Guest Writer - James Shelley

You have seen them thousands of times before: hungry, forlorn children on the television screen. And then, like a divine ray of numerical hope, up flashes a promising 1-800 number and the opportunity to “sponsor a child” in a developing country. You do not even have to be watching TV to encounter this humanitarian plea: child sponsorship organizations promote at concerts, put ads on Facebook, plaster billboards and syndicate material through the most distained communication medium in the world: junk mail.

It is hard to argue against the benefit of child sponsorship in the eyes of a fly-infested, belly-extruded child. What kind of cold-hearted bastard would not hand over their credit card number immediately? Very real and natural instincts provoke us with an emotional response (which, not ironically, the producers of these ads know full well as they go for your emotional jugular). However, this article exists to raise a very simple question: is child sponsorship the most effective way that you and I can be involved in the lives of children in the developing world?

My first “on the ground” experience with child sponsorship came when I visited a small community in the Dominican Republic. A number of my friends sponsored children from this particular village and invited me to go with them on a trip to meet the children they supported, visit their school, and get to know the community. I leapt at the opportunity: aside from all the commercialization and perforated envelopes I had never seen child sponsorship actually in action.

It did not take long before some alarming realizations were made. The sponsorship money of my friends had inadvertently ruined aspects of the village’s social cohesion. There were two classes of people: families with sponsored children and families without. (And since the organization my friends supported would only sponsor one child per family, the structure of nuclear families was often undermined. Clearly it was a decision made by some people in an office somewhere, and did not emerge from within the culture itself.)

Most disheartening was the rampant evidence of what aid workers call “dependency.” This sociological phenomenon arises when enough aid money flows into a country to actually “dis-encourage” citizens from actively participating in the growth and redevelopment of their community. To put it crudely: why bother trying to make things better if all these resources are just going to be constantly poured in from the outside anyway? It is a killer cultural attitude when it rears its head-and many international aid dollars have been paid to create it around the world.

It was a painfully depressing airplane ride home and my friends were very dejected. It was not that they felt that they had “wasted” their money; it was the feeling that maybe they had been a part of making things worse for the village than they already were. Of course, there is no way of knowing that, but the potential alone can become a haunting reality. The whole experience drove me to go beyond the emotionally suffocating television ads to learn more about other ways of being involved in developing countries…ways that maybe make a little more sense.

What I am discovering around the world are actually stories of hope. Here are some of the approaches that are re-defining the way people think about international development on the ground:

ABCD (Asset-Based Community Development).

Strategy: Start with what is present in the community, the capacities of its residents and workers, the associational and institutional base of the area (not with what is absent, or with what is problematic, or with what the community “needs”). The underlying assumption is that every community boasts a unique combination of assets upon which to build its future.

Appreciative Inquiry

Strategy: Local people are gathered together to use their understanding of “the best of what is” to construct a vision of what their community might be if they identify their strengths, then improve or intensify them. They achieve this goal by creating provocative propositions that challenge them to move ahead by understanding and building on their current achievements together.

Positive Deviance

Strategy: Assume that solutions to community problems already exist within the community. Identify and optimize existing resources and solutions within the community to solve community problems. (Example: Find the healthy families who are the poorest, find how they function in their context, empower them to teach the rest of the community. This affirms that communities are not “stupid”, clearly the solutions to problems can be found when people work together and learn from one another.)

I see a pattern: we, the Westerners, are waking up to the reality that poverty is not solved by money; it is solved by relationships. I am hopeful that this means we are beginning to shift away from top-down, needs-driven, oft-institutionally-crippled development approaches.

The neighborhoods of the developing world are no different than your neighborhood; what enables them to “work” is people who have each other’s backs. You can’t make that happen just by writing a check (but you can certainly screw around with the sociological landscape by sending money to a select few-imagine if some random people on the other side of the world arbitrarily sent a few checks for a million dollars to a few of your neighbors and you missed out).

The point of this article is certainly not to demonize child sponsorship, nor to ridicule those who support it, or even to steer you away from it. I do not want to paint a simplistic, binary picture of it. Precisely. Development and systemic poverty is complicated and complex-getting involved with it might mean some more headwork than signing up to deduct a few dollars out of your bank account each month. It is among the most intricate and convoluted issues on the planet right now. Be wary of simple.

Most important of all: questioning the viability of child sponsorship is NOT an excuse for doing nothing. Check out these links to learn more and support organizations involved in positive deviance, appreciative inquiry and ABCD development methods. Question them. Challenge them. Invest yourself. This stuff matters more than most of us can possibly imagine.

James Shelley is an author and humanitarian-at-large based in Ontario (Canada).