The Office

All the government ministry buildings are together on a large campus called capital hill. Each of the buildings looks exactly the same and although there are signs on the road telling you which is which it can be very confusing as a pedestrian.

The Ministry of Health

The building for the ministry of health is about a 15 minute walk from the main gate, inside its like stepping back in time. The offices here are just like those of the 70’s in Britain, everyone has their own office with a lockable door and their name or job title on a plaque next to it. This makes for some very long dark corridors that are lined with stacked boxes of paper and filing cabinets.

Our project office is room 88 on the second floor, it’s actually the personal office for a HR manager and so it’s quite a squeeze getting the 7 of us in there! At one end there is a small stack of computers; that’s our development server kit!

Our little office

Our development servers!

The ministry only employs one IT guy normally which is no easy job given the number of machines and decaying infrastructure. His name is Teddy and while he’s a lovely guy he would be the first to admit he’s not the tidiest. Check out that switch cabinet!

The switch cabinet

Teddy's office

At lunch there is a short walk to the capital hill cafeteria where you can get chicken, beef or beans with rice, nsima (maize) or chips. There also seems to be an impromptu church service on the grass everyday which even for the non-believers is a good background track to lunch. Check out the video!  

Full pictures available here: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjGf8nz4

The Dam

At the weekend a group of us visited a Dam about 50km outside of Lilongwe, responsible for providing most of the city’s water. We were driven by Mahmoud, a friend of Cenks who is working with the Arab development bank for Africa in Lilongwe.

The journey was better than the destination in many ways, it was my first time out of Lilongwe since arriving in country and suddenly it felt like I was seeing the ‘real Malawi.’ We drove through several small villages on the way, separated by miles and miles of dirt track with dead corn fields on either side. The car kicked up so much dust when moving at speed that we had to drive very slowly past pedestrians and cyclists so as not to choke them.

Everywhere we went people would stare, point and wave at the car shouting Mzungu Mzungu! (White person/people.) This isn’t meant in an offensive way, people are genuinely amazed and intrigued to see white people, particularly children who probably never have before. This, coupled with the usual Malawian friendliness made for some great photos as people were more than happy to be in front of the lens.

When we arrived at the Dam there was not a soul to be seen, aside from the security guard. The entrance fee was supposed to be 1000KW (about £2) which may have explained how quiet it was, but we got in for free thanks to Mahmoud’s government connections. The place was beautiful and very peaceful, although deserted it was clearly used for large functions on occasion as there were large stone barbecues and lots of seating around the lake.

Judy, Cenk and Mahmoud

Looking over the edge of the dam you could see beyond the fenced enclosure, down to the bottom where kids were using the weir as a water slide, they looked like they were having plenty of fun without paying the 1000KW!

We drove on a little way further and came to a second dam which was far less restricted and hive of activity. People were bathing and washing laundry in the white water, others were fishing in the calm. The whole place had a great, bustling atmosphere and the views from the top were stunning

Full pictures available here: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjG8EfvN

The House

My House

Compared to some of the horrors we were shown during training in the UK my place in Lilongwe is actually fairly palatial. I have a proper bathroom complete with hot running water, a western style toilet, tiled floors and a fairly spacious living/dining area.

My Kitchen

My Living Room

When I arrived it was filthy, the previous tenant had been living there for six years and I don’t think he’d cleaned once in all that time! Luckily my house is in the same compound as Judy’s and she very kindly helped me scrub the place up a bit.

Our compound is fairly typical for Lilongwe; 5 or 6 houses surrounded by a 6-10 ft wall with razor wire all around the top and a 24 hour guard at the front gate. Despite it sounding a bit like a prison it feels fairly safe in Lilongwe and I wonder whether having a guard is really just so someone can have a job.

Our fortress walls

The Compound

We pay a local security firm to provide us with guards and so we often get different people day-to-day. Some of them look slightly less convincing than others, we often have a woman in high heels and a dress show up which is amusing but I dare say pointless.

Joking aside, being a guard is not a very well paid job. VSO gives us an allowance of 15,000 KW per month for ours which is about £30 or just over a dollar a day. We try and help them out with gifts of stuff we don’t want anymore and food where we can.

Full pictures available here: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjG6A3si 

The Project

All the ministries within the Malawian government currently use a single HR/Payroll system known as ‘Global.’ This system is kept updated by a dedicated team of staff that report into central government, if any ministry wants a change made on the system (e.g. a new person being employed, someone leaving or a change to a pay grade) then they must fill out a paper form which is signed off by the HR director for that ministry before being passed to the central team who then manually adjust the system data.

