Xavier Project's Cultures

In my last blog I wrote about how important it is for an agency to have an identity as a team. This is a team of people who share a belief in a different future that they believe is possible to bring about. They share a belief in the best approaches that should be used to bring that future about. These approaches can also just be cultures, or ways of behaving that unite a group of people into a team whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

At Xavier Project we are united by our core value, which is solidarity. I have written about solidarity in the past in this blog http://odieromondi.blogspot.co.ke/2015/08/solidarity-xavier-projects-core-value.html. Our core value permeates all our cultures and approaches but we also focus on three pillars that summarise our organisational cultures. These are “open”, “cohesive” and “pioneering”. We chose them because these are  words that other people use to describe us, but we could also be a lot more open, cohesive and pioneering so we focus on them as cultures we would like to display more fully.

Open

The culture of being open is heavily inspired by our core value of solidarity, in that we can’t show solidarity with each other, with the refugees we work with and all other stake holders without being open. We are known for always having an open door to refugees and being accessible to people who need our help or want to partner with us. The word “open” also signifies our belief that societies around the world should be more open to refugees fleeing conflicts, famines or extreme poverty – the phrase open doors therefore has a twin meaning for us.

However, the culture of being open has implication at other levels as well. We have been congratulated by donors for the transparency in our reporting and the accuracy in our financial accounting. We are also keen to be open-minded to new ideas and ready to listen to anyone’s ideas of how to be more creative, be they full-time team members or others.

Cohesive

The culture of cohesion is inspired by the ideas in my last blog about “agency” http://odieromondi.blogspot.co.ke/2017/08/on-agency.html . It is vital that a team should be united in its vision and way of doing things if it wants to make a change and we foster a culture of focusing on this cohesion within the team.  We have ways of doing things that we believe are the Xavier Project way, such as leading by example, communicating clearly and effectively, taking responsibility, and mentoring others in the team. But cohesion to us does not mean that we all need to be robots operating on identical lines of code – in fact as part of our culture of being one team with a shared vision we welcome diversity; diversity of opinions, diversity of background and diversity of individual ambitions. In fact more than welcome, we encourage team members to employ their individual flair in their programmes and urge people to pursue interests that might not immediately line-up with our work plan, whether during or outside of work hours.

Pioneering

In the long run this diversity gives us a team that has a far broader understanding of the core and the peripheries of the context we are working and a team that can come up with more colourful ways of addressing age-old problems. To be pioneering in the work we do we need to understand the gaps in our sector and the things that are being tried elsewhere that could work in our context. This means we all need to be willing to research and to learn. It means we have to accept we can be wrong, and ready to be flexible and adapt our programmes according to the need and to the potential. A great example of this is our Tamuka department. Tamuka means speak out in Swahili and in 2012 we opened Tamuka as a platform for refugees to speak out about the realities of their lives. It was an idea that came from the refugee community, but about a year after we launched we realised that refugees were more interested in using Tamuka to learn and to engage in their societies, not necessarily to use it as a platform to promote their rights. Today Tamuka has evolved into the department that runs the Community Enterprise Cycle as described here http://odieromondi.blogspot.co.ke/2017/01/xavier-projects-community-enterprise.html .

Most importantly, to be pioneering in our sector you need to be resilient knowing you will consistently come against barriers that seem to be unsurmountable and problems that appear to be infinitely complex. People have tried to solve these problems before and failed, so if we are to succeed we need to be radical. Being radical nearly always means you have to be unpopular with someone and it can be exhausting so you need a lot of energy. At Xavier Project we have come up with numerous radical ideas, such as our iGCSE project and our community run hubs, but a challenge with having a culture of always coming up with new ideas is that we need to be better at completing our ideas and seeing them all the way through to the  

Power and Fragile Peace

One of the deputy leaders stood up at the peace rally today and berated the previous speakers for not thanking the President first and before all other actors for the successes we were celebrating. It was because of his bravery as a warrior that we have peace in the country, we were told, and he has spread peace and continues to spread peace throughout the land.

Outside of East Africa our leaders are not given a great time in the press. Self-proclaimed “mature democracies” are full of scorn for countries where votes are bought, not cast based on policy, and often miscounted. They assume that because the current regime is corrupt the elections must have been rigged, because there is no way over 50% of the adult population would have chosen to keep a despot in power.

But they don’t see the drip-drip effect of propaganda that the majority of voters are fed. If they did, they would see that most people have been made to love the status quo, and, I believe, vote it back in with a legitimate majority, even taking into account the impact of blatant election rigging.

Everything today was framed into a hierarchical prism, and there was a constant feeling that this was all happening under the watchful and encouraging eye of the President. The minister for development in this province was the ‘guest of honour’ and left to speak last, but when he spoke he mainly deferred to the President and brought things back to how great things are because of him. In his light, we sang the national anthem twice (once at the beginning and once at the end), and presents were even donated to the minister, to take back to the President and his wife in the capital – as a thank you.

This may sound like it was contrived, but it was supported by various underlying layers of hierarchy, which acted as a prop to this ultimate Presidential hierarchy, and as such were no less significant. For example, the three hours of speeches, although made in the presence of the children and reformed warriors who should surely have been the audience, were made in English and literally addressed to the minister. When I say literally, I mean most speakers paused mid-sentence nearly every minute to say “guest of honour Mr Minister”. Naturally, the minister was given a special chair, right in the middle of the top table and was always served everything first. When he spoke, a solder stood behind him holding an umbrella to guard him from the sun – a privilege that was exclusively available to the minister, despite the soldier standing idle for most of the day.

The minister had to leave early, so the deputy I referred to at the beginning moved into the big chair and motioned everyone to his right to move on chair closer towards him- they had all just received a hierarchical promotion.

It is this worship of hierarchy, enacted without a hint of irony, that the hundreds of children present today witness on a daily basis. Of course, they very rarely if ever see the President, but if his representatives are treated this way, think what kind of a god he himself must be. He is important and as they are always told, it is because of him that there is peace and because of him that the road was tarmacked and the hospital built. It would take a lot to see through all that and question his ability to rule, or care about the rumours of cleptocracy – even if they ever hear them in the first place.

This is why they all vote for him. The question would be- who out of the officials believe this propaganda and who is acting out some self-preserving and self-promoting game? It’s hard to tell because in this tightly centralised power structure you have no choice but to play the tune if you want to stay in your coveted position of power.  However, after seeing it for myself I believe it is genuine here and this is something foreigners also don’t understand. This region has seen a lot of unrest in recent generations, and the strong leader has brought peace [did he arguably fuel or even cause the war in the first place? Topic for another day]. Looking at neighbouring countries it is too easy to see what can happen when the state is weak, and even in the model(ish) democracy next door, the state is too weak to control rampant crime, tribal conflict and land invasions. Development can only happen if there is peace, and it is only after realising how fragile peace is across the whole of East Africa and how horrific the opposite can be, that you appreciate it when it is there, however (un)democratically it may have been achieved.