One of the goals of community-based development is to build the capacity of beneficiaries to lead productive, healthy, meaningful and self-reliant lives—and to help them become autonomous agents for the development of their communities. It is about sustainability: that is, working for change to happen, not just for the present but also for the long-term.
It is also about participation and ownership: that is, poor and vulnerable people becoming, not just recipients of interventions imposed upon them by “outsiders”, but co-drivers who not only determine their own development priorities but are also empowered to take charge of their own socio-economic re-invention.
In a similar vein, until community members believe that a project is their own, they will have little incentive and commitment to protect the project and keep it functional. Incorporating such a demand-responsive approach as key to project effectiveness and long-term sustainability has become a norm in contemporary development practice, with mountains of supportive case evidence from grassroots organisations to international development agencies. Because sustainability does not just happen, it is one element of development management that should not be left to chance, but should be strategically incorporated into programme design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
Following the UN Women’s Decade (1975-1985), Maryam Babangida leveraged her influence as first lady to launch the Better Life Programme for Rural Women (BLP) in September 1987 as a vehicle for furthering the objectives of the women’s decade in Nigeria. Over the seven years that followed, the programme evolved to become the definitive standard for community empowerment initiatives driven by wives of chief executives at the federal, state and local government levels across the country in subsequent years. The Nigerian media, always quick to invent pejoratives for trends, stamped the inappropriate catchphrase “pet project” on all such initiatives, and it stuck. Meanwhile as Maryam’s legacy was radically redefining the First Lady phenomenon in Nigeria, it was also generating with it a wave of unprecedented interrogation of that role, its relevance, and its consistency with contemporary better practices in the field of development.
Ever since then, one of the recurring critiques about first ladies’ pet projects has been the absence of sustainability. While some have been derided for focusing on giving handouts in the name of so-called “charity”, others with more empowering programmes have been accused of a ‘sustainability blind spot’ in their programme design, such that many a “pet project” gets abandoned as soon as their husbands leave office. In fact, successive initiatives of this nature die a natural death as soon as a particular administration ends.
On founding the Family Life Enhancement Initiative (FLEI) in 2007 as a vehicle for delivering complementary social interventions in Akwa Ibom State, Mrs. Ekaette Unoma Akpabio was neither oblivious to these critiques nor unprepared for the challenge of addressing them in practice. To ensure that her impact outlives the current administration, therefore, Mrs. Akpabio adopted four innovative strategies in FLEI’s programming, each of which I will highlight briefly.
First, FLEI understands that giving handouts to the poor and socially disenfranchised does not amount to empowering them. That Chinese proverb is instructive here: ‘Give a man fish, you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime’. For this reason, FLEI’s beneficiaries are trained and equipped to be self-reliant in the long term. In the last seven years, an estimated 3,000 beneficiaries, especially women and young persons, have passed through FLEI’s grassroots entrepreneurship and skills development programmes, in addition to receiving cash grants and equipment for business start-up or expansion. That way, sustainability is achieved at the level of individual empowerment.
Secondly, Mrs. Akpabio has ensured strong community ownership of FLEI’s interventions, which means that with or without her, beneficiaries have an ongoing support structure within their communities. This approach to ensuring sustainability is especially evident in the Shelter for Widows’ programme, in which community gatekeepers are utilised to identify an eligible widow (based on predetermined criteria) to benefit from FLEI’s furnished two-bedroom bungalow and a livelihood grant. The programme has so far reached upwards of a hundred beneficiaries in far-flung rural locations all over the state. Involving community members has helped FLEI navigate potential cultural landmines and other community reprisals that otherwise would have dogged the programme.
Another programme that has benefitted from the community ownership model is the Family Life Multipurpose Cooperative Society, through which rural widows are organised into farmer cooperatives to run model farms and agro-allied ventures. Validating this model, the first chain of pilot farms and a farm-gate factory established in Essien Udim LGA are already recording huge yields in cassava, vegetables and fish, as well as processed and export-ready agro-products such as garri, flour, fufu and starch.
The third safety valve for ensuring sustainability is through what we may term legislative ‘’insurance’’. Once a policy or practice is codified in law, it takes only a reversal of that law or very feeble political will on the executive side for implementation to lapse. To ensure that her modest legacies in the areas of widows’ and child rights will not be reversed as soon as she leaves the scene, Mrs. Akpabio has successfully advocated for the enactment of the Child Rights Act in 2008 and the Widows’ Rights and Protection Act in 2013. Currently, efforts are ongoing to see through legislations on gender-based violence and the girl child in the state.
The fourth strategy to ensure that FLEI’s programmes are sustainable is that they have organic linkages with the relevant government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs). That way, long after the Akpabio era, those social services can continue to be delivered as formal government programmes, rather than as non-governmental interventions. In an interview with some journalists two years ago, someone had asked Mrs. Akpabio: “So many pet projects of First Ladies have died after their initiators left government. Are you sure this will not be the case with FLEI?” Her answer to that question was quite straightforward: “No it will not. We make a point to link most of our interventions to existing government programmes to ensure that they are sustainable and will outlast us.”
Evidence of this can be seen in the Children’s Correctional Centre, a state-of-the-art juvenile reform facility which was established by FLEI in 2008 but has since been handed over to the Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development. FLEI’s child rights programme is also run within the same framework: The organisation’s repatriation and rehabilitation of more than 2,000 trafficked and abandoned children and young women since 2007 has been done in collaboration with half-way homes and special foster-care centres run by the same Ministry.
Other initiatives executed through similar partnerships with government are the Women Agro-Enterpreneurship Development Programme (WAEDEP), a collaborative effort with the Ministry of Agriculture that has provided agro-input financing for more than 4,000 women. There is also the Green Brigade scheme, initiated by the governor’s wife but implemented by the Ministry of Environment, through which urban sanitation and beautification jobs were provided for more than 2,000 women and young people. The idea is to tie the project to government so that it can outlast the present administration.
As the current administration winds down, it is just natural for public minded individuals to ask questions on the future of the “pet project” of the governor’s wife, FLEI, and its laudable programmes. The answer is that most of FLEI’s programmes are already demonstrating a huge potential for self-replication and sustainability far beyond 2015, when FLEI’s founder and principal visionary would have left Hilltop Mansion. The lesson in this is simple: The difference between a “pet project” that gets abandoned along the line and one that outlives its initiator lies in three words: vision, passion and strategy.
In the case of FLEI, the vision is instructive: “A prosperous society in which every woman, man and child actively participates in, and benefits from, the development process.” The passion is also self-evident: Mrs. Akpabio has over the years demonstrated a commitment to touching lives that is as overwhelming as it is inspiring. As a change-maker, she is consumed with a passion for social justice. And as for strategy, I have argued above that FLEI is not just another “pet project” because, from the very outset, sustainability mechanisms had been built into FLEI’s programming framework. For these and several other reasons, students of contemporary social development trends can afford to be very optimistic that Mrs. Akpabio’s impact will outlive her eight-year sojourn as wife of governor. And deservedly so!
Bolton-Akpan, a development practitioner and policy analyst, is on the staff of FLEI. He can be reached on tijahbolton@gmail.com or 08034984063.
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