Why What We’re Doing Isn’t Working

In our first episode of Season 2, Erica and Sam ask: what if some of our well-intentioned efforts to help people are making things worse?
Drawing on real experiences in Africa, they explore how traditional approaches to addressing poverty often overlook the strengths already present in communities, unintentionally creating dependency rather than lasting change.

Your hosts:
Sam Birondwa - Africa Director at Kurumbuka Leadership Solutions
Erica Asiimwe - Founder of Love & Hands and Executive Leaders Program Director at Kurumbuka Leadership Solutions

In this season, Erica draws on insights from Kurumbuka Leadership Solutions that she has applied in communities in East Africa through her work with Love & Hands.

Visit www.kurumbuka.org/podcast for more resources or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello, my name is Sam Burundwa.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

I'm Erica Asimwe and you're listening to the Crossing the Raging River podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Hello, my name is Sam Burundwa.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

I'm Erica Asimwe and you're listening to the Crossing the Raging River podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Erika and I are both the alumni of the Abanda Leadership Institute, LI. I serve as the Africa Director for Kumbuka Leadership Solutions, and Erica serves as the Executive Leaders Program Director. But also Erica helped found a social enterprise called Love and Hands, and she will be sharing more about that.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Thank you, Sam. I think I'm excited about this series that we are going through because we are going to be talking about the different approaches that organizations use. How do you choose the right approach when you're serving a community? When you're serving, if it's a church program that you are trying to lead, how do you do it in a way that you're not going to be creating dependency in the community? But also make sure that the situation is right for it.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

You know, you're not Do you want to take us through those models?

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Yes, I will take you through the models in the next episode. But there are four models that are there, and you have to know what model they are because each of them has an effect on you, on the outcomes of your program. Then after that, we're going to discuss a little bit about how to choose a model because it's one thing to know it, and then you have to choose it. Then we'll be introducing the core of our conversation, which is the asset-based community development, which is about how you can lead the community to make choices for themselves and mobilize resources from within the communities. That's what we'll be talking about in the next few episodes, and I'm really excited to chat with you about that.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Erica, today we start with uh a question. Every development worker fears.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Are we sometimes part of the problem?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

That's a very hard start for me to have to start by telling the truth, but I'll try to be gentle with the truth a little bit. Um, I think yes, sometimes we are part of the problem, and it's not because we are doing it intentionally. Many of us, when we start our work, we we do it out of a good intention. Nobody wakes up in the morning saying, I'm going to do this wrongly, wakes up in church and says, Oh, we are going to reach out to the poor because we want to do something bad to them. All of us think we are doing a good thing because we want to go serve people, we want to do it. But sometimes we don't know better. That's what has been presented to us. That's the only way we know how to do development, how to help people has been you go somewhere, you find a challenge, and you feel like because you have seen that challenge, you must do something about it. And the other day I was listening to someone on TV and he said he's helping African children by giving them food. He has started an organization that takes people to different countries, and then they go and help street kids by taking food to them. And he said he feels very good about that. So I felt like he's doing it out of a good intention. Although I could also hear that some of the steps he was making were not the right steps. When you give food to someone just once, it's not gonna change their entire life. So these are some of the things, the mistakes that we might be making without knowing. So I think we might, some people don't think they're making mistakes, but I think some of us we do it unintentionally, we make those mistakes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

