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When winding up a major program
such as this, the Foundation customarily reviews its efforts,
recognizing an obligation to account for and evaluate the use of
tax-free funds abroad. The review process has management objectives as
well; it is a method of sharing experience among staff in various parts
of the world; of identifying flaws in operational methods, and sometimes
of spotting loose ends that should be dealt with before moving on.
Broadly, the backward look is a way of learning about the development
process from the experience.
In this case, the exercise has
added interest because the two principal countries involved, Tanzania
and Kenya, have chosen radically different social and development
strategies. Indeed, the contrast between them has attracted much
scholarly attention, a fact that makes possible a somewhat broader
review than one based largely on program documents.
The anticipated emergence of
Namibia and Zimbabwe in southern Africa also lend a potential
significance to the review process. The Foundation may be called upon to
decide how much of its eastern African experience it is prepared to help
replicate in these states.
A. 1. Program
dimensions
The specific program actions that this review is meant to
cover are the following Delegated Authority Projects (DAPs):
#639-0290 - Project specialists and consultants on economic
planning in eastern Africa
Allocation (1963 - 1976) $
3,606,000
#649-0420 - Project specialists and consultants on public
administration in eastern Africa
Allocation (1964 - 1976) $
2,450,000
#709-013 9 - Project specialists and consultants to the
East African Community
Allocation (1970 - 1976) $
671,000
These projects supported
approximately 172 man-years of resident advisory staff, whose local
logistical support costs were borne by the East African office budget.
These costs amount to an additional $1,500,000, approximately.
This, however, is not the full
picture. Some DAPs, totaling $2,362,000, supported related activities,
such as the first three years of the public administration program in
Tanzania and final expenditures of the three main projects, which were
combined into a Public Management DAP in 1974 for administrative
reasons. Parallel advisory efforts in Botswana were first funded under
DAP 649-0420, but then spun off into a separate but related DAP.
In addition, grants totaling over
a million dollars were made in support of planning and administration
program objectives; e.g. for building a Civil Service Training Center in
Dar es Salaam, for holding the Kericho Conference in Kenya, etc. These
are not evaluated here, but they contributed directly to the programs
under review. It can be seen that the total cost of the Foundation’s
work in these fields since 1961 in eastern Africa was more than ten
million dollars.
For this review, it is useful to note the breakdown of direct advisory
costs in economic planning and public administration between Tanzania
and Kenya:
Tanzania
Kenya
Economic Planning
$ 1,173,000
$ 1,924,000
Public Administration 1,530, 000
995,
000
Totals
$ 2,703.000 $ 2,919,000
(Advisors stationed in Arusha to assist the East African
Community organizations are excluded from the totals.)
A. 2. Methodology
and Limitations
Having sketched the broad purposes of a terminal review, and described
the dimensions of the programs to be considered, one must hasten to
describe the way the review had been carried out and the limitations
inherent to the process.
The bases for the review are
experience, the files, published material, and a limited number of
interviews with participants, government officials and knowledgeable
observers. My experience consists of having served as assistant
representative of the Foundation in East Africa from 1963-67; focusing
on Tanzania in writing two papers while at Harvard the following year;
and revisiting Nairobi and Dar es Salaam for two weeks at the end of
1976. The files contain periodic program justification documents
(requests for supplements), formal program review documents, and an
incomplete set of terminal reports written by departing project
specialists. The published material on eastern Africa is enormous; that
which I have been able to consult is listed in the bibliography. A list
of interviewees appears in Appendix B.
A draft of this paper was
circulated to a few individuals who participated in or were familiar
with the program in operation. Helpful comments have been received from
David Anderson, R. Cranford Pratt, Bevan Waide, Brian Van Arkadie, Jon
Moris, Edgar Edwards, Guy Hunter, Edward Rubin, Peter Bottelier, John
Robin, Edgar Winans, and Frank Sutton. Needless to say, they cannot be
held responsible for the inaccuracies or biases that remain in the
document.
