"There’s no prettier sight than looking back on a town you’ve left behind…”
This week’s Ramble takes the theme of travel.
* * *
Anyone who has ever worked in or with Government in Malawi will tell you that one of the most acute problems we have is the incentive structure in place that encourages civil servants to abandon their posts at any opportunity to travel for meetings outside of the office. I’ve already written about the poor pay available to most civil servants on standard contracts, the source of much discontent and the root of much of the poor motivation that plagues Government; travel is one of the outcomes of this.
Naturally, over time, various coping mechanisms have evolved to mitigate the effects of poor pay. The most prevalent of these coping mechanisms has been the exploitation of opportunities for travelling on official business. Whenever a civil servant travels outside of Lilongwe, he is entitled to an allowance, to cover costs of accommodation, food and the like (transportation is almost always covered separately). These allowances are high for internal travel within Malawi, much more than one actually needs to spend; when travelling abroad, they become astronomical, relative to the basic salary. As such they represent a rare opportunity to substantially augment the meagre income of a civil servant.
This has two obvious effects. Firstly, civil servants have an incentive to plan as many workshops outside of Lilongwe as possible. While many workshops are legitimate, though they don’t need necessarily to be outside of town, many are simply cobbled together, as an opportunity to get allowances. Donors are at least partly to blame here – it’s not too difficult to write up a decent proposal and get funding for a workshop where very little gets done, and nothing that couldn’t be done during routine work in the Ministry. My friend, Snowball (named not for any Clerks-related reasons, entirely down to the Simpsons), has been subject to a number of these frivolous workshops, in locations seemingly chosen primarily due to their proximity to popular drinking spots.
These completely pointless workshops are the exception; often, workshops are necessary for a particularly large piece of work, and in honesty, I’ve attended more useful away days here in the Ministry of Finance than I did in my previous incarnation as a UK civil servant. However, the decision to locate them outside of town is almost always purely driven by the desire to generate allowances. To make matters worse, in some cases some civil servants find themselves having to undertake important work as part of a specially organised retreat as the culture of allowances is so deep seated that the only way of guaranteeing attendance from a wide range of stakeholders is to ensure that there is a financial incentive.
What’s more, especially where international travel is concerned, there is competition within a Ministry for the rights to attend a workshop – so much importance is attached to getting the okay from senior management to attend workshops that the decision of whom to send depends more on who is in the right place at the right time, rather than who will benefit most from the training or who will contribute most to the work. A person may have spent months working on a project, only to find a colleague who has done very little similar work has been selected to attend a conference on the topic. It can be very frustrating, not just for the potential attendee, but also for a good manager who wants to get the most value from each of his or her employees.
So what’s the solution? The obvious way of dealing with this is to eliminate the concept of allowances altogether and build the average value that can be expected from allowances over a year into the basic salary of the civil servant. It’s not that simple, however, as resistance would be fierce from those individuals who have mastered the art of travelling. The system is also embedded; with so many civil servants looking to allowances for income, it is very difficult to get momentum behind any attempt to reduce or change them.
Large scale pay reform is already under way in the civil service here, but at a basic level, problems will crop up repeatedly until donors show a greater willingness to put support into the recurrent budget, and tie that support there; the complaint that donors have a comparative advantage in development and investment projects only holds water if we assume that Government will withdraw from this area as far as possible. For political reasons this will never happen, so donors need to act to support the areas that remain underfunded. Pay is one of the major ones.
* * *
And on a second travelling note, this bumper edition of the Ramble will have to suffice for two weeks. I’ll have some friends visiting next week and have a packed schedule to show them around the southern part of Malawi. I’ll be away for a week, and can’t say I’m not looking forward to the break.
* * *
Anyone who has ever worked in or with Government in Malawi will tell you that one of the most acute problems we have is the incentive structure in place that encourages civil servants to abandon their posts at any opportunity to travel for meetings outside of the office. I’ve already written about the poor pay available to most civil servants on standard contracts, the source of much discontent and the root of much of the poor motivation that plagues Government; travel is one of the outcomes of this.
Naturally, over time, various coping mechanisms have evolved to mitigate the effects of poor pay. The most prevalent of these coping mechanisms has been the exploitation of opportunities for travelling on official business. Whenever a civil servant travels outside of Lilongwe, he is entitled to an allowance, to cover costs of accommodation, food and the like (transportation is almost always covered separately). These allowances are high for internal travel within Malawi, much more than one actually needs to spend; when travelling abroad, they become astronomical, relative to the basic salary. As such they represent a rare opportunity to substantially augment the meagre income of a civil servant.
This has two obvious effects. Firstly, civil servants have an incentive to plan as many workshops outside of Lilongwe as possible. While many workshops are legitimate, though they don’t need necessarily to be outside of town, many are simply cobbled together, as an opportunity to get allowances. Donors are at least partly to blame here – it’s not too difficult to write up a decent proposal and get funding for a workshop where very little gets done, and nothing that couldn’t be done during routine work in the Ministry. My friend, Snowball (named not for any Clerks-related reasons, entirely down to the Simpsons), has been subject to a number of these frivolous workshops, in locations seemingly chosen primarily due to their proximity to popular drinking spots.
These completely pointless workshops are the exception; often, workshops are necessary for a particularly large piece of work, and in honesty, I’ve attended more useful away days here in the Ministry of Finance than I did in my previous incarnation as a UK civil servant. However, the decision to locate them outside of town is almost always purely driven by the desire to generate allowances. To make matters worse, in some cases some civil servants find themselves having to undertake important work as part of a specially organised retreat as the culture of allowances is so deep seated that the only way of guaranteeing attendance from a wide range of stakeholders is to ensure that there is a financial incentive.
What’s more, especially where international travel is concerned, there is competition within a Ministry for the rights to attend a workshop – so much importance is attached to getting the okay from senior management to attend workshops that the decision of whom to send depends more on who is in the right place at the right time, rather than who will benefit most from the training or who will contribute most to the work. A person may have spent months working on a project, only to find a colleague who has done very little similar work has been selected to attend a conference on the topic. It can be very frustrating, not just for the potential attendee, but also for a good manager who wants to get the most value from each of his or her employees.
So what’s the solution? The obvious way of dealing with this is to eliminate the concept of allowances altogether and build the average value that can be expected from allowances over a year into the basic salary of the civil servant. It’s not that simple, however, as resistance would be fierce from those individuals who have mastered the art of travelling. The system is also embedded; with so many civil servants looking to allowances for income, it is very difficult to get momentum behind any attempt to reduce or change them.
Large scale pay reform is already under way in the civil service here, but at a basic level, problems will crop up repeatedly until donors show a greater willingness to put support into the recurrent budget, and tie that support there; the complaint that donors have a comparative advantage in development and investment projects only holds water if we assume that Government will withdraw from this area as far as possible. For political reasons this will never happen, so donors need to act to support the areas that remain underfunded. Pay is one of the major ones.
* * *
And on a second travelling note, this bumper edition of the Ramble will have to suffice for two weeks. I’ll have some friends visiting next week and have a packed schedule to show them around the southern part of Malawi. I’ll be away for a week, and can’t say I’m not looking forward to the break.
posted by the Maradona of Malawi at 12:23 AM
