Why giving is good

 

Holiday catalogues galore spilled out of my paper this past weekend. I was struck by just how much stuff was on offer. Gift ideas for my sisters, my nieces, my sweetheart, my aunt and her cat! Trouble is that there is very little on offer that any of them really need and although there is a lot my nieces would say they want, they are at the age where I wouldn’t select a hairpin on their behalf. And while the kitchen implements are tempting in their holiday red, none of us have room for another appliance.

And the cat well…

So how to celebrate this season of giving? Is it by giving up? Or by giving in to the holiday hype?

I’m advocating all of the above. I plan to celebrate giving and giving up.

This year I am following Lawrence Hill’s lead. The three-time Crossroader and acclaimed writer (The Book of Negroes) started his holiday shopping by giving back to Crossroads. And so did I. I encourage you to consider making Crossroads’ Gift that keeps on giving a new part of your holiday tradition.

I have learned a lot about the power of giving at Crossroads.

Crossroads volunteers rarely talk about what they gave up to volunteer overseas. Instead they speak about what they got — how the experience changed the way they see themselves in the world and how the skills and lessons they learned changed their own lives.

The act of giving enriches them to be sure, but more than that, it enriches all of us by increasing understanding and by reducing the disparity between North and South.

Which brings me to giving up. For most volunteers the reality of working in the developing world is shocking at first. How am I supposed to build a database when there is only electricity for a few hours a day? ....Build a web site with dial up? ...I have to get permission from who before we can introduce a workshop? Crossroaders quickly learn to slow down, to seek advice, to listen well and to get creative to compensate for gross inequities and a dearth of resources. And for many, with the support of their host families and their local colleagues, they also get a glimpse of the richness of community life where relationships with people come first.

Crossroaders know it is not easy to know how to help. Many Canadians feel the same way. Just six per cent of donations made by Canadians support international development causes*. Not for lack of compassion witness the hundreds of millions of dollars raised to support victims of the Tsunami or the earthquake in Haiti. But long-term development and strategies to address the root causes of extreme poverty are often too nuanced for a fundraising pitch — hence the proliferation of goats as gifts and pictures of children in need. How can we be sure that these donations will actually make a difference in the lives of people on other side of the globe?

That is why at Crossroads we work with local partners to develop joint projects that advance their goals. We don’t set up offices or stand-alone projects overseas. Instead we invest in the people and organizations that are driving change in their own communities.

As for the hype, I am glad there is at least one time of the year to remind us that we're here for something other than ourselves. This holiday season I will be making time to be with friends and family and honouring those who inspire me half way round the world.

PS: Click here for a few goat-free shopping ideas that celebrate gifts that keep on giving.

*Highlights from 2007 Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating Caring Canadians Involved Canadians 2009.

Words into Action

Zimbabwean Women set example in fight for global equality

Recently I read Electing to Rape: Sexual Terror in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe a report from AIDS Free World, another optimistic and ambitious initiative co-founded by former UN Envoy Stephen Lewis.  

Page after page, women recounted their harrowing experiences of rape and brutality.  I felt like I had been punched in the gut.  Women with even the most distant connections to political opposition parties were targeted.  I had to put it down.

Of course, this was not the first time I had heard stories of the terror women withstood in Zimbabwe. In November 2008, Crossroads’ women’s rights partners gathered for a meeting in Cape Town.  For Zimbabwean women it was a respite. They spoke sombrely of the violence being waged against women and openly about fears for their own safety, even as they worked tirelessly to support individual women and to advocate for an end to the violence in their country.

So when I learned that CCI partner, the Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe, had been awarded the Canadian Council for International Cooperation’s (CCIC) Betty Plewes Award (recognizing their work in advancing women’s rights), my heart sang.  

