By Kemo Cham
After about an hour of deliberation, discussion came to a standstill. The disagreement, I later learned, was about representation: who should head a committee that had just been formed to champion development issues bothering the community people. The choice was between the Town Chief and the Youth Leader.
This scene, which happened on Wednesday February 19, at the Zimmi Court Barry, involved representatives of about a dozen communities in Ward 360 in the Makpele Chiefdom of Pujehun District, who had gathered as part of a community engagement session under the UK-funded Strengthening Accountability Building Inclusion (SABI) project.
“This is the thing about the SABI project. We let the people decide for themselves their path to development,” Sahr Kellie, a field officer working with Christian Aid, said to me in the background of noisy exchanges.
Kellie, a senior programme officer of the international charity in the southern region, shared his time during the nearly four discussions between taking note and interpreting to me the contributions of the Mende-speaking participants.
The discussion was held in both Mende and Krio.
“They are going to decide without us telling them what to do,” Kellie said, referring to the stalemate over the leadership of the committee.
And so it was.
Eventually, the participants, about 25 of them, came to an agreement. The Town Chief would lead the committee which was tasked to visit the Pujehun District Headquarters Town the following week to meet with local government officials to demand for fulfilment of promises they’d made regarding provision of water to their communities and other development needs.
Zimmi is a small town of over 5000 population. It is located at the border between Sierra Leone and Liberia, with its inhabitants mainly dependent on agriculture and mining.
The SABI project, which is a four-year initiative run by a consortium of local and international Non-Governmental Organizations, is geared towards improving on service delivery and accountability by bringing together community people and their elected representatives to discuss issues affecting their livelihoods.
Headed by Christian Aid, the consortium strive to create awareness among citizens to enable them demand for service delivery.
Other organizations that are part of it include the health NGO Focus 1000, which operates at the national level; as well as Restless Development; Rehabilitation and Development Agency (RADA); SEND Sierra Leone; Social Development Direct; and Sierra Leone Social Aid Volunteers, all of which operate at community level.
The project covers three key thematic areas: Health, Education and Social Protection.
The agenda of the Zimmi Court Barry discussion was informed by findings in the 2019 Citizens Perception Survey (CPS) published earlier this month.
The SABI project is funded through the UK’s international development arm – the Department For International Development (DFID). With operations nationwide in every district of the country, the programme makes use of grassroots civil society organizations which report based on solid data.
The CPS, an annual report, recounts the experiences of beneficiaries of public services in the three thematic areas.
The data collection exercise was done by Restless Development. For Makpele Chiefdom, the report covers about 10 communities.
The 2019 CPS, the third edition, revealed a steady increase in service delivery across the three sectors. But analysis of the report shows that there were still gaps, as indicated by the Makpele experience.
Among the issues identified were lack of clean and safe drinking water, drug shortage in health facilities and lack of seats in schools.
Alpha Lahai, Field Officer for RADA, who coordinated the Zimmi Court Barray session, said that the day’s discussion was designed to identify the most pressing issues from among the lot and to draw an action plan to address them.
After the preliminary discussion, two major issues stood out – lack of clean and safe drinking water and low turnout for Antenatal Clinic (ANC) in some of the communities.
The participants also identified the specific communities affected by these issues, the relevant authorities to take up the concerns to, as well as the composition of the representation from the community. They also drew a timetable within which to undertake all these actions outlined.
Some of the communities identified included Nyeyama, Pewa, Ngorporuhun, Njagbema and Bayama. A total of nine communities had acute shortage of water, while six others recorded low ANC turnout.
The meeting heard testimonies of how women opted to stay away from health facilities due to the attitude of healthcare workers and how they struggled to deal with unavailability of water in Labour rooms of health centers.
One participant recalled how a recent consignment of drugs couldn’t meet the demand of a certain community, calling for a review of the requisition procedure.
Among the actions required to address these issues were meetings with the Councilor of the Ward and the Paramount Chief of the chiefdom. The participants also planned to meet with the District Medical Officer.
Occasionally, when the discussion hit a snag, the SABI officials would intervene.
At one point a participant emphasized on the reluctance of some of their elected representatives to treat their concerns with seriousness. “What happens if such a situation arises?” the concerned participant, a young man, asked.
“If a public servant is not delivering, you all have a role to play, but you have a greater chance to succeed only when you do it as a team. What SABI does is to empower you to know the referral pathways to demand for services,” explained Fanta Daboh, Head of Prgramme at Christian Aid.
“When you raise an issue with the Councilor [and] it doesn’t work, you go to the Council,” she added, stressing that as citizens they had the power to get their elected officials deliver on what they were elected to do. She noted that until the people knew this, they wouldn’t be able to make any headway in their development aspirations.
Besides representations from the communities directly affected by the issues under discussion, participants were also drawn from key institutions within the district.
There were even representations from the religious groups: the Imam and Pastor. Every decision is carefully considered to reflect the potential concerns of everyone.
Community Health Officer, James Massaly, who chaired the session, noted that the SABI project had led to a rise in the level of awareness through sensitization and outreach. He said prior to now the people complained about long distances they had to cover to reach health facilities as well as the difficult terrain.
“We set out as a community and put ideas together on how to overcome those obstacles and increased turnout,” he said.
Massaly pointed out that the current concerns emanated from communities where a new facility was recently established.
The new facility is located in Pewa, on which over half a dozen other communities depend for healthcare services.
“At this meeting we have put strategies in place which include community engagement and sensitization. We will also use our CHWs [Community Health Workers] at the communities. As a CHO, together with other stakeholders, we will lead this process,” Massaly, who is also Community Health Supervisor for the Chiefdom and heads the Zimmi Community Health Center, told me in an interview at the end of the discussions.
Youth representative, Satie Sheriff, noted that with SABI the youths had been allocated their rightful place in discussions and participation in community development issues in the chiefdom.
“Before this time, the youths were not looked up to as people of responsibility,” he said, while explaining the role the youth could play to attain the goals of SABI.
Women are the most affected by all the issues concerned, added Adama Konneh, Chair Lady of a SABI-affiliated women’s organization in Zimmi. She said women were more eager to solutions to the current issues.
“Everything about us is water, we use it for domestic purposes like cooking and drinking,” she said in an interview.
“We saw the long distances people have to cover to health centers. For example, from Nyeyama to Pewa. Some of the times people come through all that distance and there is no drug. It discourages them from coming back,” she stated, adding: “About seven villages rely on Pewa for healthcare services. And without water, the hospital cannot work. In the labour room, when we deliver, there is no water. So water is really a problem.”
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