Desk Optional: Attendance

Nuru works in six to seven month shifts for each foundation team, like Aerie, Meghan, and me
with such a brief period on the ground, our time is incredibly valuable
African time is a problem, making it acceptable for Africans to be incredibly late to meetings
we fight against African time everyday, and we're making progress

One of the battles we fight everyday is with one of the worst kinds of enemies, time. Nuru's strategy is to enter a community, work at an incredible pace for five years, and then leave the community on the upswing, having escaped the grasp of extreme poverty with the future looking bright. Five years is a short time for a community wide growth project, especially when fighting against extreme poverty. Even so, five years is a good limit as it avoids creating dependance, a problem many non-governmental organizations (NGO) face.

With such a short supply of time, every minute of everyday is incredibly valuable. If we're awake (and it's not Sunday), we're either working or thinking about work. We'll even discuss projects over dinner. Our time is a precious resource that we have a limited quantity of, a mere six to seven months per foundation team. Unfortunately, we use a different time convention than that of the area we work. We don't use African time.

African time has many definitions but the definition I am using is the time keeping of farmers in rural Kenya. It's a problem of punctuality. African time affects our meetings, functions, and farm supply distributions. If only a small portion of the w+s representatives are present when the meeting is supposed to start, we can't start on time, forcing us to wait around for a half an hour or more to let the masses trickle in.

It's not a problem of laziness or lack of respect but a different approach to time. We're working with farmers that don't notice a few hours lost here or there because they are waiting months for crops either way. For us, African time is a frustration, but more importantly a challenge to be overcome.

Ever since Nuru has been on the ground, before I arrived, we have been instilling a sense of punctuality in the members of the community we work with. Our CDC, including Lucas, has been doing exceptionally well with keeping time but it is still an issue with the general community. Even within the w+s program, our meetings are delayed because not all of the w+s representatives arrive on time.

The w+s representatives have an important role in the community to attend the bi-weekly w+s meetings with Lucas and me to get new information about the w+s program. If the w+s representatives don't arrive on time, or don't arrive at all, then they will be missing part of the information. This information is not only for the w+s representatives but also for the group of ten other farmers who elected them to the position. So if they are not getting this information and passing it on, they are not doing their job.

So how are we approaching this battle with African time? There are three ways, one of which is by not wasting anyone's time if they do arrive on time. There is nothing worse than a meeting that drags on about something unimportant so Lucas and I work hard to make every meeting efficient and relevant. We make the meetings worth coming to.

The second way to work towards punctuality is to make it part of the job description. The w+s representatives are not paid for their work but they do enjoy benefits. They are the first to receive projects from the w+s program such as our most recent, the rainwater catchment program. In fact, for the rainwater catchment program, the w+s representatives (all 48 including our six leaders), will be receiving the rainwater catchments for free in return for their work in spreading information and letting their homes be used as construction examples when we roll the program out to the rest of the community. But, I have explained to the w+s representatives, if they are not doing their job by not showing up on time, why should I distinguish them from the general community. If they aren't willing to come on time and pass on the information we give out every two weeks, Nuru won't be willing to give them a rainwater catchment for free.

The final way we get w+s representatives to arrive on time is to make their attendance the responsibility of the six leaders. Each leader has six to eight w+s representatives they lead and we have now incorporated their average scores into the leaders scores. The leader's scores will determine the order and amount of benefit the leaders receive in the future. It's a tough job but the leaders are already enjoying their catchments and all of them have been willing to work hard. I reviewed the scoring system with the leaders and Lucas before putting it in place and all of them agree it's fair.

Our plan has been working very well. We take attendance at every meeting and function, assigning different values depending on the arrival time of the w+s representatives. When the attendance sheet began, before I arrived, only 32% the first week and 22% the second week of the w+s representatives arrived on time. Now that the w+s representatives understand our system, we're sitting at 85% two weeks ago and 72% last week and will be improving that next week as we replace leaders that don't come or always come late. Below are the up to date attendance sheets if you want to see how we score and how the system works. Click on the sheets for a larger image.