy sources of water for which there were no alternatives.

There was also the fourth and perhaps the most important force which came in rather handy but made all the difference and helped me to win the battle of Asutsuare finally. This was my aversion to sticking to old, pedestrian and monotonous methods found in text books and sector manuals to pursue my goals and objectives in the field. In my situation I found such participatory methodologies as kilo-kilo, funeral donations, festival contributions as damp squibs and ineffective. I found that those were the methods my predecessors who had failed to achieve their final goal had fastened themselves to like leeches. I had to look somewhere else when the going became too tough with the threat of a bloody nose hanging over me after days and months of frustration and ineffective energy sapping efforts to collect 160.000.000 cedis from the people in the project area. That somewhere was the fetish grove where I marched to one sultry Thursday afternoon after discovering that I could not make any dent on the people’s stubbornness not to pay. The churches had not helped much despite the umpteen announcements that had been made during days of worship and other ecclesiastical activities. I took time to brief the fetish priest who came to meet me at the gate of the shrine. I was not spiritually clean enough (according to the shrine’s tradition) to shake hands with him and so I contented myself to engage in a face to face interaction with this young man in his early thirties while we stood. He listened to me in silence while I poured myself out with all the relevant information on the project and explained why it was necessary for community members to pay their share of the capital cost.

‘The gods will hear’ he assured me briefly and turned away with an infectious smile.

A month later the communities’ contribution level rose sharply from the paltry sum of 330.000 cedis to an all time level of one 130.000.000 cedis. Today, the three communities have paid up all the 160.000.000 cedis representing their share of the capital cost and are ready for the project to start.

Incredible! What happened? Look for the answer and the important lessons learnt later.

To be continued…….