NEWSBYCATHERINE WU

A picture that one of the women in our pilot classes drew. She described her life as a flower. Her childhood was bittersweet. She then went to school and started a family. In the future, she wants her three daughters to be married and happy, and she wishes to retire in a big house.

There was a period of time during the past five weeks when I found myself questioning more and more the reasons that I am in India and the real impact that I am having on the women and the organization that I am working with.

About three weeks ago, I had a long conversation about development work with an Indian American, who had decided to move to India to create his own nonprofit and who has been living here for the past eleven years. He viewed “development” as another form of imperialism and colonialism and saw the perceived need to “develop” other countries as stemming from the need to address problems that the West faces. I recommend the book The History of Development, which explains this line of reasoning in more detail, to those interested. Nevertheless, his basic argument was that the people living in “developing countries” have been self sufficient and living their own way of life for generations; most of the problems they are facing are caused by globalization and the imposition of outside systems on their way of life. Development exists to extend and perpetuate the Western capitalistic and liberal system onto the rest of the world.

This idea troubled me for a long time and made me extremely self-conscious. For a while, when conducting fieldwork, I could not help but feel like an intruder. Sitting on the straw mats that the women whom we visited reserved for guests, I felt invasive, armed with my pen and notebook and asking the women what their average income level was, whether and how much money they saved per month, what their level of education was. Most women would graciously bring out chai and crackers for us, and I realized that I probably would not be as hospitable if strangers came into my home and asked me such personal questions.

Obviously, I had been trained in “asset based community development” and had been taught to be sensitive to different cultural contexts, but I had never been so self-conscious of my own ignorance and inadequacy. Who was I, a twenty-year-old college student from the United States, to come into these women’s homes and presume that I could develop a curriculum to teach them how to better manage their money? I had never been to India prior to this trip, did not speak Hindi, and certainly could not learn enough about the culture in the seven weeks that I was here to create a truly culturally sensitive curriculum. Furthermore, these women didn’t ask for my help, and of all things, was financial literacy really something that they valued as a priority or was it something that me and the organization that I am working with had concluded, based on our own set of presumptions and values, that these women wanted and needed?

Because I had grown up in a different culture and would never be able to experience these women’s way of life in the way that they had, could I really create any program that wouldn’t be imposing my own “Western” values onto them?

The first reform that we created in Sahayata Livelihood’s financial literacy curriculum was a drawing exercise. One of the main goals of the original financial literacy curriculum is to make the women aware of their life cycle needs and to get them to create a financial plan and save for the future. We decided to get across this idea by having the women draw their lives as children, their lives now, and what they wanted their lives to look like in the future. When we first tested this exercise with a group of women, the women merely giggled and looked at us as if waiting for us to tell them that we were joking. Most of them were illiterate or else hadn’t held a pen in a long time and therefore felt uncomfortable using one.

We remained firm, but I felt patronizing, asking women who had more than ten to twenty years of life experience than me to draw pictures of their lives to envision their own life cycle. Furthermore, I had no idea whether this exercise would be useful to them at all. My partner Sahiba and I drew our own pictures to encourage everyone else to do the same. They eventually began drawing their own pictures, and we went around the circle and asked everyone to share their drawings with the group. Our pictures were eerily similar. In the future, we wanted our children to be happy. We wanted lots of grandchildren and a nice house to retire in. We wanted to be happy in old age.

The moment was incredibly touching to me, especially when I had been questioning the purpose and real impact of the work that I had been doing here. It was an amazing connection to feel when I realized that, despite all of our different life experiences and the fact that we grew up in such different cultures, what we wanted for our lives were the same.

In an effort to be politically correct and “culturally sensitive,” we often forget that on some level, we are all human and there are some things that we all value and cherish, regardless of culture. The problem with development and with critiques against development is the focus on “Western values” vs. “Eastern values,” “developed” vs. “underdeveloped.” If we strip away all these labels and see each other as simply fellow human beings, we begin to see that there are indeed ways that we can learn from each other and help each other, but all that starts with building friendship and understanding first.

There is often a romanticized culture around the notion that students can and should “change the world” and a recent movement towards college students establishing nonprofit organizations and doing volunteer work abroad. However, underlying all this is the presumption that something needs to and should be changed about the way these people live.

My primary reason for coming to India was to “engage in development work on the ground.” However, during these seven weeks, I have not been a student working in development or a student out to change the world. I am simply another human being, coming to learn about other ways of living and trying to connect with other fellow human beings in a meaningful way.

When I met with Ajay, the current director and CEO of Sahayata Microfinance, about how he envisioned the future of Sahayata Livelihoods (the nonprofit that I have been working for), the first thing he told me was, “I want to retain my customers.” This fell in line with the spiel that my supervisor gave me on my first day at Sahayata Livelihoods about the reasons why Sahayata created a nonprofit entity. “As Sahayata Microfinance grows, it will attract more attention from the media, and Sahayata Microfinance will be expected to have given back to society. We have to show people that we aren’t just taking money but are also doing something for society.” Microfinance has become a competitive industry, and potential customers now have a variety of options to choose from when taking out a loan. Sahayata Livelihoods is meant to set Sahayata apart from the rest.

If there is no intrinsic motivation to give to society, at least the idea of “social responsibility” seems to have become enough of a norm that for-profit companies feel the need to engage in activities that benefit society. Furthermore, for-profit companies like Sahayata view “doing good” as potentially profitable because it can create goodwill with their customers. Perhaps the government incentives for social enterprises that I alluded to in my last post can be replaced by societal expectation?

The danger of using a nonprofit as a public relations mechanism, however, is that the incentive is to only create programs that look good and can provide quick results and to avoid spending money and time on conducting proper assessments to test the efficacy of the programs and revise the programs accordingly. Last week, Sahayata Livelihoods held a preventative dental checkup for women and children in one of the slum areas in Udaipur. Four dental students from the local dental college arrived in a yellow bus as Suresh, the Sahayata Livelihoods employee responsible for organizing the event, pulled out chairs from locals’ houses and transformed the area of the slum that usually served as the children’s unofficial playground into a hastily-made dental clinic. A large Sahayata Livelihoods banner hung in the background; where the banner should be placed generated much more attention than other important administrative matters that day. There was very little documentation of which patients underwent checkups and what the diagnosis and follow up for them were. Sahayata Livelihoods wants to expand this preventative health program to 10,000 women within the next twelve months. Similarly, it plans to expand its financial literacy program (which our team is working to assess and reform) to reach more than 15,000 women across Rajasthan within the next year without having conducted any systematic assessment of its pilot financial literacy program. Sahayata Livelihoods has an ambitious plan, but as of now, it only has three employees, only one of whom is employed full-time.

I do not mind if we are working for a nonprofit that was meant to provide good PR to its parent company, as long as that nonprofit is doing good work. However, if PR is the only reason for Sahayata Livelihoods’ existence, then it seems like the incentive to create programs that look good on paper but whose efficacy is questionable at best is almost unavoidable. Their efforts can begin to mirror those of organizations like the Rotary Club, which often make a lot more fuss over taking pictures and publicizing their good deeds than understanding and creating sustainable programs within communities.

Rotary Club's Mewar Chapter President hands a child in the village school that my host mom teaches at some notebooks donated by one of the Rotary Club's members.

A woman in one of the slums that we visited offers chai to us.

A woman washing clothes in one of the urban slums that we visited.

What a typical neighborhood of a Sahayata client looks like.

A Sahayata client shows us her cloth shop, which she was able to expand through her Sahayata loan.

The non-profit that I am working with is an offshoot of the microfinance institution Shree Hari Fintrade Private Limited, which operates under the Brand name Sahayata. Founded only two years ago, Sahayata now has twenty-one locations in Rajasthan and is aiming for a total of three hundred branches throughout India by 2010. The six founders of Sahayata hold impressive resumes and bring a wealth of experience from working in multi-national corporations outside of India. The MFI claims to be adding more than 4,000 customers a month and expects even greater growth as it expands to more locations.

While Sahayata’s growth plan and execution are impressive (loan officers text collection figures from the field to a software that automatically compiles data from all branches and generates a report on excel), its focus on rapid expansion makes loan officers leery of lending to those at the very bottom of the income bracket. With huge targets to reach, the branch managers place their energy into increasing collection amounts. It is Sahayata’s policy to lend only to women who are married, own their own house, and have their own business.

When speaking of alleviating poverty, it is important to define exactly what parameters qualify as “poor” and what constitutes bringing individuals out of poverty. The initial aim of microfinance under Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen model was to help those at the very bottom of the income bracket, who did not have steady shelter or businesses, obtain loans. Though the women who receive the 5000-10000 Rs loans from still earn far less than the average middle class Indian, it is clear that Sahayata is not by any means a poverty-alleviating entity by Grameen standards.

Our supervisor says that Sahayata loans to women in the slums, but it is evident that the definition of “slum” varies significantly here. He unabashedly rejects the idea of lending to those living under tin roofs in the slums because he believes that there is a slim to nothing chance that women in the slums will pay back their loans.

“Sahayata lost money last year. We cannot afford to take on such high risk, When Sahayata expands and is able to make a lot of money, only then can we consider loaning to the poor. We must be able to stand on our own before we can help the poor. We can’t be expected to simply give out of our pockets forever.”

The assumption here, however, is that the poor are not going to return their loans and that the MFI will automatically lose money if it lends to these poor. Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen model has proved this wrong. Isn’t it precisely because normal banking institutions will not lend to these people that MFI’s were created? When I mentioned this to my supervisor, he explained that the Grameen model is viable in Bangladesh only because most of the population in Bangladesh is at the same level of poverty, so MFI’s there are forced to loan to the poorest of the poor. In India, however, where there are many different levels of income, MFI’s do not need to loan only to the poorest of the poor.

What he seems to be saying is that because there is greater profit to be made by lending to other income brackets, it is only natural that for-profit institutions will automatically favor lending to those women over women from the lowest income brackets and with the least amount of job security and stable housing. From a business standpoint, Sahayata’s decision to loan only to women who are married and own their own homes and businesses makes sound financial sense. As a newly established MFI, Sahayata suffered losses last year and is therefore unlikely to take on a large amount of risk.

Does the profit motive always lead to the neglect of the poor? In this profit-driven, growth-oriented approach to microfinance, the most disadvantaged group is again left behind. Is the profit motive and the fact that microfinance has become a lucrative business model detrimental to the original intent of microfinance as a way to alleviate poverty? Should MFI’s follow the rules of the free market?

Without government incentives for corporations to serve the poorest classes, it seems very unlikely that corporations will be willing to take on such initiatives on their own. The alternative to corporations that operate only to generate profit is what Muhammad Yunus calls the “social enterprise,” which has the twin aims of profit and social impact as barometers for success. As such, Yunus explains that, “A social entrepreneur will continue to be in the market for as long as his or her socially beneficial enterprise is at least breaking even.”

However, unless there are policy changes on the macro-level that provide incentives for the development of more such social enterprises or that encourage the adoption of double bottom lines, goodwill alone will not be enough to alleviate poverty. And until then, it seems unlikely that MFI’s will direct their efforts towards loaning to the poorest of the poor.

A beautiful moment happened today. It occurred during a housewarming party of a friend of my host family’s. The night started like most social events have started here in India. I sat in silence as the guests of the party questioned Sahiba, one of my group members who is living at the same host family as I, about her family, what she usually ate for dinner, and the meaning of her name.

“Are you Indian? Your face is very Indian.”

“You speak Punjab?”

Sahiba and I exchanged a quick smile as she gave her usual explanation that yes, her great grand parents were from Punjab, but her parents were from Kenya, and she was born in and grew up in America. And no, she could not speak Punjab. I occupied myself with the various decorations in the house as Sahiba nodded and smiled politely to the guests who tried to speak Hindi and Punjab to her anyway.

Sahiba and I are experiencing the opposite ends of the spectrum here in India. While I am constantly faced with puzzled looks when I say that I am from America (“Your face, it is not like American.”), and then usually silence, Sahiba struggles with others assuming that she speaks Hindi and understands everything about Indian culture. If I am spoken to, it is usually to ask me about Taiwan, which I, thankfully, can talk about because I lived there for two years, but it is apparent that the idea of an “Indian American” that does not eat chepati every evening and of an “Asian American” doesn’t exist in the vocabulary of most Indians that we encounter. It was my wish that if I could accomplish nothing else this summer, that I could at least convey this idea to those that I met in India.

This happened in a very unexpected way tonight. In India, it is a custom for guests to exchange songs after a meal as a welcome gift. The hosts requested that I sing a Taiwanese song, and I felt relieved that I knew at least one Taiwanese song. I did not think that I would be a cultural ambassador for Taiwan when I came to India, but the guests were very pleased. Sahiba and I then proceeded to sing an American song, and then something I had been waiting for since I got here a week ago occurred. One of the guests pointed out that America was unique because anyone in the world could go there and become an American. The guests then proceeded to discuss the merits of America’s diversity and wonder why the same kind of assimilation and acceptance did not occur as frequently in their own country.

The discussion lasted less than five minutes, but I felt like I had jumped a hurdle. Living in a new culture, I have learned to appreciate little triumphs. When I first got here, my host family never made eye contact with me and hardly ever spoke to me. I have never been so aware of my identity as an American, woman, or Asian. While it is frustrating to be treated by strangers based on these identities, I have learned to manage the different expectations that come with the identities that people associate with me. When one first enters a foreign country, one is undoubtedly judged by appearances. Breaking down cultural assumptions requires patience, empathy, and a willingness to make your voice heard. Participating in a local custom and sharing a simple Taiwanese and American song spoke more clearly than any words could have.

During Northwestern University’s ten-day Global Engagement Institute, we spent a lot of time doing team-building activities with the group members that we were going to be working with in our NGOs overseas. One of the activities consisted of each team member articulating his or her core values. After each person had shared their core values, the group identified common and conflicting core values within the team. Contrary to our expectations, the exercise was incredibly helpful in identifying some common ideals that can bind our group together when we work abroad. The exercise also initiated a debate over the difference between “giving back” and “giving” that corresponds well with the larger dialogue of first world aid to developing countries.

Two of my team members, myself included, are both first generation Asian Americans whose parents immigrated to America. Growing up, my parents always emphasized the importance of service and “giving back to the community.” Having lived the “American dream,” my parents have extreme gratitude for a country that gave foreigners from a tiny farming village in the hills of rural Taiwan the opportunity to live the life that they had imagined. For my parents, America is a place where, in the words of Walt Disney “if you can imagine it, you can achieve it.” This upbringing drilled the idea of service into my head as an obligation and duty. While my other team member whose parents are also immigrants to America also identified “giving back” as one of her core values, our two other team members whose families had both been in America for several generations viewed service in a very different way. To them, service is an act taken for its own sake. They disagreed with the idea of “giving back” because it implied that we had taken, and, perhaps more subtly, that we had a special “right” to give.

I had never viewed my idea of service in this way. To me, “giving back” was simply a duty that I should perform. I never discovered the meaning of service for myself beyond what I was told. Consequently, the service activities that I engaged in generally consisted of one-time activities that left me feeling good and enabled me to fulfill my duty but had no real impact beyond that. I tutored inner city kids, bought Christmas presents for “needy” families, delivered groceries to the elderly, and served at soup kitchens. These activities gave me a sense that I had performed my duty and then I forgot about them. It was like curing a wart by putting a Band-Aid on it.

In first world countries, there is often the notion that we must “give back” to the developing world. This implies that we have some special right or role to play in “developing other countries.” Intention could be irrelevant to action, but maybe this can help explain the “Band-Aid” approach to development that many first world countries take. Giving shouldn’t be an obligation or a privilege of only the wealthy. If we serve simply because we want to and not because we believe we have an obligation or right to, maybe we will look for better, more sustainable solutions, and maybe we will discover that everyone, not just the wealthy, have something to give.

“People live as the subjects of their own history and no longer objects of a history defined by others for them”

In his book, The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly criticizes the West’s approach to development as perpetuating the white man’s burden to remake the rest of the world in their image. Though harboring all the best intentions, Big Planners like Jeffrey Sachs and institutions like the World Bank and IMF try to transform countries through ambitious, top-down approaches that aim to “rectify” the institutions and address the needs of developing countries. What gets neglected in this analysis is the web of complex social, cultural, and political actors, the interactions on the ground, in the communities receiving the aid and services of the West. It also results in a focus on the seemingly overwhelming needs of the developing world and the belief that only the West can provide for these needs.

The cost of this neglect is not only the failure of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to create effective development but the creation of attitudes of dependency and worthlessness that ultimately serve as even greater obstacles to effective and sustainable development.

It’s time for us to let the developing world define and engage in development on their own terms and in their own way. To do this, the West needs to stop looking at the developing world as half empty. Instead of asking what it is that the developing world needs, instead of focusing on what it is the developing world lacks, the West should focus on what assets the developing world already possesses and how those assets can be connected and utilized for development.

On a micro level, this strategy of “asset-based community development” has been successfully implemented in many communities all over the world for decades. Pioneered by John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann, who now head the ABCD Institute at Northwestern University, the strategy challenges outsiders and members of the community to look past deficiencies (crime, poverty, dropout rates) and see the glass as half full. Rather than being clients of outside services aimed to cater to their needs, members of the community utilize existing civil associations, talents and skills, and other assets to serve as agents of change in their own communities.

To me, this is an extremely powerful idea that can translate into every other facet of how we perceive our world and the people who live in it. How many times do we judge individuals by only their perceived needs? And how many times has that only served to cripple growth and engender hopelessness and dependency?  For movie buffs out there, 3:10 to Yuma offers a poignant illustration. It does not take much to see how others’ inability to de-medicalize war veteran Dan Evans (Christian Bale) from his disability only reinforced a sense of worthlessness in Evans. A longtime community developer in the South Bronx during the mid 1900s, Edna Johnson, once said that the biggest obstacle she faced was “living in a prison of other people’s ideas about who we are.”

To quote Professor Kretzmann, we should cease obsessing over whether  “the glass is half empty or half full” and instead ask, “how is the glass half full?” To me, the larger idea behind asset based community development is about finding a place in the community for every individual, no matter what disease, disability, or circumstances he or she faces. It is about letting developing countries discover their assets and what development strategies work best in their own country and helping to support those initiatives that work.

Further Reading:
If you want to learn about specific cases in which asset-based community development has been implemented, you can read From Clients to Citizens by Alison Mathie and Gordon Cunningham.

My name is Catherine Wu. I hope to provide a perspective on international development from the viewpoint of someone who is inexperienced and new to this field. I am twenty years old and a rising junior majoring in political science and economics at Wellesley College. This summer, I will be working with the microfinance organization Sahayata, based in Udaipur, India, through the Foundation for Sustainable Development. This will be my first time engaging in development work on the ground. I will be working with three other college students from the United States to design and implement our own program within Sahayata. Working through the Foundation for Sustainable Development, I aim to create a project that emphasizes the foundation’s commitment to grassroots initiatives, community development, and sustainability.

Like a lot of young people, I have a lot of big ideals and strong convictions about how I think the world should work. Perhaps growing up in a nurturing, middle class family has afforded me the luxury of optimism; after all, in the twenty years of my sheltered, suburban life I have never really experienced any real hardship. I hope that my experiences in India this summer will help ground my ideals in reality and give me a more realistic picture of development work. Though I will undoubtedly find myself challenging many of my ideals, my wish is that, rather than become cynical, I can piece together a more useful and insightful vision.

I hope to share with you my thoughts and encounters as I embark on this new journey. There is much that I do not know and have yet to learn, and I invite you to share your insights and experiences with me.

I will be posting every Wednesday and Friday during my time in India (6/27-8/15) and once a week before and after I leave India.

Also look for me on Twitter at luckygirl6. I will be sending out a few tweets every day during my stay in India.

Thanks and I hope you stay tuned for more!