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''.
The first response was that of all the people we were targeting, to them no one was poor. When I probed on who the poor are in their perspective, this is what I got;
The poor are those that are landless and have no means of production, and that means they had no business in our meeting since they had no crops to talk about. The poor were single women, separated from their husbands and cast out by their families because culturally they are not allowed to get out of abusive marriages. So they rent a room where they live with four or so children. This category had no business in our meetings because they had no money to save, no land etc Another category of the poor were old men and women that had no means of social protection and could not access medical care and food. Lastly, were the youth, school dropouts, out of school youth that did not have any form of employment and did not own land, depended on their parents, and to some farming was not an option.
The argument was that these poor people in the community were the most desperate and needed support more than those being targeted, to raise them to a level where they can also earn a living and gain confidence to interact with development interventions in the community and get out of chronic poverty. These were community views, different from our own understanding of ''chronically poor''. Addressing poverty per se with out addressing the underlying causes of poverty and vulnerability may not be enough!
That did not mean that we were targeting the wrong people, but may be we needed to engage these communities to define what ''chronically poor'' meant in practice to guide interventions suitable for different groups, especially those always excluded from development processes because they are voiceless and invisible. This applies to many organisations, research, development or otherwise.
In our work, we always strive to get programmes right, from our elite perspectives, personal experiences, (which are usually more privileged) and academic framing because we learnt definitions of different words, or have read models of different authors, who might also have constructed them from the same privileged positions.
As the world grapples with inequalities and challenges of all forms - racism, Covid19, gender inequality, climate hazards, etc, this is the time to work with the most affected, to co- design and co-produce solutions, based on our knowledge and theirs, plus their lived experiences, which we know nothing about. By doing this, we shall create solutions that work, may be even come up with new models that are informed by those we work with, --those whose lives we strive to impact.
Does any of this speak to you? share your views!
@TKajumba
Comments
Post a Comment