TRANSFORMING MINDSETS

Judge each day not by its harvest but by the seeds you sow into it – An African Proverb

In Africa we are inundated with and subjected to all the latest ‘answers' to the development conundrum. Well-intentioned Western aid advocates, activists, theorists, donors, practitioners and increasingly even politicians are racking their brains and emptying their pockets in the modern-day search for the Holy Grail – development in Africa . Yet despite their best efforts, African poverty remains resolutely impervious to improvement. Indeed in many parts of the continent the AIDS pandemic is destroying hopes of progress. The reasons for this are obviously highly complex and intractable, but from our experience in Malawi we observe that a fundamental weakness of many development approaches is that they miss out the most critical element of any human change process – that of confronting contradiction. Most development interventions, such as PRA, Appreciative Inquiry, PRSP or Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) processes focus on helping communities, organizations and nations plan their desired future. They emphasise external actions – the ‘doing'. While this is a necessary stage of a change process, it is not sufficient. If we want authentic change we must go to the much deeper internal, less comfortable level of ‘being' and awaken peoples' conscience, will and sense of responsibility first. By merely making ambitious development plans, we either externalize or trivialize the problem – saying in effect that if we do ‘a', ‘b' and ‘c' then ‘d' will definitely result. We know from harsh experience that this is not the simplistic deterministic way development occurs.

For development to take place, people must change behaviour and this requires them to become aware of and then confront the contradictions in their past and current behaviour. It requires individuals, communities, organizations and nations to avoid externalizing the problem as ‘someone else's fault' or ‘someone else's duty to assist' and begins to take responsibility for their contribution to the current context of poverty. When asked what their development problems are people will usually produce long lists of problems but they will rarely include themselves in the lists. A ‘responsibility-based approach' to development is essential if we are to release the will and energy to change. This paper, written from the receiving end of a plethora of development innovations and fashions, argues from experience that development only occurs when people, communities, organizations and nations confront their contradictions and take responsibility for doing something about the problem themselves.
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