Administration and Management

Education programmes require management. This is no different than any other enterprise.

There are certain specialized administration and management concerns in the implementation of a programme:

• Leadership
• Coordination and Control
• Quality Assessment
• Staff and Volunteer Morale
• Relationships to Other Stakeholders
• Security for Staff  which deals with Peacekeeping and Peace enforcement, Education In Closed Institutions, as well as Education In Unsafe Areas

But in general, voter education teams rely on the standard techniques of management. While there are different ways in which people describe best practice in management, a simple categorization assists those who perhaps have more educational expertize than management expertize.

PLOC, or Planning, Leadership, Organisation, and Control, establishes the four functional areas within which one or more people, or a team of people, exercizes management to achieve intended outcomes and to reduce unintended outcomes.

Planning refers to the setting of objectives, the aligning of resources, the assessment of strengths and weakness, and the identification of opportunities and threats that result in an operational programme.

Leadership concerns those behaviours that align the organization with the stated objectives, and motivate and challenge staff to their achievement. Leadership might also be concerned with the positioning of the organization to ensure its continued effectiveness.

Organization deals with the construction of the necessary means to achieve the objectives. This includes procedures, policies, teams, operating units and other systems.

Control, sometimes softened to coordination, indicates the need to manage the achievement of objectives. This includes systems to monitor their achievement, rewards and nonperformance consequences, reporting and auditing, and so on. Control is achieved in different ways in different organizations.

Leadership

Voter education programmes make particular demands on those who lead them. The demands are increased if the programme is being run by a coalition.

The Team Under Pressure

The education programme team is likely to be

• extended and meeting demands and deadlines on a daily basis,
• under some pressure by those who have certain expectations of what should be done and how it should be done,
• facing a myriad of staff issues, amongst these the rapid growth in the size of the operation,
• dealing with maintaining nonpartisanship and neutrality as an election campaign heats up,
• because of the importance of involving national and community media in the programme, dealing with considerable public relations demands.

All of these have to be handled in a diplomatic and nonpartisan way, irrespective of the source of the pressure.

Team Leader

Team leaders are also going to be assailed with information from those conducting educational programmes, often negative information about the level of preparedness of the citizenry for example. They have to deal with any negative information in a way that maintains confidence in the electoral process.

A Shared Leadership Approach

Leadership can be centralized. It can even be assumed to be natural. But given the pressures outlined above, it makes more sense to develop a theory of shared and functional leadership in which responsibility and expertize is diversified and shared on the basis of appropriate competence.

Functional and shared leadership is not always easy. It does not ultimately absolve those responsible for the final call. The buck does stop somewhere and, under pressure, it is likely to force those who are designated as leaders of the programme to make regular and on occasion unpopular decisions.

Hershey and Blanchard provide a useful model of situational leadership that does not take away responsibility from the leader, but changes that responsibility to diagnosing the appropriate moment to behave in typically four different ways.[1]

• a directive or telling mode
• a persuasive or selling mode
• a participative or consultative mode
• a delegative mode

Each of these modes is based on the leader's diagnosis of the group of whom she is the designated leader being willing and able to take on and complete a particular task. In this model, a group may be able to do one thing, and the leader may delegate this and take no further part in it.

The same group may, on another task, be immature or either unwilling or unable to complete the task. Here, the leader may have to take the directive role, determining what should be done and telling people what to do and how to do it.

Notes:

[1] This model and a range of extremely useful leadership and team building information can be found in Johnson & Johnson, Joining Together.

Co-ordination and Control

National education programmes that are largely decentralized, whether geographically or functionally, place special coordination and control demands on the education team. This section discusses these demands and provides suggestions for dealing with them.

Coordination

Apart from the general requirement to manage different programme inputs according to a calendar or timetable that can be particularly tight, there are issues of power and authority.

In coalitions, consortia, or programmes involving civil society, there is no direct line of authority, unless it has been negotiated for the duration of the programme. In this circumstance, an education team has to be developed in which there is time given to managing the partner relationships and defining the terms of work, the delegation of tasks, and the relationship of these tasks to one another.

Sometimes this requires a full-time staff of its own, and such a staff is typically drawn from amongst the partner organisations.

Steering committees, management committees, engine rooms, or project coordinators have to commit themselves to very close relationships and spending time in meetings. Other responsibilities of the representatives who sit in on these meetings may need to be reduced.

Control

Team leaders require good information and accurate reporting on the progress of the programme. When programmes are biased in favour of field staff or outside contractors, the team is likely to rely heavily on them for this information. There are potential problems in the areas of reporting and financial accountability.

Those who have to report may find it difficult to report accurately for the following reasons:

• Accurate reporting requires particular skills and a good knowledge of the outcomes planned. Neither of these may be available to those who are far from the centre.
• An educator or a contractor may under-report problems or poor performance; or may underestimate the number of people reached by a large event or a mass distribution of materials. This may be because of the reporter's own lack of information, or misperception of what has happened. There may also be some self-delusion. Each of these reduces the accuracy of the information filtering back to the programme centre.

In addition, there may be false reporting of events not actually conducted, or services not actually rendered. But it does not take such deceptiveness to skew the information and make it difficult to respond appropriately.

On the financial side, education programmes have to manage many different expenditure flows from the centre. In decentralised programmes, there are lower and lower levels of expenditure. Educators often have to pay for venues, catering, and even participant subsidies when accurate invoicing is difficult, and where the field educator is event secretary, bookkeeper, and trainer all at once.

These different expenditure flows need to be resolved during the planning stage and systems developed that enable good financial control without hindering the delivery of the programme.

Systems and Trust

In each of these dilemmas, the need for external sources of information and the necessary checks and balances of accounting and management have to be developed. Such systems have to be relatively slim, and judgements have to be made about the cost of such systems in relation to the overall budget of the programme.

Perhaps the best system is one that develops personal integrity based on pride in performance; commitment to the social aims of the programme; and defined, generally agreed, and inevitable censure where personal integrity fails. It is difficult to see how it is possible to put in place an administrative system capable of dealing with all the coordination and control demands of a national education programme without some level of trust.

When this trust does not exist, the costs of establishing it can be lower than implementing a bureaucratic control. When this cannot be done, bureaucratic controls, audit trails, double reporting procedures and inspectorates, spot checks, dip-stick audits, and external investigations will be the order of the day.

Quality Assessment

Educational programmes set standards for themselves or have these standards set for them by the sponsors of the programme. When certification is a component of the programme, this acts as a benchmark. When there is no certification, a combination of staff qualifications, learner results, available educational plant and materials, support staff, and programme are considered.

In monitoring nonformal educational programmes (for more detailed evaluation suggestions, see Monitoring and Evaluation), two benchmarks that must be considered are process and outputs.

Process

Education programmes require certain processes. These may be the conduct of a calendar of education radio slots and television advertizing, or a set of educational events, with each of these having its own internal processes.

Education organizers should attend to the processes that are under way and ensure the intended quality is being maintained, through a set of monitoring activities, staff assessments, and peer evaluations.

Outputs

Outputs require monitoring only in order to ensure that they are happening. The assumption is that the objectives have been set correctly and that if certain outputs can be seen and measured, the programme is attaining its planned quality. This is the "if it works, don't fix it" approach to quality management.

Of course, it may be that in addition to the expected outputs, there are some unintended outputs that may, over time, begin to affect the quality of the programme.

Such outputs can include perceptions of the education organization, impressions about the manner in which business should be conducted, and even attitudes toward other learners.

Regular Programme Assessment

Uncovering these outputs and considering process questions can be difficult unless there is a regular programme assessment in which programme staff meet with team leaders or managers and go through a checklist of the intended staff behaviour and educational objectives. Progress can be assessed by asking: "How are we doing it?", and outputs: "What is happening as a result of the programme?"

Such checklist-based assessment should be backed up with data from external sources. This data can be provided by a monitoring and evaluation body, or can be collected by managers participating in actual events or behaving as clients of their own services.

Staff and Volunteer Morale

Education programmes, and especially voter education programmes, tire people. And, under pressure, they find it hard to perform at their best. This section suggests some ways to help people perform well.

Indeed, while the programme itself may be going along quite well, some staff may start showing the symptoms of burnout and depression. They become defensive and egocentric, and the programme begins to demonstrate the same characteristics.

Dealing with this under stressful conditions is not easy, and there may not be the resources or time available to give people a real break. But there are certain things that can help both staff and volunteers.

Affirmation

Managers and team leaders have to develop systems for recognising and affirming good performance. They will identify this performance in a number of ways in order to ensure that they do not start focusing only on a narrow band of behaviour.

Small Teams

Construct and then maintain small teams in which people can find support for their own work and assist in providing support for others. Such teams are likely to be objective based rather than specialized in orientation. But, across such teams, an organization might construct affinity groups, which draw together researchers or administrators with a particular focus.

