So, you want to help women. Let’s crassly put it this way–you want to do a term project (that will presumably address women’s needs in some way). Where to begin?

With a problem? And how do we identify problems? The literature helps–we’ve spent the majority of this class reading and posting on problems that affect women in poor countries of the world. How do we know about these? People do research, people document the problems (remember the three key roles–researchers, advocates and practitioners). But development practitioners, on the ground actually working with people, need concrete evidence and examples. The biggest social problems in the world are defined not by the people who are most adversely affected by them, but by the people with wealth and power who are in a position to define these problems in public debate, potentially playing to their own advantages, but at the very least influencing responses by major institutions like governments, NGOs, and even private industry seeking profitable (and not necessarily mutually beneficial) ventures.

Thus poverty is often seen as an individual problem–if you’re poor it’s your own fault, and not the taxpayer’s responsibility to solve. If a country is poor, it must be its own fault. Even if most of us just ride a wave of prosperity as Americans, without in most cases having the faintest idea about why our wave is more constant and steady than most. Maybe the leaders are corrupt, maybe the agriculture system is primitive and produces little more than subsistence, maybe the people are ‘backwards’ and don’t ascribe to the ideology of technological process. Maybe they don’t understand the benefits of free trade.

But . . . we can turn this inside out and it looks like those defining the world’s problems, powerful politicians, leadership in private industry, foreign policy ‘experts’, are dabbling in victim blaming. How many times do we hear that the big problem in the world is high fertility rates in the South, rather than high consumption rates in the North? Why isn’t carbon footprint one of the measures used in the Human Development Index?

Yet agrarian societies have managed, with little help from the outside but much interference, in some cases despite genocidal tendencies of their colonial conquerors, to survive, and–this is important–to live within their environmental means. They don’t have the luxury of importing goods and natural resources from all over the world–if they overuse local resources, they’re likely to suffer starvation and famine, or at least the suffering of a refugee population migrating in desperation, or maybe even die out. Their very survival is a testimony to their ingenuity and ability to master their own local environments. Do we recognize or appreciate this? Rarely. Could any of us pull that off (rhetorical question)? Those who do appreciate indigenous knowledge usually use it against the creators (e.g., pharmaceutical companies who send ethnobotanists in to learn indigenous people’s medicinal secrets and figure out how to pirate their knowledge and synthesize it in the laboratory).

But let’s not get too global. If we want to identify a problem, say time poverty, we should probably do what? Go to those who are time poor and learn from them? Sounds crazy, I know. Politicians don’t go live in rat-infested tenement houses to learn about poverty and public health. Policies show us that they usually understand very little about poverty, at least in the U.S. We have a system that regularly subjects poor people to humiliation and degradation before giving them minimal and often misguided assistance, tell them to be responsible and get jobs when none exist for which they’re qualified, put added pressure of a time limit on their benefits, and blame them when they fall short of middle class standards for success.

Some development design principles

There are some design principles that can help us organize our thinking about development, help figure out how to make that leap from poor women as hapless recipients of welfare to poor women with dignity who are full partners in their own development:

1. Grassroots participation. From the bottom up. We can design the greatest project in the world, but if it doesn’t meet the needs of its intended beneficiaries, we may need to revisit the definition of greatness. Sound development begins by making partners of the people we work with, understanding their living situations, the obstacles they face, listening to their stories and problems, enlightening them to some of the possibilities that exist, and working with them to identify needs, set goals, make plans to achieve them, and ultimately transfer responsibility to local populations.
2. Sustainability. In the big picture, sustainable development refers to people in the present meeting their needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. When we use resources up faster than they are being generated, development is unsustainable. The globalization model is unsustainable in its current state, undergirded by fossil fuel consumption and industrial processes that generate wealth but also generate volumes of waste that the planet can’t absorb. We’re essentially fouling our nest–ask someone who lives in Mexico City or Beijing.
   So sustainable development has an environmental component–not using up resources faster than they’re produced. But it also must be sustainable culturally–people have to accept it–and economically (there have to be opportunities that people will take advantage of). For instance, I used to pilfer iron-enriched vitamins from the Peace Corps office for the pregnant women in the villager where I was stationed (I can admit it. I think the statute of limitations has finally passed). Is this sustainable? Could it continue in my absence, or in the absence of outside support? Now that doesn’t mean that outside help is not permissible–it just means that it shouldn’t create dependencies that may some day be removed. I have no regrets about introducing an unsustainable process, because I believe the babies and mothers who benefited were well worth the violation of principle. As for dependencies, think of industrial agriculture and Africa, the baggage that accompanies it, the dependencies on industrial products and processes, markets, lending institutions, the environmental fallout from use of pesticides and fertilizers, soil-compacting machinery, etc.
3. Collective action. There is greater transformatory potential when women act together, when they interact, than when they are ‘atomized,’ isolated in their homes and households. Think of the suburbanization movement in post WWII U.S. Families moved out of cities. Technologies were to make women’s lives ‘easier,’ liberate them. But the suburban woman was isolated more than liberated. Women’s movements for greater equality have happened when people organize collectively, not when they are divided or ‘atomized’ and acting as disconnected individuals. Traditional cultures understood–you don’t have to love your neighbor, but you’d better respect and learn to rely on each other for survival.
4. Flexibility. Projects and initiatives that have cookie cutter recipes are likely doomed to failure. What works in one village, for one ethnic group, among one age group, in Muslim or Animist villages, among men or women, in small villages, where soils are rocky, etc., may not work elsewhere in the same way. Development must be able to respond to change. Remember part I, and how all these other social processes are occurring and can affect anything we might be trying to do deliberately. Often times it is the unintended consequences of development that make it into history books, despite our best efforts. Flexibility allows for learning and adaptation. For instance, when I was doing well projects and vegetable gardens with women, in some villages, the women wanted to work together as a group. In others, they each wanted their own individual plots. Trying to force them into one model or another likely would have diminished their initiative to participate. It would deny their agency. Yes, that complicates design, by the way.
5. Scalability. The idea here is that it is wise to start small, build on successes and learn from failures (obviously related to flexibility). Pilot studies are often developed to help projects learn and plan more effectively. Once you have something, you can try to apply it somewhere else, to another population, on a larger scale, and see what happens. Take the giant dam projects–for electricity, irrigation, etc. They relocate all villages in the flooded valley–people whose ancestors are buried there, and for whom land is sacred, not a piece of property–take them away from the place where they are masters of their environment, the reservoirs’ lives (before they fill with sediment) often become compressed by deforestation and siltation along the hillsides, the electricity produced creates problems for those not used to the expenses of city life, irrigated agriculture may pose problems for the soil (e.g., in Pakistan irrigation has brought salts to the surface and the salinization of the soil has rendered some areas with lots of irrigation potential practically uncultivable). Start small. If it’s a giant failure, you’ll lose less. Presidents tend to forget this.
6. Social capital and local knowledge. We know what capital is–usually money, that can be used to produce something, to invest, to generate wealth, etc. Land, labor and capital are the factors that underlie commodity production. Human capital implies the skills and expertise of individuals–we often think of job skills. A college education, training in a trade, management experience–things that make us more employable in the job market. Social capital is this same idea, but applied at a higher social level, such as the community. Communities have all kinds of existing resources that could and do help them address problems–churches provide food and shelter. Food banks provide boxes for the food insecure. Organizations do food drives, or hygiene drives. Social capital is essential for investment in the community. Women in the Global South often have traditional ways in which they organize to solve problems. We’ve posted a bit about rotating labor and credit organizations. This inclination to organize represents social capital that could be put to use in other useful and productive ways if women so chose. Local knowledge refers to what people know–culturally, technically, etc.–especially as it might be useful and integrated into project design. Villagers are the masters of their local environments, yet often times we discount or devalue their knowledge and local wisdom, seeking to ‘improve’ upon it with technical solutions. For instance, the best cure I’ve found for giardia or amoebic dysentery (water-based abdominal parasites endemic to many places in the world, including US wilderness or anywhere livestock are found) didn’t come from the Embassy doctor, who couldn’t even find parasites but would have prescribed me some mutagenic medicine anyway. It came from villagers who told me to try chewing up fresh papaya seeds. The ‘Ask a silly question’ article (Drucker, week 9) gets at this.
7. Leverage. We all know what leverage is–it can help us gain the upper hand in a negotiation, for instance. My sister knew that catching me playing with matches would coax from me that evening an offer to take her turn on dish duty. From a physics point of view, leverage increases our power to do something–for instance a lead pipe on the end of a tire iron could help loosen a rusted lug nut. Some projects or initiatives can serve multiple functions. For instance, let’s say that women purchased a hand-crank grain mill to reduce the amount of time spent pounding grain with mortar and pestle. To pay for it, they have to charge a minimal fee for a certain amount of grain–this will cover maintenance and replacement costs. They’ll have to learn some numeracy (numbers and math) to do that effectively–some women will have to learn skills. Otherwise, as is often the case–the men may be the ones doing the books (and I’ve seen lots of skimming in this case–remember, we’re dealing with a patriarchy, and with men who define subsistence as what they do to help the household survive). Literacy is another example. You can teach women the alphabet, teach them to read. But then what? What reading material is available? Why not make reading material available that offers other development ideas and projects to them, teaches them about family planning and birth control, how to start a small business, rehydrate an infant enduring diarrhea? That’s leverage, using literacy skills as a vehicle to get across other points. At EOU I work on a project called Haven from Hunger. One of the projects we’re working on is a cookbook, using a limited number of low cost ingredients mentioned by survey respondents at food banks as most useful. How to get the recipes? We’re developing ways to test them, to ensure that the recipes in the book are not only easy to fix, but taste good. In the past we’ve received input from a local chef to help ‘jazz’ them up. But we wanted to go further. We wanted the recipe testing to be a community event, to raise awareness of the problem of hunger in La Grande, and to bring people together and help erase the stigma of seeking help. In the end, the cookbook was almost a side benefit–what really counted was the opportunity to build community, raise awareness, giving students a chance to learn how to do bottom-up development work and develop systematic methods for achieving an aim. Leverage.
8. Appropriate technology embodies many of the principles discussed here. It’s sustainable ecologically (e.g., a diesel-powered grain mill versus a hand-crank model), it builds on familiarity and local knowledge, it addresses problems expressed by the people who will be affected by any changes, it is relatively small in scale, and doesn’t rob the user of the skill involved (e.g., Ernst Schumacher wrote of the difference between a power loom and a hand loom in weaving).
9. Transparency. This implies openness. Decisions have to be made and people held accountable. This is the way democracy is supposed to work (not working very well in the modern US political climate, I’m afraid). For instance, the women who manage the books and money for the grain mill need a process and structure that all can see and trust in. A lack of transparency tends to erode people’s trust, and can marginalize some groups, make them feel powerless. At the same time, ‘transparency’ may have different interpretations in different cultures, and the US is generally the most literal, straightforward and even crass (in other words, some understanding of cultures and subtlety is in order, as any foreign service professional would tell you).
10. Transformatory potential. Important enough to repeat. Development that benefits women is more likely to occur when it moves beyond simple delivery of services, augmenting of personal income, etc. When it changes the structures that prevent women from achieving equal opportunity and protection in the economy and under the law. When it transforms gender relations.

But keep in mind, there are other processes going on. Don’t take your eyes off the steamrollers . . .