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.
