Wanting to assist a village in Columbia with its rice production, a nonprofit organization gathered the villagers into a cooperative and bought them a thresher, a motorized huller, a generator, and a tractor. Rice production boomed, and the cooperative sold the rice at the highest price the farmers had ever received.

The project appeared to be a tremendous success. The nonprofit organization then left the village, but several years later one of its staff members returned to find that the cooperative had completely disbanded and that all of the equipment was broken down and rusting away in the fields. In fact, some of the equipment had never been used at all. Yet, as the staff member walked through the village, the people pleaded with him, “If [your organization] would just come help us again, we could do so much!” (1).

The sad truth is that this story is extremely common. All around the world one can find donated equipment that is rusting away, latrines that have never been used, community associations that have disbanded, and projects that disintegrated soon after the nonprofit organization left town.

Despite an estimated $2.3 trillion in foreign aid dispensed from Western nations during the post-World War II era (2), more than 2.5 billion people, approximately 40 percent of the world’s population, still live on less than two dollars per day (3). And the story in many North American communities is similar, with one initiative after another failing to meet its intended objectives. Indeed, 45 years after President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, the poverty rate in America stubbornly hovers around 12 percent, decade after decade, year after year.

Yes, there has been progress in the global fight against poverty, but the “bang for the buck” has been appallingly low. There are a lot of machines rusting away in fields. Why?

Learning process versus blueprint approaches

One reason for the slow progress in poverty alleviation is inadequate participation of poor people in the process. Researchers and practitioners have found that meaningful inclusion of poor people in the selection, design, implementation, and evaluation of an intervention increases the likelihood of that intervention’s success.

Unfortunately, the majority of post-World War II approaches to poverty alleviation have been highly nonparticipatory, using a “blueprint approach” in which the economically non-poor make all the decisions about the project and then do the project to the economically poor. The ultimate goal of the blueprint approach is often to develop a standardized product and then to roll out that product in cookie-cutter fashion on a massive scale. It’s “McDevelopment,” the fast-food franchise approach to poverty alleviation, and it has resulted in more than 2.5 billion poor people not being well served.

Although the blueprint approach appears to be very efficient, it often fails because it imposes solutions on poor communities that are inconsistent with local culture, that are not embraced and “owned” by the community members, or that cannot work in that particular setting. The fact that equipment worked well in Kansas simply does not mean it will work well in the cultural, economic, and institutional context of sub-Saharan Africa. “We’re not in Kansas anymore!”

For example, the staff worker of a nonprofit organization working in a Latin American country describes how the nonparticipatory approach of a short-term mission team resulted in a house being built that may soon go unused:

One team came here to build the house of a low-income pastor of a local church. In the design of the house, the team put the bathroom in the middle of the house, which runs counter to local culture in which bathrooms are located in the back of the house. The pastor had not seen the plans of the house in advance. When he discovered this mistake while the team was building the house, he objected to the team leaders to no avail. The short-term team felt happy that they gave the pastor a much-needed house, but the pastor is ashamed of his house and is not sure he wants to live in it. (4)

And the cultural barriers are there on our own soil in places we might not even anticipate. Consider the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) program that attempted to provide housing loans for poor people in the rural southern United States. The FmHA specified that every house in the program would be standardized, having carpets on the floors and small kitchens that included washing machines. Research on the program’s efficacy found the following:

[The FmHA’s] specifications for how houses may be built…actually defy community wisdom and experience. Many applicants [for housing loans] consider it unsanitary to cook and wash laundry in the same room. They know that overflowing, secondhand washing machines are best located in a storage or utility room outside the house. They know that there are other advantages to putting the washers outside. You can take off your work clothes before you go into the house, and your clean laundry is closer to the clothesline. People who live on dirt roads, who work the land, or who are employed in poultry processing plants or in lint-filled mills often prefer vinyl floors that can be swept. But they can’t have them [in this program]. (5)

Because of these types of pitfalls, many practitioners have abandoned the blueprint model in favor of a “learning process” approach to development, an approach that seeks to facilitate an action-reflection cycle in which poor people participate in all aspects of the project: proposing the best course of action, implementing the chosen strategy, evaluating how well things are working, and determining the appropriate modifications. The role of the outsider in this approach is not to do something to or for the economically poor individual or community, but to seek solutions together with them.

A learning process approach increases the likelihood that the project will work well, for two main reasons. First, like all human beings, poor people are more likely to have a sense of enthusiasm for and ownership of a project if they have been full participants in it from the very beginning. When the project is “theirs,” they are more likely to sacrifice to make it work well and to sustain it over the long haul. Second, poor individuals and communities are highly complex and not understood by the materially non-poor. Hence, the knowledge and skills of the insiders – the materially poor themselves – are vital to getting things done and to making things work well.

People living in North American ghettos, in Appalachia, in slums in Mexico City, and in rural India really do know a lot of things about those contexts that outsiders will never understand. It is simply foolish to ignore their insights.

Ironically, while a learning process approach typically takes more time to produce tangible results than a blueprint approach, the learning process approach is often more efficient in the long run because it is more likely to result in workable and sustainable interventions. Put another way, participation can reduce the likelihood of unused equipment rusting away in the fields.

Endnotes:

1. Roland Bunch, Two Ears of Corn: A Guide to People-Centered Agricultural Improvement, 18-19.
2. William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 4.
3. Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, “The Developing World Is Poorer Than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty” (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Development Research Group, 2008), August, Policy Research Working Paper 4703, 20.
4. Anonymous, “Short-Term Missions Can Create a Long-Term Mess,” Mandate, Chalmers Center for Economic Development, 2007, no. 3, available at www.chalmers.org.
5. Lissette M. Lopez and Carol Stack, “Social Capital and the Culture of Power: Lessons from the Field,” chapter 2 in Social Capital and Poor Communities, ed. Susan Saegert, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 39.

From When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. Copyright © 2009. Reprinted with permission of Moody Publishers.