So that that's that's amazing. So we we are not actually aware that we're actually hurting people as we do that, but our intentions are pure.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Unfortunately, it's not the right steps.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Exactly. And that was my story, you know. Uh, before I joined the Abandon Leadership Institute, I I founded an organization that you mentioned earlier, Love Enhance. And it started out of a heart of serving the community that I was living in. I moved into a community here in Kigali. At the time, I was surrounded by people who had a different life. I would not, I don't want to now, now that I know better, I would say, okay, this is what I was thinking about them. They were poor, their houses were not looking good, and I felt like I needed to do something. I felt like if God has brought me into this community, I must serve this community. And the only way I knew best to serve the community was to give what I had. I was just a young graduate, I didn't have a lot of resources, but I felt like in my life I was exposed to different things, including knowing how to speak English. So, what I did was I looked at the community, looked at the different challenges, and I found that the only way I could intervene was teaching children basic literacy, and I invited two children on the verandah of our house. And I do this is what is called a famous needs analysis. I asked two children if they could read by giving them a book that was written in English to read. And of course, they were not able to read. And obviously, if you understand the history of Rwanda, some people are French speaking. We are still learning how to speak English in some areas. So if you give someone a book, you're likely to have someone, the younger children, for example, have struggles with reading. So I validated the idea I already had by giving them a book and they were not able to read and starting a whole project around that. I invited two children from the community, they couldn't read. I asked them to invite others, and then we started a program in the veranda of our house teaching them basic literacy. So out of that experience of working with the children, the children started presenting more challenges to me. Some days they would come with notes from their parents written, or we did not have food at night. For the last two days we haven't eaten, and I would feel the need to give them food. So I would go pick food from my sister's house and give it to them. Then they would say, Oh, we don't have health insurance. How can we learn when we don't have health insurance? Then I would mobilize my church and the youth in our church to get health insurance for them. Like we would raise money, the basic health insurance. So the list of problems never ended, and the community kept presenting more and more problems. But one day that I'll never forget is the day that one time when we had moved to a new space and we were really struggling to keep the project afloat because the more the challenges grew, the more we needed to raise resources. I was in between classes. I used to clean, sweep everything, I would teach. I was literally an all-in-one person.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Doing everything by itself.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Then one of the parents comes and she asked me, Can you pay me so that I can help you sweep? And I was very disappointed.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

And this was a parent of one of the children.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

I had never asked for anything from them, you can imagine. And the only thing I wanted to do to hear from them was, can I help you? And at that moment, I felt so disappointed in them. I blamed them. I thought like it was their problem, they can't appreciate. This is the least thing. I know some of them do this for a living. Yeah. And they're asking me to pay them so that I can do it. It's because they had thought of me as somebody who is rich, who has all these resources that I have to keep pouring into the community.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Because that's the picture you'd presented to them.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Exactly. And this is where many of us start. When we go to places, we go and we start doing things for people. And the more we do, the more the people step back.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Interesting. Now that you mentioned that, does that explain why billions of dollars have been poured into Africa for development projects that actually do not succeed?

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Exactly. Because they are being led by people who don't understand the context sometimes. We think that we are doing a good thing. But the more we are giving to these people, sometimes the communities, the people that we are giving, we are creating a sense of dependency where they start to step back and say, Oh, you need to give us more. We gave you money for this. Oh, the money you gave us was not enough. Now we have a new problem in education. Now we have a new thing. And sometimes people have funded projects and years later they don't find them. Why? Because when people are just receiving, they don't sustain the programs. They tend to feel like it is your thing and not mine.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

That's interesting. When people are on the receiving end, they do not sustain the program.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Exactly. They don't. Because they were not part of conceiving the idea in the first place. In my story, you could hear that it was my idea that I was trying to make the community like. And I was doing everything. I was not inviting them. I thought like these people are incapable. Sometimes when you are coming from a privileged position, it's easier to feel like you have to do everything for that community. And then they are just supposed to receive. And because they are just supposed to receive, they develop a sense of dependency and they step back and do nothing after you leave. And your programs might not be sustainable in the long run.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

And that's not your intention in the first place. No.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

I don't think people do these things thinking we are actually helping the communities or the countries that we are working in.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

But in the end, then we create dependency and people are not actually involved in the same projects that is supposed to help them.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

And you know, Sam, it's not just big projects, it's not just countries. Even churches, you know, some of us have programs where we are reaching out to communities. And every time we think about going to reach out to the community, the first thing we think is what are we taking? What is our solution? We have this thing. Let's gather our clothes, let's put all this. The easiest one I always find is the handouts. Personally, I was not a fan of the handouts because every time we gave handouts, there was so much chaos. Communities felt like they were entitled to good things. I don't know if that has ever happened to you. Do you have a story around this or any experience where you have seen programs in this?

