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Conventional Wisdom More Relevant Than Scholastic Theories

By Moin Qazi

14 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

My experience of working with poor women emphasizes the fact that work is their foremost priority. Most poor women in villages are intelligent, hard-working and have nerves of titanium. They know that if they do not work, their families do not eat. All manner of self- employment—sewing, delivering small items, making handicrafts—could be facilitated with a small amount of capital for a sewing machine, a bicycle, or tools. Availability of decent loans is far more important to them than shaving a few points off the interest rates of those loans.

Over years of wandering the villages, I have been compelled to revise much of my received wisdom about what our rural priorities should be. We must be challenged to see the reality of poverty and vulnerability through the eyes of a particular individual, typically a woman, and to understand how that person strives to overcome it. This way we can get a feeling of her daily worries and needs and develop solutions that have relevance to her needs.

It’s crucial to help people shift their thinking so they believe they can do the job. Role models matter more than words. Mentors are more important than formal training. To that end, we must introduce bank clients to people like themselves who are succeeding in the kind of environment in which they themselves will need to succeed. The tacit knowledge that senior executives have accumulated over the years must be passed on face-to-face, revealing culture in action.

Consider, for example, the remoteness of our professional lives from our villages. In the village, each successive generation is born into the rigidity of caste; each generation must bear the rapacity of the moneylender and the merchant and the random cruelty of nature: floods, famines and pestilence. And yet the majority survive and adapt. In other words, there is in the villages some collective wisdom for which the professional’s knowledge is not a substitute. This is why the divide between the professionals and the villages is so serious; now if we do go to the villages, it is to study them, to do good for them—but not to become of them.

You must not volunteer for work where you ‘educate’ the community about its problems, in which you generate plans and then get ‘buy-in’ from the community, and in which the priority is the development product (latrines, health centre, church building) rather than the people, for which you bring in the capacity rather than help build it within the community. This kind of ‘help’ is likely to stunt development because it creates dependency, conflict and feelings of helplessness. If you are already inside such an organization, do what you can to help colleagues realize that development is an ongoing, endogenous process. It cannot simply lurch along, dependent on outsiders arriving with solutions and resources.

Instead of mapping problems from needs through external solutions, we must help the community identify its values and then map these through local resources to develop a vision and action plan. Intervention may still be called for and appropriate strategies devised, but the kind of intervention that gets them over a bump in the road, not the kind that builds the road, provides the car, petrol and driver, buckles the seatbelts and pays the tolls.

What is required is sympathetic but hard-headed leadership, operating from a variety of institutional bases (government agencies, NGOs, banks). It should make common cause with rural people, learning with and from them how to make desired and sustainable improvements in the customers’ conditions of life. NGOs that carry out developmental work in the field are stuck within programmes specified by planners in far-removed developmental agencies and donor institutions. Creative plans that run counter to the conventional wisdom at the core of most programmes seldom qualify for funding. Thus, project proposals are prepared to reflect the requirements set by these far-removed planners in terms of methodology and outcomes. Demonstrating compliance on paper ends up more important than getting the job done. As a result, recipients of developmental funds spend significant time preparing reports that will find approval with the planners to qualify for continued funding, and less time worrying about what actually benefits the poor.

The reality of village life as experienced by the poor living on the margin of existence is often different from the assumptions made by the administrator who has no ground view and whose understanding is based on secondary sources. These assumptions may also be coloured by past biases and prejudice. It is difficult for us to understand the fears, the hesitancy, the pain and the labour with which the poor live and which therefore separates the project from its implementation, or what is easy or difficult for the rural poor.

As Robert Chambers, the well known development expert. has pointed out, the rich, the powerful and the urban-based professionals are at the core of the development process while the poor, the weak and the rural people are at the peripheries, leading to a systematic bias in terms of rural poverty. Any attempt at economic reform or better governance cannot succeed without addressing the needs of the poor. Gandhi had this advice for policy makers: ‘Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.’I feel that approaches to rural development that respect the inherent capabilities, intelligence and responsibility of rural people and systematically build on their experience have a reasonable chance of making significant advances in improving those people’s lives. The real challenge for development practitioners lies in finding tools that are aligned with local capabilities.

The urge to reduce the poor to a set of clichés has been with us for as long as there has been poverty. The poor appear in social theory as much as in literature, by turns lazy or enterprising, noble or thievish, angry or passive, helpless or self-sufficient. Even journalists who feign such deep interest in the lives of the poor struggle to get even a single fact straight. When people talk about fighting poverty, they talk about making agriculture more productive, educating girls, passing laws to prohibit discrimination, building roads, fighting traditional superstitions about health, equalizing the balance of trade between countries—there are endless solutions, because poverty is endlessly complicated.

The international poverty industry is worth tens of billions of US dollars a year. It’s bursting with experts and consultants. There is a surfeit of studies, reports, books, PhD grants, loans, consultancies. Rural development is now becoming an old-fashioned cause. Rural reform has become the policy bandwagon everybody is clambering on, and every progressive politician across the country wants a piece of the rural development pie. What the new bandwagon implies is rural reform, a new way of developing the villages. Changing their mindset from a charity-oriented approach to an opportunity-oriented one. To bring a new novelty to their appellation, writers and journalists have added the new professional label of ‘activist’. This double-barrelled appellation is a lethal combination, with the country’s judicial system also moving in as an important stakeholder. The political leaders too have their share of acrobatics in the development ‘circus’, with minions projecting t If, therefore, nearly fifty years later, it has been found necessary to re-emphasise the need to ensure that social justice accompanies economic growth, it is not because we were not conscious of that need from the start, but because we only now have come to realise that, however high its rate, economic growth does not automatically generate a proportionate rise in economic status.

Moin Qazi is a well known banker, author and Islamic researcher .He holds doctorates in Economics and English. He was Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester. He has authored several books on religion, rural finance, culture and handicrafts. He is author of the bestselling book Village Diary of a Development Banker. He is also a recipient of UNESCO World Politics Essay Gold Medal and Rotary International’s Vocational Excellence Award. He is based in Nagpur and can be reached at [email protected]


 



 

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