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The World Bank Participation Sourcebook
Chapter II: Sharing Experiences - Examples of Participatory Approaches

Chad

Education V Project

Contents of this section:

Chadians value education highly, so local involvement and significant local contributions to the cost of education have been a longstanding tradition in Chad. During the 1979-82 war, Chad's education system deteriorated seriously. The slow recovery from the
period of disturbances caused local communities to play an even greater role in financing and operating their schools. The Education V project, financed by the International Development Association (IDA), has been supporting rehabilitation in this sector.

During further disturbances in December 1990, looting and damage occurred in the building housing Chad's Ministry of Education, which lost a great deal of its records, files, and equipment. Schools throughout the country suffered various kinds of damage; books and other teaching materials were in short supply. To rebuild the education system, the government of Chad developed an Education-Training-Employment strategy for 1990-2000. Chadians from many backgrounds and sectors (mainly from the public sphere) and most major donors helped create this strategy. In 1991 the new minister of education asked the Bank to help the government implement its new strategy.

In our initial conversations with the minister, he asked that we prepare the new project in a manner that involved local people and responded to their real needs and concerns. We were delighted with the request and quickly responded in the affirmative. During our next mission, we visited local communities and held discussions with officials and citizens at the local, regional, and national levels. We then sat down with the officials at the central level to decide the specific actions and steps needed to plan the project.

It soon dawned on all of us that, although we were in full agreement with planning the project, none of us really knew how to do it. We decided to start by finding a tried and tested methodology with which we were comfortable. The Bank offered to find the methodology, and, as Task Manager for the project, I undertook the search myself.

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Choosing a Methodology

In talking with my Bank colleagues, I learned about a methodology called Objectives-oriented project planning (ZOPP) (see Appendix I) that was originated by Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, a German aid agency. I found that a nearby company offered seminars onZOPP, one of which I attended along with my Bank project team members.

ZOPP seemed to fill the bill nicely; the project team returned to Chad enthusiastic about sharing what we had learned with our Chadian partners in the project. At a meeting, we told our Chadian colleagues that we could use a methodology called ZOPP and proceeded to explain how it worked. As we described ZOPP, I noticed that people were giggling and laughing. I asked what was the matter. They good-naturedly explained that in Chad, the word "ZOPP" was a slang expression with sexual connotations, and we all had a good laugh about it. But they had a more serious concern. They said we were acting in a typical Bank manner by prescribing how to do things.

We got over both these problems in good fashion by recognizing that ZOPP was the only participatory methodology we knew. Besides, we explained, ZOPP is not the usual way of doing things in the Bank, and we might have to persuade Bank management that using it made good sense. Also, we simply dropped the ZOPP acronym and replaced it with its English equivalent "OOPP" or Objectives-oriented project planning.

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Identifying the Stakeholders

The first step in the ZOPP methodology is identifying the stakeholders of the projects and then beginning to understand what they want. It was a simple matter to recognize the official stakeholders in an education project. But we wondered who really spoke for the local community and if there were issues of gender, ethnicity, social class, religion, or other factors that we had to take into account.

The government organized four regional conferences attended by high ministry officials, school inspectors, school directors and teachers, members of local school associations, and representatives of NGOs and women's groups. At these meetings, we discussed local primary education problems and ways to correct them. We were pleased that two of the meetings were held in a traditional manner, under a tree-sous l'arbre à palabre-where passers-by joined in the discussion.

As a result of these meetings we learned that Chadians at the local level are seriously committed to and closely involved in educating their children. One unexpected benefit for us was learning local people's concerns about their ability to collect and account for educational funds and about dealing effectively with the well-educated people who ran the schools and taught in them. Clearly, local people needed education on how to run a school and would greatly welcome this as part of the project. We also noted how women came and spoke up at these meetings, often complaining that not enough girls were getting educated in the country.

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Designing the Project

All of this was helpful, but it still had not been translated into a project suitable for Bank financing. To get the contents of the project identified and to do the detailed preparation, government convened a six-day national "OOPP" conference for participatory project planning. The minister of education invited ministry staff, regional officials, NGOs, and several of us from the World Bank to a project planning conference. All told, about thirty people attended the conference.

