Development

Learn how to fish is not enough
How (not) to do development

We build solutions based on how we see and identify the world around us. The point is - the deeper we can see the causes of the problems, the better we can target them, like in the story with the fish.

„If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime“. But what if this man, or actually this woman, is simply prevented access to the pond or river?

When you intend to help develop other less privileged communities in the majority world and decrease their poverty, you might not necessarily improve their situation. It might happen that you do the opposite even when your intentions are good.

Imagine a situation, where a sick person goes to the doctor. The doctor may do two fatal mistakes:

Any of these mistakes would cause the conditions of the person not to improve or even get worse. The same happens with poor people. If we treat the symptoms or identify incorrect cause of the problem, the situation of the poor will not improve and their lives may change in a negative way.

• Treat the symptoms, not the causes of the illness.
• Identify the incorrect cause of the illness and prescribe the wrong medicine.

Let´s illustrate it using a common situation. Your friend periodically asks you for money at the end of month to survive till salary will come. At first sight, it seems that the problem is the lack of money and some of us would give money to the person. But what if the problem this person has is not a lack of money but a lack of self-discipline, which he needs to have for managing money. If you give your friend money, you just treat the symptoms and not the cause of the problem and you allow your friend to live with a lack of self-discipline. In this case, the financial support will do more harm than good and it would be better to not do anything than give the money. Instead it would be better, and more valuable to support your friend and assist him in finding the cause of his problem, which again and again lead to problematic situations.