The Struggles of Growth

On the struggles of a growing nation – are we making progress?

In 2011, the government of Rwanda made an ambitious commitment of 2 million hectares to The Bonn Challenge. While significant progress has been made in achieving this goal, the commitment faces the risk of not being able to demonstrate progress or impact if a flexible and customizable monitoring system isn’t availed.

So IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), as a stakeholder in the Bonn Challenge, is interested in supporting the implementation of a national forestry monitoring system which can be used to track progress on the Bonn Challenge. Thus, the overall objective of my capstone is to carry out an audit of the Forest Monitoring Information System (FMIS) at RWFA (Rwanda Water and Forest Authority) for the purpose of providing clear guidelines and recommendations for the upgrade and operationalization of the monitoring system.

The audit is being completed thorough a desktop analysis at IUCN to demonstrate how FLR indicators across key institutions can be matched/harmonized with ones used by the FMIS at RWFA. Desktop analysis will also be used to audit the system to identify areas where its architecture and functionality can be upgraded to ensure flexible use across institutions and ease of data input, processing, and display/interpretability to the decision makers.

So far in my placement, I have developed a Terms of Reference for the project, met and interviewed key stakeholders to discuss their forestry-related programs and the corresponding monitoring systems and indicators, drafted a logframe for The Bonn Challenge indicators, and drafted an outline for the final report.

In late July, we will have and a monitoring and evaluations systems expert from IUCN HQ join me in Rwanda for a week to audit the existing FMIS architecture and focus on providing technical recommendations for the report.

My next steps are to complete the logframe, draft the report, and get feedback before finalizing it and passing the report off to IUCN.

On the struggles of personal growth – Am I making any progress?

My friends and family have always been a fountain of indispensable advice and inspiration. Some of my closest friends are constantly achieving crazy feats and make me feel cool just for knowing them. Yet striving to keep up with them is sometimes a marathon. Among their achievements are rescuing child soldiers in the DRC with the UN, earning an advanced degree while traversing the Antarctic, touring their Midwestern country rock band around London, and competing in weight-lifting competitions while also working as a kickass water quality scientist. They help me push myself while reminding me how many things are within reach if I’d just try. But at times, I struggle and fail. I am lucky that when I start to waver my family is there to support me. My mom always reminds me of my strength and resilience while also reminding me that success never comes without failure. My grandparents show me how to deal with adversity and hardship with grace while also reminding me to practice self-care as demonstrated by their inability to buy less than 5 pints of Babcock ice cream per store visit. My brother reminds me that life is meant to be enjoyed and often humbles me when, in the rare moments he decides to follow in my footsteps, he makes everything I labored over look incredibly easy. And my father always knows how to lighten the mood and provide blunt yet practical advice. And while I have leaned on all of my loved ones during my time in graduate school, my father’s most recent advice keeps surfacing in my mind – Just start with 20 minutes.

The last couple of weeks have been pretty difficult in terms of focus. Two of my IUCN advisors, who have been helping steer and review my project, were out of the office and unreachable for two weeks. Before they left, we had an established to-do list, but to be honest, there are a lot of tasks on the to-do list which I didn’t know how to start (or finish for that matter). I felt like I started and stopped tasks repeatedly. My google search history was littered with the phrase, “how to…” but even after some exploratory research I was still unsure if I was doing any of the tasks correctly. The exercise left me unmotivated and struggling to maintain the self-control I thought I needed to hammer out these tasks. But after a few days of flailing, my dad’s advice came to me, “If there is a project you’re avoiding, but which you must complete, just make yourself work on it for 20 minutes. Usually by the end of 20 minutes, your mind will have accepted the task and you will be able to get it done… or you won’t.” I could see his grin and hear his chuckle in my mind as he dispensed this supposedly sage advice followed by the swift reminder that sometimes life just isn’t that easy. This led me to realize, I was relying too heavily on wanting to feel motivated to work. But the reality is, you don’t have to be motivated to get something done.

So I just started grinding at my research and writing as best I could. I set up interviews, gathered documents, and outlined my final report. And it was awesome. The tiny progress towards completion brought back some of my motivation and made further progress a little easier. I think I still struggle with this vague feeling that I don’t know what I am doing, but I’m just trying to accept that there are probably a lot of people who could do this job better, a lot of people who would know even less than I, and that neither of those people are here. I also try to keep in mind that the people who helped me design this project have confidence that I can get it done.

Turns out auditing a national forest monitoring system is often confusing and tough work. Who would have thought?