Designing a Problem-Driven Donor-Funded Project in Mozambique

Katya Gonzalez-Willette Hello and welcome to the Building State Capability Program, Harvard University’s podcast series. Many government policies and reforms fail in developing countries. Research at the Center for International Development’s Building State Capability Program, also known as BSC, ties such failure to the tendency of governments to adopt external solutions that do not fit their contexts and overwhelm their capabilities. The program believes that governments should build their capabilities by employing processes that empower their own people to find their way to solving their country’s real problems. They propose a process for doing this called problem driven iterative adaptation or PDIA, and have been working since 2009 to explore how to do PDIA practically in the real world. This is the second of a series of interviews with the Building State Capability team, the PDIA and Practice or PIPS, where we describe where the PDA tools and ideas have emerged from and how these ideas have taken shape. The previous interview covered experience working with officials in Mozambique’s public financial management sector in 2009. The Adaptation window idea and practice it inspired. Today’s interview will tell the story that followed that first year of work, how long it took to take the project off the ground, and what were the main learnings of implementing an innovative, problem driven approach across many sectors at a national level?

Salimah Samji Welcome to the PDIA Practice Series podcast. Today we’re going to discuss PIPS 2, as you will recall, in PIPS 1, we talked about the story of doing PDIA in Mozambique in December 2009. With us today, we have Matt Andrews. Welcome, Matt.

Matt Andrews Thank you so much.

Salimah Samji And today we’re going to discuss PIPS 2, which tells us the story of Mozambique from 2010 to 2013. Matt, do you want to remind us from PIPS 1 kind of where we ended and where this PIPS 2 begins?

Matt Andrews Yeah, Thank you very much. In the first PIPS we discussed, where we first started trying some of the PDIA stuff in Mozambique, where the Ministry of Finance had engaged with myself and a team from the World Bank to try a problem driven approach to thinking about public financial management reforms. Now public financial management reforms are usually extremely technical. They involve computerized systems. They involve changing laws. It’s usually something that really is only interesting for, you know, internal auditors and accountants. And I wouldn’t imagine anybody else would want to be in a room having that conversation, which also means that oftentimes those reforms don’t get adopted and implemented because the people who have to use the systems are not the kind of like PFM geeks, but they are real people who are trying to fund real things and pay salaries. So the first one we had these two meetings, which we called the adaptation Windows, which were designed to try and reorient the conversation around these reforms from like solutions, dry technical solutions that PFM geeks love, to a conversation about the real problems that real users have. In the adaptation windows, we were really inspired by the fact that, you know, you had people from different sectors coming and speaking about what they really cared about, right? And they were speaking, you know, where the Ministry of Finance was saying, What we want is a program budget. These guys were saying, no, what we need is the ability to be able to pay people on time. And they said, what we want is a program budget. And I said, no, what we need is the ability to get the right vendor to provide the right service at the right time. And what we want is a program budget. No, we need to be able to buy pharmaceuticals and have the pharmaceuticals on shelves when they need to be on shelves so that people can receive the treatment. We then left at the end of the second adaptation window where everyone agreed that there needed to be a future conversation between the land ministries, the people in the districts and the Ministry of Finance and the PFM. Reform needed to be focused on their real problems, etc. And I remember flying out and thinking, wow, this is so cool. This is the first time that I’ve been involved in something where we have all these voices involved. The problem has been clearly stated, etc. And then I found out three months later that the Ministry of Finance just continued to do the reform in the same old, same old way that they had before and it was all technical, etc., etc..

Salimah Samji So nothing changed.

Matt Andrews Nothing seemed to have changed. And that’s where we ended the last story.

Salimah Samji And then what happened?.

Matt Andrews So then we went back and we found out that actually some of the Latin ministry people who’d been at the workshop went to the World Bank and said, well, the Ministry of Finance may want to carry on doing like its roll out of computer systems and etc., etc. And they said, not that that’s a good or a bad thing, but we kind of like the conversation that we had before. And we’d really like it if the World Bank would support a project that looked a little different and that actually focused on the problems that we have related to public financial management, related to getting money for the things that we care about when we care about them or when we need them, and in in ways that make sense to us. And so the World Bank said, okay, so the problem conversation has now spawned a new demand. What’s the next step? How do we think about developing the problems of and project.

