The workshop for Zanzibar has been postponed until September. Apparently there was a conflict with another CARE workshop the same week. I get the sense that planning for these things is a lot more informal and impromptu than in the US. The next workshop is in Iringa, which while the setting may not be as interesting, it will probably be better for my wallet. I was going to lead a session at the Zanzibar workshop and Edson told me to keep preparing for the same session for Iringa. I'm in charge of explaining the general concepts of governance and good governance to workshop participants.

This morning I attended the British Council's monthly Policy Breakfast. The topic was interesting, but the speakers chosen were not. There is a plan to ratify a NGO Code of Conduct in Tanzania, and the debate is over who should enforce it: the government, the NGO Council, or the legal system. The NGO Council wants it to be completely voluntary and leave any wrong doing to be pursued by the courts. The government wants to enforce it, ostensibly for fairness, but there is a lot of concern about government control over the non-government sector.

The debate over accountability in the government and NGO sectors is one I'm familiar with from my studies. Most NGOs are very accountable to their donors and hardly accountable to the people they're supposed to be serving. This means that if the services delivered are poor or incorrect, people have few avenues for demanding change. Edson asked me if I had any solutions, and it was my turn to laugh. Accountability is such a huge part of justice, but I don't know if it's a justice many in the world will ever be able to access. I certainly don't have answers.

The Policy Breakfast was a good beginning for my day. I'm helping Edson write up a proposal for DFID (the UK counterpart of USAID) that has to do with increasing government accountability. The grant is for over $20 million and I can just hear all the higher-ups salivating over the prospect of getting all that money. Having DFID as a donor agency is something CARE Tanz has been pursuing for a while, and they really want this proposal to be good. Wish us luck!