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Kate Jongbloed (Canada):
Working with CAPAIDS in Ethiopia
(September 2006-July 2007)
Organization: Canada-Africa Partnership on AIDS (CAPAIDS) provides resources to grassroots community-based organizations that are on the front lines in the battle against the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa.
Project: Microeconomic empowerment for HIV-affected orphans
Slipping between two corrugated iron walls, down a narrow pathway, I entered the two-room house of Makeda Girma*. I met with Makeda as part of my internship with a non-profit organization in Ethiopia working to combat HIV/AIDS. At 18, Makeda had been responsible for her 4 year-old daughter and her younger brother and sister since her mother died of AIDS three years ago.
The project provided vocational training and start-up capital to 340 adolescent orphans who were guardians to their younger siblings since the death of their parents due to AIDS-related illnesses. Implemented by four local HIV/AIDS service organizations in Ethiopia and Uganda, the two-year project was supported by CAPAIDS, a small Canadian NGO.
As an undergraduate International Development Studies student, I joined the project to fulfill the work-experience component of my degree and conduct field research for my thesis. Coming from an academic program that was very critical of development, my expectation was that I’d have very little to contribute and that the experience would be one for learning rather than doing. I was very conscious of not trying to “fix” or “help”.
When I arrived, the project was already under way. I took some time to get familiar with both organizations and learn about their projects beyond the one CAPAIDS was supporting. It became clear that I wasn’t just going to be a passive bystander and that there was a specific role that I could fill. As the only CAPAIDS representative in Ethiopia, I became the connection between Head Office in Canada and the two local organizations making the project happen. Sometimes this meant that I was the “donor police,” helping the two organizations stick to the project agreement, and sometimes it meant that I could help relay messages from the Ethiopian organizations’ for future support from CAPAIDS. Because I was familiar with the demands of the donor organization, I was put to work doing all the required paper work, freeing up the project officers to spend more time on project activities.
Because of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)’s policy, it is very difficult for non-Canadian NGOs to access funding unless they partner with a Canadian NGO. CAPAIDS works to identify grassroots HIV/AIDS organizations in Africa and help them access Canadian funding. I found this approach really positive as the organizations were very responsive to the communities where they worked, tackling AIDS through home-based care, psychosocial support, orphan care, scholarships, nutrition projects and microfinance. The difficulty came when the organizations wanted to modify project activities: CAPAIDS was responsible to CIDA, which limited its flexibility.
Part of my responsibility included conducting research for my thesis, looking at how microeconomic empowerment affects adolescent orphan guardians’ risk of contracting HIV, which is how I met Makeda.After receiving training in hairdressing, Makeda was preparing to establish a salon business with other project participants. She also told me that after each day of training, she would teach her younger sister the skills that she had learned, hoping to include her in the business one day.
I was really impressed with how the project affected the lives of those involved not only economically, but also their self-esteem, social networks, physical safety, and reduce stigma. If you’d like to read more about the impact of the project, you can link to my article Preventing HIV/AIDS through Microeconomic Development here: http://unpackingdevelopment.com/?page_id=48
*Name has been changed.
Mark’s Story as Ecuador Country Director for Manna Project International
Since August 2007, I have been working outside of Quito, Ecuador with a small NGO called Manna Project International (MPI). MPI grew out of the dream of some Vanderbilt students in 2004 as a sort of Peace Corps alternative – rather than two years of working solo in a strange land, MPI volunteers serve for one year in groups of seven to ten, at one of MPI’s two international sites.
I started my MPI career early, inspired and humbled by a trip that MPI’s founder Luke Putnam and I took to Lima, Peru. Shortly after our group’s week playing and working with street children at an orphanage there, Luke had decided to start MPI in Managua, Nicaragua. He asked me to help set up MPI’s first campus chapter at Vanderbilt.
Four years later, we launched MPI’s first international expansion to Quito, Ecuador. Our starting group of yearlong volunteers (which we call Program Directors, or PDs) came from five states and four different universities, and have been trying – with mixed success – to apply the scattered and bookish knowledge of community and international development we learned about in college. MPI is commited to holistic development, picking a single geographic location rather than a programmatic theme as its focus.
What has bubbled up from all of the experimenting at the MPI-Ecuador site is what we believe to be a comprehensive and informed approach to community development, based on two related development methodologies:
1) The World Bank’s Social Capital Assessment Tool (SOCAT) asks detailed questions about social cohesion, communication, and collective action, focusing on assets rather than on problems and needs.
2) Northwestern University’s Asset-based community development (ABCD) also shifts attention away from the needs of a community. Instead, it looks for the capacities and assets that a community already contains, with an eye to connecting people and strengthening institutions.
The first step in this process has been a series of surveys drawn from SOCAT and ABCD asking community members about their own skills and resources in their community – generally avoiding questions about what problems exist in those neighborhoods. In practice, what this means is that as a result of surveys, we may not know the prevalence of parasites in these neighborhoods, or how many people feel unsafe after 10:00 at night, or what percentage of residents consider public transportation to be inadequate. What we might know is where someone in the community can find midwife, or who might be capable of establishing a cooperative of local corn producers, or whether there may be English-proficient neighbors who can help tutor students before they go to high school.
Why is that important? First, it’s proactive rather than reactive - building up strengths rather than plugging up holes. Second, it focuses (positively) on the assets a community has rather than (negatively) on what it lacks. Third, it provides the community itself with a tool – a local “who’s who” of sorts – so that everyone can see where their community’s strengths lie. Fourth, it precludes outside organizations from (often vainly) assuming the mantle of responsibility for change in the community, and devolves it to the community itself, where it should be in the first place.
We are quickly, and anxiously, tabulating the results from our 400-plus surveys, and have already begun to do some groundwork for some rapid response programming that will begin to flesh out MPIE’s threefold focus: Empowering Individuals, Strengthening Institutions and Building Networks. We’ve got our work cut out for us – but hopefully, with the end result being that we’ll help these communities cut out some work for themselves.
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Mark is the Ecuador Country Director for Manna Project International. You can email him at mark(at)mannaproject.org or read more about MPI-Ecuador at mpiecuador.blogspot.com.
