In an excellent piece from Devex, intercultural communications specialist Emily Braucher talks about the need for real communication between development workers and project participants and beneficiaries.
In development, it is known that in order for projects to be sustainable and produce long-term benefits, it is necessary for beneficiaries and other stakeholder to meaningfully participate and be involved from the very beginning. However, there is a difference between recognizing this importance and actually creating a participatory process. Emily discusses one key gap - listening without communicating.
For example, she describes one story of a project to improve household access to water. In theory, this sounds like a great idea - making it easier for families to have water, reducing time needed to collect and transport water each day. However, one piece of information was missing:
Had development professionals not instantly assumed that walking to a well was a burden, they might have realized that the water faucets installed inside houses in a remote African village were cutting into women’s sacred time. Women in that particular area considered their journeys to collect water as time out of their homes.
Read the full article online via Devex here: https://www.devex.com/en/news/the-blindest-blind-spot-what-effective/80248
