Problem Solving in Hargeisa

More travel--I’m in Hargeisa for a few days right now.  So far I’m well on track to break last year’s record of 62 takes offs/landings.  I’m at 24 now, with the promises of lots more travel on the horizon.

I’m in Hargeisa for two reasons, one because somebody from headquarters is here who wanted to go to Hargeisa and two, because we’re having a little issue with one of our donors here.  I won’t name this donor but I’ll say this:  they are a UN donor and they work exclusively with providing food. 

Last fall, we approached two donors, one (Donor A, also a UN agency) of whom provides food and money for treating children with severe malnutrition and one (Donor B) whom provides food and money for treating children with moderate malnutrition (obviously, right?  Since, you know, one donor couldn’t do both?  Very efficient.)  Anyway, we proposed a total of 54 sites in eastern Somaliland, with costs split 50/50 between these two donors.  Both agreed and things moved forward relatively smoothly for the donor that treats severe malnutrition.  The other donor…not so much.  Issue after issue after issue. One of the big issues is that parts of eastern Somaliland are disputed between Somaliland and Puntland, Somalia.  It might sound a bit funny, but realistically no one really knows at any given time where the border between this two countries is.  While Donor A thought all of our sites were in Somaliland, Donor B thought 20 of them were in Puntland and wanted us to cut them. 

Finally we got to a point, during my last visit to Hargeisa in February, where Donor B agreed to fund these 20 disputed sites and supply them from its Puntland office.  It looked like everything was ready to be officially signed, when all of a sudden, Donor B called and said, oops, it turns out our Puntland office already gave this sites away to a local NGO and we didn’t know!  Sorry!  Good luck!  And I said, oh no you don’t—that leaves us without 50% of our funding for 20 sites that you had promised us, as well as the fact that we are already working in these sites and haven’t seen any sign of an organization providing these programs for moderately malnourished children.  So I told Donor B that they needed to be sure that these organizations were providing what they said, and that as long as they were we were happy to remove those sites from our proposal—provided that Donor B would talk Donor A into providing 100% of the funding for the 20 sites we were removing.  So we started working on this.  And then things got interesting—at a MoH planning meeting, the government of Somaliland realized what Donor B had done, namely that it had more or less decided that an entire regional of Somaliland actually belonged to another country.  The MoH demanded that these sites be given back to my organization, as we provide all the nutrition programming in that part of Somaliland.  

  

Aaaaaand now I’m on a plane to Hargeisa to try to deal with that.  The solution remains yet unclear, other than that we will not, I repeat, WILL NOT, be getting in between Donor B and the MoH in this political game.  At this point, I am just going to advocate for getting these programs started in the remaining 34 sites while the MoH and Donor B duke it out.   Because something everybody seems to have missed during these games is that while we are playing them, sick kids aren’t getting care, and isn’t that why we are all here in the first place?

On a lighter note, I had brunch yesterday with somebody who works with another (different) UN agency that is working to get Somalia’s police force into some semblance of order.  His big task recently has been attempting to find and get to Mogadishu enough manual typewriters for Mogadishu’s police stations.  Laptops have constant problems that can’t be resolved with the resources available, and both laptops and electric typewriters require electricity, which there isn’t any of usually.  So, manual typewriters were the best option by far, except that they are hard to track down and, it turns out, expensive.  He finally found a manufacturer, Olivetti, in India and a supplier of them in Nairobi, at $400 each.  More expensive than a cheap laptop, until you factor in the cost of a generator…They’re off to Mogadishu on a Jubba Airlines flight later this week and the Mogadishu police should be clacking away in no time.