Salimah Samji And did they actually manage to find a solution or some sort of financing instrument that they could use?

Matt Andrews So it was interesting because the first thing we needed to do was then to bring those people together and say to them and bring the Ministry of Finance together because they needed to be there and say, Who do we need to be involved in the conversation. And two things happened for a good while. One was saying to the folks from the ministries, okay, what are the real problems you’re facing? Right. And starting with the minister and it was particularly in education and health. Justice was involved for a time, agriculture for a time, but particularly in education, health. The first part of it was having the conversation about what are your sectoral problems? How does it relate to public financial management system, starting with the minister. So the minister would authorize teams, then identifying teams to come and really break these things down. So it wasn’t having a one off meeting. It was months and months of really kind of getting to what is the problem, What is it that we. The World Bank at this time also did something interesting in that they realized that you couldn’t just have budgeting experts in the conversation. They themselves needed to have the budgeting people with the education people, with the health people. So they developed a pretty complex team going across boundaries and the World Bank that are usually quite difficult to cross. And it wasn’t about one person leading a team and bringing people when they were needed. It ended up being a project that was co-managed by different sectors in the bank, which was really interesting. So part of it was kind of just people leveraging their different connections, building these teams across government and government teams working on what are problems, etc. And then at the same time, like the World Bank saying what kind of lending instrument can have the flexibility that is required to allow people to find their own solutions. And so those two things kind of went in parallel for a period of time. And at the end of the day, they did manage to identify a set of problems on the government side that were tractable, were real, that could be measured. That brought the attention of people at the central government level, at the provincial government level, because service delivery is very complex and that offered entry points for engagement. And at the same time, the World Bank managed to identify a project type which was called a People All which is a project for results, which sounds like it shouldn’t be connected with something that’s called a problem driven, iterative adaptation approach. But they said that the project for results approach is one where we identify what the government intends to do and then they have flexibility on how they get there. So in a sense it kind of really related well to what we wanted to do. And so, you know, those two things happening was was quite exciting to create this the ingredients for a new kind of product.

Salimah Samji How long did it take them to actually get this off the ground?

