It is HIGH time I contribute to this blog by telling you everything you never dared to ask about BTC bilateral Capacity Building project with the Department of Health of South Africa (DoH).

I arrived in Pretoria in July 2007 to work as a HRIMS (Human Resource Information Management System) project co-ordinator. Hopefully, after almost 9 months on the field, I am now able to tell you more about this mysterious code word, and about the unexpected (but awaited) turn my work here took.
BTC is involved in two Health projects in South Africa: “Expansion of TB/HIV/STI Prevention, Care and Support in South Africa” and “Capacity Building in the Department of Health”. As I have only been involved in the latter, I will try to present it without digressing too much, I promise.

The HR Capacity Building project has been divided into 5 Result Areas (or RA for those who like the REAL jargon):

- The first Result Area (RA1) is technical and has the objective to improve the HR management tools. A Technical Advisor has been appointed by BTC, and I was sent to Pretoria, in the Department of Health, in order to assist him on the project management and communication aspects between the Department and the service provider that has been selected to create an extensive work-force planning database. My time there has been very distressing, no other word could describe my feelings better. I will plainly say there were too many challenges, at all possible levels, but I will not go into the crunchy details you all die to know! Moreover, because of some delays experienced for the implementation of this Result Area, I started working on another result area, now and then.

- Eventually, my terms of reference changed and I started to officially work with Mirela, the project officer appointed to work on Result Areas 2&3. Those RAs have been combined and aim at improving skills amongst health practitioners and line managers in hospital that have been selected throughout the 9 provinces of South Africa. It is quite a unique approach as it is a team-based skills development programme (similar programmes usually tend to focus on the individuals).

Working on this result area has been really motivating, even exciting! I arrived right on time for the implementation of the soft skills trainings interventions in the hospitals. This means I assisted with the selection of the various service providers that would train the management teams of selected hospitals in diversity management, team building, stress management, people management, basic financial management, change management and strategic planning (as per the needs identified in the institutions). After that, I have been fully involved in all the daily tasks of this project: planning of trainings, communication with the various stakeholders, dealing with the most unexpected challenges, etc. And because so many trainings had been – and still have to be – scheduled in a short period of time, we have had very busy days. It has been really rewarding to work with Mirela, who took her work so seriously that she even taught me some Romanian – when I spoke of Diversity Management! Moreover, it has been such a good feeling to feel fully part of a huge team including the Department of Health, the service providers and BTC. I have also been lucky to be sent on the field in order to monitor some of the training interventions in the hospitals. This was a wonderful opportunity to really understand the importance of the project I am working for. It definitively helped grasping eventual challenges better, as I went back to the roots of the need and work realities of hospital staff. This really doubled up my motivation.

- RA4 has the purpose to develop leadership in HR planning. To do so, HR management members from the Department of Health have, for example, undertook study tours to UK and Belgium (University of Antwerp and Institute for tropical medicine). Currently, a trilateral cooperation between the governments of Belgium, Mozambique and South Africa is being considered to fight for the eradication of malaria.

- RA5 aims to support the improvement of skills development structures with the purpose to transform the sector into a learning environment. Different skill development facilitators from all provinces enrolled in different courses.

Common impacts of those different Result Areas are e.g. staff retention in hospital and in the Department of Health, and uplift the morale, productivity and performance skills of officials and beneficiaries. Tout un programme!

On a more (very) general note, living in South Africa has been really…how can I put it?… different from any experience I had before. The country is very developed, great tar roads even in the most remote areas, numerous luxurious malls (the consumption society is at its highest – or almost), yet the government is still young and the state very fragile. Criminality is a constant problem, newspapers seem to quite love the daily (or hourly) very sensational stories of people humiliating, injuring, robbing, raping, and killing each other. Therefore it is fairly easy to become completely paranoiac (you just have to listen to the very gruesome stories of any living soul in the place), but little by little, I managed to find my way, made some friends and discovered a more and more interesting South African life.
Some inhabitants do not understand the reasons why development agencies are working in their country (when they know what development agencies do, which is not often the case), while others do stress their importance. Once thing is sure, development agencies (BTC included) tend/want/plan to exit the country in a near future because South Africa is now in the process to become a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation Development (OEDC), which implies that the country will no longer be eligible for Official Development Assistance funds.
South Africa is such a huge country, so diverse (11 – eleven! – national languages, imagine, we sometimes have difficulties to cope with our three official languages in our tiny Belgium!) that whenever you think you understand something about the country, you’ll meet somebody that will challenge your mindset and send you back to scratch. Unfortunately, regardless of this rich diversity (or let’s rather say because of it) racial tensions (in Pretoria at least) are still an everyday problem, as well as the lack of skills of a huge part of the population (and the brain drain of the other part).
South Africa is a wonderful country; there are so many things to discover… And, I promise, whenever I had the chance to travel around and see the Kalahari Desert, the tea-banana-orange-mango-etc plantations of Limpopo or the mountains of the Drakensberg, I often felt completely breathless at the sight such infinite and wonderful places.

PS: Congratulations to those who managed to get through all this (is there anybody?)
PS 2: Hope you didn’t mind with me writing in English. Since this is the working language here, I admit I was struggling with the translation of the technical words into French…