Participatory Community Development - Its Origin

Let’s start with this.

I believe it is the right of every single person, whether man or woman, adult or child, rich or poor, to participate in the making and carrying out of decisions that affect their lives.

Perhaps it sounds like plain common sense. After all, you wouldn’t want someone to go to your home, look around, and then tell you how to live your life or how you should work or how you should raise your kids.

But this is what is happening every day all across the world under the guise of international development. Even in countries that call themselves democracies.

Highly paid experts, called consultants, are constantly telling people that have been identified as “marginalised” or “socially excluded” or whatever what to do. It is usually done in the form of a report submitted to the organisation that pays them: a Ministry, World Bank, USAID, DFID, to name a few.

Because you are poor or a commercial sex worker or an indigenous person, for example, you are supposed to be too stupid to figure out why you are poor or why you’re not getting your piece of the economic pie. You need an expert getting paid $1,000 a day plus expenses to tell you why you are in the mess you’re in. And it is usually someone who has never been in your shoes and is just visiting, of course for the purpose of helping you.

When I was with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, based in the then regional delegation in Panama, I had a chance to work with the Embera in the Darien. They are among the poorest and most discriminated against people in Panama. They told me that they were sick and tired of so-called experts flying in with pre-conceived ideas and projects and wanting the indigenous people to sign off on them. This was supposed to be a participatory approach to development. They didn’t buy the label.

I have heard the same complaint around the world -- from Siberia to the Amazon, from the United States to Russia, from Europe to Southern Africa – stop treating us like objects.

In the late 1990s I experimented with something I called Participatory Community Development . PCD for short. I can’t claim credit for the title. I can’t even claim credit for the elements that make up PCD. I just took what existed – ideas, methodologies, tools, etc. -- and put them together in such a simple way, that when this method was first used throughout Hungary, it made a difference in the lives of people (impoverished Roma, hungry pensioners, adults and children with disabilities) almost right away.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has since turned PCD into a programme; it has spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe and into the Caucasus.

Maybe it should be used in Western Europe and in North America.

Next: How does PCD work?