What am I doing in Ghana, Part One?

The MOFA team, the group of EWBers working with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Ghana, has worked with the District Directors of Agriculture (DDA) to create a fellowship between them. This is one of the many projects the MOFA Team works on. They had their first Fellowship in 2010; 7 DDAs participated and they met 5 times over the year. The goal is to create managerial capacity; by having DDA with better skill sets. This year 7 DDAs have signed up for the fellowship, 3 are returning from last year. We are had the 3^rd meeting of the year on August 16^th. As part of this year's program they were asked to create an improvement initiative for their district and they have to report on it each time we meet.

We believe it can have an important impact in the farmer's lives. If by better managing their Extension Agents (the EA are the ones visiting the farmers and delivering the services) we hope that more or better services will be delivered to the end users; the farmers

My task is to evaluate if the DDA is working and being effective? Also, we want to give the fellowship a direction that will impact more DDAs. In the Northern Region, were we work, there are more than 20 Districts. At the present the Fellowship depend entirely on EWB's leadership and money. We also provide the content of these meetings. Instinctively I would say that the Fellowship is working but this is not based on hard evidences.

Although we will try to evaluate the positive impact the Fellowship has in the districts we also want to get them to take ownership for the program and use this as a measure of success.

How Will we be doing it?

Between now and December I will be working on the first three steps of changes.

1. Creating a sense of urgency: As mentioned before by making the transfer of ownership and leadership a measure of success we can make it clear that we won't be supporting the program if it doesn't succeed. Therefore they have to start taking action or it won't exist.
2. Building a coalition: I am already working with 2 of the DDAs. I believe that they both understand the necessity to create ownership within the Fellowship. Some of the key points:
   1. Taking ownership, start assuming some of the functions that the group needs to operate (little by little).
   2. Have some of the senior Fellows to take over some of the teaching.
   3. Find a way to keep the past participants informed and active.
3. Creating a vision: For this part they will have to come up with it. We want them to be proud of their Fellowship; They are very capable and very smart people. Most of them are a lot smarter than me... they shouldn't need me. ;)

More to come...