by Dr Kate Neely (Director of Projects, RoundTrip Foundation)
“I once lived for a week on rice with soy sauce, and sometimes I have chocolate cake for breakfast”
Aside from admitting to some odd dietary quirks, the reason that I am telling you this is to introduce some ideas about poverty, development and choice. You see, the chocolate cake for breakfast thing is an occasional choice for me (yum), but the rice and soy sauce thing wasn’t really a choice at the time – I had no money and only rice to eat. When I am financially secure, I can sometimes choose chocolate cake for breakfast. When I am broke, I have no real options and just eat whatever is available. Living for a week on rice and soy sauce isn’t ideal, but I was lucky to know that if I really needed it, my family or friends would help out. My point here is that being poor significantly reduces your choices.
Poverty makes risk riskier
When we travel, one of the things that you might notice is that in poorer communities there is a ‘sameness’ that starts to become obvious. It might be that all the houses look the same, or all the schools are painted the same colour. Or every small farm is growing the same crops, or maybe the plants around the houses all look the same, or all the shops are selling the same produce. If you knew that local community better, you might also find that each household has a similar livelihood strategy – they might all be subsistence farmers, or they might all work in a local factory.
This is very different to my neighbourhood in Australia where the houses are all different, there are different gardens and my neighbours’ jobs include teacher, lawyer, tradesperson and more. When travelling through poorer communities, visitors might wonder “Why doesn’t someone here just do something different – like plant a different crop or sell something different?”
One of the issues with poverty is that when you have very few resources, and no ‘backup’ savings or other support, you can’t afford to fail. If you are financially secure, you can afford to try new things and fail at them, because you know that you have a ‘safety net’ of some sort. If you are poor, you do things knowing what the outcome will be, because you need to know that you can feed and house yourself and your family. Trying new things is riskier if you are poor, because the consequences of failure are worse.
Typical house being built near Tikondane, eastern Zambia
A good approach to development therefore, is to support people so that they can have real choices to do things differently, without the worry that if they fail their children will starve.
What are real choices?
Let’s look at the difference between a choice and real choice. For example, a family with four children, very little money and no local school don’t have a choice of sending the children to school. If a school is built nearby, you might think ‘oh now the family has a choice to send the kids to school’ and that is true… sort of. If we look deeper and discover that sending the children to school requires a school uniform, books, pens and an expensive school fee, then it is no longer a real choice, because no matter how hard the family works, they can’t afford the costs of education. So, real choices are the ones that aren’t just ‘in theory’ you could choose… they are ones where you really could make a choice.
You could choose to plant a test crop because you know that you have enough of your main crop to survive on. You could choose to buy interesting new products for a shop because you have a little extra money to invest. You could choose to send your kids to school so that they can eventually choose to be teachers and artists and scientists and farmers and (even) politicians.
In the long-term, community development is about broadening horizons and supporting communities to diversify and thrive. In the short-term, community development is about increasing the real choices that people can make in their lives and being there to support them if they need it.
Innovation through community driven development
If you have looked through the RoundTrip Foundation website, you might have read the section on how we work. We are advocates of community driven development and direct cash transfers because we know that this enables individuals and communities to make their own choices about what is most important to them, how much effort they will put towards new ventures and how they will manage a project. It allows communities and individuals to try innovative ideas. Sometimes projects fail. That’s okay, we want the communities that we work with to know that we will support them to get back on their feet, to know that they have the safety net that allows them to take a chance and do something new.
We believe that community driven development is about giving people the opportunity to be free to make their own choices. It means that individuals and communities can look for new ways to live in their environment, they can diversify their income and their diet. They are free to choose a new path, or even to choose the well-trodden path when that seems safer. Our job is not to tell people what to do or how to do it – it is to provide the resources that they need to be able to make a real choice. Whatever we do, we ask ourselves “does my action increase the real choices of the people affected?”
Making and selling local crafts increases real choice
What can we do to support community driven development when we travel?
Now that we will be travelling again, there are a couple of actions that we can easily take, that will help us to contribute to community development. The first is to look for community driven social enterprises and spend money there. It could be accommodation, a women’s craft collective or a local restaurant that trains at risk youth. A quick internet search using terms like ‘community social enterprise’ and the country you are visiting, should bring up a heap of places that you can keep an eye out for, or even make a detour to visit. If you are on an organised tour, you can ask your company or guide to include a social enterprise on your itinerary, and do check that the tour company you are with gives back to community driven development.
Other ways you can support community driven development can be to donate your time and skills, either while you are there in person, or as a remote volunteer when you get home. For English speakers with good access to technology, one of the easiest things we can do is to answer questions about language and technology – this could be an ad hoc kid’s singalong, a casual conversation class or a quick technology demo. You can even take this further and set up an online mentoring arrangement for when you get home. If you aren’t confident setting up something yourself, many organizations that support community driven development are moving to online volunteering and mentoring, so if you are interested, take a look at sites such as Australian Volunteers and maybe you can help someone who needs your skills.