Greetings,
readers, and hope this blog post finds you all well. I alluded in the
last entry to the seminar that Carla and I attended earlier this month, and now
I would like to expand a bit on what we learned....
Held at MS-TCDC, a training center for development cooperation located in beautiful Usa River, we conferenced amidst these colorful murals about African power and governance. The grounds were also abundant with vibrant flora and, of course, there was that fabulous library which I wrote about last week (https://toanafasi.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-clean-well-lighted-place.html).
Capacity 4
Humanity (C4H) was a conference dedicated to learning and capacity-building
innovations in Africa. It was put on by Humentum (https://humentum.org/),
a group of young, international development professionals who met forty years
ago at a workshop for financial managers in Washington, DC. Realizing the
common challenges they were facing, they began to share ideas and solutions,
and created a support group to give each other advice.
Focused on networking, human resources, and advocacy, Humentum’s mission is to inspire and achieve operational excellence for those organizations working for positive social impact. Their current membership is 350 organizations strong, offering 150 learning events in 20 countries this year alone.
[GLOBAL DIRECTOR, CHRIS PROULX, IS A BOSS.]
Focused on networking, human resources, and advocacy, Humentum’s mission is to inspire and achieve operational excellence for those organizations working for positive social impact. Their current membership is 350 organizations strong, offering 150 learning events in 20 countries this year alone.
[GLOBAL DIRECTOR, CHRIS PROULX, IS A BOSS.]
The C4H conference held on February 7th and 8th, 2018 was one such event.
In partnership with ActionAid and with support from CIVICUS, Gateway Academy,
Humanitarian Leadership Academy, and MS-TCDC, this conference provided a space
for capacity-builders and thought leaders in East Africa to convene,
collaborate, and learn from each other.
Sessions
included topics such as: Instituting Behavior Change in Local Communities;
Strengthening Capacities Among Responders and Humanitarian Organizations; How
to Create an Organizational Learning Culture; Fostering a Work Environment
Conducive to Learning Transfer; How Organizational Learning Will Make Stronger,
Happier Staff; and, Valuing Local Perspectives: Lessons Learned from
Participatory Reflection and Review Process.
[I
KNOW. IT'S A LOT.]
The keynote speaker was Adriano Campolina, General Secretary of ActionAid International. Even if he had not said it, Carla would have identified him as Brazilian, given his implicit reliance on Paolo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The key term for both of them is "oppression."
[OPRESSÃO.]
According to
Adriano, we need new approaches to capacity-building given current global
trends such as climate change, the rise of right-wing politics, joblessness,
disputes over natural resources, but most especially the erosion of
humanitarian values in the public arena.
[AMEN.]
Thus, we
need to: a) begin by reading the context of oppression; b) find ways to empower
local communities, working on the premise that knowledge comes from both within
and without; and, c) develop strategic actions that would include
consciousness-raising, economic empowerment, building alliances, and solidarity
movements. Most specifically, we need to be aware of the gap that exists
between national policies on the one hand and programs of the local level on
the other, and find a way to integrate them.
[END OF
STORY, AMEN.]
"Capacity-building"
is defined as the "process of developing and strengthening the skills,
instincts, abilities, processes, and resources that organizations and
communities need to survive, adapt, and thrive in a fast-changing
world." Specifically, in relation to NGOs, capacity-building
encompasses "actions that improve non-profit effectiveness," in terms
of organizational and financial stability, program quality, and growth.
One of the
conference-goers, a French woman named Victoria Fontan, told us how contested
this term actually is. Initially, it was invoked from a neo-colonial
perspective to indicate that the West was bringing its "vastly
superior" capacity-building knowledge to help former colonial
populations. More recently, local native communities have been fighting
back, insisting on their own specialized knowledge of local needs and capacity
to build. There is currently a struggle between these two opposing points
of view.
[HOT DAMN.]
Victoria is
the author of Decolonizing Peace,
available in both English and Kiswahili.
Victoria says, "Decolonizing Peace
offers a vivid critique of what I refer to as the "peace
industry" and the neo-colonial Northern addiction to helping, hence
infantilizing, the Global South. The book looks at social complex
adaptive systems for peace which do not rely on Northern funds, or well-meaning
peace missionaries. I use chaos theory, cybernetics, and panarchy as
post-Cartesian lenses to analyze the sustainablity and resilience of local
peace initiatives."
[DOUBLE HOT
DAMN.]
This got
Carla and me to thinking about the instability of power within organizations,
including our own The Toa Nafasi Project. The director (me) and board
(her) ostensibly have power since Toa is "our" organization.
But power may also shift to local authorities who may impose their own rules
(define who is and who is not a "teacher" or a
"professional") or to the staff who may accept or refuse to do the
work. So it would seem important to recognize these different forms of
power and to try to balance them out.
I think we are on the way to doing that now. Our "teachers" are
on the right track though they may not have the necessary qualifications or
certificates that local government authorities would like. However, the
training Toa provides them and the benefits they receive have professionalized
them. To a certain extent, even more than the government-employed
teachers.
Our
administrative/managerial staff takes a back seat to the work of these
professionalized, capacity-built native women, so that Adriano's main point of
empowering the local community and providing services on-the-ground while still
balancing the needs and wants of the central government and trying to effect
policy change is a part of Toa's agenda.
It's a lot
to process, and even more to think about and realize into action.
[I'D LIKE TO THINK SENHOR FREIRE WOULD BE PROUD....]