Canadian Crossroads International accepted the awared on behalf of the Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe and all of its members at CCIC’s annual meeting in Ottawa May 27 as the National Coordinator Netsai Mushonga was unable to secure a visa to come to Canada. READ MORE

We can learn a great deal from these brave women.  In the face of brutal oppression and an economic crisis, the likes of which we have never seen, they continue to work and to raise their voices.

And of course it is not just women in Zimbabwe who are targeted.  In many countries where we work — Swaziland, Senegal — violence against women remains pervasive and debilitating.  Around the globe, the systematic use of violence against women in an increasingly militarized world is on the rise.

That is why it is vital for those of us in the North to speak out.  Not just in defence of colleagues and friends in the South, but in defence of all women.

At the widely quoted panel discussion Where is Canada’s Leadership on Women’s Rights (held May 3 on Parliament Hill with women’s rights leaders and parliamentarians of all political stripes) long time women’s rights proponent Senator Nancy Ruth offered sage advice to women’s rights advocates:  “Shut the f*#! up” or risk a backlash. 

Her advice, while a tad dramatic, was tactical and made with the best of intentions. But it was panelist Lydia Alpizar, Executive Director of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, simple response that stuck with me:  “I know of very few rights that have been won by keeping silent,” she said.  Alpizar warned Canadians that the apparent closing of democratic space to openly debate issues and advocate for rights in this country could also have serious repercussions for communities in the South, still struggling to define those spaces.

As has Alpizar noted “there are no magic bullets to achieve gender equality and women’s rights.”  Interventions such as gender mainstreaming, micro-finance and quotas for women in political systems are good ideas for which women have fought.  But “none of these either individually or together will necessarily empower women.”

So then what works?  What should be our role? 

The answer lies not just in what programs we initiate or support, but in how we do it. Our role is not to prescribe solutions to women in the South, but rather to work with them, to invest in them, to advocate for their rights and ours.  From the grassroots, as illustrated by the members of the Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe to national and international organizations, women and women’s groups are the driving forces in the fight for equality.  They are developing and implementing strategies to enable women to: live free from violence; increase their economic autonomy; assert their sexual and reproductive rights; and participate as equals in broad range of political spaces where decisions that affect their lives and communities are made.

Immediately following the discussion on Parliament Hill, our own government faced a barrage of criticism when it was revealed that more than 14 feminist organizations, including our colleagues at Match International, had recently lost federal funding and would be forced to close. Speaking in the House of Commons in defence of government cuts, the Hon. John Baird said “Mr. Speaker, let me be very clear. This government is giving a record amount of funding to support women’s groups. We do have one big criteria, we want less talk and more action.”

In my experience working in women’s rights in Canada and internationally for nearly 20 years, the latter is not achieved without the former.  Rights come first, programs to mitigate the impact of inequity follow. It is difficult to isolate the women’s organizations who deliver quality services, from those who demanded them in the first place.

The Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe is case in point. “During the violence we began realizing that we had to do much more in terms of peace building and in terms of intervening in the politics of the country,” Mushonga said in an interview from Zimbabwe. Women are particularly well positioned to forward positive social change, she said. While some men are still in “the fighting mood” women are invested in development and peace. Rather than leaving the public agenda to the men, women are staking out space to have their say.

While governments may be slow to recognize this critical relationship, it is meaningful to have a Canadian award that recognizes it.

Rethinking Development Effectiveness

I met a Crossroader a few days ago and she got me thinking.

Marina Salazar is a 32 year old volunteer from Cochabamba Bolivia. She works with Foncresol, a long standing Crossroads partner, focused on decreasing poverty through the provision of small business loans for some of Bolivia’s poorest people.

Marina came to Canada to work with Haida Gwaii Community Futures and the First Nation’s people on Haida Gwaii. Marina’s country is the poorest country in South America. The vast majority of its people live on less than $2 a day, so the goal she set for her placement might surprise you.

Marina came to Canada to help First Nations people use communal banks to work their way out of poverty.

