No-Nonsense Guide to International Development, 2nd Edition by Maggie Black

Author:Maggie Black [Black, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771131421
Google: LBfPBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2007-10-01T11:39:58+00:00

A new focus on software

Thus the upending of Western models for social advance provided the laboratory from which emerged today’s development tenets: ‘participatory’, ‘decentralized’, ‘empowering’, ‘knowledge transfer’ and the rest. This was the ‘how’ – the software ingredients which knocked from their pedestal the all-powerful hardware ingredients and their technical overlords – engineers, planners and scientists. The new emphasis on processes, their stimulation and their management, was a useful corrective to the old idea that development was all about buildings, installations and technological devices. But it also helped to introduce a degree of incoherence. If what a community wanted were a year-round water supply, a functioning village dispensary and a school with teachers, books, desks and pencils, it was hard for them to appreciate that a ‘knowledge transfer’ or ‘attitudinal change’ would do the trick. Tangible benefits were also needed, and sometimes the pendulum swung too far in the software direction.

However, in the course of flirting with alternative approaches or at least with some of their tenets, the diverse nature of ‘the poor’ became more visible: poverty was not a uniform phenomenon and its victims could not all be lumped into one conceptual basket. The particular predicaments of women were increasingly recognized; children as a sub-group also become more noticed as an outcome of social disintegration and family breakdown. Concern was also focused on those threatened with indigence because of war or famine displacement, disability, family disaster, or chronic illness including HIV/AIDS. The circumstances of target population groups, and their existing beliefs, attitudes and practices, began to be accommodated in planned activities in which they were to participate. The Master Plan approach gave ground to the plan developed on site and tried out on a small scale before going into overdrive.

The HIV crisis

The HIV/AIDS pandemic emerged in the 1990s. Since women and men in the prime of economic life are mainly affected, the infection devastates household economies and leaves children and the elderly without means of support. Africa has suffered disastrously, containing 70 per cent of those infected and 80 per cent of AIDS orphans. Of the five million new infections in 2004, one third were among young people aged 15-24, with girls and women especially vulnerable. In the worst affected areas, the under-five mortality rate is expected to double by 2010.

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