Posted by Duncan Maru
The breaking point for me in the bureaucratic process was the day, after four weeks of being stuck in Kathmandu awaiting for a signature-of-a-signature-of-a-signature, I lodged a silent protest in the office of the Ministry of Women, Children, and Social Welfare. I sat working on various grants and planning documents in the general secretary’s office (i.e., the head of the ministry) waiting for an audience with him. At the end of the day, he finally emerged, said to me “Your presence is not needed” and left as I tried to apologize. That was definitely a low point, but as with any failure, it brought with it an opportunity to re-think our strategy.
What brought me to this process, and its ultimate resolution, requires some clarification. Briefly, we had submitted our project proposal in April, with assurances that all necessary approvals would be finalized within one month of submission. What went wrong over the ensuing months is unclear, other than that we had had several different members go to the government with little success. What is clear is that when I arrived back in Nepal at the end of October, we had in fact taken a step backwards: the Ministry of Women, Children, and Social Welfare, I was informed, had lost our application. We printed and delivered the proposal that day; some of our colleagues from ANMF made some calls, and within a week the agreement was approved by the committee. This was when the real saga began.
Once the approval was made by the committee, a letter was written addressed to the Social Welfare Council stating their positive response. For this letter to be forwarded to the SWC, however, it needed to be signed by the sub-secretary who had chaired the meeting. Our bad luck was such that the day after the meeting the sub-secretary had left his post and had not had a chance to sign. We were assured repeatedly that he would come back tomorrow. Tomorrow kept on not coming, until finally we were informed that he had gone for the holidays and he we would have to wait for a few days. During this time, we were attending to other matters in Kathmandu (pertaining mostly to supply chains management and telecommunications), but still this was seriously delaying the start of our services.
Eventually, we learned, that the sub-secretary had in fact gone to Japan and it was not known when he might return. At this point, Dr. Bishnu and I tried to lobby with another sub-secretary to sign the document, but this too failed. So we waited. Finally, after over three weeks apparently he had returned and had signed the agreement. Now it only needed the general secretary’s signature. Yet when we went to the general secretary’s office nobody knew where the document was other than that maybe it was on the general secretary’s desk. In frustration, I finally raised that (in retrospect, quixotic) protest in his office.
Enter two critical players that came to our rescue. The first was Manindra Malla. By pure coincidence the very day that I was sitting in the general secretary’s office, Ana had met Mr. Malla while purchasing a voltage stabilizer at his electronics shop. Mr. Malla is an IT and computing entrepreneur, with his hand in VOIP, electronics, and solar panels businesses in Nepal. Mr. Malla took interest in what Ana had to say and decided to have us meet with one of the NGOs he was working with to discuss our problem. Due to his business background, he had extensive experience working with and contacts in various government ministries. We met with him at his NGO’s office, and then over the next few days several times more at his electronics shop. We agreed to take him on as our (unpaid) interim Administrative Director.
Simultaneously enter Gagan Thapa, a long-time political leader originally affiliated with the Nepali Congress Student Union. He is friends with our Clinic Superintendent, Rajan Kunwar. Rajan lives close to the clinic in Achham and carries significant weight in local and district politics. He had repeatedly offered to lobby on our behalf, but, owing to concerns about getting involved in political games we had been holding off. That evening, after receiving Manindra dai’s counsel and talking with Rajan again, I decided to give Mr. Thapa a call. He said that tomorrow he would look into it.
Thus the new strategy was as follows. Myself (a foreigner) and Dr. Bishnu (a doctor) were too intimidating and not experienced diplomatically to get the job done. As such, Manindra dai would go alone to the Ministry and discuss the issues. With Mr. Thapa’s political pressure and Manindra dai’s diplomacy, we had the signed agreement in hand within three days.
The next step was receiving SWC approval. This was much less painful, mostly because it was only Manindra dai who interacted with the bureaucrats. It took about a week of small haggling in which Manindra dai would go, they would say, oh take out every reference to poverty, please use a different format for your literature references, please add a few lines to your description of the visa requests, the director’s name must start with doctor, etc. I had in fact left for Achham with the AMD/Open Architecture team by the time it was actually signed. Manindra dai had a grand time with a press conference and invitations to dinner of all the bureaucrats.
After all of this, we learned an important lesson: the international NGO as an institution doesn’t work all that well in Nepal. This was a difficult lesson for us to learn, and in fact it took us six months of struggle to realize. During that time, however, we have put together a fantastic Nepalese team who are now developing a domestic NGO—Nyaya Health Nepal. This NGO will consist of Board Members of the INGO and from a bureaucratic standpoint will receive funding and technical assistance from the INGO to implement projects. For us, given that the NGO is run entirely by INGO board members and decision making is shared in the same way, there is really no functional difference. For the government, however, there is a huge difference in the bureaucratic hurdles they will put in our way. We will discuss more about the Nyaya Health Nepal NGO in another post.
One final note to our current and prospective donors. This post may indicate to you the dangers of investing in a young organization. I would argue that in fact, although this process did delay us somewhat, it actually cost us very little money and only at most two months worth of time. Seven months is in fact not a long time for most organizations to get approval. Most organizations take at least one year. Nobel-peace-prize-winning Doctors without Borders required two years of approval for one of their projects; recently one of the best hospitals in the entire Seti Zone that had been operating for forty years was shut down because of a delay of over a year and a half in getting approval. During the seven months of delay, we raised an additional over 40,000 dollars, conducted another health survery, refined our supplies chain system, expanded our internet presence, built our volunteer base, and won the highly competitive AMD/Open Architecture award. So this has been a productive planning period indeed.