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The Unitarian Church of All Souls • 1157 Lexington Avenue • New York, NY 10021 email: peacetaskforcenyc@yahoo.com
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TOOLS FOR BUILDING LOCAL PEACE
Experiences in Asia and Africa Talk by Richard Ford Review by Phoebe Hoss March 22, 2009 On Sunday, March 22, a member of our congregation, Richard Ford, gave a truly inspiring talk on his many years of work helping the impoverished villages of developing countries resolve conflict and become productive. Professor Ford, now a research professor at Clark University, has worked in about twenty-five African countries and eight nations in Asia and Eastern Europe. His talk was sponsored by the Peace and Justice Task Force, the UU-United Nations Office Group, and Green Souls. To alleviate poverty in underdeveloped countries, Professor Ford works on the assumption that villages have three basic needs and opportunities that outside helpers can, with particular tools, effectively and inexpensively address: 1. Organizing what they already know. Every member of a village has solid knowledge of its physical, social, environmental, political, and economic situation. This knowledge is often poorly organized, however; and people have little idea how to present it effectively to donor communities. As a result, the external imposition of outside project identification and design–such as that from the World Bank or the United Nations–is not only costly but 85 percent to 90 percent ineffective and not sustainable because the local communities do not identify with the initiatives as something they wanted or can use. Using tools that help to systematize what people already know, Professor Ford listens to a particular community and then helps its members organize their information so as to get their government’s attention. 2. Mobilizing Resources already available. For a village to work its way out of poverty, resources are needed. An apparently impoverished community may have considerable resources–natural and human, leadership and management, material and financial–but often these resources are underutilized or not accessible. Professor Ford’s tools help communities to identify resources that they already have and how to access these resources to solve their own problems. In brief, the method helps people mobilize what they already have. 3. Creating an Action Plan that the entire community supports. In many communities, conflict prevents the people from mobilizing effectively and cooperating in applying their local knowledge and resources. He described tools that enable communities to achieve consensus on their highest priority needs without voting and to construct community action plans that the entire community owns and supports. These tools enable community members to meet together to air their differences and come to consensus on a Community Action Plan. He noted that voting on such issues, and the influx of significant sums of money to respond to needs selected by voting, are among the greatest causes of conflict. Thus the third and final step in the community peace building and planning process is to create an action plan that organizes what the community already knows (step 1) and mobilizes resources that they already have (step 1). Armed with such an action plan, communities can link with local government, local NGOs, and other in-country resources and implement solutions that they have designed. To address these needs and enable a community to cooperate in its own development, Professor Ford has pioneered five basic tools: (1) community mapping, (2) institutional analysis, (3) different types of calendar, such as a season or a gender calendar, or different types of time line, (4) pairwise ranking, and (5) action planning. In village sketch mapping, he asks members of a community to form groups to prepare a map of infrastructure and systems vital to it. In the 45 minutes this task takes and in the following 3 hours of conversation, people combine their knowledge, become aware of their overall situation, and start to think what to do about it. In making a map of its sources of water, one village worked out a hitherto intractable difference with the Kenya Wildlife Service and installed water tanks and 22 kilometers of water pipelines. Traditionally only a chief acts in a village; but here, the discussion activated a woman–for example Victoria, who mobilized the women of the village to obtain water tanks to store that vital resource. The tool of institutional analysis takes an initial 45 minutes of talk to find out how community groups rate each of its institutions–whether the most influential, middling so, least so; in the subsequent 3 hours for conversation, people come to understand their situation and see how to take action. This tool has been especially effective in women’s hands. In one community in Kenya, women’s groups have kept it moving and organized–health, education, livestock. In another community in Transylvania, a seventy-five-year-old woman spoke up for the first time in her life in a public meeting and was heard. She was overwhelmed that someone had listened to her speak. For the gender calendar, Ford spends about 45 minutes helping people make a calendar of what men or women actually do in a day and then some hours in conversation about how to modify or eliminate counterproductive behavior. For example, in a Muslim village in Somalia in 2001–after 15 years of war, during which the men abandoned the village–the women’s calendar of how men spent their day showed that almost every man knocked off work at 4:00 in the afternoon to chew kat, a hallucinogen. The use of the calendar, after much protest, enabled the men and women to spend two hours talking about kat, agricultural work, responsibilities at home, and roles in decision making among men and women. As a result, some of the men agreed to support and assist with four or five needed programs that the women had identified; and the village is now transformed with a renewed infrastructure and is more habitable for men, women, and young people. For the ranking tool, Professor Ford cited a Philippine village, where he persuaded people to identify its severe problems and then, in conversation, to take them two by two and identify which–say, medicine or roads–was more important. In this village, its members resolved their conflicts, created an action plan, raised $100,000, and established a water supply. Peace building is a basic need in these communities, says Professor Ford. By working with a community this way–showing them that you’re seriously interested in what they know, getting them to talk to one another, and allowing traditionally marginalized voices, such as those of women and young people, to be heard–you offer people a way of setting aside their differences in order to act on their own behalf. Thus, you empower people and give them a tool by which they can safely take action. After his talk, Professor Ford took questions from the audience: 1. Has your life been threatened? To start with, we ask to meet with chiefs. And we explain that we bring no money; instead, we bring a set of tools to enable people to raise their own money. 2. How do you find a place to work in? By networking. 3. Do you help people to understand international issues and why their country is in trouble? Not in the villages, but we hope to do so now or via UU churches. Not just for UUs of course, but for the entire community. 4. How do you empower youth? In Ghana, AIDS is a severe problem: the youth, owing to the dearth of rural livelihood, head to the city and bring back money and AIDS. One village program is helping its young people through growing and processing crops of cassava and maize and raising small-scale livestock 5. What would it take to expand the program? It’s difficult because people are suspicious of any program seen as being administered by the government. In India, for a block of villages to get money they must use these tools. Churches may be a resource; Muslim churches love the program. Other forms of local and traditional organizations are also a great help in expanding tools that enable the donors to “listen to the people” and use tools for local peace building that enable communities to work together. |