Mulanje

For those of you that know me well you'll appreciate this is completely out of character but in a moment of pure madness I agreed to climb Mulanje two weeks ago, the highest mountain in central Africa, a whopping 3000m!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulanje_Massif

The five of us set off on Saturday morning after spending the night at the forestry lodge at the bottom of the mountain. It was a grueling 8 hour hike which I was totally un-prepared for. Chris, Briony and Jessica are all pretty fit and are in training for climbing Kilimanjaro, although I'm sure they could have easily been up in 6 hours flat they were very kind and waited patiently as Judy and I struggled up, offering kind words of encouragement which at times just made me want to hurt them :-)

All smiles at the beginning...

Less so several hours in

On Saturday afternoon we finally arrived at Chisepo hut atop the Mulanje plateau. The views were stunning but whether they were “worth it” was still unclear in my mind. It was much cooler on the plateau but the hut had a roaring log fire which we sat around and relaxed with a well deserved beer. Conversation turned to the porters who'd carried our bags up the mountain and how unbelievably fit they must be, we then started to wonder what the most offensive item would be that you could produce from your backpack at the top after they had carried it all the way; I think in the end we settled on a magnum of champagne complete with ice bucket and ice!

Our porters

On Sunday morning our guide Alex took the three sadists up to the top of Sapitwa (the highest peak) leaving Judy and I to lie in and feel sorry for ourselves. 5 hours later they returned and we all set off for another hut (roughly at the same height mercifully) where we'd spend our second night.

The second hut, Chembe was much nicer than the first and we had it all to ourselves which was great. Another log fire and more beer :-)

Monday morning we set off early down the mountain. It was incredibly steep and not for the faint hearted as some parts of the path came perilously close to the edge of large drops. I was much happier going down but although easier on the lungs it was certainly painful on the legs after a while

Finally at the bottom again we went for pizza in the local town, I have no idea how good or bad it was, I ate it in under 30 seconds!

Hard earned

Full pictures available here: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjJZiwHJ

The Pilot Begins

Well it's been a little over three months since I arrived in country now so thought it was high time I gave you all an update on how my project is going and what sort of impact we're having.

Despite a few road blocks and some difficulties in getting started the project is now progressing well. For the last three months we have been getting to grips with the iHRIS framework (see my previous post for detail on iHRIS) and feverishly customizing and developing it for Malawi's needs. We recently ran an initial user workshop where HR officers got to play with the system for the first time and give us some initial feedback on usability and reporting requirements. The workshop was a great success and generally the feedback was both positive and constructive. We're now about to begin our formal pilot phase during which we'll be rolling the system out to three sites in Lilongwe; KCH, (The main hospital in Lilongwe) Lilongwe district health office and the ministry of health headquarters.

During the pilot we'll be making regular visits to the three pilot sites to train and shadow system users as well as collect feedback and requirements that emerge. We plan to branch our code for the purposes of providing a stable production environment during the pilot while at the same time allowing larger scale development to continue on trunk.

The pilot is scheduled to run until Christmas with small incremental releases taking place as needed throughout. In the new year we'll be aiming to begin national roll-out with a more formalized training curriculum. Hopefully by the time I leave next June the system will be in use throughout all 34 of Malawi's district health offices

Challenges

One of the main challenges at the beginning of the project was stakeholder engagement. Unlike a traditional IT project where a client would approach a consultancy, here it is large aid donors such as USAID and WHO which have recommended and subsequently funded the iHRIS project. This has a huge impact on the working dynamic because although the Malawian government are keen to say yes and support anything that brings aid into the country they are also not sure of the benefits of such a system or what impact it might have on their working practices.

Although USAID are the primary donors for this project it is of course us (VSO) that are delivering it. This has added further complication because although both parties want the same outcome there are inherent challenges in cross-donor communication and agenda setting.

For quite a while it felt like we weren't getting much traction and that the project looked set to fail. In an attempt to prevent this we called a meeting with senior management at the ministry and representatives from VSO to discuss a way forward. It was agreed that the ministry should take a leading role in the project and own the delivery of the system. Since then things have been much improved; senior management have been much keener on status reports and we have managed to secure much more local resource time to help with the development.

The main hurdle that still stands in our way to successful delivery is by far and away infrastructure. Many of the district health offices do not have reliable Internet access and we're still unsure of where we can host our server.

We're currently in talks with USAID to provide 3G dongles to the district health offices for the purposes of accessing the system on-line which is great although there are concerns that they may go walk abouts if we're not careful.

For server hosting we're trying to secure some space in a data centre (which are exceptionally rare in Malawi.) The problem of hosting anywhere else such as in the ministry building is ensuring a continuous power supply and reliable air conditioning

So far a very interesting project with some unusual challenges. I will endeavor to provide another project update before Christmas when hopefully I can proclaim the pilot a success!