Matt Andrews It took a long time. And that’s an interesting part of the story, is that even the work with the government in defining what the problem was, took probably a year, maybe even longer. And it involved, as I said, starting often. People, you know, will often say we do problem driven work. And what they mean is that someone sits in the office and identifies the problem and then they they address this. Problem-driven work is not about that. The reason why we focus on problems is that we think that problems are really interesting entry points for change, because one of the things that you need to have effective change is you need to have effective authorization. The people at the top and we’re talking mostly about governments here, right? The people who have authority need to authorize the work. And oftentimes they need to be persuaded to authorize the work. And problems are very persuasive. If you can prove to an authorizer that they have a problem, they haven’t been able to solve it. They have to pay attention to it. It’s really something that matters. Then they’re going to say, okay, you know, I’m going to work on it. The second thing about problems, though, is that they need to be clearly communicated clearly what we call constructed so that they can bring other people into the conversation. Because, you know, you might have the minister of health saying we have a problem with the availability of pharmaceuticals. It’s a problem I want to solve. But then you realize that there’s a bunch of autonomous agencies involved in providing that that are not under the minister’s authorization, that actually it involves the role of the provinces and involves the role of provincial ministries, etc., that are also not under his authorization. So you have to have a problem statement that motivates all those people to come in and that needs to be identified, created and worked on. Right? So you need to have numbers to say this is how big the problem is. This is where the stuck outs are. This is kind of how many people aren’t getting their pharmaceuticals, so that you can persuade all these groups. And that takes time. Once you’ve done that and you have people then and notice you start with the authorizer and then you move to a team that builds this technical conversation. And then the technical conversation leads to the expansion of authorization, because now you have other heads of agencies who are behind you and that changes the problems sometimes. And then they start to say, okay, we get it, we have a problem, what do we do about it? And as we went through this process, you realize, okay, once you’ve identified the problem and the team is and when I say you, I’m talking the teams, right? These are all government people. Then people say, okay, we will do about it. Then you have to deconstruct it so you can identify what’s causing the problem because you don’t tackle the problem at the manifestation of the problem. You need to tackle the problem at the root of the problem. So then there’s another period where you have to engage, again, the technical people to break the problem down. And we found that we had to really work progressively over a period of time to go through these stages. So that at the end of the period you could come up with a problem that was constructed to get all of the authorization that needed and a problem that was deconstructed so that it could give people the identification of what to do. Or at least where to start. Thinking about what to do. One of the reasons why we’re doing the Pips is to kind of say, this is where our PDIA process came from. Out of this has come a systematic approach to doing problem construction and deconstruction, which we talk about in the PIPS, in which we, we talk about in other places as well. But in this period that took a long time and one of the reasons why it took a long time, which is one of the things that was frustrating and we speak in the PIPS about what we struggled with, was that it took a long time. But even getting to that point, it took about a year and partly because the way in which development is done is we often say it’s done in months and years, right? You go on a mission to a country every three months and you’re there for four or five days. And because you think that everything should be about you and the work has to wait for you. So let’s say you’re there for four or five days every three months, you do 12 days of work here. And so that’s why it took a long time. What we’ve found out since then is that if you work in days and weeks and if you realize that the work isn’t about the external person flying in and out, the work is about the internal people doing the work, there’s no reason for it to be disrupted and interrupted. Exactly what we’ve done now, you can do it in the space of probably four or five days in some places, and that’s kind of what we’ve broken it down to. But that’s one of the reasons why it took a long time. But at the end of that, you came to, let’s say, 2011, 2012, that period where you had these ministries that said we have real problems. You know, you had the Ministry of Health saying we have a problem with getting money to procurement of pharmaceuticals, to the purchase of the pharmaceutical and the arrival at the port, to the distribution, to the national warehouse, to the distribution from the national warehouse to the provinces, from the provinces, the distribution to districts and then to the health centers. And they said, we know what that is. We know where the stock outs of the stock outs, where you just run out of pharmaceuticals. Right. And this is a systems problem and it’s a problem that has to do falls back all the way to money in education, they said our key problem is that we know that most schools don’t get the money at the start of the school year that they should be getting, and most of them don’t get it even within three months. Some of them don’t get it within six months. And we’ve done our homework now, we know which schools don’t get the money. We know when it comes in. And we know why they don’t get the money. We know that they not getting the money because before they get the money, the ministry has to sign off on some things to say that they have a parents committee and etc.. But there were multiple things, right? They said, now we need to know what to do. And at that point in time, you’re at such a better place than saying we don’t get the money on time. That’s right. So, you know, that itself is positive. But then at that point in time, the World Bank wasn’t ready. And I say this just to say, firstly, I worked with such great colleagues at the World Bank and, you know, there are too many of them to name all of them. But Renaud Seligman, the friend who fought through this period to get this project done, we had a bunch of people who worked valiantly, but it was a new thing for the World Bank and they had to work out how do we do this? You know, how do we give, give flexibility where we don’t even know who’s going to be doing the delivery with us. And so they identified this people are as a new mechanism that had never been used in Mozambique. I’m not sure at that time if it had been used in Africa. And then, you know, they had to say, okay, we’re going to be identifying problems and then leaving these people to solve their own problems. And you can imagine that conversation in its donor agency to say, you know, we’re giving $50 million for what? Right? So then we had to have a conversation where they said, look, it’s a program for results. And the design of the program for results is that we allocate money to the government when the government achieves certain results. So they said, we understand that, we’ve identified the problems, we’ve broken the problems down. We know essentially where the fight is going to be fought. We need to be able to identify what the results are going to be. And that was a testing moment for me because I said to them, my observation is as soon as you mean results, you mean solution, and you’re identifying some kind of thing that I don’t want to support. Right? And so that became a tricky a tricky thing at that time. It was one of the things that was just messy in the conversation of how do we get there?

Salimah Samji And then they finally get this project off the ground. And what happens?

