From a distance, Carolyn Rodrigues seemed to have no business berating the muscular six-foot-tall man who serves as chairman of the Community Development Committee in Kumaka, a sweltering hinterland river town and trading center in northern Guyana.
Rodrigues is only 5 feet 3 inches tall, after all. But on this particular steamy afternoon she was also very angry. It had taken several hours to get to Kumaka , where she was to inspect the construction of a sanitary facility consisting of eight flush toilets and two showers. The coordinator had arrived 20 minutes late. But worse, while the facility itself had been completed for several weeks, the concrete walk that would link it to the town’s market was still not finished. Without the walk, marketgoers would have to traverse ground that turns into a quagmire when it rains, which it does very often. The community was supposed to supply sand, gravel and lumber for the walk, and the chairman had promised the materials three weeks ago.
“When are you going to finish the project?” she demanded after he finally arrived. “You’re taking too long!”
He complained that the other committee members were not helping him. They expect him to do everything, he said. Rodrigues was not placated. “Well, as far as I’m concerned, negligence is to blame,” she told him. “People are supposed to follow you. If you are not a good leader, then you should just opt out and let somebody else take it over.”
The coordinator added that local authorities that had promised him a tractor to haul in the sand and gravel had not kept their word.
Rodrigues did not relent. “If this is the way the group wants to continue,” she said, “then you will have to suffer the consequences. We will not be doing another project with your community unless you can prove to us that you have the capacity. The group is not making the effort. I want the materials here by Tuesday.” Two days later the sand, gravel and lumber arrived at the project site. Soon after, the walk was completed, and the facility opened, replacing eight dilapidated wooden latrines at a cost of just $22,000.
Carolyn Rodrigues, a 28-year-old Amerindian (as indigenous people are referred to in Guyana), housewife, university student, and mother of two (and recently appointed to head the Guyana ministry in charge of Amerindian affairs), had pushed, threatened, cajoled, and encouraged one more Amerindian community to complete a project financed by Guyana’s Social Impact Amelioration Programme (SIMAP), one of the IDB’s most successful initiatives in this South American country.
“At times you have to speak sternly,” Rodrigues said. “But being a woman talking to these big strong men, you have to really try not to be too rough, but let them know that in their contract they are responsible for reporting to us.” In one community, she said, they started calling her the “Iron Woman—the woman who is like a man” after she sorted out some “irregularities” with the project there.
“You have to have your head on at all times,” said her boss, Harry Nawbatt, SIMAP’s executive director. “I can tell you that! You have to be diplomatic. Carolyn is as firm as necessary, but she can also be flexible when it’s necessary.”
In five years as coordinator of SIMAP’s program for Amerindian communities, Rodrigues (pronounced “Rodriggs” in English-speaking Guyana) and her team at SIMAP have helped nearly 60 remote hinterland communities carry out a wide variety of projects. Most of these have constructing facilities such as schools, community centers, health centers, nursery schools, daycare centers, dormitories for secondary school students, small water supply systems, public toilets, roads and bridges. But the program has also financed training activities, productive projects like sewing and furniture making, and even a water taxi service for schoolchildren who live along the shores of a remote river.
Small and isolated. The projects have directly benefited nearly half of all Amerindians living in the country. It is an amazing feat in view of the fact that most of the communities can only be reached by small plane or boat and have poor communications services. Moreover, most of the building materials for the projects she supervises also have to be flown and/or boated in from Georgetown, the capital, at considerable cost.
Rodrigues credited her boss, Nawbatt, for much of the program’s success. “Most of what I’ve done here at SIMAP is due to the encouragement I received from him,” she said. “He’s willing to see me anytime, even on weekends. He’s like a friend.” Nawbatt, a man known for his articulateness and his ability to communicate, took over as head of SIMAP in 1996 and is credited by many in Guyana not only for the agency’s success but also for making it a household name all over the country.
Amerindians account for only 50,000 of Guyana’s one million inhabitants. But most of them live in small communities or along rivers spread over 200,000 square kilometers of the country’s interior, where there are few local roads and no highways, where economic opportunities and government services (except schools) are scarce, and where most people still get around in dugout canoes called “corials” or narrow flat-bottomed boats with small outboards. Most Amerindian families live from subsistence farming and fishing. In addition, many of the men leave home to work for small scale gold and diamond mining operations in the remotest areas for as little as $45 a month.
Rodrigues grew up in Moruca, a community where people still sleep under mosquito netting. She is the daughter of a primary school headmaster who was part Portuguese and an Amerindian mother who was part Chinese. Her parents still live in a house without electricity. She left Moruca as a teenager to go to high school in Georgetown, living in a cheap boarding house and supporting herself by working for a lumber company. After graduation, she won a scholarship for Amerindians to study at a university in Canada for a year. When she returned, the lumber company doubled her salary. But the terms of her Canadian scholarship required that she work for Amerindian communities. Soon after, she got a job at SIMAP, where she took a 65 percent cut in pay.
Being Amerindian herself gave Rodrigues an edge in her job. “She’s one of us,” said Jenny Rufino, a SIMAP community development officer for the Moruca area. “She’s lived the way we do. She understands us.”
