Bad development work is based on the idea that poor people have nothing. Something is better than nothing, right? So anything you give these poor people will be better than what they had before. Even if it’s your old clothes, technology they can’t use, or a school building with no teacher.
But poor people don’t have nothing. They have families, friends – social ties. They have responsibilities. They have possessions, however meager. They have lives, no matter what those lives look like to Westerners.
The “it’s better than nothing” argument is meaningless. No one is starting from nothing. If you find yourself saying, “our program/charity/intervention is better than nothing” that’s more than just damning faint praise, it’s a sign that you have a problem.
Good development work is based on the idea of more. Identify what people have already, and what they value. Work with them to figure out how they can get more of that. More education, or more money, or more food. More control over their lives. Whatever it is, the focus should be on getting more of what they need – not some of whatever we can find.
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(photo credit: Turkairo)
Chosen because the look in this girl’s eyes and her carefully tied scarf prove my point.
Couldn’t agree more and well-stated. This is the premise at the root of the Asset Based Community Development school which animates assetmap.org, the Global Engagement Summer Institute program we’re launching at Northwestern this summer (mycge.org)
I’ve seen different layers of bad development projects–there are the development projects that are just designed to generate good press or pictures for fundraising if it is non profit, or project extension if it is an international aid program.
A lot of people and even programs go in assuming that they are going to be the hero in the story, which means that the work being done isn’t about the individuals that they claim to be serving, but really just another variation on narcissism.
You see it in disaster response work as well. Disaster response means inserting oneself into someone else’s tragedy. It becomes clear in a very short time who is there to fulfill an imaginary narrative taking place in their mine, and who realizes that they actually need to have no part in the story at all. Reach out, stabilize, listen, try to share the weight (though it’s impossible), show the steps to the path that will lead to restoration of the feeling that it is possible to feel normal amongst the living again.
You are a minor part of a much larger story, you are showing paths that may have seemed impossible to reach, you are letting people find their own way through the challenge being faced, you get out of their way and let them do it.
@Nathaniel – Asset based community development school – what an awesome idea.
@carol – Those are all great points.
I’ve read, and tried to practice the idea that good development is basically: going to a place, finding out what the people are doing that works for them, and joining in. Of course there are a few moral caveats to that (ie, not joining in a slavery racket, or drug running) but the general idea holds.
Phil
The people who think ‘something is better than nothing’ also seem to get angry that people aren’t eternally grateful to receive a hand-me-down something.
Case in point, when visiting a friend working for MONUC in Kinshasa, I asked her, “So, do you think that things are improving?” She said, “Well, the Congolese aren’t throwing rocks at our vehicles anymore.” A lower bar, I’ve not seen and she was saying that in all seriousness. Of course, that was in May. Things have since jumped the shark. A low bar is an easy bar to jump.
@miguel – wow, talk about losing perspective.
Well said, Alanna. I appreciate concise, straight-to-the-point posts like this. I think you’re able to sum up in less than two hundred words ideas that other writers devote entire chapters to in books on aid and development.
This post reminds me a little of an NYT editorial titled “Just Do Something”. Similarly, Bob Geldolf once said, “Something must be done; anything must be done, whether it works or not.” Anything, that is, to assuage the collective guilty conscience of celebrities and pop stars, right?
It’s tragic and heartbreaking to see the end product of the “something is better than nothing” fallacy you describe. I’ve witnessed it too many times both at the NGO I work with and elsewhere in Cameroon. It arrives in the form of old, broken equipment (PCs, printers, scanners, photocopiers) scraped up and shipped at great expense for a school computer lab. The school invests time and money building furniture for the lab, training/hiring a teacher only to discover that half of the PCs don’t work, and the remainder have failed within the first year. The majority of old, donated hardware like this end up as vast piles of e-waste, either gathered by a hopeful collector or discarded in gutters.
More recently, I saw what amounted to probably a literal ton of donated books for Cameroonian kids. Titles included tax code references from the 1980’s, books on weight loss and romance novels in Spanish. Thanks, but no thanks.
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