Matt Andrews Also it’s interesting, because when they said we need to identify results, we said to them, okay, let’s think about how you could identify results but still be problem driven. So we said, what would the problem look like, solved? But instead of saying, well, the result is we’re going to have a new system or we’re going to have a new reporting protocol, we said, okay, in the schools, by the end of four years, we’ve identified, let’s say, a thousand schools that don’t get their money on time. By the end of four years, we want a thousand schools to get their money on time, which means they get it on the 1st of January or the 30th of January, whenever the date is. So that becomes almost kind of where you’re going to the end. And then we said, okay, how about just dialing that back every six months to kind of what you think you could do, how many schools are going to be online or in the project, etc.. So the first thing is they managed to identify that and that became the basis of thinking about the search frame, which we also thought about. But so that kind of unlocked for the World Bank. They got to kind of say, this is how are we going to do this. They then had to go into the process of developing the project, putting the project before their board, etc.. And the project only came into being in 2014.

Salimah Samji Wow, that is a long time.

Matt Andrews That is a long time. Again, it’s a new thing. But also development organizations take a long time designing projects. So, you know, this took a long time, but actually many projects will take two years.

Salimah Samji Preparation generally does.

Matt Andrews Preparation takes a long time. And people are saying, we want a lot of homework done, we want all our T’s crossed and our I’s dotted.

Salimah Samji But that’s commitment of these people, right to this idea. You do this workshop in 2009 and this project only comes to bear in 2014. And to stay committed to this to this idea takes a lot of grit and that is really impressive.

Matt Andrews So, you know, this is a shout out to for Khan to Reno or to just a bunch of other people who, yeah, they had that grit and they said, we want to do this. And I think that part of what kind of inspired them is I think that the engagement that they were having with their counterparts was different to what it had been before. I think that their counterparts were talking about real things. They were mobilizing real people into conversations. There was a commitment that was on both sides, just the government and the World Bank side, just really impressive. There was also involvement of other donor agencies that I think were interested in seeing this happen. You know, DFID was heavily involved in this as well. I mean, one of the things that happened and I think this was sometime in 2012 is once the government had identified the problems and now they were sitting waiting on these things and they broken down, some of the other donor agencies in town kind of jumped into the into the void. So USAID actually did like a project. They came in, they said, you’ve identified a problem. So they had their version. I can’t remember what it’s called. That’s called something for results as well. And they basically did a year’s worth of almost kind of like gap financing, particularly in the pharmaceuticals area. So we often speak in PDIA about emergence is you’re getting people thinking differently, you’re aligning actors in a different way. By the time that they’ve now identified the problem and they’ve said this is kind of where we want to start working, now you have USID saying, okay, we can help with that. That’s right. That wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t there if the government wasn’t mobilized. It wasn’t only the World Bank people. It was bunch of interesting people creating opportunities and then taking those opportunities. And the amazing thing is it didn’t stop in 2014, right? So I didn’t work on this since the end of 2012. And, you know, some people say, is PDIA all about you guys? And Matt and Michael Wilcock and Building State Capability and Harvard. And if you had no Harvard, would people put the effort in? We weren’t there. And all I heard for about two or three years from people in the World Bank was this is a messy project. It’s not working very well. They can’t really identify the people to do the jobs. It’s not functioning, we’re not getting results, etc.. At the same time, I was working a lot of PDIA initiatives, which we’re going to be talking about in months to come, and finding that, you know, the lead up to getting things done is messy. And when you’re getting into real problems that have politics involved, that have dysfunctional systems at the heart of them, etc., there’s often a bunch of muddling through you have to go through because there’s a lot of mud rot. Yeah, it’s very, very messy and it doesn’t look good. And one of the things is that, you know, people need to realize that is the reality of many countries, not even developing countries. Is this just a lot of stuff to work through? And when you’re working through it, it doesn’t look great. But they carried on until even now, they’re still working. And a few months ago, we got to see the report on progress. And the project’s been hugely successful. When the World Bank describes this again with we weren’t even looking at it, they’ve done evaluations that’s been through exactly the same as usual. They have people not only saying, gee, we managed to solve our problem- but it’s not people at the top projects school principal saying our money didn’t used to come on time, money comes on time. And we were involved in finding the solution for it. Wow. So you don’t have one solution for the whole country of Mozambique. You have you have like hundreds of solutions because for every single school in a different political environment, they have different issues, they context of different they all manage to create within certain kind of variance their own kind of solution. And the beautiful thing is there’s a video that the World Bank has, and they have some excerpts from the video. You read this, so people are saying literally they’re using words like, well, we were never involved before. Now we’ve been involved and we’re empowered and we’re kind of doing it again somewhere else, and we’re doing it again somewhere else. So this idea of building the capability to identify a problem, to break a problem down, and then to inhabit that problem in a search for solutions, is something that is like building a muscle. And once you build the muscle, the muscle is still there and you can use it for something else. And that’s kind of what we see through this project, which, again, we were not involved with since 2012. So the credit does not go to us. And that’s one of the things we are also learning about these things is when they work, a key thing that we’re learning is that it’s not about us. And it’s so interesting because we’re academics and we like to kind of have the publication and say it’s our thing. And what we find actually is the more we involve ourselves, the more we’re engaged, and the more we there, the more people depend on our presence and the more it matters that it’s Harvard and the more that matters that we’re around. And as soon as we pull out, we find that they are not everybody, but they are some people who continue with it because the tools and the philosophy and the approach is sensible to them. Right? And when sensible people take sensible processes ahead, amazing things are possible and we get to look at them and say, wow, isn’t that cool?

