Deputy Minister for Local Government, Agrrey Mwanri, visits Njombe

Deputy Ministry for PMORALG, Aggrey Mwanri (left)

I got an invitation last week to a meeting with the Deputy Minister for Local Government (PMORALG/TAMISEMI), Agrrey Mwanri, who was visiting Njombe. The invitation said he had requested to meet with local government leaders, religious leaders and "wazee wa mji" (town elders). Since I'm neither a leader of local government nor any religious group, I supposed I must have qualified for "elder" status, and thought I should go along. Plus, Mwanri has been making quite a stir locally with his unusually hands-on approach to his role (see photo, and the links below), and I wanted to see what the fuss what about.

I was not disappointed. The Minister spoke at length (around 3 hours) without notes on issues of local governance, and was clearly in confident command of his brief.

Running a hybrid - NGO and media cultures combine

A little while ago, I posted an old op-ed column by Rakesh Rajani, in which he asked "What if NGOs were newspapers?" And I promised to follow it up with some thoughts on our situation here at Daraja, where we are an NGO that runs newspapers, to see how accurate Rakesh's ideas were. Well, here goes.

Rakesh's main point was that NGOs are not subject to the strict deadlines that rule newspapers' work, or to the same kind of pressure that newspapers face to give readers what they want. A reporter who misses a deadline finds that their story isn't published. A newspaper that comes out late risks missing out on sales and undermining their readers' trust. And if a newspaper writes about things that don't interest their readers then that paper won't get bought again. The nearest equivalent pressures on NGOs have often very little to do with the community - their "beneficiaries" - and more to do with keeping their donors happy.

In other words, NGOs aren't as strongly accountable to the community as newspapers for doing their work on time or for doing it well.

A good start to 2012

2011 ended with a disappointment - the loss of Mzee "Njoo Uone" Augstino Hongole, the chair of Kwanza Jamii Njombe's Editorial Board and inspiration to Daraja, was hard to take.

But he would have been delighted with how 2012 has begun, with our Kwanza Jamii newspapers getting wider exposure in the UK. The Journalism Foundation, a recently-established body headed by Simon Kelner, respected former editor of The Independent newspaper, has published an article by Daraja's Executive Director, Ben Taylor, "Local newspaper project putting the community first in rural Tanzania". This is one of a series of first-person accounts from people "on the journalistic front line," introduced here by Simon Kelner.

Lala salama Mzee Njoo Uone

Below is an obituary of Mzee Augustine "Njoo Uone" Hongole, inspirational journalist and activist, and Chair of Kwanza Jamii Njombe's Editorial Board. He will be much missed. This obituary, by our Managing Editor, Simon Mkina, will be published in Kwanza Jamii newspapers next week.

Lala salama Mzee Njoo Uone

• Nyota yake imezima ghafla, akiwa anahitajika kujenga maadili, kutetea chai

Na Simon Mkina

Mzee Augustino "Njoo Uone" Hongole

DESEMBA 13, mwaka huu wa 2011 ilikuwa siku ya mwisho kabisa kuuona mwili wa Mzee Augustino Hongole maarufu kama Mzee ‘Njoo Uone’. Ni siku ambayo mwili wake ulibeba zaidi ya tani moja ya mchanga kuutenganisha na uso wa dunia hii.

So what's in Tanzania's Draft Open Government Action Plan?

Tanzania's draft action plan for the Open Government Partnership has evolved and grown significantly since we last posted a draft on this blog. I've posted the full "commitments" section of the latest draft below, with the less interesting preamble, etc, removed - though the full text is also available online. This is the draft that came back from the recent OGP meeting in Brazil, and will be finalised for formal submission to the OGP in April 2012. 

Maji Matone hasn't delivered. Time to embrace failure, learn, and move on

It is no secret that Daraja's Maji Matone programme has not lived up to expectations. In particular, despite considerable resources spent on promotional work - printing and distributing posters and leaflets, as well as extensive broadcasts on local radio - we haven't had the response from the community that we had hoped for.  A six month pilot in three districts resulted in only 53 SMS messages received and forwarded to district water departments (compared to an initial target of 3,000). So we've made a decision - to embrace failure, learn and share lessons from the experience, and to fundamentally redesign the programme.

Admitting failure in this way is easy to support in theory, but much harder to do in practice. It may be accepted practice in the for-profit world, but it's uncomfortable for a donor-dependent NGO. Would it be easier to continue half-heartedly with a programme that isn't working or close it down quietly and hope that nobody notices? Of course it would. But those approaches would not benefit anyone, wasting money and missing out on valuable opportunities to learn. So we're taking a different tack, embracing and publicising our failures, and trying to make sure we (and others) learn as much as possible from the experience.