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This is a very familiar phrase among job and scholarship applicants. Usually, employers
include such a statement or something alike when they advertise for vacancies. Principally,
job applicants are expected to consider themselves unsuccessful in case they don’t receive
notification within a set time. The rationale being a large number of applicants going far
beyond the capacity (in terms of time and other resources) of the recruiting organisations
to notify all applicants. Given the growing numbers of applicants, the justification for the
propensity can never be over emphasized. For the example, Daraja received 600
applications for only eight vacancies during its recruitment process last year.
Like in the recruitment world, the same has been observed in the planning process within
local government authorities in Tanzania especially at the village and ward levels. A
discussion with the villagers has shown that the villagers are not informed over the
decisions of their plans especially when their plans fail to get into the district plan. This
implies that the plans will not get funding for its implementation. Repoa (2010) also
observes a lack of interactions between council bureaucrats and rural communities and the
justification being lack of time and high costs.
Following the inception of decentralization by devolution more than a decade ago, the
government also introduced a bottom‐up participatory planning methodology for local
development called Opportunities and Obstacles to Development (O&OD) in 2002. The
introduction of O&OD was meant to increase local autonomy in prioritising, planning and
budgeting of development activities. A village in rural communities or mtaa (street) for
urban communities develop a three year community development plan which includes its
implementation plan. The plan is subjected to review, monitoring, evaluation and updating
on annual basis.
On the other hand, annual development plans are developed at the village level and
forwarded to the ward and later to the district for producing a consolidated district plan. It
can be seen that there is a possibility for a village plan to be dropped at ward level or district
level depending on the priorities and funds available. Our interest is what happens when the
village or mtaa plans fail to be included in the district plan. It was observed that the villagers
are not informed do not get the results of the project. For example, Lusisi villagers were not
able to articulate the outcome of their past plans.
As with the job applications, there are two major issues connected to feedback, one being
the simple answer of yes or no, and the other related to knowing the reasons for not being
able to impress the employer. The later is impractical however very important to all
unsuccessful applicants. Inquisitively, it is possible that the winners may also wish to know
what made them successful.
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For the job applicant, the prime need for the feedback is inclined on knowing the aftermath
of the application. For the villagers, the aftermath may be easily understood as their
problems will continue to exist though it may take time for them to notice. However, there
is a secondary need for unsuccessful applicants on understanding the reasons for not being
able to impress the employer or ward/district scrutinizers for the case of villagers. Most
importantly, feed‐backing particularly on unsuccessful plans may also enhance the
understanding that planning is a continuous process.
In theory, further consultations and feedback with communities are expected to take place
when reviewing and revising the plans. In practice, however, the council planning team
rarely consults citizens after receiving the proposals from communities. The situation is
worse for all unsuccessful proposals. Lack of feedback is also true for village and mtaa
representatives that are involved in the ward planning committee meetings.
As it can be experienced in job applications, lack of feedback can cause depression and
demoralization. The same applies within citizens who fail to get feedback of their proposals.
Given that planning is a continuous process, it is likely that citizens who have experiencing
failure will be demoralized to participate in the succeeding planning activities. This has
severe effects on the efforts to promote participatory planning on one hand and developing
plans that reflect the needs of the citizens on the other.
A number of questions need to be answered following the above discussions. The first
question being if there is a need for feedback on unsuccessful plans at all levels particularly
village and ward levels. The focus is not only the simple answer of yes or no but on the
description of the reasons for not being successful. Other questions will only follow if the
answer to the earlier question is affirmative. Then the list would go like “how to create a
means to provide the feedback effectively and on time? How do we solve the issue given
limited resources against a big number of applicants (villages/wards). We may also go
further by asking how can we ensure that the comments and lessons learnt by the villagers
are put into practice. This would be very useful in improving succeeding plans and
guarantee successful funding.
Looking for your responses,
Kapongola
NB: It is worthy to note that I was inspired by a visit to Lusisi village (Njombe) few weeks ago
in which Daraja team accompanied by Jenerali Ulimwengu and Njombe district water
engineer Mr. Mkalimoto went to see the development of the village.