REDIRECTING THE SPOTLIGHT:
Beneficiaries as the primary decision makers for receiving aid
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Macro Approach vs. Micro Programs
2
Certainty and Cash Transfers
5
Connection and Small Groups
6
Conclusion 8
Bibliography 8
DEVELOPMENT APPROACH HONORS INDIVIDUAL REALITIES, NEED FOR
HUMAN CONNECTION
By Dan Pearson, director of international programs at Unbound, June 2015
It was already hot and sticky the morning we trudged up the mountain toward the Guatemalan village of La Cuchilla. I was with a local social worker on a routine visit to families served by Unbound.
A stout Guatemalan woman greeted us with shouts of affection and a hearty hug as we approached the first home. She was dressed in the traditional juipil blouse that is common in Guatemala. Over her juipil she wore an apron. The corn flour on her apron suggested she had already had a busy morning making tortillas for her family.
Her name was Lidia (her name has been changed for privacy) and she and her child were participants in the Unbound program. I met her while visiting homes of randomly selected families in my role as director of international programs with Unbound. We frequently visit families in the countries where we work to monitor program quality.
IN 2008
Lidia led us to her home and asked us to excuse the disorder even though everything in the home seemed tidy. I used my sleeve to wipe the sweat from my face, feeling grateful for Lidia’s offer of fresh-squeezed juice after the long walk. She acted as if my visit had been planned for weeks, even though it was unexpected.
I was visiting the homes of children I randomly selected earlier that morning. My intent was to make sure the children were present and active in the program.
Lidia leaned out the front door and called her children up from the river where they were playing. I wasn’t sure how far away the river was, but I was sure her kids heard Lidia’s booming call. The children came running up the hill a few minutes later and were laughing and cheerfully teasing each other as we stepped outside to greet them.
Lidia’s home was surrounded by the family’s drying laundry, chicks she was raising and a garden that helped feed the family. In talking with her, it didn’t take long to see that Lidia was doing everything she could to improve her living conditions and give her kids more opportunities.
Lidia’s kids were doing well in school and benefiting from their participation in the Unbound program. In the program in Guatemala, participants achieve more than a year and a half more schooling than the general population on average and even have a shot at post-secondary education. (Unbound evaluation findings 2010)
If Lidia had lived in a U.S. suburb, she would probably have been the president of the PTA.
After coffee and some more conversation, we told Lidia we needed to continue visiting the other families I had selected for home visits. Lidia immediately offered to come with us and show us the short-cut trails through the forest so that we could save time. We accepted her offer and set off for our second home visit.
No one came out to greet us as we approached the next home. It was a simple wood structure with only one room. There were no animals or laundry outside. The house appeared to be abandoned, but as we got closer I saw there was a woman sitting motionlessly on the edge of the bed just inside the door.
The woman on the bed was Luisa (her name has been changed for privacy), the mother of another child in the program, Gustavo. The room around her was dark even though the morning sun was now quite high. Her home had only one small window, and cloth was pulled over it.
Luisa did not look up until we were nearly at the threshold of her house. She offered a tentative smile and slowly rose from the bed where she had been sitting. Her hair was unkempt, and the few belongings in her home were scattered on
the ground around her. Luisa mostly kept her eyes on the dirt floor in front of her as she began to tell us her story. About two years earlier Luisa’s husband had abandoned the family. Luisa didn’t have a job, so she and her three children were evicted from their rented home soon after her husband left. Her parents allowed them to move into the small shack where we found her sitting. It was only about a hundred yards behind her parents’ home, but they rarely interacted. Her parents made it clear to Luisa every time they saw her that they blamed her for her husband’s departure. They told her she was a disappointment.
Luisa’s son Gustavo was doing poorly in school. He seemed to be a bright boy when he started school, but the past year he had inexplicably fallen behind in his classes. His classroom had a lot of students, and the teacher didn’t have much time to figure out why he was struggling.
