Here we are again, five months after my last blog as DevWorker. Urgent matters kept us away. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake 15 October last year has kept us busy with a lot of things: distributing relief goods sent by friends; organizing a fund drive to help those made homeless by the quake; monitoring the house build in target barangays of two municipalities, Calape and Antequera; attending meetings organized by the government and international donors; promoting the planting of dwarf coconut trees among the quake victims as short-term source of cash and long-term strategy for livelihood; serving as tour guide to supporters of Bohol Quake Assistance Fund Drive, an initiative of BLDF in partnership with Miriam College and Peacock Garden, a world-class resort here in Baclayon, Bohol.
Prior to the quake, we had been going through a rather grim assessment of what our development efforts of the past 40 years amounted to. It's more than half of a lifetime of work with development agencies and NGOs and we are faced with the reality that we are meeting the same set of problems in our work, most notable of which is the lack of sustained interest on the part of individuals and organizations we work with at local levels. I realized we spent more time in donor-assisted capacity-building activities than in providing real "hardware" support to community initiatives.
There seemed to be no end to consultations, orientation, seminars and workshops paid for by external donors than with activities designed to find out more about existing local initiatives and seeking ways and means to enhance them. The result is that we become more of a burden to local governments and communities by robbing them of precious time to look at their concrete situation and helping them improve what they are really doing. Most of the so-called capacity-building activities are based on modules field-tested some place without bearing to local conditions. Hence, the locals are not better off with new practical knowledge to improve what they do. They are instead loaded with new acronyms which are difficult for them to remember and are not useful in helping improve the planning and implementation of projects.
The participatory development concepts and processes that we have subscribed to in decades of work with local governments and communities are generally not subscribed to in the planning, implementation and monitoring of projects. Everything seems to depend on what the higher level of authority says. No striving at all for project officers to understand the local situation and how projects can be made more relevant to it. Worst, if you are an NGO implementing a project, you become an extension of government in building an authority-centered approach as opposed to the participatory approach.
Again, I might be wrong in this perception, but it tortured me for quite some time. Then the earthquake happened. Somehow this natural disaster shook us from the comfort of just looking back and comparing whtat happened in the past to what we saw as trends in present-day development work. We stopped blogging for fear we might infect readers with our negative thoughts and the depression which seemed to have set in.
The extent of the devastation and the need to act provided us a basis for trying out the relevance of the old participatory approach to the current situation. Indeed back to action.
Indeed back to blogging, too.
Prior to the quake, we had been going through a rather grim assessment of what our development efforts of the past 40 years amounted to. It's more than half of a lifetime of work with development agencies and NGOs and we are faced with the reality that we are meeting the same set of problems in our work, most notable of which is the lack of sustained interest on the part of individuals and organizations we work with at local levels. I realized we spent more time in donor-assisted capacity-building activities than in providing real "hardware" support to community initiatives.
There seemed to be no end to consultations, orientation, seminars and workshops paid for by external donors than with activities designed to find out more about existing local initiatives and seeking ways and means to enhance them. The result is that we become more of a burden to local governments and communities by robbing them of precious time to look at their concrete situation and helping them improve what they are really doing. Most of the so-called capacity-building activities are based on modules field-tested some place without bearing to local conditions. Hence, the locals are not better off with new practical knowledge to improve what they do. They are instead loaded with new acronyms which are difficult for them to remember and are not useful in helping improve the planning and implementation of projects.
The participatory development concepts and processes that we have subscribed to in decades of work with local governments and communities are generally not subscribed to in the planning, implementation and monitoring of projects. Everything seems to depend on what the higher level of authority says. No striving at all for project officers to understand the local situation and how projects can be made more relevant to it. Worst, if you are an NGO implementing a project, you become an extension of government in building an authority-centered approach as opposed to the participatory approach.
Again, I might be wrong in this perception, but it tortured me for quite some time. Then the earthquake happened. Somehow this natural disaster shook us from the comfort of just looking back and comparing whtat happened in the past to what we saw as trends in present-day development work. We stopped blogging for fear we might infect readers with our negative thoughts and the depression which seemed to have set in.
The extent of the devastation and the need to act provided us a basis for trying out the relevance of the old participatory approach to the current situation. Indeed back to action.
