The Fieldworker: The last mile or the first mile connect

Glad to read this article in India Development Review (IDR) about the realities of frontline workers or fieldworkers. We have had multiple conversations in our team about the burden on fieldworkers who are actually the first point of contact with our communities - in terms of how much can we expect from them and do they feel adequately supported to do what they have to do.

I was also one of those who used to think that how hard would it be to multitask until I spent a year in Bihar and closely observed the everyday life of our team members going to schools in far flung blocks of the district. Earlier my expectation was that why can't a field officer submit their reports on time - you go to school in the first half, come back to office in the second half, file your report and go home. This, until I accompanied them on their bikes - 50 sometimes 100 kms to reach a school, then patiently wait for the teachers and school head to give you time to listen to what you have to say, then demonstrate certain processes in the classes which by the way requires a lot of energy to manage a class of 50-60 students in the sweltering heat with no electricity. Then on the way back you drop by at the block office or the district office to update them about the project or seek permission for trainings or other activities you want to do. You actually have no energy left to even cook your own food after a day like this.

In terms of skills there is so much that we expect from them - facilitation, design, observation, relationship building, data collection, documentation - of not just monitoring templates but also write case stories, basic presence of mind to deal with unplanned situations, negotiation, communication and much more. Their lives in the future are going to become more complex as technology becomes a given in work - they will be expected to have basic technology skills as well - understand AI and more.

Yet when it comes to project budgets, they are the lowest paid in the role hierarchy, first ones to be let go if the projects are not renewed, budgets for internal capacity building are always questioned, in terms of ratio at times it can range from 1 person for 50 to 100 schools or 1 person for the entire district, if a demand is made for more people on the ground then you are told '50% of the project budget can't just be for paying salaries' or that 'scale models are supposed to less resource intensive' - which is not true.

Scale or depth you need to build human relationships on the ground which is the impetus for change, behaviours don't change without dialogue and reflection and building self awareness and for that you need people to engage with people.

In my team we have had a lot of discussions and debates about how much can we really expect from our team members and that has led to some reflections and even changes in the design of our programs. Not that things are ideal for us now, we still struggle with our people to school ratios and how much can a person do but some shifts that we made:

1. Earlier we would expect people to work on both scale and depth strategies together, now we have separate team members for each, hopefully giving them bandwidth to focus on one strategy more mindfully, rather than having to switch gears.
2. In our design we have phased the introduction of strategies, instead of having to work on all themes simultaneously we introduce them one by one. Earlier we would work on STEM, gender, career all together to now where we start with one in the first year and then introduce the next one in the next year. It means that the intervention cycle itself is a minimum of 3 years.
3. Investing in internal capacity building - I have heard from some of the older organisations how they would have an immersive capacity building program almost like a crash course of 1 or 2 months for their field staff before sending them out in the communities and then ongoing spaces for reflection and continuous learning. While we cannot afford that, we do make an attempt to keep 10-12 days in a year for immersive capacity building workshops and then monthly spaces for reflections and reviews. We also encourage our teams to participate in org level capacity building initiatives like the monthly skill shacks on topics like documentation, data analysis and so on.
4. While working with our implementation partners who would hire the field staff we designated a minimum starting salary for all field roles. It did lead to a dilemma that partner organisations have smaller budgets and might not be able to sustain those salaries once our support ends, but in the interest of the field workers we arrived at a benchmark which would work for the partners, in the hope that in the long run it would increase the entry level salaries for the sector eventually.
5. Dialogue with donors - As civil society organisations we are also at times guilty of not representing the full picture of the effort it takes to work on the ground in our budgets to meet the requirements and keep the per stakeholder cost low. It has been a learning journey for us to move away from that tendency. It is like coming of age as an organisation in some ways where you can demand what you know is the need, rather than build workarounds. It is also about equalising the power balance sometimes between the donor and the civil society organisation. While there are some donors who are still hard to convince, there are also those who are open to understanding the needs on the ground and make space for initiatives like internal capacity building and so on. Like they say 'if you don't ask the answer is always no', therefore always have a conversation about what you need and if there is a genuine interest on the other side to work towards change, it will lead to a fruitful dialogue and understanding.

We need more conversations about this as a sector and more cross learning to improve the lives of our first mile field workers who actually determine the experience of the program and drive the change with the communities and our stakeholders.