Interview with Peter Danku, TLM's project lead
When donors and international NGOs enter into partnership with organisations in the Global South, the power is almost always focused in the hands of the partners from the Global North.
The leprosy sector is currently working with organisations of persons affected by leprosy and organisations of persons with disability more than at any other point in the history of the sector. How do we ensure that the power is not so heavily in the hands of people who are far removed from the communities that are the focus of the project?
We Are Able! (WAA) is a five-year, 34 million euro project being run by a consortium of Dutch NGOs and the African Disability Forum, using funding from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The project works across six countries in Central Africa (Burundi, DR Congo, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia).
The overarching aim of the project is to empower organisations of persons with disability so that persons with disability in Central Africa and the Horn of Africa will be able to achieve a sustainable, fully-fledged place in their communities and gain access to basic resources.
An underlying principal of the WAA project is ‘Shift the Power’ principle, whereby the northern NGOs in the Netherlands aim to up-skill, strengthen, and develop capacity within local partners. What can we learn from their approach and from the challenges they have faced? We talk to Peter Danku from The Leprosy Mission Netherlands, who coordinates the project for TLM in Burundi, DR Congo, and Ethiopia to learn more.
Peter: Well, it looks like a lot of things all at once. This is a huge project, across six countries, lasting five years. We are working with organisations of persons with disability (OPDs) and local Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) across Central Africa and the Horn of Africa. Some are small, some are big, all will benefit from organisational capacity building and strengthening.
Our aim is that these organisations will be strong, legitimate, and capable of defining and leading their own agenda, with the right networks to enact change, particularly related to improving food security for persons with disabilities and persons affected by leprosy.
The project started in 2021 and one of the first things TLM did was the ‘Training of Trainers’, focusing on the capacity building of a pre-selected pool of future trainers. We focused on the rights of people with a disability and advocacy. These trainers are now ready to train further persons with disability in their own communities.
Around 20 people were selected by each of the national umbrella OPD organisations and trained as Disability Inclusion Facilitators and Lobby and Advocacy capacitators in Ethiopia, Burundi and DR Congo last year.
The training focused on disability models, barriers to inclusion, adult education, and the methodology of the problem-tree. The training – delivered by one of the best experts in disability inclusion consultancies, ENABLEMENT – taught participants how to work with a toolkit as facilitators so they can strengthen local OPDs in inclusion and facilitating access to services.
At the training, ENABLEMENT conducted stakeholder analyses with the participants to gain a broader picture of the main actors (such as duty bearers, OPDs, municipal/public authorities, legislators etc.) to reach out to with key messaging on behalf of persons with disability in their region. We then considered legal frameworks, institutional barriers to inclusion, networking practice, food security related exercises, rights-based approaches in Africa, and the use of visuals in training.
Our plan is that the training these individuals received will be cascaded throughout OPDs and CSOs in their countries over the years to come.
This is a process we will continue to support until the end of the WAA project in December 2025.
Of course, TLM is not the only organisation working on WAA. Our partners have their own set of WAA activities, focusing on specific needs across the six countries. The WAA annual plan for 2022 states that there are over 300 activities due to be run by the entire consortium under the WAA flag. These activities are centred around three pathways:
Peter: I think there’s an incorrect tendency to focus on the OPDs and local CSO actors, expecting them to change and develop so they can effectively reach out to government agencies, duty bearers and funding partners. In this project we work from different angles by also engaging local authorities and duty bearers.
The reality is, however, that working with government actors – both at national and local levels – is challenging. Even when there is a willingness to engage, the resources and capacity can be limited. Pathway three of the project focuses our endeavours on public authorities. We raise awareness and build capacity so they can better engage with OPDs, CSOs, and individuals with disabilities and those affected by leprosy.
Two members of the consortium are experts on engaging with local governance: The Hague Academy for Local Governance and VNG International. Their extensive experience puts us in a very good position to work with policymakers – especially at a local level – to build their understanding of the needs of persons with disability.
When we have opportunities for persons with disability to talk directly with policymakers, we want those duty bearers to understand the contexts and experiences they are hearing about.
For the WAA project, ‘Shift the power’ means developing OPDs, their national umbrella organisations, and other CSOs so they can be engaged and sufficiently capable interlocutors with public authorities and legislators in the future.
We have just ticked off the first of five years of the WAA project, so many of the challenges we have faced so far have been related to establishing ourselves as a large consortium of NGOs and a huge number of OPDs across the six partnering countries.
A small number of these partnering OPDs are up and running with lots of experience and a strong disability agenda. Other organisations are struggling with structural and institutional challenges and a lack of capacity for everything from strategy to raising awareness and lobbying, including a lack of sufficient funding for their activities.
We are optimistic that this challenge will fade as the project progresses and smaller OPDs benefit from the capacity building, training and network support they are receiving.
We have been given responsibility for a very large budget and a big five year project which has the not insignificant aim of integrating and empowering people who have been marginalised throughout history. We are looking at societal change. If we are to achieve our objectives, we have to be very clever about what we do, especially when we are working in some very fragile contexts.
Identifying the most effective interventions for a project as large and as broad as this may pose some coordination challenges, but the consortium partners are well engaged in effective cooperation and have formed strong ties.
After the first year of the project, we have seen that the solution is to be found within our ‘Shift of Power’ principle; local solutions will solve local problems. It is the objective that by the end of the project, we as donors will be directed to the most effective interventions through our OPD partners in Africa; as their decision making and programmatic role will grow and grow throughout the project.
Peter: We are very thankful to have already seen some benefits from the ‘Training of trainers’ that we conducted in 2021.
In Ethiopia, we have heard that, thanks to the efforts of those who received training in 2021, more persons affected by leprosy have been able to access clean water in their communities.
In Burundi, we have heard that awareness raising by one of the people who received training has led to greater inclusion in churches for families whose children have disabilities.
These are really great stories for us to hear after only the first year of our project. It gives us hope that four more years of concentrated effort is going to create more and more space for persons with disability to access their rights within their communities.
Another big success for us over the last year has been developing ways of working in consortium, in particular with partners with a strong disability inclusive agenda. The Leprosy Mission and SeeYou Foundation have added our disability knowledge to the humanitarian history of ZOA, the networks and experience of the African Disability Forum, and the perspectives of VNG International and The Hague Academy for Local Governance. Together with the invaluable input of the local OPDs, we have a huge range of experience, but also a need for close coordination.
We have thematic working groups on finance, advocacy, monitoring and evaluation, communications, and Shift of Power. Establishing and jointly coordinating our efforts has already been a real success, as disability inclusion is now high on the agenda!
My hope is obviously that people with disability and persons affected by leprosy in our partner countries will find a safe and effective space for themselves within their communities and their regions, with increased food-security through access gained to basic resources and land and water.
My other hope is that the OPDs we are partnering with now will increasingly redress the power imbalance between themselves and their Northern partners. When the WAA project ends and they move onto more partnerships, they will have the experience, systems and networks to access funding directly, to work with government partners and other actors engaged in the disability realm in their own countries and elsewhere, and to lead their own agenda without support from the Netherlands or elsewhere.
At this point, we also have to thank the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for funding a project like this. Investing a budget of this size over five years will not necessarily lead to lots of immediate wins, but over time it will lead to sustainable change and a new balance of power with our partners in the Global South. -- If you have questions about the We Are Able! project or would like to learn more about how this could inform your work, you can email Peter directly. The We Are Able! project partners are - African Disability Forum - ZOA - SeeYou Foundation - VNG International - The Hague Academy for Local Governance