It’s something she knows a bit about. Marina helps people, mostly women, to start small businesses. A key strategy for this at Foncresol has been communal banks. In these banks, the vast majority are women, as most women cannot secure loans from traditional lenders. Their only collateral is their trust in each other. “It isn’t just an economic strategy,” says Marina. “People have a chance to take leadership. It is a democracy. They decide who will be president, treasurer, spokesperson and they are accountable and if someone leaves the bank they are responsible for the payments.”

Over the last 11years, Crossroads has supported Foncresol in numerous ways. Canadian volunteers have supported risk analysis and market research as well as more mundane aspects of the work, such as systems development. CCI also helped expand Foncresol’s work with women by securing funds to expand microcredit loans for women. Foncresol now supports more than 200 communal banks. Marina told me of women who are increasingly able to support their families, to send their children to school and make decisions about their own lives. And no matter what happens, it seems, they repay their debt.

Marina’s journey to Canada was a long one. She tells me it is quite unusual in Bolivia for a woman to hold a position like hers. “The opportunity was very interesting for me and I thought it would be almost impossible to get. I thought, I am Bolivian, I don’t speak the language. The people in the North are smart. What can I teach them? … It was very scary to me. My boss said I had to win this position and we worked for four years. The project identified was to start communal banks with Community Futures in First Nations communities.”

“The First Nations people have so many problems, economic, social. But they want to start something; they don’t want to live as they are now with drugs and alcohol. Our clients in Bolivia want the same things. Around the world I think the dreams are the same. They want to wake up with security, with a job and not having to worry that tomorrow they will have food for their children. When I walked the streets in Haida Gwaii people would greet me, people knew I was coming to help start communal banks, it was very emotional for me that people trusted me.

“The experience was more than I was expecting. I understand that it is not only people in my country that need help. In different [ways] and forms… I can help people through my engagement. It was the best experience in all my life. This partnership has made me more committed to Foncresol. I think I will die with Foncresol.”

All this got me thinking. In the same week I met Marina, I provided opening remarks at The Open Forum on CSO Development Effectiveness, one in a series of consultations taking place in countries around the world. In honesty, I have spent considerable time in board rooms talking about aid effectiveness, but as this forum highlighted, the real challenge is how we increase development effectiveness.

The world has changed. Yes, tremendous disparity remains between North and South. Yet in many places, Bolivia among them, a strong civil society has emerged. And these increasingly powerful development actors are not without criticism of their peers to the north.

As northern CSOs we now contribute up to $25 billion a year to development efforts, with five of the largest international NGO families alone bringing together a total of $6 billion in development resources. That’s more than some governments.

We are vociferously critical of global leaders and donors’ failure to respond to changing realities of developing nations, but only recently have we formalized a critical look at ourselves. Are we, as northern CSOs, living the values of social solidarity, participation, transparency and respect? Are we really taking direction from local actors and priorities? How effective are we in contributing to development that empowers poor and marginalized populations and enables women to claim their rights?

Fellow Canadian Bernard Wood, the team leader for the international evaluation of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, has said “all development is indigenous, so that outsiders who wish to help must first and always work to empower and support. If we try to dictate or prescribe, we will never bring durable benefits.”

I think at Crossroads that is something we have always understood. It might be too early to judge if a fledging communal bank in Haida Gwaii will better the lives of the First Nations who have embraced it (although Marina is convinced it will), but we know our partnership with Foncresol is improving the lives of women in Bolivia. Marina, for one, now sees issues confronting her people and the people in Haida Gwaii as global issues and that she has something to contribute.

Australian aboriginal activist and educator, Lila Watson, once said, "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time..... But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

This is the heart of Crossroads approach. Although separated by unequal access to resources, cultural and linguistic barriers, we are inextricably linked in a common human cause. And everyday, we work to break down these barriers and build our common future.

How to help

Canadians outpouring of support to Haiti challenges our thinking on how to avert disaster for the world’s poor.

When new broke of the massive earthquake in Haiti, Canadians across the country asked themselves, How can we help?

