"I have only one request./ i do not ask for money/Although I have need of it,/ I do not ask for meat.../ I have only one request,/ All I ask/That you remove/the roadblock/From my path."
— Okot P'Bitek, "Song of an American Woman"
Perhaps my pace had been more my agenda than theirs.
Meanwhile I found myself frustrated once again by development "experts" who looked in from the outside and suggested clever solutions that created a lot of noise, distorted markets, resulted in systemic corruption, and accomplished little.
How do you define success? How do you know you've been successful? How do you know what you're seeing without real measures of accountability? And how do you know when you've failed?
We should learn from failures, but we have to name them first, talk about them, learn from them.
Is corruption a cause of poverty, or is poverty a cause of corruption?
There might be some chance that you give them money if they answer your questions in the way you want to hear them.
...Stephen Biko, who understood that freedom is not just about political liberty, but also economic independence and the power of choice.
If women had been given a chance to borrow for a project they believed would generate income, they would have focused more seriously on the work. A market mechanism would have provided a better feedback loop for both women and donors. Instead, the system festered under low expectations and mediocre results.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment