UN Chronicle | Partnership with the Poorest

Partnership with the Poorest
By Diana Skelton and Joan Burke

Article

Exactly ten years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark, the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in its Programme of Action called for “enabling [people who live in poverty] to become genuine partners in development”. In February 2005, the UN Commission for Social Development met in New York to review the further implementation of the World Summit.

UNHCR photo/C.Schwetz

The presence of thirty government ministers at the forty-third session of the Commission helped underscore the importance of social development, as did three high-level round tables and with the participation of several non-governmental organizations (NGOs). And yet, despite their commitment, the question still remains of how to move forward with those who were not even present at the meeting, whether they are ministers of finance who could help provide the means for social ministries to reach their goals, or the very people who are intended to benefit from these programmes.

“The untapped excellence of the poor is being wasted in the need to survive.”

—from a survey in Bolivia

The civil society forum linked to the Commission adopted the NGO Forum Declaration on 7 February1 urging the “inclusion and participation of all those affected by government policy”. Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo of South Africa, Chairman of the Commission, called for “a people-centred approach to rise above abstract thinking”. Towards the end of the meeting, a discussion among NGO representatives turned to the question of just how to enable people living in poverty to play an active role in shaping social development, since they are the major constituency affected by social development policy.

During UN conferences on the status of women and on the environment, the halls of the United Nations are thronged with people whose lives are directly impacted by these issues. So why aren’t there more people living in poverty present at the Social Development Commission? It would certainly help to have more funding available from the United Nations and Governments to support the work done by NGOs to bring these people to UN Headquarters. But there are other obstacles to participation as well.

Several years ago, an NGO brought an international delegation of people living in poverty to the United Nations for a high-level seminar concerning extreme poverty. A journalist, who chose not to attend the seminar and instead interviewed participants after the meeting, cornered a woman and asked her: “Why don’t you have any poor people with you? I can see that you’re all well dressed, so you must not be the ones who need help the most.” Little did he know the real background of the woman who was too shocked to reply. How could she tell him how hard it had been for her to accept help from others in her community who had made sure that she would be able to attend the meeting wearing clothes appropriate for the occasion? How could she explain that even though her family’s daily life was terribly difficult because of extreme poverty, she had not come to the United Nations to plead the case of her children, but to speak on behalf of many other people? When union representatives take the floor in a UN meeting, we do not expect them to speak of their own personal experiences in factories, but to represent others. And yet when we think of people living in poverty attending international meetings, our most common expectation is that they will prove that they are poor by relating intimate details about themselves, not engaging in a debate about issues.

Street library grass-roots projects in Senegal, run by ATD Fourth World. Photo/ATD Fourth World

This is a terribly hard thing to do, not only because people living in poverty continue to be those with the least access to formal education but also because from the time they were born they have felt the full weight of the world’s disdain for their thoughts and those of their parents. No one has ever asked their families for their opinion. When a respected community leader crosses their path, they may be able to elicit pity, but little more. Growing up in this situation makes it particularly hard to believe in one’s own voice enough to speak out publicly.

So how can we ensure that development projects are planned and evaluated in dialogue with people living in poverty? In the same way that they must prepare to feel equipped to participate in an international conference, development experts must also prepare themselves to become partners with people from different walks of life. One step could be for actors in development to learn from projects that have already been built on a grass-roots partnership. Learning from each other about what does and does not work happens every day in the community of NGOs.

The NGO Committee for Social Development has member organizations that run grass-roots projects in many parts of the world. Its Sub-Committee for the Eradication of Poverty has conducted a detailed survey about the successes and obstacles faced by those building partnership with very poor people in the field.2 One survey comes from a city in Southeast Asia, where facilitators who regularly visit families living in shanties or in the open air under a bridge bring mats to sit on, illustrated books covering a wide range of interests, and drawings or other craft materials. One of them writes:

“We walk around the community to invite everyone to participate, placing special emphasis on the children from the poorest families. It is not possible to run these activities without building mutual trust between the facilitators and parents. This requires that the facilitators take the time to learn from the children and their parents about the obstacles they must overcome, and their hopes. One facilitator, Orruedee S., aged 33, who works in a law office, said: ‘Initially I thought that I could use all my knowledge to help and teach the children and their families, but after some time I realized that I learn new things every time I go to the community. I now have more vision about life, about people and everything.’

