Any experiences with development co-operation?

["Tomi Toivio" <tomi -dot- olavi -dot- toivio -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hello everyone!

I am asking if any of you have had extremely frustrating experiences with
development co-operation. I know technical writing and development
co-operation might seem to quite distant, but i know from experience they
are not. Cause in the development field a lot of the work is about taking
some new technological tool into use, documenting it for use, and teaching
people how to use it. So the skills of a technical writer are actually
extremely useful in the development field.

I have been working as a tech writer for a couple of years now, though
actually I got a M.Soc.Sci from development studies.I thought that I might
do something good for a change and I went to Kenya to work for a PGIS
project. You know, in this development project my role was extremely close
to whatever technical writers are doing, so I created a GIS platfrom from
various pieces of Open Source software, documented it, and did some teaching
sessions about how to use it. And I participated in some field mapping
sessions.

So you know I came back from Kenya about 6 months ago. Now I notice that
nobody is using the computer platform, actually nobody is doing any real
work with the PGIS project! There is absolutely no data to put into the
database, and putting data into the database is actually the point why PGIS
projects exist! The manual I wrote for the system has been used for training
somewhere in Italy... For PGIS training... So at least the whole effort is
not completely useless? If the Africans don't get anything out of it at
least the Italians will?

I like my day job in technical writing, but I have been really irritated
about this one.  We put some development co-operation funds into something
like this and then... Nobody finds it useful?

Today today I took a day off from work cause I found this so confusing. We
just go to Africa to give people different chances or options of doing
things... And then you notice nobody cares or will not use these things?

What do you think? Do you have experiences about things like this? I
understand that this is a bit off from the usual subjects of techwr-l, but
like I told you, the actual development work was extremely similar to
whatever technical writers are doing.

Regards
Tomi Toivio
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