Both such gatherings of people should meet during working hours: the time spent on maintenance should not have to happen during people's own time.

Celebrate

Team leaders will find opportunities for celebration. Birthdays, holy and high days, especially those that commemorate human rights and democracy milestones, and other similar moments provide an opportunity for people to gather and celebrate the importance of their work and that of other people. Interestingly, the election day and its aftermath can be a major letdown for voter education workers. The nonpartisan nature of their work leaves them outside the real contest and its emotions; and the fact that they work through the last-minute administrative preparations often means that they do not hold election staff positions in polling stations.

In South Africa, a special T-shirt was produced for workers so that they would not feel out of place in all the hullabaloo.

When it is not possible for education programmes to free their staff to participate fully on election day, special arrangements should be made to ensure that staff and volunteers do have a chance to celebrate the closure and likely success of their enterprise.

Be Administratively Competent

Cheques paid late for services rendered, misspellings of names on certificates, being left off internal mailing lists, late decision making about policy and practice, having to wait for stationery and the materials necessary to do the work: all of these have a debilitating effect on people. These situations can be avoided by ensuring adequate and professional administrative backup to the programme.

Manage Terminations and Closure

The morale of the staff and volunteers is important. No programme can afford to have people leave during the last days of its life.

It should be noted, however, that many programmes end not only with an election but also with the termination of employment. So, in the most hectic moments, staff members have their thoughts on future employment or the insecurity of unemployment. Programmes should either schedule contracts so that they run through an election or ensure that people resolve their futures early. It helps to have absolutely clear and unambiguous statements and contracts that determine the period of employment, but it may be necessary to start quite early in stating the obvious to people, so they do not leave their arrangements to the last minute and do not get distracted when it is least appropriate.

Relationships to Other Stakeholders

Educators do not necessarily have to please everybody when they are conducting a voter or civic education programme. But to make the programme a success, and to ensure cost effectiveness and the multiplier effect, they have to keep everybody involved.

This has to be done by establishing and maintaining channels of communication between stakeholders and the programme.

Reporting

Regular reports to those who provide the budget can include a newsletter, a series of briefings and consultations, and one-on-one meetings between team leaders and designated people within the stakeholder community.

Consultative or Advisory Groups

In some cases, it may be possible to establish one or more consultative groups amongst stakeholders that meet on a regular basis. While it is difficult to maintain interest in these groups if they do not have decision-making powers, or if they have too broad a focus, it is possible to develop a set of tightly focussed and representative groups.

For example, a group may review and provide advice on an advertizing campaign, another on the content of messages, and a third on a code of conduct and monitoring of programme effectiveness.

Such groups are more than focus groups, because a relationship is built up with stakeholders over time. Groups require attention; to set them up and then not service them can be worse than not setting them up in the first place.

If such groups are established, they should remain open to new members, but the new members should have to meet certain criteria. Members who represent stakeholders should be identified and required to come to meetings with some consistency, otherwise each meeting will turn into an educational event rather than a continuing discussion.

The Effort is Important

All these strategies are important, because an education programme, particularly one conducted over a period of months, cannot take for granted the goodwill and understanding of the programme that might have been generated in initial discussions. Stakeholder views change because of their experience of the programme, changes in the external environment, and sometimes changes within the stakeholder group itself. So the legitimacy of the programme has to be constantly attended to.

When stakeholders are kept on board, a programme is able to reach into territories it might not otherwise get to. The programme is protected from political fallout as implementation takes place (an aspect of the programme might otherwise be deemed too sensitive or not sensitive enough), and there is a ready and continuing early warning system that ensures programme leaders do not get all their information from their own staff (see Coordination and Control).

Security for Staff

Education organizers and team leaders conducting programmes during election times cannot protect their team members against all eventualities. In circumstances where there is conflict over an election, those promoting it may also be at risk. In educational programmes conducted in situations where there are large numbers of events and limited numbers of staff, the chances of travel accidents increases.

While all programmes should take basic precautions and care, there is no guarantee of perfect safety for all programmes. There are specific needs in relation to security that must be considered in managing a voter or civic education programme.

• In closed or secure institutions, such as prisons or army barracks, voter education may be essential, but the nature of the institutions requires separate attention from the mainstream programme.
• When there is community conflict, such conflict is likely to result in territorial strongholds; and these will still be in place once an election is promulgated. Programmes have to be developed for such places. Some would say that these are precisely the places where voter and civic education programmes are most needed.