Street library grass-roots projects in Senegal, run by ATD Fourth World. Photo/ATD Fourth World

“It would be easy to run these activities only with those children who are the most dynamic and sure of themselves. Instead, we make a point of giving priority to those viewed as ‘less capable’. This is the guideline for the preparation of each session, as well as for the training of the activity facilitators. Making sure that everyone is included becomes the hallmark of all the activities. For instance, when one family was not planning to join in an outing because they could not afford to bring along their picnic, the other families insisted that everyone participate and that they had enough food to share.”3

In this project, several strategies are being employed to build partnership with people trapped in the greatest poverty: choosing an extremely poor community for the project and giving priority to those who are the least sure of themselves; building trust and taking time to learn from one another; recognizing that people living in poverty have experiences and thoughts from which others can learn; and ensuring that no one gets left out.

At the Commission’s session, Gregoire Kantoucar of ATD Fourth World said: “In preparing for this round table, I have felt the weight of responsibility given to me by the poorest people who have trusted us for so long. So rather than speaking only in their name, I would like to offer the floor to one of them, Mr. André of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. He says: ‘A poor person remains like a person who is taken by surprise when a war erupts. What I mean is that once a war has started, it’s too late to prepare for it. You can’t prepare in a rush. And in fact the poor person is always taken unawares. But altogether, we don’t lack for ideas. Let’s continue to exchange ideas with those who believe in our strength. This is how we can free ourselves from being taken unawares’.”

This demonstrates another important strategy. Very crucial is that development projects be planned from the beginning along with the people themselves who are living in poverty so that no one can be taken unawares.

There are, of course, many different strategies that can be employed at the grass-roots level to build partnerships, but we need to create more arenas where strategies can be designed, evaluated and shared. The Commission for Social Development remains one of these arenas, where Governments, the UN Secretariat and NGOs address the questions of eradicating poverty, and improving employment and social integration. During the tenth anniversary of the World Summit, Commission members at the 2005 meeting reaffirmed the Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action and wrote: “We also reaffirm that social development requires not only economic activity and greater inclusion and participation but also maximizing opportunities and guaranteeing social justice, and recognizing the interrelationship between social development and economic growth.”4

We hope that this Commission will set the tone for the other meetings in 2005 that will prepare the September evaluation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the very first of which is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. The initial benchmark set for reaching this goal is to “reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day [and] reduce by half the population of people who suffer from hunger”. Progress must start somewhere and many engaged NGOs see the MDGs and the target year 2015 as but the mid-point in achieving the goal of completely eradicating poverty, as envisioned at the World Summit.

“Participation Works: International Success in the Fight Against Poverty”, a panel discussion sponsored by the NGO Sub-Committee for the Eradication of Poverty. From left: Gregoire Kantoucar (ATD Fourth World), Gretta Fernandes (VIVAT International), Albert Gyan (Church World Service) and Haleh Arbab Correa (Baha’i International Community). Photo/Leilei Duan

But what is the plan for the “other half” of people in extreme poverty, and which “half” will programmes begin with? If the first half is made up mainly of those who are slightly less difficult to lift out of poverty, experience shows that it will be even harder then to reach those who are the most entrenched in destitution and caught in deep chronic poverty. Taking the time to build trust with people in extreme poverty in order to then build partnership with them can lead us to design innovative programmes that are more effective and far-reaching, including to those least likely to be reached by the MDGs.

The recently published report by Jeffrey Sachs, Special Advisor of the UN Secretary-General, on the Millennium Project describes the eradication of poverty envisioned by the MDGs as a “linchpin to the quest for a more secure and peaceful world.”5 The NGO Forum Declaration underscores that “social development is the underpinning of human security for all people of our globe”. All the people in the international community would be enriched were the resolve of Governments, in partnership with civil society and the private sector, strong enough to carry the commitments made into action.

The social justice called for by the recent Commission session is one compelling reason to build in partnership with the poorest. Another reason was expressed in the survey from a grass-roots organization in Bolivia: We have not yet begun to tap into the “excellence of the poor”.

Notes
1.	See http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/csd/csocd2005/docs/csf.pdf
2.	“Best Practices in Poverty Eradication: Case Studies from the Field”, based on surveys conducted by the Sub-Committee for the Eradication of Poverty, was published in 2003.
3.	Ibid. This specific questionnaire was submitted by the International Movement ATD Fourth World.
4.	Non-Paper of 25 January 2005, presented by the Bureau on the Outcome of the forty-third session of the Commission for Social Development, paragraph 5.
5.	UN Millennium Project 2005, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Overview.

Biographies

Diana Skelton, Vice Chair of the NGO Committee, has been part of the ATD Fourth World’s Volunteer Corps for 18 years. As its representative at UN Headquarters, she has brought people from poor communities to UN conferences.

Joan Burke, Chair of the NGO Committee for Social Development, is a trained social anthropologist who has spent 20 years in Africa. She represents the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur at the United Nations.

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