This article was first published in the Guardian newspaper on 27 Feb 2009
A group of foreigners turn up in a community. They are a different colour, dress differently and speak a funny language. They step off the bus and are ushered into a communal building, a school perhaps, where some local residents (elected, selected, or just pushy) explain the problems they are facing. The foreigners listen attentively, taking notes, sometimes shocked by what they hear. Afterwards, the leader of the visiting group stands up, expresses his solidarity, and promises to work with the community to help it make progress.
A typical scene in many African countries as development "experts" arrive to help plan interventions with local communities. This kind of consultation will have taken place many times in Katine. But what if this wasn't Katine? What if it wasn't Africa at all? Imagine that the community being visited is in London, or Manchester, or a poor rural area in the UK, and the visitors are from Katine, bringing their expertise, their culture, their solutions to share with people in this country.
"Development" work has changed a lot over the years. We don't call it "charity" work much any more, because we don't want to further the idea that we are giving hand-outs to the poor in a paternalistic manner. Whereas once we arrived with grand ideas to help the "undeveloped", now we don't think we know all the answers – we listen, and do our best to respond. At Christian Aid, where I work, we are proud of our partnership approach, supporting local communities and organisations to change their own lives and contexts by providing them with money, expertise and political accompaniment.
But for all the shifts in our understanding of what development means, there is one paradigm that stubbornly persists. It is still about how we in the west can help the poor in other countries. What can we give you? What can we teach you? What can we campaign on that will make the world better for you? At your service. But are we right to be so confident of what we have to offer?
I know a lot of Africans, Latin Americans and Asians who are appalled at how we live in this country and who genuinely pity us for our way of life. And they don't just pity the poor. They pity the affluent, the wealthy, society as a whole. They cannot fathom how we put our parents into old peoples' homes to sit in circles watching telly. They are sad that mental health is now as big a concern in our hospitals as physical injury. They find the number of abortions carried out each year abhorrent, to name just three examples.
And I know many westerners whose thinking has been transformed by their experiences in other countries and who believe passionately that we in the west need to learn from other parts of the world, including very poor communities, where life is approached differently. I read an article a few years ago written by a married couple who had spent 20 years working with marginalised communities in rural India before they returned to work in Glasgow. They said: "We thought we knew what poverty was, and then we came to Easterhouse."
In the Katine project, through the website, we have learned of the serious problems locals face: in education, health, gender differences, water quality and simply making a decent living. What would our experts from Katine discover on their visit to a poor British community? They might visit the parents of a young boy, the most recent victim of knife crime. They might be invited to a group for pregnant teenagers. Go around the corner to the school where smoking kids are shouting at teachers. Up the road, past the crack house, is the job centre where there are no jobs for people with no skills. A caricature, maybe, but not so far from the reality of life for many people living in Britain today. Having created a society so ill at ease with itself, so disappointing, it might seem surprising, almost arrogant, that we still choose to go abroad to try to help other people.
But it isn't arrogant or wrong. We are right to want to help people, wherever they are in the world, especially if we have played a part in their poverty (through unfair trade rules, natural resource exploitation, insistence on crippling debt repayments and so on). We have many ideas, and we have lots of money. And despite the problems in our society, we have succeeded in just as many areas as we have failed, and we are right to want to share our successes with other countries, whether in science, political freedom, culture, economic management or social policies. But we do get it wrong when we think that we have the answers. And we are arrogant when we think we have nothing to learn from the communities, like Katine, that in our generosity we want to support.
Wouldn't it be interesting for the Guardian and Amref to break open this last great mistaken paradigm of development - the one-way street paradigm - that of us helping them, and develop a system to foster communal learning across borders? What would it be that we might learn from the people in Katine? What insights might they be able to offer not only the poor communities in Britain, but the affluent as well? How might it work practically? What would catch the attention of Ugandan journalists invited to live in a London suburb, or a sink estate? Not an HIV epidemic, for sure. Nor the extreme poverty still experienced by billions of people in Africa, India and around the world and which must continue to be the main focus of our attention. But poverty nonetheless. Physical, material, mental and spiritual. Isn't it time we opened ourselves up to the kind of scrutiny we so confidently undertake in other countries?