The limitations of the exercise will be seen to be considerable. Most
regrettable is the comparative lack of attention to Zambia. I was unable
to visit Lusaka or to see the principal architects of our program there,
David Anderson and Alan Simmance, so this part of the program, a
successful and important part, will be relatively neglected.
Similarly, the work in the East African Community is inadequately
treated. This is less damaging, perhaps, because of the declining
climate for East African cooperation and the limited relevance of the
project for other regions. Still, John Scott’s work as director of
economic research and planning for the Community was of unusual quality
and influence and deserves more adequate treatment.
A. 3. Previous
reviews
This
is far from the first review to be made of these programs. In addition
to the annual program report by the representative, and the frequent
restatement of results and objectives involved in requesting
supplemental funds, staff consultants made periodic reviews throughout
the fifteen-year period. The first of these was Operation Janus, an
intensive analysis of program objectives and activities conducted by
each field office of the Foundation in 1966. In 1970, a rather elaborate
African Program Review was conducted for the Board of Trustees, with
contributions from program staff in New York and the field offices. Also
in 1970, the economic planning program in Kenya was reviewed by Ben
Lewis and Edgar Edwards, and in Tanzania by Lewis and Gerald Helleiner.
J. Donald Kingsley and John Thurston, whose consulting report gave shape
to the original public administration program in Tanzania in 1961,
returned ten years later for a subsequent assessment. In 1973, a staff
conference in Dar es Salaam examined the planning and administration
programs with a view to changing directions towards a public management
program.
These efforts give evidence that,
although advisory assistance was popular with the governments of the
region and generally regarded by Foundation staff as being of good
quality, there was no tendency to complacency, no routine continuation
of the projects simply because they were functioning satisfactorily.
Indeed, the strongest criticism of the Foundation’s restless process
of program review came from Alan Simmance, who felt that in recent years
intense Foundation self-scrutiny has led to a distraction of energies
from the work at hand and the premature abandonment of work for which it
was uniquely fitted. This is a topic to which we will need to return
later.
B. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
B. 1. Foundation
strategy
The Foundation turned seriously to Africa in the late
1950s, only after some years of development work on the Indian
Subcontinent and in the Middle East. Prior experience naturally had an
important influence on the fields in which its work in Africa initially
concentrated. Broadly speaking, governmental modernization and the
building of educational institutions were high priority for governments
and the Foundation.
The large investment made by the
Foundation in India in the 1950s in community development programs was
less well thought of, with the result that projects in rural development
and agriculture, as well as community development, were not featured in
the Africa programs for some years. This did not reflect a lack of
interest in rural development on the part of the Foundation (indeed
Forrest F. Hill, then vice president in charge of overseas development
programs, was an agricultural economist); but a new strategy was thought
to be needed which would offer greater chances for success than building
community development projects or agricultural faculties in
universities. During this period the Foundation joined the Rockefeller
Foundation in building IRRI, setting a pattern of investment in
technology development that has generally been adhered to since.
A fourth program category that in
recent years has been a prominent feature of the Foundation’s work is
population, but in Africa at the time of independence that was a subject
far from the minds of its leaders. Development work in Africa,
therefore, focused initially on education and government modernization,
of which only the latter program is the subject of this review.
In retrospect, the Foundation’s
strategy in working with governments in East Africa has a clarity and
coherence that masks some of the groping uncertainty felt at the time.
The first and obvious task was to assist the newly independent African
governments to assume effective control, i.e., to indigenize their civil
services without unduly damaging their effectiveness. The second task
was to help these governments realize their egalitarian objectives by
shifting more attention to developmental activities; and the third was
to devise methods to improve the functioning of governmental services,
particularly those of a developmental character.
These three strands correspond
roughly, but not exactly, with the public administration DAP (649-0005),
the development planning DAP (639-290), and the public management DAP
(749-0828), which superseded the other two.
The Foundation’s strategy
coincided with, and to a large extent was in response to, the priorities
of the governments themselves. African leaders wanted first to take
genuine control of the state institutions, which meant rapid
Africanization of key positions; then to gain control of their
economies, and to increase and spread the benefits of political and
economic independence to their people through development programs.
