» Gaela Bernini
Interview with Gaela Bernini
We spoke to Gaela Bernini, head of the project area of FMpE, Fondazione Milano per Expo, the promoter of the JFpA project. We asked her to tell us about her role within the Foundation and to explain the meaning of sustainability in the development cooperation field.
It’s a matter of fact that following an international cooperation project is not an easy job, can you tell us what your role is and what motivated you to accept the assignment from FMpE?
Development cooperation is a process based on change with the consequent complexity and multi dimensional nature of the actions connected with it. Being in charge of the project area thus means verifying that the various phases of the project are being properly carried out with programmed monitoring, anticipating critical areas and intervening and evaluating the results achieved with respect to the objectives. Measuring the results is never an easy job and one must avoid the risk of simplifying or reducing a phenomenon to make it measurable. A rational approach is necessary in international cooperation to avoid populist tendencies that can lead to assistance without autonomy and hence without sustainability. It’s very stimulating to work for a foundation such as FMpE, which on the one hand must achieve an ambitious result on the ground, the economic and hence social emancipation of a group of young Togolese women, and on the other intends to offer its experience and specific know-how to a universal appointment like Expo 2015, where there will be a debate from different angles precisely on the themes of the project “socio—economic dynamics and global markets, the development of rural communities and of sustainable models of consumption).
The third objective for the millennium is equality of the sexes and the empowerment of women. Do you think the JFpA project has respected this?
Personally I believe strongly in the role of agent of change for women and the JFpA project is the evidence that proves it. The progress achieved has increased the sense of security of the women involved and their role in the family.
Something is happening.
The project itself in Togo has been developed in partnership with the Ministry of Base Development, and the Minister there is a woman, M.me Dogbè, who is committed and open to the concept, she has shown great intellectual honesty both in the start-up phase of the project and in the assessment phases.
Can you explain in simple terms what sustainability means.
The great theme of development cooperation projects is sustainability and, in our case, if the women’s cooperatives will be able to keep cultivating, producing and selling with sufficient economic margins without the presence of expatriate support personnel. To reduce as much as possible the risk of things grinding to a halt we are planning a gradual exit from the territory to ensure a progressive handover.
But at a certain point, to borrow the words of Amartya Sen.: the fishing rod is made and delivered to be used autonomously.
» Enrico Selmi
Interview with Enrico Selmi
We spoke to Enrico Selmi, head of project coordination with MLFM, Movimento Lotta Fame nel Mondo, the NGO chosen by FMpE as its technical partner in Togo. We asked him for a review of the project "from the field".
What is Movimento Lotta Fame nel Mondo's role in this project?
The commitment of MLFM IT in the JFpA project is to make available and coordinate specialised personnel to transfer into the field, and to make the most of their presence through daily contact with the project staff, with the people benefiting and not least with the local NGO RAFIA (Recherche, Appui et Formation aux Initiatives d'Auto-développement, founded in Togo in 1992, editor’s note).
In fact it is the success of this contact that brings results, and is a sign that all we have done to achieve perfect integration has been successful and that all the people involved have understood their roles and perform them as leaders.
What has changed today in the concrete management of a project like JFpA?
It has nothing to do with what used to happen 10 years ago, when technologies were developed only in the northern hemisphere and contact was by letter, letters that took 10 days to be delivered, and there were only telephones in the big cities.
Now that mobiles are everywhere in developing countries and satellite connections are very widespread, my role from Italy means continuous exchanges of email and telephone calls, which today are instantaneous thanks to new communication technologies.
I must underline that frequent daily contact is no substitute for assessment missions, which allow direct contact with local staff to evaluate their involvement and their management abilities, allowed visits to beneficiaries and their activities, discussions with our local partner and not least give us a chance to evaluate the progress of the project and its sustainability.
Daily email contact and missions into the field, you must have a privileged viewpoint of the project "in the field", what can you tell us about it?
It's precisely through this continuous, in-depth contact that we managed to monitor the various activities. From the cultivation of tomatoes to their transformation into concentrate, up to the production of six different fruit juices that allow the transformation cooperative to work 12 months a year.
Today the Dindan cooperative produces bottles of fruit juice and bags of concentrate to sell on the Savannah Region market, where the project is based, but we are gearing up to cross the whole of Togo and arrive at the Maritime Region, where there is the capital Lomé.
Behind this transformation there are four other cooperatives of women working and they, in addition to cultivating tomatoes, harvesting them and doing initial processing, today are running a mill to grind the products of their fields, are rearing pigs to use waste from the process and have a nursery of seedlings to transplant into the production fields. Not least the production of raw materials for making tamarind, ginger and bissap fruit juices.
In conclusion, the women of Jeune Filles pour l’Agro are increasingly enthusiastic and much more autonomous: the future of this project depends on the roots that the seed of cooperation is able to put down, and today we can say that it has germinated well!
» Davide Martina
Interview with Davide Martina
We spoke to Davide Martina, of PuntoSud, the foundation that handles auditing, monitoring and accountability in Togo. We asked him to explain this still little-known aspect of the management of international cooperation.
Today there is increasing talk of accountability in cooperation projects, can you explain what this means?
The accountability dimension sprang from the continuous development of methodologies, approaches and applications in 30 years of international cooperation.
This term sums up all the methods relating to feasibility, operation, communication, and accounting which have a single lane: to bring development and emergency projects away from the alibi of singularity which would make them implode, and lead them into shared regulations so that they can account for what they do in a professional, transparent and clear way.
You are one of the founders of Fondazione Punto.Sud, can you tell us what your role is?
Since it was set up in Milan, in 1999, by a group of consultants, our aim has been that of sustaining and optimising the activities of organs that work in the humanitarian field and in international cooperation. We are the kind of bridge between donors and non-profit organisations.
What we do in monitoring, in helpdesk support, in training, in assessment and in financial and control is not just a series of arid and abstract processes but rather an added value, to bring out the qualitative aspects of the programs we follow.
How did collaboration with Fondazione Milano per Expo come about?
When we were contacted in 2010, FMpE was looking for an entity that could guarantee and external monitoring and auditing process, to be carried out on activities and documentation produced by the implementer of the Jeune Filles Pour l'Agro project in Togo.
The FMpE was very interesting because for once it wasn't starting with the rules already written and procedures to be adapted while it was under way, at last there was the request to develop beforehand a package of procedures and formats regarding all project phases.
FMpE had the objective of promoting best practices that fully expressed the entrepreneurial DNA of the founding partners. This allowed us to use procedures inspired by the world of business and tried and tested in international cooperation. We didn't have to invent anything, we took good examples from here and there to guarantee the quality of the project and proposals to be broadened and discussed with the rest of the cooperation community.
It doesn't often happen to have the chance to work alongside those who design the procedural architecture of a donor right from the start, but this time it was possible.
Our effort went into avoiding FMpE procedures being contaminated by the typical nature and singularity of the project. So it wasn't a specific project package for Jeune Filles pour l'Agro, but a professional tool that drew on worldwide control methods, that looked at the best there was in the world of cooperation and humanitarian aid.
In concrete terms, what have you achieved?
Starting from the experience of Puntosud and the main manuals of Project Cycle Management, Monitoring, Assessment, financial control applied to international cooperation projects and international donor procedures, we developed the FMpE Management Methods: an integrated package of rules on the admissibility of costs and activities, formats accompanying the project process, meeting the needs of modification, monitoring, assessment, auditing and obligations of visibility and communication.
The project has behind it three years of implementation, reports, audits and experience that have sometimes demanded changes of course because of changes in the context, production, techniques, climatic events, administrative organisation, but we can say that the Management Methods have always remained a reliable, complete and pragmatic compass.
Mission accomplished, then?
In this FMpE has certainly achieved one of its aims: to demonstrate to the wide world of international cooperation that it is possible to work with rules that are well defined and certain, not cumbersome or bureaucratically tiresome but based on clear rules of accountability that make the life of the project fluid, if they are always borne in mind and applied across the board.
No objections?
Sure, monitoring in progress costs money, but I think it is a required investment for accounting to donors: both companies in the case of FMpE, but also citizens who pay their taxes.
» Mariacristina Cedrini
Interview with Mariacristina Cedrini
We spoke to Mariacristina Cedrini, Director of Fondazione Milano per Expo, who took part in the Focus Groups identifying the project with local authorities and the civil society in Togo and in all the phases of defining the project.
How did you come to identify the tomato chain as a project opportunity?
Already during the candidature of the city of Milan for Expo 2015, Italian entrepreneurs were able to understand the importance of international relations based on the true needs of emerging countries. So when the Togolese authorities showed interest in being involved in a project which could offer a possible contribution to the cultural landmark desired by Expo 2015, we set out to identify critical areas where project would make sense both for the development of the country and as a model for the Foundation itself. The tomato chain proved to be a particularly important area of intervention for involving young women, an issue to which we at FMpE are very sensitive because of the key role of women in cooperation for development and in the Italian entrepreneurial sector. Not least the content is in line with the theme of Expo 2015.
Women are going to the market already today, they already have some activities in tomato transformation. What can the FmpE project change?
This is exactly the kind of intervention that is in line with the FMpE approach. A project that fits naturally into the reality of the country, concretely tackling some problems and, through development, offering ideas for solutions. Women in Togo are particularly active in harvesting tomatoes that they then distribute to the market, after transformation on a very small scale, almost always at the family level. The problems are linked principally to the quality of the product because of the lack of hygiene and technical support in transformation, the difficulty of correctly conserving the product given the climatic conditions and the problems of selling outside the village market. The women involved in the project will be able to access forms of microcredit and work with micro entrepreneurial enterprises.
How are you thinking of involving the excellence of Italian enterprises in this project?
The entrepreneurial sector has already got involved, as an Association, when a group of important entrepreneurs enthusiastic supported the candidature of Milan for Expo 2015.
Given the growing importance of the project it was felt a key move to set up a Foundation, today called Fondazione Milano per Expo, also with the support of Assolombarda and the Milan Chamber of Commerce. The very existence of FMpE shows that Italian entrepreneurship is playing an active, participating role and is deeply involved. It is true that in individual projects we will be able to identify the most relevant companies for their knowledge and technologies and good practices that have already been tried and tested. This in fact is the role of FMpE: a connection between the requirements of the countries our projects are aimed at and the entrepreneurial sector, also in the extraordinary range of competences so well represented by Assolombarda and the Milan Chamber of Commerce.