As you can imagine this process is slow and error prone, but that’s not all. Here’s a summary of the main problems the ministry of health currently experience with the system;

• The ministry (MOH) must specify staffing requirements for each hospital which are represented as open positions on Global. Unfortunately the current business process is to only review these requirements once every 5 years and so to work around interim requirement changes MOH must often assign staff to one hospital when they are actually working at another.
• Due to dirty or incomplete data and complex reporting structures it’s often possible for a corrupt supervisor to continue to claim an employee’s salary as part of the hospital budget even after that staff member has left or died. These are known as ‘ghost workers’
• Because global has to accommodate every ministry it’s very generic and does not have many health sector specific fields that the MOH would like to see. This makes it hard to assess where skill and service shortages are

The proposed solution to tackle these issues is a new information system specific to MOH which can be tailored to their needs and can be integrated with Global to keep payroll in sync. The starting point for this is an open source, LAMP* web app called iHRIS;

http://www.ihris.org

 iHRIS has been written specifically to tackle HR process problems in developing countries and has already been successfully deployed in a number of areas. Our first job will be to branch and customise the software for Malawi’s data requirements; we will then be looking to integrate the software with the existing Global system so that data consistency can be maintained.

The project promises to be both technically and politically challenging in a number of ways. Politically the office that is responsible for Global is considered higher up the food chain than the ministry and so getting their buy in on the integration project will be key. Technically, aside from the integration of software the physical infrastructure for the project also poses some problems. There is currently nowhere to run the production environment, we have budget to buy a server but we have nowhere to physically put it. There is also very poor internet connection for much of Malawi so connectivity to the system in some districts will be tricky. If that weren’t bad enough, we’re currently not even sure if some of the district hospitals have computers or people who have the skills to use them.

Initially the whole project team will be based in Lilongwe while we’re building out the system. Once that’s done we’ll be moving out to the districts to trial the system and assess hardware and training requirements.

Will keep you posted…

*Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP

In Country Training

Hello from Malawi, Muli Banji! Apologies it’s taken a while to write this first post but it’s been pretty non-stop since I arrived and internet is sketchy to say the least.

I finally arrived at around midday on Sunday 2^nd after almost 24 hours of planes and airports. There were 9 of us arriving on the UK flight, the rest of which I’d managed to track down during a stop in Nairobi. It felt good to be part of a group who were all new and finding our feet together, we all got along really well and I’m hoping that we’ll stay in touch and be a support for each other throughout the year.  Aside from myself the rest of our intake are nurses so I’m guessing I’ll be ok for medical advice!

Our first week was spent in a local guesthouse getting training on Malawian culture, language and VSO’s objectives. We were also given some orientation in town and got to meet the management team behind our various projects.

Riverside Hotel

Lunch at Riverside

During the week I got chance to have lunch with the rest of the volunteers from my project (iHRIS.) It turns out that the project isn’t as advanced as people had originally hoped and so my job description is going to be somewhat different from what was planned. Originally I was supposed to be based in Zomba, a small town in the south of the country where I would be deploying iHRIS and training users. Unfortunately iHRIS is nowhere near ready for rollout yet and much of the system still needs to be written, as a result I’ll be based in Lilongwe (the capital) for the foreseeable future, helping to build out the system itself. For those of you interested in the technical detail of the project I’ll post a separate article shortly.

By the end of the week I think we were all chomping at the bit to get going and move into our project housing. Although the training had been very useful it had been a long week cooped up in the hotel with little opportunity to get out and explore Malawi. On the last night the VSO staff took us out for pizza, expensive by Malawian standards but a comforting taste of something familiar.

The next day (Saturday 8^th) we were all picked up by our respective employers, in my case the ministry of health and driven to our new homes…

All packed ready for moving

New volunteers class photo

Full pictures from in country training here:

http://flic.kr/s/aHsjG3WjtC

And, as promised, the fairly embarrassing pictures from my leaving party in Leek here:

http://flic.kr/s/aHsjG2S51A

Pre-flight Checks

Well the day has come at last. After over a year of planning I leave the UK today almost as unprepared as when I first applied to VSO. Sure I’ve done plenty of shopping and think I should have most things I need in Malawi but it feels like it’s largely impossible to either imagine what my new life will be like or to think of everything that I should have tied up back home. As I write this in the car on my way to the airport my mind is racing with lots of really dumb little things that feel unfinished; things like have I remembered to cancel all my direct debits? has Molly got all the info she needs to proceed with the sale of our house?  Have I changed the address of all my bank accounts? The reality is that there probably is a lot of stuff I forgot and most of it probably doesn’t much matter, I’m actually really looking forward to getting on the plane simply for the relief of not being able to do anything about any of it anymore.

Aside from worrying about things I can’t control the last couple of weeks have been great. Ron and I went on a weeks holiday around Scotland which ended in Edinburgh for the marathon festival. It was really great to see some of you there for the last time, we all had a lot of fun, pics available here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/olidennis/sets/72157633810126572/

Yesterday my family threw a goodbye dinner for me which was awesome. Ron surprised me by coming up from London and they had all made banners and posters for the house which was really sweet (Pics to follow.) Ate my own body weight in roast lamb so that should hopefully keep me going for a few days in Africa J

Not sure when I’ll first be able to get online in Malawi but rest assured I’ll be posting again as soon as I can. Hope you’re all well and enjoying the weekend