Peacekeeping and Peace enforcement

Recent years have seen an increase in international interventions in failed states and in conflict resolution for intra and inter state conflicts. While peacekeeping has a long history and has developed its own protocols, there has been a convergence between this activity and that of electoral assistance. Full scale country re-building actions led by the UN or similar regional inter-governmental organizations are receiving more attention. The cases of Namibia, Cambodia and Eritrea have been joined by Bosnia, East Timor and the Democratic Republic of Congo. On the African continent, peacekeeping and its more recent and more complex and controversial peace enforcement missions are present in countries in the Horn of Africa, the Great Lakes region and West Africa. Afghanistan and Iraq are drawing the attention and the resources of many Northern countries.

Educators are conducting innovative civic education programmes in many of these countries, making use of voluntary associations, expanding school enrollments, especially amongst girls, and adapting or reforming curricula, using many of the techniques and tactics described elsewhere in this topic area. The process of developing and implementing these programmes under adverse conditions may be as important in developing a commitment to democracy and the re-invigoration of a social fabric as the overt educational outcomes.

A more dangerous activity is undertaken when voter education is conducted in insecure or unstable countries in the run up to elections intended to act as conflict resolving mechanisms. While it is understandable that elections get planned under these circumstances, where there is presently either no legitimate national government or contested legitimacy, it is essential that such elections do actually poll the informed wishes of a broad electorate, otherwise they fail even in their limited aims. This means voter education or at the very least universally provided voter information.

In some of the countries where international troops and police are deployed, they have taken on either an educational mandate themselves or the mandate of protecting civic and voter educators. It is perhaps too early to evaluate this activity and to determine whether it has strengthened domestic commitments to democracy or has had the effect of creating a perception that democracy is a foreign or imposed concept. Where it is the only way to ensure the safety of educators and participants in educational events, there may be some particular principles to be born in mind. These are:

• nonpartisanship
• civilian and local ownership and mandate
• empowerment of voters
• non-discrimination

There are some particularly technical concerns in the delivery of elections under conditions where authority may be dispersed in a country between international administrators and security forces, previously existing state organs and emerging transitional structures. These will have an impact on educators and on educational provision, although they will often have no say in the manner in which these relationships are developed.

The experience in the Democratic Republic of Congo suggests that educators can insist upon empowering and thence developing the capability of the election management bodies which are created. This places the locus of authority where it will subsequently fall, and increases domestic ownership. This has some immediate consequences – efficiency of delivery may fall – but in the long run it contributes to the state-building and democracy-creation agenda which is presumably why international agencies have entered the country in the first place.

Lessons in the delivery of education and information programmes in these often unstable or contentious circumstances are still being learned. Some have chosen the centralized media route, others have used cascade strategies to ensure that local education programmes are delivered by local people who have less problems with access and security.

Education In Closed Institutions

All societies have closed institutions. In some cases, these are literally closed to members of the public and to their inhabitants, for example maximum security prisons or asylums. Others may be partially open, but the nature of the institution shields it from general contact with the public: for example detention centres, special homes, hospitals for chronically ill people. Others may create an aura of closedness, which makes it difficult for nonmembers to enter: military institutions, some religious houses, and police stations in some countries.

In these closed institutions, with few exceptions, people are either already participating in society, or will return to that society at some point in the future. In institutions where there is a ready contact between the members and the outside world, education can happen during this contact. In some cases, there may be little or no contact and, while it may not be possible for the members, inmates, or patients to vote in a particular election, it may still be necessary for them to have opportunities to learn about democracy and citizenship.

This section suggests three things that must be balanced in managing the security of programmes conducted in closed institutions:

• the security of the staff
• the security of the participants
• the efficacy of the programme

Programme Choices

Educators talk about the hidden curriculum of schools: what is taught not during the lesson, but as a result of the environment within which the lesson takes place. Prisons pose a particular problem if they are primarily designed as places for restriction and punishment, while military bases operate on an authority system somewhat at odds with what is generally considered democratic behaviour between people.

Because of this, special programmes need to be developed, and a variety of methods found to ensure the efficacy of this programme.

Security

Having established this, arrangements have to be made to deal with general security issues: access to the institution, contact (or lack of contact) between educators and inmates, relationships to the staff of the institution, and their relationship to those participating in the programme. Such discussions should take place well in advance of the initiatiation of any programme, and the specialized nature of the work suggests that specialized staff take responsibility for it.