It seemed no one could figure out why Gustavo was falling further and further behind, but Luisa knew. She knew Gustavo couldn’t hear very well. She knew he always tried to sit at the front of the classroom so he could read the teacher’s lips. She knew he tried to hide his hearing problems. She knew he hadn’t explained to his new teacher why he didn’t want to sit at the back of the room when the teacher placed him there at the beginning of the school year. Luisa also knew she should take Gustavo to a doctor to get his hearing checked. She knew all of this, but something big was blocking her from acting on the things she knew.
When Luisa’s husband left, a dark chasm had opened in her life. His departure had sparked a relentless depression that blocked Luisa from doing the things she used to do. It blocked her from taking her son to the doctor and from talking with his teacher. Sometimes it even blocked her from leaving her bed. Luisa’s depression left her stranded in a single, lonely room with three small children and no prospects. She had no education, no job, no supportive family and no way out as her life steadily unraveled.
My heart filled with emotions, and my mind filled with questions as we sat talking with Luisa. Why didn’t the local social worker know about Gustavo’s problems in school? This was exactly the type of situation she had been trained to respond to. Helping families like Luisa and her children was why she chose to become a social worker in the first place. She had seen Luisa at program activities, but there had not been time or opportunity to sit and talk to hear Luisa’s story. Lidia was also moved by Luisa’s situation, so why hadn’t she helped? Lidia said she wished she had known sooner because she had the ability to help Luisa. She could have alerted the social worker. She could have gone with Luisa to the school to talk with the teacher and explain Gustavo’s hearing problem. She could have helped make an appointment with a local doctor, could have gone with Luisa to that appointment, could have helped raise money in the community to help pay for the treatment Gustavo might need.
There were people nearby who could have helped Luisa and Gustavo and would have been willing to help, but no one had intervened. Why?
MACRO APPROACH VS. MICRO PROGRAMS
The view of the world I carried in my head when I walked into La Cuchilla was fundamentally different from the view Luisa had from her bed in that dark room. I carried a view of La Cuchilla that was characterized by my program, which was designed to alleviate poverty, help people and indirectly change the world. I saw my program as an organizing reality around which many lives revolved. But there was no program at the center of Luisa’s view of reality. Luisa’s reality was organized around her regrets, her disappointments and her internal struggles to get through each day. Luisa’s unique and complex life experience was the organizing principle of her view of reality.
The Unbound approach emphasizes micro solutions to macro problems. Funding flows to families sponsored through the Unbound program for their specific needs and initiatives, instead of pooling money for a community-level project that may only fulfill the vision of a few. The Unbound concept of decentralized decisions means families have the primary voice in selection of personalized benefits and services and in making other key program decisions, allowing them to create their own paths out of poverty.
The story of reality we each tell ourselves is simultaneously always the same and endlessly different because each one of us sees ourselves as the organizing principle of reality. Luisa saw the world from a different perspective, but we both saw the world with our own interests in the center of the frame. It is human nature to view our life experiences as a movie in which we are the stars. I may be a hero, a villain or a victim. But the one constant is that I am the character at the center of the story. I am the character who is in every scene, and the other characters are supporting actors whose primary relevance to the central story occurs when they are in scenes with me.
Those of us who work for nonprofit organizations inevitably bring these assumptions to our work. Just as we each view ourselves as the central character of the movie of life, we view our program as the protagonist in a movie called “theory of change.“ This is how we tacitly view our program and its relationship with the typical array of stakeholders:
But that’s not how Luisa viewed her reality or her relationship with us. This was closer to the way Luisa organized the world:
Starting with the wrong organizing principle has profound implications for our theory of change. Using our program as the organizing principle inevitably leads us to make generalizations about the needs and interests of a heterogeneous group. One size has to fit all in a world where our assumptions cause us to search for the lowest common denominator shared among the group of unique individuals our programs seek to benefit. Listening to Luisa made the limitation of the common denominator visible to me for the first time.
