Development
This topic speaks about the world development, what it is and how it relates to us
Planners versus searchers
"McDevelopment is not working! Development is not a fast food restaurant with quick solutions – deep and lasting change takes time.”
One NGO with the intention to help a village in Columbia with the production of rice created an agricultural association of villagers and bought them trashing-machines, peeling machines, generators and tractors. The production of rice increased and the association sold rice for the highest price ever. The project was a great success. After that the NGO left the village, but a few years later, one of the employees of the NGO came back and found out, that the association had fallen apart and that all the equipment was broken and had gotten rusty on the fields. In reality, some of the equipment was never used. When the employee from the NGO was walking across the village, the people asked him: “If your NGO came back and helped us, we could accomplish more.”
What is sad and true is that this kind of story is very common. You can find all over the majority world so called “development cemeteries” – given equipment, which is rusting, latrines, which were never used, community associations which fell apart and projects which fell into pieces soon after the NGO left the place.
Why is it so?
Unfortunately, many development interventions were not done in a participative way and a “project approach” was applied, where people from rich countries selected the type of intervention, planned, made the decisions and implemented the project for the target community. It was faster than asking the community for their opinion, but what happened is, that this “McDevelopment” based on a model of fast food restaurants caused, that 2,5 billions of poor, which is approximately 40 % of world population were not served properly, because they are still living on less than 2 US dollars a day.
Many of these projects were not taking into account the local culture – were not accepted by the local community, or were not applicable for a certain environment. The fact, that a project worked well in Slovakia does not mean that it will work well in a different type of cultural, economic and institutional environment in sub-Saharan Africa.
Example:
A team came to a place in Latin America to build a house of a low-income pastor of the local church. In the design of the house, the team put the bathroom in the middle of the house, which runs counter to local culture in which bathrooms are located in the back of the house. The pastor had not seen the plans of the house in advance. When he discovered this mistake while the team was building the house, he objected to the team leaders to no avail. The short-term team felt happy that they gave the pastor a much needed house, but the pastor is ashamed of his house and is not sure he wants to live in it.