For so long, the world has celebrated the statistics of ‘unprecedented progress’. But in the shadows of this progress, there are over 800 million people who are still part of the “bottom billion” caught in absolute state of malnutrition, disease, low life expectancy that offends the very concept of human decency.
As we attempt to solve this crisis, we are faced with a glaring paradox: the blue print of global development is being designed by those most separated from the reality of poverty. WHY?
In modern development, speed is the enemy of understanding. The rise of fast moves and exotic travel allows experts like bankers, researchers, consultants and policymakers to travel back and forth from urban core to rural periphery while remaining effectively insulated from the rural places.
When the unpleasant realities of the rural poor are not seen, they are easily ignored. This detachment is not merely physical; it is institutional whereby “Outsiders”, that is, those who are neither rural nor poor, exist within urban cores, generate and consume knowledge that rarely reaches the rural periphery. This limited exposure often characterize “rural development tourism,” full of systemic bias that cover a collective vision. When the outsiders come from the core to the periphery, they travel by luxury or comfortable means, surrounded by distinguished “stakeholders”. Their visit favors the tarmac roads and other accessible areas. They engage the elite and a few selected distinguished. In some cases they wear protective masks and gloves that offer them ‘protection’ from the reality and symptoms of absolute poverty. With their welcome team, they speak in their own language while avoiding direct contact with the poor for fear of whatever. These biases filters the reality through a narrow lens of their own specialization, leaving out the very people they aim to uplift.
The biases culminate in a deep irony within our educational and international systems. It plays out in the halls of elite universities, where students pay exorbitant tuition fees in the heart of wealthy nations, to study the poverty and problems of poor nations. One question that seeks an answer is: Why do scholars from poor nations study the poverty of their nations in a rich country?
We are teaching development through a lens that systematically excludes the very people it aims to improve. By designing programs without the lived experience or the input of those suffering in the rural periphery, we perpetuate a cycle of detachment.
If we are to bridge the gap between policy and progress, we must move the focus away from the speed to reach deadlines. True development cannot be observed from a limousine or from an “Ivory Tower”; it requires a drastic shift from “doing for” to “listening to.” By integrating the perspectives of the rural poor, we move from a model of “prescriptive aid” to one of co-creation. Until the voices of the poor are integrated into the design of their own futures, our international development efforts will remain, paradoxically, a product of the very comfort and distance they seek to eliminate.
Adapted from: Robert Chambers “Rural Development: Putting the Last First”
Written By: Byke Freeborn| X/Twitter: @bykefreeborn