Purposely, government set the date of the meeting to coincide with a planned Bank project mission to the country. In selecting the stakeholders, we thought that the NGOs would represent local people at a conference otherwise attended by government officials. As it turned out, the NGOs tended to represent their own interests, and it fell to others to represent the views and interests of local people based on what we heard at the regional conferences. We also learned, to our dismay, that no women were present at this meeting, because no one took any special action to ensure their presence. Nevertheless, the participatory planning process went rather well, in our opinion, even though it was the first time any of us used our so-called OOPP method.

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The National OOPP Conference

We hired a consultant from a nearby country to plan and facilitate the conference. The consultant was experienced in the OOPP methodology and worked well with Chadians.

We devoted the first day to identifying stakeholder interests. We did this simply by asking and encouraging the participants to express their own interests, hopes, expectations, and fears related to Chad's education system and a possible Bank-financed project. At the end of the day, all of us at the conference could see pretty clearly how the potential project activities might affect each stakeholder.

We spent the second day delineating the specific problems that existed in providing sound primary education in Chad. We did this by means of a "problem tree" that clearly identified the causes of the problems the participants mentioned during the first day. We noted how well the participants worked together even though this was not their normal way of working. This is not to say that everything went smoothly. At one point, a Chadian participant said to one of us from the Bank, "I am telling you that I have a headache, and you keep telling me that I have a foot ache and you want to force me to take a medicine for that." Hearing that made us from the Bank think twice about our own feeling that we were really just part of the group.

On the third day, we developed the objectives of the project. As it turned out, this was pretty easily done by converting the problem tree into a "decision tree." One key objective was to reinforce a decentralized system in which local communities had more autonomy and responsibility for their schools, while central government provided part of the finance and technical guidance and assistance.

Day four was devoted to developing alternative ways of attaining the objectives we had decided on the previous day. We did this together listening to proposals, discussing them, and then choosing what we considered to be the best. We were pleased that the methodology facilitated a consensus among a group of people whose interests and views had so severely differed on the first day.

Days five and six were devoted to developing logical frameworks for the project and its various components. The logical framework employs a project-planning matrix that looks like this:

Participants broke into small groups, each working on one or more goals in a detailed fashion. Bank staff became part of several small groups.

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The Project

In Bank project terms, the last two days of work produced a project with these components:

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Cost and Time

The total project cost is $33.8 million. The Bank is providing an IDA credit of $19.3 million. Eighteen months elapsed from Initial Executive Project Summary to Bank Board approval in May 1993, well within the standard for education projects in Africa. Three fund sources paid for the preparation of this project. The Bank's budget contributed enough to pay for the seventy-eight staff weeks applied to the project by four Bank staff members and one consultant. We made six missions from identification to appraisal. I believe these preparation costs are significantly below average for education projects in our region. The previous IDA credit contributed about $8,000 for the out-of-pocket costs of the national conference, including the fees for the facilitator, who resided in the Central Africa Republic. The government's budget paid for the salaries and associated costs of the Chadian officials.

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Project Quality

Implementation is just beginning (the credit became effective on January 18, 1994), so I cannot say much about how the participatory approach has affected sustainability and ease of implementation. But I can share some immediate results of the participatory planning process. The project went through the peer and management review processes quickly and easily, which pleased us because the project was mainly prepared by the Chadians. During identification and preparation, a large number of people within Chad learned a great deal about what was wrong with their educational system and what could be done given the financial constraints of the country. The actual project was produced by many of the people who will have to work together to implement it. They really "own" it, and, more important, they really understand it. Finally, we have something in it that the local people really want-help for parent associations in interacting with the school directors and teachers. I doubt if we would be doing this if it hadn't been for the sous l'arbre à palabre.

Implementation has been delayed some because of the economic and political situation in Chad and the constant change of ministers and directors. In this difficult Chadian context, the broadly based preparation process and the resulting network of committed stakeholders has been keeping the project going through times of changing officialdom.

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On Reflection

I think the process of identifying objectives and building consensus brought stakeholders at all levels together and produced a project plan that the local schools, donors, and government could really "own." This project demonstrates, in my opinion, that a participatory approach can be employed within the time frame and procedures of the Bank, if the Bank and government are genuinely committed to the process. If I were to do it over again, I'd first have a consultant train four or five Chadians in theZOPP methodology. Then, with those four or five trained national facilitators, I'd ask the Chadians to identify and prepare the project themselves as a basis for discussing with the Bank our financing their project.

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