Set Up For Success

Great news. We have hired Samuel and Mario as two micro-enterprise development coordinators (and, for those who are interested, they agreed to work for a salary of $100 per month). Now the real challenge begins: equipping these two men who have demonstrated a passion and willingness to help their fellow Mozambicans to develop and implement a successful program.

Glenn and I both leave in a little under four months, and we can't help but hear a loud ticking sound in our ears as the time grows closer and closer.

One of the things that we're particularly mindful of is to start out with these new coordinators firmly holding the torch of responsibility for this new program. For the next four months, we'll walk alongside them to help and encourage, but the torch is in their hands.

The torch analogy is borrowed from a mentor who once described evangelism and development projects this way: he said that his experience has shown him that good programs often fail as the foreign creators of the program attempt to pass the torch to national leadership. The torch, he cautioned, is often dropped in the transfer.

Great programs avoid this pitfall by starting out with the torch firmly in the hands of nationals who can provide consistent, local leadership to the program. The nationals own the vision for the program from the outset.

Great words, but what do they mean in practice? That's our present challenge.

Barriers to success -- the weak points where leaders stumble and risk dropping the torch -- come in all shapes and sizes. We're working hard to identify and avoid as many as possible.

When we leave, these coordinators will be required to carry out the program without the benefit of our cars, so for the next four months, Glenn and I will avoid shuttling them around in our cars. Walking or taking local transit will be less efficient, but will prevent creating a barrier to continuity that would need to be torn down later.

If the coordinators need to send an email, they will use an Internet cafe.

If they need to make a presentation, they will do so using materials and resources available to them, not our laptops and projectors.

Past programs have failed to transition to national leadership for the simplest of reasons. I've had it explained to me, for example, that a Mozambican couldn't continue a training program that a missionary had previously started because that missionary had handed out certificates at its completion (something that we had done earlier, as well). The program needed certificates in order to be legitimate, the Mozambican reasoned, but he didn't have the means of making any.

Certificates may be nice, but that's a lousy reason to not continue a program. Certificates, unless they can be produced locally, are a barrier to sustainability that we need not create.

Reflecting on sustainability in August, I wrote that I would act "only where absolutely necessary as an up-front leader." Almost half a year later, I haven't found any situation in which it has been absolutely necessary for me to lead by standing in front of a group. The only reason I have found to do so is for my own sense of usefulness (which, by the way, is not a good enough reason to lead from the front).

This is exactly the point that I was coming to realize in December: I realized that I, too, was a potential barrier, and that I needed to get out of the way, focusing on "supporting, encouraging and equipping people like Mario to sell the strategy to his nation's own sons and daughters."

If something can't be done when I'm gone, it shouldn't be done now. No cars, no computers, no certificates. No white guy, except as an encourager, equipper and mentor. That will, I hope, facilitate the continuity of our program when I'm gone.

If we can start out with as few barriers to sustainability as possible, the Mozambicans who continue the program after our departure will have few to dismantle or surmount.