Amref says development professionals do not always want to work in rural areas such as Katine. Photograph: Dan Chung
Development, we are told, is very complex. But recruiting someone to head up a programme in rural Uganda is perhaps not the most challenging of tasks. Yet nearly six months after the Katine Community Partnerships Project launched, Amref has not managed to find a full-time project manager. Has Amref failed or are staffing issues such as this commonplace in development?
"It is very difficult to find someone who has a high degree of integrated development knowledge, media awareness, strong communications and management skills, and who can easily enter into subtle yet complex relationships with government. Having a media partner makes this an incredibly innovative project but with that comes intense pressure," explains Amref UK's Claudia Codsi.
"Moreover, that person has to want to sit in an office in Katine for three years, in testing conditions, in a region where there is no proper schooling for their kids, if they have them."
Amref's quest to find a suitable candidate for Katine makes for interesting reading.
It can take up to three months to recruit a suitable project manager, so Amref started the ball rolling last autumn. In order to help it find the right person, it contracted a recruitment agency. The recruitment specialist eventually helped Amref hire a temporary consultant who had great technical expertise but not a huge amount of communications experience.
Next, Amref managed to find a suitable candidate, but that person turned the job down. So an interim project manager was recruited, giving Amref time to search for a full-time manager. Candidates were shortlisted once more but, in February 2008, just as Amref's winning candidate was due to start, a sudden change in personal circumstances meant that that person also turned the job down.
Amref's temporary consultant and its interim manager have undoubtedly done great work in getting the Katine project off the ground and have led their team to many early successes, but a long-term solution is needed. The recruitment process started again last month and Amref has shortlisted candidates once again. It is hoping that from, this pool, it will finally find someone who is willing to work in Katine.
"We'd rather hold out than recruit the wrong person," Codsi explains. "Katine is poorer than most parts of rural Uganda, so there is a real problem attracting high calibre staff to come here. They either base themselves in Kampala and do a weekly five-hour commute, or they accept the conditions in Katine and live here. Many of us in the west and the north have a romanticised idea of life in places such as Katine, but it's not romantic at all and many candidates know how difficult it will be for them (and their families) to live there."
Poaching in the development sector is rife too, with the huge NGOs commonly offering large salaries to lure the best people to work with them - and often in more attractive places than Katine.
The upshot, however, is that the Katine project does not have a permanent project manager in place. Has Amref's work been damaged as a result?
"It has made it more difficult for the country director and our head of programmes because it takes up such a huge amount of time due to the media scrutiny and intense nature of this particular project," says Codsi. "We have had interim managers in place, but that results in a knowledge management issue, as we have to re-train each time. Ideally, the project officers in the field would have a leader who they know will be with them for the duration of the project."
Amref's other projects in Uganda (and even further afield) have also been adversely affected, because high-level staff are having to devote extra time to Katine when they could be working on other equally important development projects in Africa. But Amref says the above are merely disappointments rather than issues that will cause long-lasting damage to the project as a whole.
It seems that bad luck and unforeseen problems have played their part in Amref being unable to find the right person. And development is complex, after all.
Are staff problems like this commonplace in development? Have you found it hard to recruit managers in rural areas? Would you work in Katine? Post your comments below.