A group of foreigners turn up in a community. They are a different colour, dress differently and speak a funny language. They step off the bus and are ushered into a communal building, a school perhaps, where some local residents (elected, selected, or just pushy) explain the problems they are facing. The foreigners listen attentively, taking notes, sometimes shocked by what they hear. Afterwards, the leader of the visiting group stands up, expresses his solidarity, and promises to work with the community to help it make progress.
A typical scene in many African countries as development "experts" arrive to help plan interventions with local communities. This kind of consultation will have taken place many times in Katine. But what if this wasn't Katine? What if it wasn't Africa at all? Imagine that the community being visited is in London, or Manchester, or a poor rural area in the UK, and the visitors are from Katine, bringing their expertise, their culture, their solutions to share with people in this country.
"Development" work has changed a lot over the years. We don't call it "charity" work much any more, because we don't want to further the idea that we are giving hand-outs to the poor in a paternalistic manner. Whereas once we arrived with grand ideas to help the "undeveloped", now we don't think we know all the answers – we listen, and do our best to respond. At Christian Aid, where I work, we are proud of our partnership approach, supporting local communities and organisations to change their own lives and contexts by providing them with money, expertise and political accompaniment.
But for all the shifts in our understanding of what development means, there is one paradigm that stubbornly persists. It is still about how we in the west can help the poor in other countries. What can we give you? What can we teach you? What can we campaign on that will make the world better for you? At your service. But are we right to be so confident of what we have to offer?
I know a lot of Africans, Latin Americans and Asians who are appalled at how we live in this country and who genuinely pity us for our way of life. And they don't just pity the poor. They pity the affluent, the wealthy, society as a whole. They cannot fathom how we put our parents into old peoples' homes to sit in circles watching telly. They are sad that mental health is now as big a concern in our hospitals as physical injury. They find the number of abortions carried out each year abhorrent, to name just three examples.
And I know many westerners whose thinking has been transformed by their experiences in other countries and who believe passionately that we in the west need to learn from other parts of the world, including very poor communities, where life is approached differently. I read an article a few years ago written by a married couple who had spent 20 years working with marginalised communities in rural India before they returned to work in Glasgow. They said: "We thought we knew what poverty was, and then we came to Easterhouse."
In the Katine project, through the website, we have learned of the serious problems locals face: in education, health, gender differences, water quality and simply making a decent living. What would our experts from Katine discover on their visit to a poor British community? They might visit the parents of a young boy, the most recent victim of knife crime. They might be invited to a group for pregnant teenagers. Go around the corner to the school where smoking kids are shouting at teachers. Up the road, past the crack house, is the job centre where there are no jobs for people with no skills. A caricature, maybe, but not so far from the reality of life for many people living in Britain today. Having created a society so ill at ease with itself, so disappointing, it might seem surprising, almost arrogant, that we still choose to go abroad to try to help other people.
But it isn't arrogant or wrong. We are right to want to help people, wherever they are in the world, especially if we have played a part in their poverty (through unfair trade rules, natural resource exploitation, insistence on crippling debt repayments and so on). We have many ideas, and we have lots of money. And despite the problems in our society, we have succeeded in just as many areas as we have failed, and we are right to want to share our successes with other countries, whether in science, political freedom, culture, economic management or social policies. But we do get it wrong when we think that we have the answers. And we are arrogant when we think we have nothing to learn from the communities, like Katine, that in our generosity we want to support.
Wouldn't it be interesting for the Guardian and Amref to break open this last great mistaken paradigm of development - the one-way street paradigm - that of us helping them, and develop a system to foster communal learning across borders? What would it be that we might learn from the people in Katine? What insights might they be able to offer not only the poor communities in Britain, but the affluent as well? How might it work practically? What would catch the attention of Ugandan journalists invited to live in a London suburb, or a sink estate? Not an HIV epidemic, for sure. Nor the extreme poverty still experienced by billions of people in Africa, India and around the world and which must continue to be the main focus of our attention. But poverty nonetheless. Physical, material, mental and spiritual. Isn't it time we opened ourselves up to the kind of scrutiny we so confidently undertake in other countries?
posted by Anonymous @ 13:11
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