Just what is the real problem? And who's defining it for us?

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 to their advantage. Thus poverty is often seen as an individual problem--if you're poor it's your own fault. If a country is poor, it's its own fault. 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, and 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, such as the World Bank, are engaging 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?

Yet agrarian societies have managed, with little help from the outside but much interference, in some cases despite genocidal tendencies of their colonial conquerers, 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, 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. Those who do usually use it against them (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 I don't want to 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. Policies show us that they usually understand very little about poverty, at least in the U.S. We subject poor people to humiliation and degradation before giving them table scraps, 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 our 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 and make plans to achieve them.
2. Sustainability. In the big picture, sustainable development refers to people 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.
   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 think I mentioned I would steal iron-enriched vitamins from the Peace Corps office for the pregnant women in the villager where I was stationed. 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 permissable--it just means that it shouldn't create dependencies that may some day be removed. Think of industrial agriculture and Africa, the baggage that accompanies it, the dependencies on industrial products and processes, 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 and acting as individuals.
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 Moslem 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.
5. Scalability. The idea here is that you should 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 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. Someone tell George Bush (too late).
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 underly 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 often have traditional ways in which they organize in the third world. 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 replace it with technical solutions. For instance, the best cure I've found for giardia or amoebic dysentery 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 gets at this.
7. Leverage. We all know what leverage is--it can help us gain the upper hand in a negotiation, for instance. From a physics point of view, leverage increase 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 avaiable? 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 with 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 resondents 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. We're even askin a local chef to help 'jazz' them up. But we want to go further. We want 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 is almost a side benefit--what really counts is the building of community, the awareness-raising, students learning how to do bottom-up development work and develop systematic methods for achieving an aim. Leverage.
8. Appropriate technology. 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 writes 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 here these days, 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. On campus last year we were debating the underfunding of the Gender Studies program. The social scientists thought it was grossly unjustified--the program is growing, students are wildly enthusiastic about it, the coordinator is passionate and her students fiercely loyal to her. Colleges in the rest of the U.S. are expanding their gender studies offerings. So why was the program funding cut? The official reason given was that 'we've carefully considered these cuts over the last year' and 'no programs or minors were eliminated.' Just an amputation at the knees. In the absence of a transparent process, there is wild speculation. Adminstrators don't like the gender studies coordinator because she is a strong woman who is willing to challenge the higher-ups and demand accountability. Those cut all were members of the fledgling faculty union on campus (which the administration opposes and several administator supporters in the faculty are working to decertify). May administrators have never had a gender studies course (we're positive this is the case), didn't understand its value as an acadmemic pursuit and recruiting tool, even though 60% of our student body on campus is female, and merely ignored bottom-up decision making and cut the people least likely to be able to mount a legal challenge (fixed term, non-tenured faculty). The point is, in the absence of an open process for airing differences and discussing decisions--most of what emerged has been canned responses to student letters expressing dismay and outrage--in the absence of transparency, we're left to speculate and trust is difficult to maintain. The story has a happy ending, though--the Gender Studies program was given five years of assured funding (and in all likelihood permanence).
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 . . .