Against the Odds: A History of Zimbabwe Project

24. New Realities, 2003–2004

— 333 — Like Su Hove before him, Tobias Chipare took on a daunting responsibility in 2003. An unassuming, quiet person, he took charge of the organisation at a time when major shifts were becoming evident in the provision and administration of development assistance in Zimbabwe. Chipare had long experience in the NGO world, and had come to know ZimPro when he worked with the Collective Self-Finance Scheme as an agricultural expert. In that capacity he frequently stayed at the agricultural co-operatives – many of which were being assisted also by ZimPro – to advise them on management problems. So he became familiar not only with ZimPro but also with the complex challenges of moving Zimbabweans from subsistence to commercial agricultural production. After several years with CSFS, Chipare moved in 1995 to ITDG (Intermediate Technology Development Group), where he remained until he joined ZimPro in 1999. He was recruited as a resettlement officer for Mufusire, where he had hoped to work on a model for the development of peasant agriculture but, caught up in the funding debacle with Novib, he was forced to wait for several months before he could really get started in this role. And he did not stay at Mufusire very long, as his good work was noted and he was appointed programmes co-ordinator in 2001, when Hove was confirmed as director. Chipare was well aware of the programmes and the problems that ZimPro had dealt with or was still facing, but he was prepared to take over and try to rescue the situation. 24 New Realities 2003–2004 — 334 — Against the Odds: a history of Zimbabwe Project Relations with Donors ZimPro had earlier been somewhat sheltered from the more rigorous approaches of donors because of Novib’s free-spending ways. The organisation had benefited, one might say, from the donor’s willingness to continue funding without maintaining consistent checks on how the money was being managed. This had allowed ZimPro to pour funds into loss-making enterprises in a failed attempt to become self-sustaining, and it had also allowed the organisation to become lax regarding financial discipline, leaving it exposed when Novib withdrew. It had become accustomed to treating its staff generously and spending on capital development because Novib would provide funds for administration. Most of ZimPro’s other donors in the 1990s were already following a more controlling approach, providing project-specific funding – for pre-schools or for the Revolving Loan Fund or for social programmes or whatever they were most interested in. By the beginning of the new millennium ZimPro had spent a year without fresh assistance from Novib, and had had to face the fact that there would no longer be easy money to pursue creative evaluations or regular meetings of staff at national parks or loans for housing, for example. It was not just Novib’s withdrawal which made things dif- ficult. Most donors were also becoming more demanding, as Nyathi had pointed out to the trustees in 1998. They now wanted to know that their money was having a positive impact on the problems of poverty in ‘developing’ countries. The Results -Based Management tool – or something like it – was being adopted by more and more donors, requiring NGOs to identify success indicators and show at the end of a funding period that something specific and observable had been achieved. In addition, donors were increasingly determining the agenda themselves, according to their own analyses of blockages to development in Africa. A change in gender relations had come to be understood as the new key to promoting development, as emerging conventional wisdom held that women were more responsible than men, being more concerned about the welfare of their families, and that if they were less repressed at family — 335 — New Realities and local levels more could be achieved with the development dollar. HIV/AIDS was also identified as a critical area that could not be omitted in any programmes in Zimbabwe, where the very high prevalence rate was having a serious negative effect on any development gains. Most significant of all, though, was the ‘governance’ issue. It was by now widely held that development in Africa was failing because of poor governance, corruption and a democratic deficit, thus development funds were wasted unless NGOs were prepared to engage in ‘advocacy’, a thinly veiled euphemism for political, or at least policy, activism . Funds were...