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Dialogue at the Grassroot Level: The Shiksha Karmi
Project in India
Uno Winblad 1
Meaningful dialogue?
A prerequisite for a meaningful dialogue is that we can identify and involve
the intended beneficiary. Between the intended beneficiary and the donor
there are several levels of bureaucracy – all of which do not necessarily share
the values and visions of the donor or the needs and desires of those that
the donor wants to reach. My experience as a field worker, researcher and
teacher in Africa in the 60s, 70s and 1980s is unequivocal: during those
years I met very few senior government officials or politicians who were
genuinely interested in the development component of the foreign aid. His
(at that time they were always male) main concerns were rather: What type
and how many 4-wheel drive vehicles would we provide? And what about
a new office building for the department?
Officials at some of these levels understandably feel threatened by the
prospect of a direct dialogue between the intended beneficiary and the
foreign donor, a dialogue emphasizing transparency, openness and honesty.
For the ruling class such dialogue is a subversive activity. The dialogue must
be controlled and can therefore only be allowed if conducted through ‘official
channels’.
A real dialogue is only possible between equals. At a rhetorical level we
are of course all equal, but in a world of donors and recipients some tend to
be more equal than others. This is obvious in the case of the rich donor
representative versus the poor farmer but most equal of all tend to be those
representing the higher levels of the ruling party in the receiving country.
However, I have encountered a meaningful dialogue a few times in my
40 years of relating to development aid. The prime example is the Shiksha
Karmi Project in India, a case where direct dialogue between donor representatives
and the intended beneficiaries actually influenced the implementation
of the project.
1 Uno Winblad (Sweden) is a development worker with 40 years’ experience of projects in South
East Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Central America. He was trained as an architect/
planner in Sweden and England. His main fields of activity are environmental hygiene, physical
planning and education. Since June 2002 Uno Winblad is a Visiting Professor at the Graduate
School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Japan.