Last year, just like now, I was in Connecticut for a two week training orientation preparing to become a Global Health Corps fellow. It’s been now a year now and it’s been a great experience: a journey of astonishing and beautiful discoveries. The world of non-profit is such an amazing one in all senses that the word “amazing” may have, both in its positive and negative assertions.
I joined Global Health Corps with a deep conviction that health is one of the basic foundations to great social development. Throughout each of the clinic visits that my co-fellow and I made into deep rural Burundi, I was constantly reminded of my conviction. Many countries would rather have a great, developed economic industry, but without a good health policy, the whole thing would just be like a castle made of sand. Though Burundi needs a great economy for him to develop and fight against poverty, it still also needs many good health centers and hospitals for its population.
Throughout my fellowship year, I came to discover just how diverse the social development interveners in the field are. Many of them have similar or sometimes even identical objectives, and even share the same project implementation area. The ideal would then be for them and for any external observer to join together their efforts in order to address efficiently the social development issues. But this rarely happens. Each intervener having its way to proceed to reach his goal would not easily let another one to come along with a different conception and a different approach even though they share the same objective. Some other interveners would only stick to the funders obligations, fearing to partner with others as they think that it would interfere with the budget management without having same funders. If social development interveners were political parties and not mostly NGOs and local associations, then I would talk about “Political Interest Divergence.” But I can’t. Researchers still need to find an appropriated terminology for such situations.
In Bukeye commune where I spent my fellowship year, the local administration has a communal development plan made out of villages’ small development plans. Such a tool is supposed to guide each social development intervener in his project implementation. But it happened that most of the social development actors chose their intervention area without even knowing that there is a social development plan made by beneficiaries describing their own needs, as they are the ones who really know them better. Most of the time, NGOs and local associations just pop in with an already elaborated, planned and budgeted project, ready to be executed. For instance an NGO would come from abroad with a school building project in a specific area of a developing country. Once in the field, local population would suggest that what they need the most urgently is a health center instead of a school. It would be very hard to convince that NGO to change his project into one that fits and matches the local population requests and needs.
Maybe, in the future, social development interveners, such as NGOs, local associations and governments, would just work as funders or as executioners of the development projects elaborated by beneficiaries themselves.
On July 1st, which was the Burundian Independence Day, I wrote a post on my facebook account, saying that poor cannot be independent as they are always dependent to their social and economic needs, which make them also dependent to anyone that would bring them any kind of relief. Some Burundian facebook users reacted very ardently arguing that the independence is not a question of being poor or not. A few days earlier, I had had a friendly conversation with a local administrative authority about NGOs project implementation; at the end, he said something that left me speechless: “Poor have no choice. They just take all that they’re given as long as it is given for free. A school instead of a health center…would really make no difference as long as they don’t pay for its construction.” I couldn’t say more after such an answer, though I can’t even go far in this writing.