Scholarship / Programme Assistant with WFP - Chevening - One of my leadership and influencing stories [3]

United Nations World Food Programme shaped my skills

Thanks to a decade's experience in managing multi-stakeholder projects in the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Tajikistan, I have gained important leadership skills to succeed in business and team-building. In addition to empowering individuals and delegating tasks I regularly motivate colleagues, partners and community to practice full responsibility and this way inspire them from being problem-focused to solution-focused.

As a Programme Assistant with WFP, I often have to engage in open conversations with local authorities and community and their involvement to address development issues.

For instance, last autumn when I conducted a community needs assessment in one of the disaster prone and poorest areas of Khatlon region, I had noticed a difficult situation which affected livelihoods of many farmer families. Due to lack of funding and continues neglect, critical irrigation and flood protection facilities became out of repair. With very limited resources local authorities and community could not undertake proper rehabilitation activities. Farmers were unable to cultivate riparian and central lands due to recurrent floods in spring and lack of water in summer. I realized that in case of further delays in riverbank stabilization and irrigation canal repairing the degraded state of arable fields would be irreversible and for many families it would be difficult to move out of poverty.

I took a stand to help the community and performed deliberate actions to solve the problems. I organized a community meeting with participation of farmers, local business community and local authorities including the Chairman of the district. Using preliminary prepared budget estimates I worked hard to convince participants that with joint efforts we could rehabilitate flood protection and irrigation facilities which would benefit all participants. Despite significant input from WFP, total internal contributions made only 20% and remaining 30% of required resources were unavailable. Further, I was assisting the Chairman and his team in approaching existing donor agencies for assistance through providing advices and editing their official letters. Finally, regional office of United Nations Development Programme agreed to collaborate with us via its small grants projects. All these efforts brought positive impact on the target community. Rehabilitated irrigation canal and flood protection dyke made it possible to bring 95 hectares of degraded land back into productive use for 231 disadvantage families which improve their long-term food security.

My job requires a lot of commitment, great sense of responsibility, and constant awareness on resolving issues to make a difference in the lives of women, men, girls and boys in rural communities. I have achieved goals of the project through hard work and excellent communications skills with the aim to bring positive changes in the targeted communities.

On my end I learnt a lesson in leadership - if one wants a project to be successful, one needs to engage all stakeholders in different forms and audiences until interests of all the groups are in line with the project goals, and everyone is informed and motivated to deliver on their part of the project.