The Household Mentoring Approach in Uganda
January 24, 2015 9:02 PM   Subscribe

Household mentoring "is an innovative extension methodology used to work with poorer households. The specificity of this approach is that all adult members of a household, including both women and men farmers, are visited and assisted by a trained mentor selected from the local community. During these visits, men and women in a household learn how to better plan their livelihoods together, work together to improve their food security and income, and to share the benefits equally."

"The poorest of the rural poor are always difficult to target...Often illiterate and isolated, they have such great needs that reaching them on a significant scale remains a challenge. In Uganda, IFAD has been working with the government to pilot a methodology that is helping to bridge that gap and change the lives and outlook of the most vulnerable households." "In Uganda household mentoring has been piloted in 18 districts across the country."
posted by Sir Rinse (7 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
They need more money first, and maybe mentoring second.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:09 AM on January 25, 2015 [3 favorites]


Dip flash, did you bother to R any of TFAs? I can't help thinking that, if you did, you would see how untrue, ignorant, content free and frankly silly that comment is. Aid is complex ;this approach has yielded dramatic outcomes in Uganda.

OP, thanks for posting this, fascinating stuff. It's amazing the changes the mentors have wrought in some households. I'm always intrigued by aid initiatives that leverage social factors to increase your efficiency. I'd love to know more about why they think the recommendations, esp in regards to giving the women more power in the household and labour sharing, are received so well and acted upon by the mentors. Indeed I would love to know the mentor profile, are they local, what kind of roles do they hold in their communities? Are they male or female, what are their ages? How are they trained? Awesome stuff.

I do think for people without in country experience, it's easy to underestimate the skills gap in rural, undeveloped areas. When I was in southern Kenya a couple years ago in a little town near the border with Tanzania called issinye, a real challenge for the local teachers at the incredibly impoverished vocational colleges was getting the education they were delivering, getting anything, really, to stick with these young Maasai kids in their home and tribal environments, it was very hard. They could absorb a lot in the school context but putting that into the social context was not a foregone conclusion, even where the curriculum seemed a better fit.
posted by smoke at 2:03 AM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Lots of assumptions and presumptions inherent here, imho. Some thoughts from those better qualified than I.
posted by infini at 3:41 AM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Dip flash, did you bother to R any of TFAs? I can't help thinking that, if you did, you would see how untrue, ignorant, content free and frankly silly that comment is.

Of course I did, and I just reread all three after seeing your comment in case I had grossly misread them the first time. Thanks for the feedback, but I'll stand by my comment. Just as with the article about mosquito nets and overfishing I posted the other day, when the fundamental problem is scarcity of resources (or really, an inequitable distribution of resources, both within Uganda and between Uganda and the developed world), you can't fix that with these kinds of small scale interventions. The program certainly appears to be having benefits from encouraging people to engage in more middle class behaviors, but it isn't solving the actual problem and it isn't clear from the brief articles if they have fully considered the reasons why people might engaging in the discouraged behaviors such as separate control of resources.

Over and above that, there's the issue of scalability and generalizability from pilot programs that has been known and discussed for decades now. Pilot programs tend to produce good results -- they get extra resources and lots of intellectual investment, and yet often don't work so well, or produce an array of unintended consequences, when scaled up.

"Things are better now because we work together and make decisions jointly," says Provia. From having separate incomes and separate plots of land, she and her husband Cyprian have pooled their resources and decide together how their money should be spent or saved.

It sounds like one of the changes they are pushing is for joint control and management of resources; the benefits are obvious but I hope they have thought through the second-order consequences, such as how this would impact ownership of land if a couple separated, for example, and the resiliency that the current approach might offer in some situations.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:48 AM on January 25, 2015 [2 favorites]


The concerns about property division in case of separation aren't nothing, sure, but how on earth does that rate as a major consideration when you're talking about people who might have to pull their kids out of school if the weather's bad this year? There's a hierarchy of needs, here. Getting information to be better farmers seems potentially much more valuable than giving each household a proportionate share of whatever IFAD's budget is. It seems very strange to criticize a program like this on the basis of how it isn't as good as it could be if wealthy nations had completely different funding priorities.
posted by Sequence at 7:45 AM on January 25, 2015 [3 favorites]


Data about the effectiveness of cash transfers seems to be much more robust than that for these types of interventions.

That assumes a lot about your budget. I'm not saying I don't think cash transfers work. I'm saying that what they seem to be saying about the budget right now, unless I'm misreading, is that they're paying somebody $10/month and giving them a bicycle. 3 years and up to 30 households. There are limits to what cash can do in the absence of information, and this is more true the smaller the amounts. $360 for 30 households across three years is $12/household--or $4/year. Say it's a really nice bike and it's $600 for the 30 households, that's still under $7/year. Maybe I'm missing something, but that seems to be the point of all of this--to actually be able to do something positive with minimal outside funding compared to other interventions.

I mean, cash transfers have diminishing returns at smaller amounts per household, surely that has to be obvious. If you give me $20k to get my life in order, this time next year I'll probably be doing pretty damn good compared to now. If you give me $1, I will go buy a candy bar. This feels like the sort of solution one comes up with when one does not have funding for effective levels of cash. I could definitely be wrong, and if it's intended to replace these people getting other available aid then it's gross. But in the absence of larger sums of money than this, while my upbringing was poverty in the US, there were a lot of types of information that would have been less valuable to me than a year's wages--but also way more valuable than a candy bar, and possibly could have been distributed for the price of said candy bar.
posted by Sequence at 10:53 AM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Thanks for fleshing out your objections, Dip Flash, I generally respect our opinion, and love a good substantive comment.
posted by smoke at 3:25 PM on January 25, 2015


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