from Martin Hauszer

In the field of development cooperation participation was already an established notion and a regular ingredient of procedure at a time when in Europe only a very few specialists were even mentioning participation, and the debate about participation and sustainability had hardly begun.

This circumstance need not surprise us, given that the goal of participatory working presented itself much more immediately and directly in development cooperation than in Europe, where participation was frequently seen as an end in itself or as a supposed expression of “closeness to ordinary people”. In modern development cooperation empowering the relevant target groups is the central issue. Where this empowerment, this sharing of power and responsibility, is done in the right way, sustainability follows on its heels almost automatically.

In the 1970s to 1990s the great educator for liberation Paulo Freire set a shining example of this in South America; his “pedagogy of the oppressed” was a deliberate attempt to empower the poor and disadvantaged segments of the population so as redistribute power between the poor and the rich. His model contained so much sociopolitical dynamite that the theology of liberation which built on it was very soon anathematized by the Roman Catholic Curia, while corresponding sociopolitical movements (the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the revolution in Grenada, …) were combated by force of arms and suppressed by the government of the USA.

I’d like to briefly present an impressive example of such “grassroots empowerment” from my work in Ecuador. In Esmeraldas, a coastal town with a population of 130,000 and one of the poorest places in Ecuador, with extremely high unemployment and poverty rates, we started training so-called “Lideres” (disseminators) in 1998; their job was to organize the slum-dwellers around Esmeraldas. Their main activity was making it clear to the population in the slums, which had no mains water supply, no drains, no waste collection facilities and no regular power supply, that there was no point in going on waiting for help from the corrupt municipal government. Their only chance was to organize themselves, set up small production projects and soup kitchens for children and join forces with other slum districts (barrios) so as to put real sociopolitical pressure on the municipal government.

In fact it was a long, stony road and it took several years, but when the population finally realized their own strength and started to take the initiative, the municipal government of Esmeraldas was forced to react. Bit by bit individual district organizations in the “barrios” joined forces, because they found that collectively they and their demands for waste collection facilities, drains and so on carried much more weight.

The author Martin Hauszer spent two years working in a DC project in Nicaragua and six years planning and supporting participatory projects in Ecuador. Today he is active in Austria as a facilitator of participatory processes with groups and teams in the commercial and non-profit sectors.