Nowadays many organizations espouse a grassroots approach to development. A grassroots approach is intended to put people, rather than bureaucracies, at the center of development. At the beginning of a grassroots program, someone representing the nonprofit agency engages a group of community members to identify the key problems in their community. The community members articulate their primary needs (or strengths, if it is an appreciative inquiry approach), and the program representative works with them to devise a program intended to respond to the needs that have been expressed (or leverage the strengths).
Grassroots approaches point us in the right direction, but they don’t go far enough. Even grassroots development faces the limitation of the common denominator because programs are based on the assumption that the pressing needs and interests in a community like La Cuchilla are the same (or at least very similar) for all of the people in that community. But Luisa didn’t always go to community meetings much less speak up at them.
The grassroots approach is not so different from one-size-fits-all approaches; the scale is just smaller. Both approaches depend on a “basic common denominator” view of the community that dilutes the potential impact on the individual in order to serve the most common needs of the group. A grassroots approach removes the nonprofit organization as the organizing principle in its theory of change but immediately places the program in the same role. Grassroots programs reach people like Lidia, but they don’t tend to reach people like Luisa.
The founders of Unbound had a firm commitment to personal outreach from the beginning. They crafted a sponsorship model with that in mind. Sponsorship would allow individuals to commit to long-term support of a program participant and to build a relationship, two essential components to an individualized approach that someone like Lidia or Luisa could welcome into her world as a dependable partner.
Unbound seeks a radically personalized approach to development. But how could we even conceptualize a radically personalized approach to development that would also be coherent since individual needs and interests were endlessly different?
First we had to redefine our notion of program scale. We no longer had a sponsorship program for 310,000 children. We now had 310,000 sponsorship programs. That small shift in word order had enormous implications. Shifting the organizing principle of our view of reality to the families led us to a “micro-program” view of our work, in which:
•
Each program would serve one child•
The child and his/her family would be the center of that program’s theory of change•
Each family would define the objectives of the program•
Each program would be “staffed” by that child’s primary caretaker, usually the mother (The mother was nearly always the best advocate that child had, and she was already dedicating enormous energy toward positive outcomes for that child without expecting compensation for her efforts.)•
Each mother would manage the budget of her “micro program”We were reconceiving the purpose of our program. Our purpose wasn’t to create change for families. Our purpose was to open a space where families could create change for themselves according to each family’s definition of positive change. In order to open that space and hold it for the families to fill with their plans and goals, we began to focus our attention on two areas: certainty and connection.
THE PROGRAM
STAFF
LUISA
LIDIA
VOLUNTEERS
DONORS
LUISA
FINANCIAL PRESSURES DEPRESSION HEALTH CONCERNS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS CHILDREN FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS LONELINESS AND ABANDONMENT THE PROGRAM 3 4CERTAINTY AND CASH TRANSFERS
Certainty lengthens the decision-making horizon for many marginalized families. A decision-making horizon is the length of time you use to make important daily decisions. The decision-making horizon for families who have been marginalized by their societies is notoriously short. It is difficult for a mother to think about saving for her six-year-old daughter’s higher education when she is not sure if she will have enough money to feed her tonight.
Some of the choices people who are poor make appear illogical until you take into consideration the short decision-making horizon they are using. The success of the 310,000 micro programs we were funding largely depended on finding ways to meet the unique immediate needs of each family and extend the decision-making horizon of mothers and children so that they could more clearly envision how their daily decisions were related to their long-term goals. Many families who live in extreme poverty never pull together enough money and security to extend their decision-making horizon beyond a few days or weeks.
Highly personalized child sponsorship is a micro-program approach that creates a stable and reliable funding base for families living in extreme poverty. Receiving a small amount of financial support on a regular basis allows families a little more room to breathe and a little more space to maneuver around the daily obstacles that surround them. The recurring nature of sponsorship funding gradually lengthens a family’s decision-making horizon as they look beyond tomorrow and begin to allow themselves to set goals for next month and next year.
The global South is learning faster than the global North that individual poor families are the best stewards of the funds that are intended to lift them out of poverty. Governments in 26 global South countries have national conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) that provide monthly cash stipends to poor families, elderly citizens and other vulnerable groups. In the case of transfers to families, the parents are often required to do things like keep their children enrolled in school and take them for annual health checkups in order to be eligible for the monthly stipend. World Bank. Conditional Cash Transfer Report (2009): CCT Programs Now on Every Continent. Retrieved April 1, 2015, from
The impact of these programs has been rigorously evaluated across countries and cultures, and it is clear they are working. Kids are staying in school longer. With Oportunidades high school attendance has doubled in rural Mexico (Dirección de Comunicación Social 2008). Kids have better nutritional status. Brazil’s CCT has reduced the chronic malnutrition rate in northeast Brazil by a staggering 45 percent (Sawyer 2007). Poverty rates are declining. At this point there is not a question as to whether cash transfer programs work. The relevant question is why non-governmental agencies are not investing more heavily in this approach.
Readers wishing to explore more deeply the structure and evaluation of CCTs are encouraged to consult the overview provided by Joseph Hanlon, Armando Barrientos and David Hulme. (2010). Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Pres
The success of CCTs challenges the program-based view of the world that occurs when we see programs as the organizing principle of a theory of change and fail to view individuals living in poverty as the organizing principle of their realities. In order for the implementation scale of CCTs to reach levels similar to their proven level of success, we will have to overcome our program bias and begin to envision a world that includes micro programs with an individual at the center of a theory of change leading to outcomes she defines.
We will also have to dismantle the myth of the undeserving poor in order for CCTs to reach their full funding potential. Many people question whether poor mothers will make responsible decisions if they control the funding intended to help their children. These doubts reveal a subconscious bias against families living in poverty, a tacit belief that poverty is a character flaw rather than an economic condition.
The myth of the undeserving poor is pervasive, persistent and false. Across cultures and throughout history, humans have always tended to underestimate the skills and character of people who are economically poor. Yet no one is better at efficiently allocating resources for the benefit of children than a mother who somehow manages to feed, clothe and house her children on a couple of dollars a day. The daily survival of billions of children who live day after day in extreme poverty testifies to the remarkable stewardship, intelligence and ingenuity of mothers.
The myth of the undeserving poor blinds us to the fact that parents are better than programs when it comes to raising children. Certainly there are cases in which substance abuse or other intervening factors may cause a particular mother to make decisions that are detrimental to her child’s development, but those situations are rare and shouldn’t inhibit efforts to empower the vast majority who will make excellent decisions.
This understanding calls us to push both resources and decision-making directly to each parent for their own child. More than 40 percent of Unbound families now create their own personal budgets for how support will be used and make their own purchases with individual child bank accounts. And the number is growing. (Unbound evaluation findings 2013). Special situations can be handled on a case-by-case basis if we are serious about meeting the unique needs of each family.
A basic level of financial certainty over a period of time is the foundation on which a highly personalized approach to
development is built. The success of conditional cash transfers in overcoming poverty is well-established as an effective method for efficiently and effectively responding to the unique needs and interests of each family. But when we listen to people who have been marginalized, they frequently say that material assistance alone is insufficient. When I ask mothers from poor communities around the world what they want for their children, they often say something like “I want her to have an education and a good job.” But they often follow that dream of material success with another dream. “I also want her to be a good person.”
CONNECTION AND SMALL GROUPS
The mothers we listened to exhibited a tacit understanding that human well-being includes human connection as well as economic security. In Unbound we paraphrase these sentiments by saying that families didn’t simply want to have more; they wanted to be more.
Our conversations with mothers taught us that being more is achieved through deeper connections, not through overcoming connections. We began to see that the myth of the undeserving poor is not the only damaging myth about poverty. Another is the myth of self-sufficiency. Many anti-poverty programs and organizations espouse self-sufficiency in their goals and mission statements. The intention behind these statements is laudable, but our goal should not be escaping dependence on others, for that is part of what makes us human. No human being is truly self-sufficient. We all depend on other people, and other people depend on us. The fiber of our being yearns for connection, not separation.
Luisa did not suffer because she lacked self-sufficiency. She suffered because she lacked healthy interdependence with others. Fighting poverty means eliminating unhealthy forms of dependency that inhibit the flourishing of human potential. It means nurturing healthy interdependence in which each one of us gives and receives.
Healthy interdependence occurs when there is a dense and resilient network of human relationships. Like all of us, Luisa simultaneously contributed to and depended on a network of family, friends and neighbors. Her downward spiral began when parts of that network deserted her, both literally (her husband) and figuratively (her parents). Her decline continued because her depression prevented her from connecting with the parts of that network that would have helped. We are all susceptible to financial and emotional collapse if we are separated from the human connections that sustain us. It’s just more obvious when you’re poor. The role of anti-poverty organizations should be to strengthen local human networks of support, not replace them. Replacing human networks creates dependency; nurturing human networks creates interdependency. When a mother talks about wanting her child to become “a good person,” she is usually talking in some way about wanting her child to become a contributing member of an interdependent human network.
The microfinance movement has demonstrated the powerful role interdependent human networks can play in development work. One of the greatest achievements of microfinance programs was connecting individual success and group success in a scalable way. Borrowers in a microfinance program are organized into small groups. The success of the group depends on the success of each individual, and the success of each individual depends on the success of the group.
We began to see interesting patterns in communities where the mothers of sponsored children were organized into small groups of 20-30 moms. In many cases the moms came to value their participation in the group as much as the personalized benefits or cash transfers they received from the program. Like all people, they craved human connection, and they knew at some level that their existence depended on being a part of a healthy human network. But demographic shifts had cut them off from their traditional human networks, and gender practices had prevented them from connecting with new networks like non-familial relationships with other mothers in the community.
http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/0,,contentMDK:22063209~noSURL:Y~pageP-K:64165401~piPK:64165026~theSitePK:469382~isCURL:Y~isCURL:Y~isCURL:Y,00.html or http://bit.ly/1f0dHdP
The world is in the later stages of an enormous migration of historic proportions. This migration isn’t between countries or continents. It is a migration from the farm to the city. The urban migration that occurred in Latin America was most heavily in the 1980s and 1990s, and it is now underway throughout Asia and Africa. The human population crossed an important threshold sometime in 2012. For the first time in human history, more people now live in cities than in rural areas.
Many of the mothers we listened to are a part of this massive migration. The survival of their ancestors who lived in villages depended for centuries on tight networks of interdependence. Small rural communities tend to place a high value on human connection because the individuals in those communities have traditionally had few other alternatives to survive things like calamities, conflicts or crop failures.
As economies modernized, the cities became host to most new opportunities and jobs. Hundreds of millions of individuals and families made the painful decision to leave behind their rural lives that provided secure relationship networks but fewer opportunities for economic improvement. They went to the cities where they were more likely to find schools, jobs and a chance for an economically better life. Most took the risk knowing that they might not reap the benefits of city life immediately. They moved anyway, sacrificing their own well-being for a greater opportunity for their children.
When they got to the cities, they were disconnected from the human networks that had sustained them and their ancestors for centuries. Their new neighbors in the rapidly swelling slums came from similar backgrounds but different villages. Many of them had a desire to rebuild a human network in the slums. But the families around them tended to be transient and suspicious, and gender roles created obstacles to women connecting within these new communities.
Many mothers in poor communities around the world live lives of semi-isolation in their homes. Gender inequality limits their chance for an education and paying jobs. Social conventions often leave them in marriages with husbands who limit their connections outside the home, or leave them as single mothers spending every available moment in an endless effort to eke out an existence for their children.
The result of the great migration to the cities and gender roles isolated mothers and left them and their children even more vulnerable to the hardships that surrounded them. Many of the mothers in Unbound’s small groups did not know the names of the other women until their groups were created, even though they lived on the same block and passed each other every day. But there was a positive side to this tragic story of isolation and vulnerability. The isolation and injustice that poor women face as a marginalized group within a marginalized group stoke the human desire for connection and make many of them enthusiastic partners when a space is created to connect. They value belonging to a group more than most of us because many of them know what life is like when one is forced to face it alone.
Small groups provide spaces in the recently urbanized global South where healthy human networks can be rebuilt. Unbound has helped organize more than 200,000 mothers into 10,000-plus small groups in 20 countries.
They can also play a revitalizing role in rural communities like La Cuchilla where urban migration has decimated communities and degraded the resilience of local human networks. Rebuilding human networks is a slow and painstaking process of building trust. Exchanging names grows to exchanging pleasantries, which can grow into exchanging assistance in times of need. Ninety-one percent of mothers in the Unbound program report that they know at least three other women in their Unbound communities that they can ask for support when they encounter difficulties. (Unbound evaluation findings 2013). It may seem like a small thing, but being able to call upon a neighbor to look after your children for a couple of hours can mean the difference between a mother’s ability to earn enough money for one meal a day or two.
Many institutions and programs try to fill in the human network gaps that have been created by urban migration. Often this is necessary, at least for a time. But sooner or later those of us who work in development must shift our attention from filling gaps in the network to opening spaces where the human network can begin to heal itself and rebuild itself. In Unbound, 63 percent of mothers reported solving problems in their community. Nurturing human networks becomes critical when external assistance/ intervention is viewed through a lens in which the organizing principle of reality is a participant’s life instead of a program cycle. The above data suggests that programs can nurture human networks that are external to the program itself. The mothers served by Unbound receive support from sponsors and program staff, but the human network with the most long-term importance is with the other members of their communities. Those are the connections with the potential to last long after the program is over. In the end, the only sustainable outcomes of development programs are the ones that have been deeply woven into the fabric of the community.
CONCLUSION
At the end of that day in La Cuchilla I walked with the social worker back down the mountain. We had worked with Luisa and Lidia to create a plan that would reconnect Gustavo and Luisa to human and financial resources. The social worker would go with Luisa to talk with Gustavo’s teacher. She would take Luisa to a counselor who could help treat her depression. Lidia would check on Luisa frequently to see how she was doing and lend a hand on the days when the chasm in Luisa’s heart opened up. Sometimes Lidia would bring her sister or another friend, connecting Luisa with a new network of people who did not reject her because of her failed marriage or her depression.
I visited hundreds of homes in poor communities around the world in the years following that day in La Cuchilla. And I began to see a paradox. I never met another person like Lidia or Luisa, but many of the mothers I met reminded me of Lidia or Luisa. I began to see ways in which each of us is a unique and unrepeatable reality and yet we all share so much in common. I began to wonder if it was possible to honor each person as the organizing principle of their own reality while also honoring our
common human needs for certainty and connection. What we have learned about the paradox is this: if we empower individuals, community is not only possible, but with some encouragement is natural and beneficial to all its members.
I am fortunate enough to work at an organization made up of staff members and tremendously insightful families who ask themselves these same kinds of questions. They continue teaching me the lesson that Lidia and Luisa began.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Esther Duflo. Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. New York: Public Affairs, 2011. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso, 2006.
Dirección de Comunicación Social, Programa de Desarrollo Humano Oportunidades, “Oportunidades, un Programa de Resultados.” México: Sedesol—Secretaría de Desarrollo Social, 2008.
Hanlon, Joseph, Armando Barrientos, and David Hulme. Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2010.
Sawyer, Diana Oya. Sumário Executivo—Avaliação de Impacto do Programa Bolsa Família. Brasilia: Ministro do Desenvolvimento Social e Combate à Fome, 2007.
World Bank. Conditional Cash Transfer Report (2009): CCT Programs Now on Every Continent. Available at http://econ.worldbank.org/ WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/0,,contentMDK:22063209~noSURL:Y~pagePK:64165401~piPK:64165026~theSitePK:469382~is-CURL:Y~isCURL:Y~isCURL:Y,00.html.
91%
Know 3 others
they can ask for
help
90%
Believe they
have the power
to change
their family’s
situation
70%
Speak up about
ideas and
opinions
63%
Solve problems
in their
communities
59%
See themselves
as leaders in
the community
7 8