A surprising meeting

We all know that meetings can be annoying. However much the instigators try to give them an exciting flavour, they are often tedious and fail to achieve very much. So it was partly with a sense of duty to be done that we approached the Lweza centre near Entebbe on Tuesday afternoon, to join the Global Care Uganda team conference.

We were looking forward to seeing friends again, to be sure, and to be honest, starting to look forward to getting home. We checked in, received the usual friendly Ugandan welcome, and were taken to our pleasant room. We found some of the team concluding a meeting in the lounge. We were surprised to find the conference centre has a spacious peaceful park-like setting. It is a haven of calm away from the madness of Entebbe Road. And there are birds singing and little monkeys playing.

On Wednesday afternoon, after team reports in the morning, it was my job to conduct training. Global Care wants to ensure that it gets the results it aims for. So do its supporters. Hence we are working to find better ways of testing and demonstrating our impact. I was gaining a little more confidence in what I was doing, having attended a day’s training at Charities Evaluation Service, and delivered sessions at Global Care HQ, Rukungiri and Soroti. Still it felt rather daunting. There were some blank looks as I started to set the scene. They got even blanker as I introduced the logical framework tool that is generally used for planning and evaluating development programmes. We struggled through the first session, the language gap adding to the difficulty of the unfamiliar concepts and ways of thinking.

For the second session, after tea and snacks, I gave each locality group the task of starting to complete a ‘logframe’ for an aspect of their work. They began with a good will, and soon the shape of the projects was emerging. It was striking to see the energy levels rise as the purpose of the exercise became clearer. It was a big effort for us all to see how the work we do could fit the framework. By the end of the afternoon, most people had a headache, I certainly did. But that was more than compensated for by the sense of achievement. Looking at the forms completed, I repeatedly had to congratulate the teams. Not only had they grasped how to use the structure to describe the impact, aims, results and activities of a project, but the content was impressive. Here were realistic accounts of how they could deliver radical change for vulnerable children in their communities. Their vision and experience were evident in the ambition and design. The added rigour of the logframe process only enhanced the power of their plans. A good result to build on!

The next morning saw the teams wrestling with the challenges of selecting children for sponsorship. They receive so many needy applicants. In their communities, perhaps the majority of families are below the poverty line. Their task is to identify the most vulnerable, the desperately poor. These are folk who have absolutely no resources to meet their basic needs. Mere poverty does not impress them. Children struck by sickness and malnutrition, who are orphans, live in tumbledown hovels AND have guardians who are in some way unable to make a living, these are the ones they look for. They are eager to improve, so they did not flinch from revealing past errors and differences in practice in order to challenge themselves with the hard questions.

Perhaps the essential challenge is to have clear criteria that are followed strictly, except when they are not! Because every child is treated as an individual, and sometimes you have to change things. Sometimes you have to find ways to meet additional needs. This happens especially for children with disabilities, whose care and education can be way more costly than others. We debated about the few whose families prosper after being taken on to the scheme. They can afford to add a little money to the sponsorship to gain access to better schools. Should we continue to support them? And how can we work with guardians who are uneducated and don’t understand the value of schooling, or know how to encourage their child to learn?

I left the conference feeling humbled and seriously impressed with the Global Care Uganda staff. Between them they have many years of experience and many professional qualifications. But beyond this they have a love for needy children, compassion for their families, and a drive for excellence. They show a strong desire to ensure that they direct all their resources to the most desperate cases to bring hope and life. They respect the donors and the organisation that enable them to do this, but for them it is personal and a divine commission. I honour them for it and am proud to call them friends.

To learn more about Global Care and how you can help, click here