Engaging Assumptions

 

 

Over a coffee the other day I had a delightful conversation with a woman who, a few years ago, had been stationed in Guinea with a nonprofit working in microcredit and poverty alleviation. She was circumspect regarding the effect her international organization may or may not have had, but she was grateful for her time overseas for what it had ended up teaching her.

This conversation reminded me of a quote I once came across via Village Earth, a grassroots advocacy consortium.

 

“A lot of people arrive in Africa to assume that it’s a blank empty space and their goodwill and desire and guilt will fix it. And that to me is not any different from the first people who arrived and colonized us. This power, this power to help, is just about as dangerous as hard power, because very often it arrives with a kind of zeal that is assuming ‘I will do it. I will solve it for you. I will fix it for you,’ and it rides roughshod over your own best efforts.”

 

Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina said this and he’s referring to the anger and incredulity of people in developing countries when faced with donor-driven agendas. Grassroots community-based organizations are too often ignored in favour of the seemingly more sophisticated foreign aid (and foreign-based) organizations. This destabilizes local voices and local initiatives.

 

Community Participation

 

International development agencies’ project cycles typically last three to five years and virtually guarantees that the systemic and institutionalized barriers to social justice will not be addressed. The complexities behind ending poverty require a deep understanding of local norms, culture, politics and the socioeconomic environment. Instead the INGOs, because of these tight time constraints, over-emphasize the quantifiable outcomes and ‘impact’ of their projects. 'This many dollars spent equals this many lives saved/improved/rescued/helped' goes the thinking and all in time for the glossy annual reports.

 

But what this abbreviated time period really means is that the elusive Holy Grail of development—community participation—is not captured.

 

The grassroots groups on the other hand have a vested interest in the community because they’re from the community. Time is on their side, so to speak, because they’re not as risk-adverse as the foreign nonprofits are, and therefore bring with them the patience for long-term mobilization and understanding. This isn’t romanticizing the ‘natives’, either. The problem comes down to funding.

 

The local groups know the issues, the people and the territory, but because they’re perceived to be 'small', they are also perceived to lack credibility to absorb the biggie foreign-funded cash and deliver the western-mandated projects. But the better approach to achieving real sustainability in any project or community, has been and remains, through empowerment and asking better questions.

 

My coffee companion’s story is commonplace (and echoes Wainaina): educated, background in finance and convinced she was there to ‘help’ for a year. It didn’t turn out that way because her expectations got in the way.

 

“My assumptions about the project, the women we were targeting, even the food, everything was like a dirty window,” she said. “I had to keep wiping it to see better.”

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Photo: United Nations World Food Programme (WFP)

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 This article originally appeared in Word Vietnam magazine and has been adapted. To view the magazine’s online version click here.