Stepping Away

The local high school faculty and student body are excited about having another College Fair, and this year it will be held during the school’s first term (instead of the final term). This year, however, planning it and hosting it is entirely up to the school itself; all we’ll do is help revise the invitation letters. It’s not that we’re lazy. It’s just that, if we were training wheels, it would be time to remove us.

At this stage of our service, it’s all about stepping away and letting our counterparts do these things without “outside” assistance. So the less we need to be involved, the more successful we’ll feel! We’re also “stepping away” from an upcoming Youth Day event that builds upon last year’s efforts to increase the capacity of a local youth organization. We’re involved, but again, the less we do this time around, the more successful we’ll feel. Our local counterparts have (hopefully) learned how to plan and organize these kinds of events, and now it’s time to apply their new skills.

I want to briefly talk about this notion of stepping away, because, with just about 5 months left in our service, we’re thinking a lot about what we’ll leave behind; what’s likely to prove sustainable and what isn’t.

After two years of living and working here, we can say with great conviction that the only worthwhile kind of development efforts are those which seek to curb the pattern of aid-dependence. And this applies even to events like the ones mentioned above. Our working model of sustainable development seeks to build a community that does not need to rely on outsiders like us to (in this example) host successful community events. No matter what the project, building self-reliance is the underlying goal.

The crippling impact of aid-dependence, we have found, extends to all areas of outside assistance. Any form of “no strings attached” handout, which does not require any accountability or effort or commensurate obligation on the part of the beneficiary, has the potential to worsen aid-dependence. For an interesting and controversial treatment of the topic, we recommend the recent book by Dambisa Moyo called DEAD AID (2009). Clearly, there are productive and nonproductive ways of offering assistance to underdeveloped countries… problem is, the nonproductive approaches are usually the easiest and quickest—and they yield great photo-ops, too.

BUT… there is a tendency for people to use this aid-dependence difficulty to absolve themselves of charitable obligation. The rationale goes, since these do-gooder organizations only end up making things worse, there’s no reason to donate or otherwise get involved with them. But that’s misguided, and here’s a couple reasons why.

First of all, not all do-gooder organizations are equal. A genuine concern about aid-dependence should not discourage a person’s natural and healthy charitable inclinations, but rather compel them to be more selective about which aid organizations they support. We like using the website Charity Navigator to research organizations both large and small. Personally, we tend to favor projects or causes that seek to develop local capacity (both individual and/or organizational capacity); that equip the local population to better address its own needs and wants. That could be skills training or strengthening infrastructure, increasing general knowledge about issues being faced, etc.

Second of all, there are, regrettably, plenty of circumstances in which direct handouts are entirely appropriate. We’ve seen plenty of them first-hand. An aging grandmother caring for 6 orphaned grandkids, for example, whose mud-hut is collapsing and whose meager pension hardly satisfies her own hunger much less her grandkids… it would be immoral to deny her a bag of rice based on some lofty principal of reducing aid-dependence. If she doesn’t get that rice from the Red Cross (for example), someone could literally die. She IS dependent on food aid, and thank God there’s an organization out there willing to support her. So frankly, I have no patience for the old “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” argument in these kinds of dire circumstances. There really IS a place for this kind of extreme intervention, and organizations providing it rely on donor (and governmental) support. But when this extreme intervention is applied across the board to ALL cases of need, whether extreme or moderate, that’s where the aid-dependence problems arise.

Anyway, as we begin our process of stepping away from our development and aid projects, we’ve learned a lot about the various levels of need and the various approaches employed to address them. We’ve been involved with projects we deem successful and ones we deem unsuccessful. We’ve seen the benefits and limitations of charity and of self-reliance, and we believe that any society, whether struggling or prospering, requires the strength of both forces to function.

In fact, we’ve learned that the most desirable kind of human charity is that which seeks self-reliance for others, while the best kind of self-reliance is that which seeks charity for others.