“Amerindians don’t trust people from the coast very much,” Rodrigues said, “because of so many unfulfilled promises. I don’t make any promises.”
The right attitude. Anne Deruyttere, chief of the IDB’s Indigenous Peoples and Community Development Unit, said this attitude has paid dividends for the program and for Guyana. “The program has been highly successful thanks to a participatory methodology respectful of cultural and institutional characteristics of the indigenous communities.”
SIMAP was created in 1991 with a $2.8 million grant from the IDB to finance locally sponsored small-scale infrastructure projects to benefit low-income people and also create short-term employment. Subsequently, the IDB has provided an additional $30.5 million in low-interest loans. In 1994, SIMAP launched a program specifically targeted at Amerindians, which were traditionally overlooked by government programs because of the remoteness of their communities and the difficulty of servicing them. It was one of the first mainstream IDB programs that specifically benefited indigenous peoples.
The IDB’s terms require that communities propose the projects themselves, set up a project management committee, contribute labor and/or materials, supervise construction, and later maintain the facility. “We’re always telling communities that after we finish with the project it’s theirs, not the Ministry of Education’s or the Ministry of Health’s,” said Nawbatt. “When people feel a sense of ownership, they will look after it, make sure it is not vandalized and that maintenance is done.”
“If you have to contribute and work hard for something,” said Rodrigues, “you cherish it and make it last longer.”
All projects SIMAP approves must be sent to the IDB’s office in Georgetown to obtain a “no objection” approval from the Bank. On one occasion, IDB social sector specialist Baudouin Duquesne, who was very involved in all aspects of the Amerindian projects, questioned the need for the public toilets at Kumaka.
“He couldn’t understand how a sanitary facility could be a priority over water for a community,” Rodrigues recalls. “I explained that we don’t live there and that’s what the community wanted. I told him to go and see for himself. He went, spoke with them, and approved the project immediately. That is a typical example of how we as outsiders often see things differently than the community.”
In development jargon, this methodology is called “community-driven” and the process of engaging local people to execute a project is called “building capacity.” John Renshaw, an anthropologist who was contracted in 1999 to evaluate SIMAP’s Amerindian program, stated in his report that “capacity building is just as important as the tangible benefits provided by renovated schools, health posts or new community centers.” SIMAP got the Guyanese government to relax its requirements for contractors so that it could hire local contractors to further build capacity and to keep the money in the communities.
Rodrigues and her team manage about 40 community projects a year, a huge number considering the area they cover. She has four engineers (recently doubled from two) to design the projects and help supervise construction and a network of 17 SIMAP community development officers who also help monitor the projects. But the average project requires her to visit each community at least three times from inception to completion. Because of the remoteness of the communities and the complexities of travel arrangements (getting to some communities can require a flight, a boat trip, a land segment, and another boat trip), she usually tries to visit several in the same region on the same trip. Each trip typically keeps her away from her children three or four days, and she makes 30 trips a year. “I love the outdoors,” says Nawbatt, who also travels a lot. “But the trips are fatiguing.”
Logistical nightmare. Once a project is approved and a contractor selected by the community through a bidding process, getting materials to the work site can be difficult. Almost everything has to be shipped in from Georgetown except sand and gravel to mix with cement and rough-hewn lumber for concrete forms. But shipments are rarely point-to-point, and Rodrigues is responsible for the materials until they reach the community and are signed for.
“One time we shipped cement, steel rods and nails to Chenapou, which is 36 miles (85 km) upriver from Kaieteur Falls,” Rodrigues recalled. “No agency had ever gone in there. There’s no police station and a lot of bandits, according to the residents, so you must be careful. We chartered a Cessna on a Saturday. The community sent 12 men to haul the materials a mile and a half from the airstrip down to the river. Then it took about seven hours to get to Chenapow because the boat was loaded and we had so many people. But the airline had not told me the shipment was overweight, and they just left the steel rods behind in Georgetown. So then I had to make arrangements to get the rods in, and it’s just a couple of hundred pounds, not a complete charter. So I had to find somebody who was operating in that area to see if they could fly the stuff in.” The high cost of charter flights can triple or quadruple the cost of materials for a project.
Rodrigues also has to pay construction contractors and workers in cash, because there are no banks in any of the communities. “One time we didn’t reach the community until around 9:00 at night. I couldn’t pay people until the next day. But remember, I am only staying two days, and people know that I am bringing in cash to pay the workmen. I had more than $10,000. So I had to sleep in my hammock that night with the bag of money. It was scary.”
Una James, the Community Teachers Association chairperson in Waramuri, said Rodrigues has become a role model for children in her community: “We in the interior are shy. We’re always left out of decision-making. Carolyn has become brave. At last we have someone to represent us! I tell the children here, ‘This is why education is so very important.’”
“In Guyana, Amerindians are looked on as stupid,” said Rodrigues, “because we are a very quiet people. But quiet people spend less time talking and they think more. Once you help to build confidence in people, it’s amazing what they can do. You give them a kind of power. You never know a people’s potential until you test it. The world is becoming a village, and we have to catch up.”