Mozambique, Field Level Leadership Program for Beira

Beira is Mozambique’s fourth-largest city, with approximately 530,000 inhabitants. Like all the country’s cities, it is growing quickly. Mozambique’s urban population has more than doubled in the last 20 years. Mozambique is a relatively poor country, with around three-fifths of its 30 million people living below the USD 1.90/day poverty line. It is among the African countries most vulnerable to climate change.
There is a growing recognition that the problems underlying the poor performance of a municipal services in Mozambique are complex and multidimensional. Therefore, they cannot be resolved simply through the application of standard technical and managerial techniques, for example in areas of policy and strategy, institutional reorganization/restructuring, and infrastructure investments or capacity development. These measures need to be combined with practical steps to transform the internal culture and environment, in order to improve organizational performance and the sustainability of results. Therefore, a need has been felt for implementing a human motivation-based approach in Beira, as an effective complement to infrastructure investments, for enhancing organizational performance and sustainability.

Development Approach

Field-Level Leadership: Field-level Leadership (FLL) is a multi-agent leadership development approach, aimed at creating a broad cadre of change champions at all levels in the public service delivery agencies. In pilots implemented and evaluated by the World Bank, this approach has demonstrated positive changes in the attitude and behavior of public agency officials, and significantly improved organizational performance.

Development Approach

The wider objective of the project is to improve the performance of the Beira Autonomous Sanitation Unit (SASB) in 4 key areas:

1. Improve access to secure sanitation
2. Decrease the amount of waste in drainage channels
3. Improve citizens’ satisfaction
4. Improve worker satisfaction

Specific Objective:

The specific objective: To introduce a human motivation-based approach in Beira through the FLL program, as an effective complement to infrastructure investments, for enhancing organizational performance and sustainability. IF a safe space is created for open dialog, for the staff across all ranks of the organization; the optimistic and entrepreneurial individuals are encouraged to emerge and self-organize themselves into informal groups; and these informal groups of change leaders are encouraged to take on self-assigned results targets, THEN improvements will take place in line with the organization’s (SASB) targets.

The expected output of the project is a broad cadre of change leaders in Beira Autonomous Sanitation Unit (SASB) who can lead a positive transformation of the work culture of the agency.

This project is a collaboration with the World Bank, whom also co-finance an additional 100.000 to this project. This makes the total project volume 409.343.

Activities:

Activity 1: Setting the parameters (Month 1)

• Review the details of the program with all those involved
• Finalize list of neighborhoods and phasing of the training program
• List of first 20 staff members for core training abroad to become FLL trainers
• Assign general roles within SASB to FLL program

Activity 2: Impact Assessment: Baseline (Month 1-3) (New schedule: Month 7: March 2022)

An impact assessment would be carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the FLL leadership development approach with SASB in Beira, i.e. phase 1 of the FLL Beira program.

Activity 3: 20 SASB staff go for FLL training and curriculum development (Month 2)

The curriculum will emphasize the adoption of a results-based approach, in order to increase transparency and accountability, and also to motivate employees by tracking and achieving results. The beta-curriculum will be field-tested, with the guidance of FLL experts, to identify and resolve any glitches prior to full implementation.

Activity 4: Beta-testing of FLL Curriculum in Beira (Month 3) (New schedule: Month 6-9: Feb-May 2022)

At this point the 20 Master trainers are trained. Once back in Beira, the trained trainers have to organize test workshops in order to practice their newly developed skills.

Activity 5: Roll-out of FLL SASB & Neighborhoods – 1st workshop (Month 4-5) (New schedule: Month 6-9: Feb-May 2022)

All permanent and contract staff of the SASB and of 13 neighborhood offices will undergo the FLL program. Workshops will be conducted for staff in batches of approximately 25 participants. Each batch will participate in an initial 3-day workshop, followed by a 1-day workshop (Activity 6) after 3 months. The FLL program workshops will be conducted initially by the first group of master trainers

Activity 6: Roll-out of FLL SASB – 2nd workshop (Month 6-7) (New schedule: Month 10-11 June-July 2022)

Activity 7: Impact Assessment: Survey 2 SASB treatment (Month 7-8) (New schedule: Month 13 – Oct 2022)

Activity 10: Impact Assessment: Survey 3 Neighborhood treatment (Month 15)