There was thus general agreement
on long-range goals between the governments and the Foundation, but
there was an important difference in time perspective. Governments are
responsible for the course of day-to-day events, and hence often have
rather short-range time horizons. The Foundation, lacking such
responsibility, has the leisure, and in some cases its staff have the
experience, to take a somewhat longer view. In practice, this often
meant that Foundation staff were generating activities in advance of the
emergence of genuine demand for them from the governments. In some cases
Foundation staff anticipated future demand correctly, and in some cases
wrongly, but the difference in time perspective explains why, despite
the coincidence of overall objectives, the Foundation’s activities
were not always limited to responding to governmental requests.
B. 2. Public
Administration in Tanzania
In 1958, J. Donald Kingsley served as a consultant on civil service
staff development in Nigeria. Shortly thereafter he became the
Foundation’s representative in West Africa and initiated a program
strongly oriented to public administration advisory services and
training. In 1961, just before Tanganyikan independence, the chief
secretary invited Kingsley to consult on the means of nationalizing the
public services. Kingsley and John Thurston of IIE produced a report
that sent shock waves through the expatriate-dominated civil service of
Tanganyika.
They described the public service
at the time as consisting of “African ministers and African messengers
with a thick sandwich of Europeans and Asians in between.” (Janus) The
expatriates were aware of the meager numbers of Africans possessing the
educational basis to master the skills of running the bureaucracy, and
naturally assumed their services would be needed for many years to come.
(Tanganyika had less than
100 university graduates and less than 1,000 secondary school leavers at
independence.) But the Party members (TANU) and labor union leaders who
had done much to advance the date of independence demanded the
replacement of the expatriates whom they saw as symbolizing the colonial
past.
Kingsley and Thurston recommended
a program of orderly but rapid transition, which would involve supply
and demand analyses of skill requirements, identification of key
expatriates for retention, restructuring of departments to accommodate
available skills, and concerted efforts to focus training programs to
meet needs of the highest priority. To help design and implement this
program, a staff development advisor, David Anderson, and three job
analysts arrived in Dar es Salaam in 1961.
Anderson came to Tanzania from Ghana, where he had been a
senior officer of the colonial service, selected to remain as
Establishment Secretary in the independent Nkrumah government. His
first step in Tanzania was to suggest the appointment of an
Africanization Commission headed by a Minister, for the purpose of
undertaking a detailed study of the staffing position and the training
needs of each Ministry. This took the political heat out of the
Africanization issue and allowed Government to identify those
expatriates it needed to retain beyond their contract expiration dates,
and even to recruit new people on the basis of functional requirements.
Anderson and his team were able
to assist the Government in beginning to build a viable public service,
through such steps as centralizing control of the Civil Service in the
Office of the President, making horizontal and vertical studies of the
operating requirements of ministries, reshaping organizations to take
account of the limitations of the local labor market, studying training
resources, and shaping training to job requirements. In addition, a
Civil Service Training Center was established, largely with Foundation
funds and initiative. The CSTC is still turning out over 400 trainees a
year in executive and clerical grades, and the Government believes its
capacity should be doubled.
In 1962, shortly after
independence, a Foundation consultant, George Tobias, arrived in
Tanzania to undertake a survey of high-level manpower requirements and
resources. His report, published in August of that year, attempted to
make a rather precise estimate of the post-secondary level skills then
employed in Tanzania and the likely need for additions and replacements
over the ensuing five years. The most important recommendation of the
study, however, was that a human resources secretariat be established as
an integral part of the economic planning process. The government
immediately accepted this recommendation and asked the Foundation to
recruit a manpower advisor to help establish what became the manpower
planning section within the Ministry of Development Planning (DevPlan).
The expert was the late Bob
Thomas, a straight-talking ex-U.S. Department of Labor employee. Thomas
was not highly trained in statistics, nor did his methodology excite the
envy of the theoretical writers on manpower planning from the economics
profession, but his work soon attracted President Nyerere’s attention.
Thomas and his colleagues formulated and gained Governmental acceptance
of a set of basic policies to guide the manpower program. Some of the
more important of these policies are the following:
-
A target date of 1980 for essential self-sufficiency at all skill
levels of the economy;
- Secondary
and higher education to be given first priority in the government’s
educational investments;
-
Higher education investments to be geared to manpower requirements;
- Government
bursaries (scholarships) to be allocated on the basis of the manpower
requirements of the economy;
-
Foreign bursaries to be directed only to supplying skills for
which training was unavailable in East Africa;
- Students
receiving bursaries to be required to work one year for the government
for each year of post-Form Four education;
- Methods
to be sought to increase the usefulness of existing skills;
- Expatriates
to be recruited to bridge serious gaps.
A number of special programs were
devised to accelerate the supply of skilled manpower and to ensure that
those expatriates who would be welcome beyond the expiration dates of
their contracts were given advance notice of this fact. The localization
effort focused almost exclusively on government positions for the first
four years of the program. Only in 1966 was there a serious attempt to
launch a localization program for the private sector; prior to that time
the demands of government for available trained people were too great to
permit their diversion.
The manpower program quickly
assumed unusual importance in the Tanzanian planning process. President
Nyerere took a personal interest in it and often declared that the
shortage of trained manpower was the principal constraint on Tanzanian
development. In introducing the 1964 Economic Plan to Parliament, the
President began with a strong endorsement of the manpower program. He
also requested an annual comprehensive report on skilled manpower
development in the country.
Thomas remained in his post until 1970, when he transferred to
Nairobi to become the regional program advisor on manpower in the East
Africa office of the Foundation. At the time of his departure he was
able to take considerable satisfaction in the program. A Tanzanian
successor, Mr. Henry Okulu, had been given three years’ training at
Foundation expense in the United States and had worked for a number of
years in close association with Thomas. The number of Tanzanians
occupying middle and high-level positions had increased from 19% at the
time of independence to 70% by 1967.
The Tanzanian manpower program
achieved a considerable international reputation. The International
Institute of Educational Planning in Paris selected it for a special
case study, and delegations from various countries visited Dar es Salaam
to view its workings. It was generally considered to be the most
advanced manpower program on the African continent. In 1968, Bob Thomas
offered the opinion that the 1980 goal of manpower self-sufficiency
would be met.
There was less satisfaction with
the results of the work of the job analysts on improving the utilization
of existing skills. Although four competent analysts had been employed
from two to four years each and then had submitted comprehensive reports
on the Ministries of Agriculture, Communications, Works, Local
Government and others, the Ministries concerned seemed reluctant to take
remedial action. In one case, an analyst was assigned to a ministry for
a full year to assist in the implementation of the report, but at his
departure he felt that little had been accomplished because the ministry
was basically uninterested in the objectives of the program.
In the analyst’s opinion, the
expatriates within the ministry who controlled the key technical and
professional posts were most resistant to change, but he also found
fault with the methodology employed in the program. The studies
generally originated outside of the ministries concerned and were
conducted by people who did not know the ministry staff on a personal
basis. The studies tended to be rather formal and somewhat critical of
the existing situation, and this naturally produced defensive reactions.
He suggested that a manpower services organization should be created to
offer a broader range of advisory services to ministries at their
request. These services would include personnel management, organization
and methods studies, work-measurement studies, manpower planning, and
management reporting and control procedures.
The staff development function
remained vital and sensitive even after David Anderson’s transfer to
Kenya, where he took on a similar task. He was replaced in Tanzania by
Edward Rubin, an American with a business management background, and
later by Frank Glynn, who had many prior years of experience in
Tanzania. The functions of the task changed somewhat, from the initial
emphasis on civil service legislation and procedures to more specific
administrative reforms, to meet changes in government requirements.
There is no doubt that the occupants of this position significantly
affected the development of the new public service in Tanzania, as in
other eastern African countries where such posts were created and filled
by Foundation-supplied specialists.
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