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Um, that reminds me of a story that I had in one community um in one country that I would not mention. But then uh this is like a nomadic community. Yeah. And so they keep moving from places to places, but also they are very strong on their culture, uh, not very educated. Some of them, of course, are educated, but those who live in the countryside, so this well-intentioned NGO comes and constructs pitolatrins because they don't use toilets or pitlatrins, they they use the bushes. They're like, oh, these people will die of corella or something like that. Let's just construct pillatrins for them. Now, in their culture, a a family, a family, a man and a and a wife and the kids cannot share the same bathroom, toilet, or pillatrine. And so you know what ended up happening? They closed the pits after building these wonderful structures all over the villages, and then they used them as crowds for their cows, for their cows.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

And this is, but yeah, I I think that's what you you're alluding to, that uh well-intentioned organizations or development workers, they come, but before they actually understand what that uh how they should help the community, because the the community was not involved in the first place. They just come with solutions.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Yeah, and what you are bringing out is actually deeper. Is sometimes what we think about it, we only the solutions we bring might be on surface level.

SPEAKER_02 11:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

It might be as easy as just putting up a toilet in a community. But we don't understand the cultures of that community that might stop them from making from using our our solutions. Yes. Sometimes people, uh sometimes we we are so passionate about bringing a solution, we we know that water is important, we know that education is important, and we see it from our perspective. Yes, but we don't understand what that community is all about. Even if we ask them what they need, we don't have enough time to learn their culture, to learn what is working for them, what they really value. And how is the best way to bring education? Because sometimes what they might want to do right now is put food on the table. But as an organization, we already have an agenda. We have to build toilets, we have to build schools, and what ends up happening when they don't use them, we get frustrated, or they get broken, and or we write down and we say, Oh, we did we built 10 toilets in this community and now let's go.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Mission accomplished mission accomplished, but purpose not served, not served.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

Activities, so many activities, yet nothing has been done. And then when our programs are not sustainable, we get frustrated. We say, We have been helping, like me in my story. I've been helping this community. No one can step up to help me. Yet our the first thing we did in the community was to do everything for them. And we'll be talking about that in the next episode. So let me not go ahead of myself.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Looking forward to it. So basically, uh it's it's when people are not involved, you come with uh already, you know, you already know what you want to do for the community, and then you do a project, and then it can't succeed because the people were not involved in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

And so, um, yeah. So, Erica, what can we expect in the next episode?

SPEAKER_01 13:38

I'm very excited because we are going to be going deeper into a diff different topics, and by the end of this episode, we are going to be covering some of the models of development that we we have. There are typically four models. That's what we're going to be going to in the next episode. And we are also going to discuss the fundamentals of asset-based community development, which is the core of this whole conversation.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

A B C D.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

ABCD. We'll be discussing it in the next episodes. We'll talk about the core principles of ABCD because it's very important to understand the core principles. We will be defining what is our role. If we are letting communities lead, because we'll be talking about that, then what is our role? I find that that is one of the questions that leaders really struggle with in our programs, even as we are teaching them. When they begin to understand that communities are capable, they start stepping back and feeling like they are not needed in the community. But that's not true. We are an asset in the community. So we'll be discussing that and we'll be talking about some practical tips of applying the asset-based community development that we can use in our churches, in our programs, as we are designing that. So I'm really looking forward to the conversation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Sounds interesting. Thank you for joining us today. We hope you'll join us next time for more episodes. Please visit our website kurumbuca.org slash broadcast.

unknown 14:58

Thank you.