Salimah Samji That is. And that’s a fantastic story of we oftentimes hear people tell us all the World Bank can’t do PDIA or donors can’t do PDIA. And here we have an incredible answer to that question is yes, they can. Flexible instruments do exist. I think it really is about the determination of the people who are running the project to want to make it happen. It’s this idea of positive deviants, right? They exist everywhere. Find them in your donor organizations and you might actually find a way to be able to do PDIA. Like we have this great story in Mozambique.

Matt Andrews And it’s not only was a World Bank Project, it was a World Bank Project that was a scale. It was big. It was a World Bank project that went through the central government, provincial government, district government, all the way down to kind of schools and teachers and health centers. And so, you know, it’s not something where we have to now sit and say, how do you change the plumbing in your organization to do PDIA, rather, look at this positive deviants and find out how they did it.  And here’s the key thing is you need people who are going to take risks. In the government side, in the World Bank side, who are going to say, I think we need to do it in a different way, because the way that it was done in the past didn’t work very well. I think that this approach is one that we can adapt, right? Yeah. And we can make it our own and I’m willing to stick my neck out and I’m willing to sit in loads and loads of meetings and I’m willing to have people say that it’s not going to work, it’s not working, it’s a failure. And I’m actually just going to keep on keeping on. And I think that that’s key. Here at the Kennedy School, we speak about leadership. Yes, we say leadership is taking risks on behalf of the things that you care about. And I think that any change requires that kind of leadership. And we see that in the World Bank team. We see that in the donor organization. We see that on the part of the government. And at the end of the day, it shows that when you have that, things are possible, things are possible. Just to say that if you go to the World Bank and you look at this project, it’s not called the PDIA project, it’s called it’s called a four hour project. And it’s about the Mozambican government. And you’ll see the people who are the heroes of this. And that’s also true is that you need to, through this process, spark a lot of fires. And I think that that’s one of the things that I think PDIA does, because people who’ve been left out of the story for a long time start to see that their voice matters and that their sweat is going to lead somewhere. And I think that you see that in this project. I only hope that not only in this project, also in the USAID, one that happened for a year where that’s also been evaluated, really interesting evaluation that they put different things into it. It’s not purely a PDIA thing, but I think at the heart of it is this idea of empowering people with their own future. And I think when you do that, the sky’s the limit and it shows that you can do it in an organization like the World Bank, which tells me you can do it anywhere else. And you don’t need to start by philosophically talking about how hard it is for which plumbing to change. Just look at this. You’ve got a deviant in front of you.

Salimah Samji Yeah, that’s fantastic. Well, thank you very much for sharing this story. I really like your metaphor of a muscle and the memory, because we all know once you learn how to do something, you learn how to ride a bike, you can do it forever. You may not do it. And it really is kind of the building blocks of Building State Capability. Which is something we really believe in, is that once we’ve built that muscle up and we walk away because we always do want to walk away, that we are not the crutch that people need to hold on.

Matt Andrews Yeah, I would I would go even further and say that until we walk away, people maybe don’t build the muscle by themselves. And I think I think the thing is, it’s when people start to practice by themselves, that’s when the muscle starts to build. And that’s why I think we see that when we leave the equation. It’s so powerful.

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you.

Matt Andrews Very much. Thank you much.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette If you want to learn more about the Building State Capability program, please visit bsc.cid.harvard.edu Thank you for listening.