When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett

Author:Steve Corbett [Corbett, Steve; Fikkert, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8024-8762-9
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2012-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

GIVING VOICE TO THE VOICELESS

In many poor communities, there is considerable diversity in terms of ethnicity, race, gender, age, religion, and socioeconomic status. Hence, it is important to make sure that each group has meaningful participation both because each group may bring a unique perspective and because participation is an important goal in its own right. In particular, it is vital to give a “voice to the voiceless” by looking for ways to make it safe for those on the margins to express their views throughout the process.

As mentioned in chapter 5, one of the central methods that can be used to engage a community is Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), a mind-set and associated set of tools that enable an outsider to facilitate a learning process in poor communities. PLA engages people, creating a safe and fun way for them to share their knowledge and to construct their own solutions to the problems they are facing.

The importance of engaging a diversity of perspectives in PLA is illustrated in figure 6.1, which shows the result of a PLA exercise conducted in a rural Paraguayan village. Men and women from the same village were separately asked to draw maps of that village and to note on the maps the frequency with which they visited each spot. Clearly, the men and women had quite different perceptions of their community! It appears that “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” in Paraguay too. A failure to include multiple voices in the PLA process would have caused everyone involved to have a distorted view of how the community as a whole viewed itself.

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