Using Existing Specialized Staff

Many closed institutions have visitor programmes, welfare and psychiatric services, religious chaplaincies, formal educational studies, and vocational education. Contact with the most appropriate of these is essential, as these are people who have already forged a working relationship with the institution and know its organisational culture, regulations, limitations and opportunities.

Such experience may have been hard won. Election administrators should not jeopardise this by sending inexperienced staff to conduct programmes. It may be better to orient existing educators and other visitors with the information and materials needed and have them conduct the programme on a proxy basis.

Education in Unsafe Areas

Societies in conflict spawn geographic areas that are unsafe for the authorities or supporters of an alternative faction or group.

These become areas where no one can go, at least not without being under threat of attack. In most, but not all, such cases, the borders of such territories are clearly marked. There may even have been a general "chasing out" of perceived aliens (whether as a result of their ethnic identity, political or religious persuasion).

When such a society begins an electoral process, or starts a reconciliation or nation building exercize, these geographic areas remain. Indeed, they may be the most significant obstacle to the re-establishment of peace and democracy.

It is essential that there be an education programme in such areas. During elections, it may even be considered necessary to allow the citizens living in such areas (who may or may not have had a choice in the matter) access to the various political contestants or their ideas.

The political parties and factions may have divided up a country in such a way that they cannot enter the territory controlled by one another. This could be a recent or long-standing phenomenon. It poses special questions for election administrators.

But for educators, it raises a series of dilemmas. Voters require information and education that must be made available on a professional and nonpartisan basis, when the risks to educators and voters may be high. Voters require access to information about all the contestants if this education is to be relevant and efficacious. The very state of territoriality is having a negative effect on voters and their perceptions of democracy, which may be difficult to overcome through standard educational programmes. Indeed, these may be so at odds with the reality of those being educated that the programme engenders cynicism or disbelief.

Life is not perfect. It may be decided that despite the problems (and the problems of educators are invariably secondary to those of political settlement) it is important to continue with elections despite the creation of "no-go" areas where political opposition is neither welcomed nor tolerated.

In these circumstances, programmes may have to be developed that require the assistance of the security forces to protect the educators, and where the educators themselves have to convey political party information on a nonpartisan basis.

In some cases this dilemma can be overcome by the use of broadcast programmes that can be received across any border. In other cases, programmes should include face-to-face activities even in the unnatural environment of an event protected by security forces.

Security Precautions

When this happens, care has to be taken to protect voters on their way to and from the event, and to ensure that the event details in every respect have been approved by the party or faction controlling the territory. Educators will leave with the security forces, but voters will not, and the determination about whether to proceed with such education has to be based on the personal safety of the participants after the event is over. Security for the event itself is the easy part of the exercize and should not be the primary concern of the security forces and the organizers.

In some cases, it may be decided to conduct a road show in which the electoral authority creates a platform for all candidates or contesting parties to speak in a particular area. Educators should use the opportunity to convey messages about the secrecy of the ballot, tolerance for opposition, and acceptance of the results of the election. They should also make handout materials available that are clearly identified as nonpartisan.

In some situations, even education is risky. A territory may be controlled by a faction that is resisting the election itself. Here, a determination has to be made about how the election itself will continue and what security is going to be provided for voters wanting to vote despite the opinions of the controlling faction.

Broadcast material may be most appropriate in these situations, although there may be other information networks that can be used.

Voter education conducted under such difficult circumstances can still be worth it. The presence of nonpartisan educators in a no-go area can increase the climate of tolerance of different points of view. These educators develop levels of trust that cannot be achieved by broadcast programmes, and they form the vanguard for what must inevitably follow the setting up of voting sites and the monitoring of the conduct of the elections during voting time. By being present when political party campaigners cannot be present, they also establish the one presence not linked to the party in control, and thus provide an opportunity for voters to obtain on a one-to-one basis general information about the campaign.

Nonpartisanship is Crucial

Care must be taken to ensure that those involved in such programmes are amongst the most experienced and clearly nonpartisan. Because they may be the only people present, they may be approached for information about other parties. If this information is not given carefully, educators could provide just the excuse a party leadership requires to turn the election to its own advantage, or even to withdraw from the election. This care should include consideration of language: using a familiar term that is acceptable in one area but not another is all that is needed to make the educator seem partisan.

One way to overcome this particular problem is to always have teams of educators from different regions. This has additional significance as a physical demonstration of the reconciliation that is being sought, but it is likely to be difficult for the team itself and such people need special support from the programme administrators and leaders.