Dominic and Community Development

After our trip to Bannerghatta and then getting lunch, Augustine fully introduced us to his friend and former social work teacher Dominic. Originally from Goa, Dominic had taught social work at university before moving back into practice in the field of community development. He had spent most of his community development time working with tribal people of India. These people are indigenous people of India from before the historical human migration of Aryans south into the Indian subcontinent (they also moved west into Europe). The term ‘indigenous’ often has political connotations, so the policy of India is to refer to all Indians as equally Indian and indigenous, and to use the term ‘tribal people’ for the pre-Aryan people.

Dominic discussed with us background and experiences, his philosophy and attitudes towards social work, his personal perspective on development work, and probably more that I haven’t recalled. We also discussed religion, Indian food, history, and language, and anything else that occurred to us. Augustine ordered food to be delivered and we continued our talk over dinner and into the evening.

Dominic

The discussion was fluid and wide ranging, and we weren’t taking notes, but I have tried to summarise some of the main points about development work that I took away from our talk:

• You need to find balance between measuring outcomes and working on the process – development is a process, but in practical terms there is a need to justify the process to funding bodies by using outcomes. You need to learn how to present your data to show your effectiveness!
• There can be negativity attached to the idea of foreign workers going to work in development. BUT: People can be foreign to the places they are working in with development practice even if they share a nationality. It is more important to listen, learn, value the knowledges and practices held by the target population, learn their customs and language etc as well as possible (for example through ethnographic learning). Try to understand the significant issues that will affect the creation and implementation of plans; for example Dominic told a story of a development agency trying to use up the last of its budget before the end of financial year so that they would not lose funding for the following year. They went to a tribal area and wanted to know all about what development tasks would help the people in their activities. They hadn’t realised that there timing was incompatible with these tribal people. The people had just finished their harvest, and so now was a time where people could finally relax a bit, take it easy, and they traditionally didn’t do any kind of work at this time after working hard the rest of the year.
• Flexibility and ability to adapt are crucial. Your goals may not work out, your plans may not coincide with needs and wants of people you are serving, aims may need to adapt or even entirely change. But, great successes can also come from areas that you had never intended to work on.
• All development work is entirely and inextricably rooted in context. Not all details will be transferable across contexts, even if it seems you are working in similar or nearby places.
• Never begin development work with a project that has too many stakeholders, they will all have different ideas about what to do and how. E.g. education – it has curriculum, students, teachers, parents, community, funders/donors… this can be far too many contrasting needs and wants to manage if you are beginning development work, and can cause it to fail. To begin with things must be kept relatively simple.
• We are all a bit prejudiced, we can’t help it because we are all socialised in particular contexts and receive information from sources that have agendas, biases, or particular angles. We should always be open to others and critical of our own assumptions and judgements (not always easy!) We should create and use internal filters to prevent our biased thoughts becoming discriminatory actions.