Should ‘development professionals’ partake in poverty tourism?

A UN-funded global meet. A ‘slum tour’ for 400 development professionals. A feeling of unabating unease. ‘Slum tourism’ hardly needs an introduction; it is practiced around the globe, from townships in South Africa to favelas in Rio; from Kibera in Nairobi to Dharvari in Mumbai. You pay a fee and are taken on a tour to see the kind of poverty you have previously only seen in charity appeal photos. Now though this poverty is right there in front of you in all its tragic, stinking, feverish glory. Birkenstocks totter across uneven ground and handbags are clutched tightly; worlds collide as tourists are ‘sensitised’ to the reality of life for the world’s majority.

No writing on slum tourism is complete without asking – is it crass voyeurism or enlightened travel? I do not want to get embroiled in the many debates that surround such questions here – they have been done to death and a quick Google will bring up a plethora of quality articles on the subject.

I want instead to focus on the dynamics of development professionals partaking in ‘slum tourism’. It is taken as read that exposure to ‘the field’, ‘the ground’, ‘the grassroots’ is crucial if we are to understand the current ‘development’ dynamics at play. I was always under the impression that ‘development professionals’ will, at some point in their career, spend a significant amount of time living and working directly with the communities where their roles play out. How wrong I was.

Empathy and development in the UK

Following on from the discussion about empathy in A Famine Buffet I’ve also been thinking about empathy in relation to development in the UK.  I campaign on development issues in the UK with a local group of interested and committed people. A lot of our campaigning involves setting up stalls on the local high street, talking to passers-by about the issues we work on and asking them to support our campaigns through signing petitions or letters to their local MPs. Learning the tricks of the trade – how to attract people’s attention, how to engage them and how to get a positive response all within about thirty seconds – is what has got me thinking about empathy.

A Famine Buffet

A bloated belly in Chad. An emaciated woman in Kolkatta. A skeletal frame in Sudan. Images of hunger are synonymous with poverty and in turn with ‘development’. I recently attended the launch of a global hunger report written by a large bilateral agency. The event was glitzy. The food was lavish. My conscience was in turmoil. The walls were covered in projected images of ‘hunger’ and against this backdrop we quaffed fancy wine, nibbled on canapés and satiated ourselves with an extravagant buffet. Food stuck to the roof of my dry mouth and the wine tasted acrid. I swallowed and made small talk as I imagined a new menu:

An ounce of maizemeal served with a side of integrity

Half a cassava dowsed in a sauce of veracity

A handful of rice accompanied by a clear conscience

What’s not to like about ‘development’? Gustavo Esteva

Surely wanting to help people is a good thing? Not necessarily so according to Mexican thinker and activist Gustavo Esteva. He is an advocate of post-development; an academic movement which calls for the dismantling of ‘development’ from the World Bank to international NGOs.

What does Esteva write about?

Esteva’s essay Development  asks “what does development actually mean?” He traces the history of the word to illustrate that ‘development’ is not something that has always existed. Rather it is an idea, something that has been invented.

My job ‘in the field’: a reflection

I live in India. I work in ‘development’. I was lucky; I graduated with a degree in Anthropology and immediately got a job working ‘in the field’. So I packed my bags and headed half way across the world to start a life far removed from my days as a student. I had been to India twice before for months at a time; I knew the country, its idiosyncratic quirks and off beat rhythms; its vibrant colours and potent smells; its sleepy villages and pulsating slums.

And far removed from all the guidebook photos of festivals and saris and yoga and wonders of the world, there is my office on a hill. I travel there everyday and sit at a computer. I write project proposals and grants and evaluations. ‘Development’ lingo says I am ‘working in the field’ and yet I can’t remember the last time I walked through a slum or a village – the places on the margins of Indian society where ‘development’ takes place.

So why do I live in India if the work I do could be done anywhere in the world?

Participation: people power by putting the first last? Robert Chambers

How can we thoroughly involve local communities in ‘development’? Participation is the answer according to the “undisciplined” academic and ever energetic practitioner Robert Chambers, based at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex.

Following widespread criticism of conventional top-down technocratic interventions, the concept of participation has emerged since the 1990s as an essential element of a people-centred ‘development’ paradigm which aims to put the poorest first.

This is the first in what will hopefully become a series of “digests” of some academic ‘development’ thinkers, exploring their main ideas and provoking a discussion about how they may and may not be useful.

Why ‘Youth Development Voice’? Background to this blog project

This blog is a space for young people who work in and around development to write about and reflect upon our views, experiences and the lessons we are learning from working in this sector.

We are young people who feel compelled to contribute to reducing global inequality in some professional capacity. We have specialised in international development whilst at university where we were confronted with insightful, intelligent and astute critiques of international development. We therefore recognise that ‘development’ comes with complex historical, cultural and moral baggage tied into ex-colonial relations and the power dynamics that this creates between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries.