Hi, my name’s Mat Pritchard and I’m the Director of the Innovation, Monitoring and Learning Division.  It’s a grand title, but it basically means I’m in charge of the monitoring, evaluation and communications for the CLP.  I started with CLP in June 2013, so I’m still on a steep learning curve!

The CLP’s work and the area it operates in are absolutely fascinating.  I’ve never visited an area like the chars before, so this has been a real eye-opener for me.  Working on a programme like this is something I’d always imagined myself doing, ever since the early 90s when I first realised that I wanted to work in development.  But somehow, till now, I’ve always ended up on other kinds of programmes.

My first taste of development work came in 1993, when I worked as a scientific editor with the International Livestock Research Institute in Addis Ababa.  In 1996 I joined the head office of the company I had worked for in Ethiopia, then called RWA International.  I spent over five years with RWA, learning about project management from the head office perspective.  It was a fascinating overview of business development, project and contract management.  It  taught me a huge amount about how the development world works – and I’m still learning!

During 2002 I relocated to the Philippines as a project designer and manager for the Philippines-Australia Governance Facility (PAGF).  This was based in Manila, but I got out into the field to work with organisations that had successfully applied for governance assistance projects.  Working with an incredibly diverse range of partners – from the Supreme Court to local grassroots organisations – I also learned a tremendous amount about how to monitor and evaluate development projects. I was also asked to become the Facility Manager / Team Leader, which I gladly accepted.

Later on, in South Africa during 2008, a similar thing happened with the Australian Development Scholarships Programme.  This AusAID-funded programme was struggling to meet its objectives, and I was tasked with evaluating it and fixing the problems.  At the end of that process, I was asked to take over as the Team Leader, which I did until the next phase.  After November 2011, I did some writing and evaluation work for IFAD, until Malcolm (the CLP Team Leader) dropped me a line letting me know that the CLP was looking for a new Director of IML.  I applied, went through the process and… here I am.

Although I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading all the reports I can get my hands on (and CLP has published a large number of those!), my experience of the verification visits during September 2013 taught me as much in three or four days as all those reports. You can see a short video of my experiences here: http://tinyurl.com/msxhbqc. 

The premise of the verification visits is simple.  CLP’s implementing organisations (IMOs) are responsible for identifying households in their areas that may become participants in the CLP’s programme of livelihoods support.  They submit their lists to CLP, and then senior managers and technicians select a random sample of 5% from each list and visit them to check they meet the criteria.  The CLP has an excellent and very productive relationship with its IMOs, but they understand that transparent processes are required to make sure DFID and AusAID money is spent only on the poorest of the poor.

Once the CLP team had chosen our sample, we set off early to make sure we got a full day of interviewing.  Moving around the chars can be difficult, and during September the river had risen. Our first verification visit involved sloshing through a paddy field that was knee-deep in water.

This visit gave me a glimpse into two people’s lives that was both fascinating and heart-breaking. They had been there 18 months, since the erosion of their last char.  The husband, Mohammad[1], worked when he could, but was partially disabled, so could not always bring in an income.   With no health services on the char, this was an extremely worrying thing for them. They had almost no other source of income, apart from the occasional work that Shohar found.  With no land or livestock, they couldn’t eat three meals a day and occasionally relied on neighbours for food.  Their daughter was married and living elsewhere, but paying her dowry used up all their savings.

As we continued with our visits, the stories took on a familiar ring.  Landless, jobless for much of the year, dependent on seasonal migratory labour, these chars-dwellers have almost all had to move in the last few months or years because of char erosion.  Many of the women didn’t work; those that did made a few extra taka from sewing or fishing.  They had no land and few possessions.  The IMOs had done their work well – the people really were the poorest of the poor.

One interview was particularly difficult for me.  The interviewee turned out to be 13 or 14 years old, still a girl, and yet had a two-year-old daughter.  Her parents had arranged her marriage when she was 10; the same age as my own daughter.  I asked my colleagues about it, and they explained that very poor families often practiced early marriage as a way of protecting their daughter should the parents become ill or die.  It was a sobering reminder of the unbearably hard choices that face the extremely poor in such circumstances.

The river provided another example of how vulnerable people on the chars are to disaster: we conducted several interviews from our boat.  The river had inundated many houses that were not on plinths.  We were able to float right into people’s homestead compounds, so we invited them to clamber in and dry their feet while we interviewed them.

As we completed our interviews and took our motor boat back to shore, I was constantly struck by the incongruity between the beauty of the scenery and the river, contrasted with the harshness of its impact on the chars-dwellers and the disruption, loss and even death it can bring.  But thankfully, the verification visits were a great success; the IMO had done their work immaculately. We signed off, confident that, in this district, the CLP will help those that are genuinely in need.

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