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Showing posts from February, 2021

Overcoming our assumptions about Development and People

  A few days ago, I came across a cartoon by Rebeka Ryvola that I was tagged in on twitter, mirroring how development planning is managed. Reflecting about it, I remembered a lesson I was taught by a farming community in Western Uganda many years back. I was working with an International development organisation at the time, and we prided ourselves on targeting the ''chronically poor'', and for sure it was in the best intentions. One day we went to the field, I was facilitating a session on conflict management because we used to support communities living adjacent to protected areas who experienced crop losses due to problem animals, and the park-people conflicts were common on crops, land, resource access etc. We also supported community livelihoods, market linkages, savings and loan associations, gender equality, among others. As we waited for the rest of the community members, I started an informal discussion to understand how they perceive ''chronic poverty&