The response was swift and impressive. As of January 25, Canadians donated than $80-million in support of relief and reconstruction. Within 24 hours the government had committed $5 million in aid and within 48 hours, more than $80 million was promised with an additional commitment to match all individual donations. Rescue teams, the disaster assistance response team (DART) and military personal were also dispatched. Less than two weeks after the quake hit, Canada convened a meeting of foreign ministers and key multilateral players in Montreal, to prepare for a spring leaders conference on the reconstruction of Haiti.

Canada’s longstanding relationship with Haiti — they are our second largest aid recipient after Afghanistan — eased our ability to help. Montreal has one of the biggest concentrations of Haitian Diaspora. Many Canadian relief and development organizations have worked there for decades. We know the country and its people.

We can be proud of the Canadian response. Canadians care. But increasingly Canadians are also asking, really, how can we help?

As a January Globe and Mail editorial noted, “With millions of dollars pledged and more than 10,000 NGOs operating in Haiti there is no shortage of good intentions.” Newspaper editorialists and ordinary Canadians are striving to make sense of what disasters of this magnitude can teach us about development for the future.

We know that in natural disasters, it is the poor and disenfranchised who suffer most brutally. Among the poor it is most often women and children who bear the brunt.

This disaster is all the more acute, because of the chronic and desperate poverty in which most Haitians live. As Peter Hallward in the Guardian UK noted poverty and powerlessness account for the full scale horror in Haiti. Earning less than $2 per day, ordinary Haitians have no ability to arm themselves against disaster with defences like earthquake resistant homes.

Haitian poverty, like poverty in countries where CCI works in West Africa, Southern Africa and South America, is no accident. It is the result decades of exploitation and oppression by wealthier nations. A history that continues to present day with global trade rules that favour rich nations and their producers while devastating national economies of developing countries; crippling debt obligations that siphon off resources that could be used to build sound infrastructure and services and impose conditionalities that force governments to curtail essential investments in public services like heath and education.

While it is critical that we support agencies on the ground striving to meet immediate urgent needs, we also need to look at how are our official development assistance and foreign policy, now and in years to come, can build and strengthen local resilience.

An important way to mitigate disasters like the Haitian earthquake is to invest in the resilience of people and their institutions. Reconstruction efforts need to support an independent and sovereign government that ensures basic human rights are met and that citizens are empowered to demand their rights.

The situation in Haiti and other fragile states will undoubtedly be discussed by G8 and G20 leaders when they meet in Canada later this year. Canadian civil society organizations, including Canadian Crossroads International, are hard at work trying to meet with government leaders to ensure past commitments are met, to renew and strengthen poverty-reduction strategies, with special emphasis on investment in programs for women and children. We are seeking government commitments to provide assistance to low-income countries coping with the effects of climate change and to instigate meaningful global financial reform to help all countries recover from the economic crisis. On Tuesday it seemed that the message was getting through. In an editorial, January 26, the Prime Minister acknowledged “it should not take a natural disaster to turn our attention to the less fortunate and that the world's poor have been hit hardest by the global economic downturn and in these difficult times we must address their pressing needs.” He stated that as president of the G8 in 2010, Canada will champion a major initiative to improve the health of women and children in the world's poorest regions.

Canada's commitment to playing a lead role in a pair of major new international aid projects is most welcome, but it has some Canadians asking where is the money? Currently Canada is giving only 0.32% of our national income in development aid. That's less than half of the point seven per cent (0.7%) we keep promising to give. In upcoming international summits and in Canada’s own upcoming budget announcement there is an opportunity to make good on past commitments and outline our vision for the future. Add your voice to these efforts and let our parliamentarians know that Canadians care deeply about these issues and believe that Canada can and should play a leadership role in developing and implementing the kinds of policies that will strengthen human rights and relieve the suffering of billions living in poverty.  http://www.makepovertyhistory.ca/en/set-agenda-action-g8