Is it Time to Get Our Hands Off the Steering Wheel?
If you’ve paid attention to the global development sector in recent years, it seems like we’ve reached a critical moment: now more than ever before, we have a clearer sense of the problems communities all over the world face every day. Revolutions in data and communication have given those of us who want to make the world a better place an increasingly fine-grained picture of which communities and ecosystems are most at risk.
The global commitment to access and equity in the form of the UN’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals crystallized seventeen actionable avenues for making tangible, positive change into the middle of the twenty-first century. COVID-19 and the economic fallout there from, moreover, have further clarified the deep fault lines of inequity around the world.
It seems, to me at least, that we have a really good sense of what’s going wrong. But what, exactly, do we do with that information?
How do we translate lofty ideals and global development goals into lived realities for the most marginalized people and environments without causing more harm than good?
That picture is a lot fuzzier, but it is the one on which we must come to understand before moving forward. In the COVID and post-COVID world, too much is at stake to answer incorrectly the most pressing question of our day: How do we go about trying to make the world a better place?
I’ve spent my career in the education sector, working first on domestic education policy in the United States and, for the past decade-and-a-half, in the global education movement, focusing specifically on girls’ education.
Millions of girls around the world are out of school simply because they’re girls.
Intergenerational poverty and problematic gender ideology lump much of the burden of subsistence on women and girls while devaluing their roles in their communities.
This is first and foremost a violation of their human rights. It also prevents girls and their communities from building long-term pathways out of vicious cycles of poverty. There’s a lot of work to be done to reverse this. HOW we do that work is of critical importance.
I started doing this work in 2007and in my research, I dug deep into the challenges facing girls all over the world and began investigating the few initiatives that at that point focused on girls, equity and education. My search met with frustration.
Too many of these already limited initiatives placed a premium on outside intervention, leadership, western thinking and problem-solving over organic, community-driven action. Too many of the interventions, especially those funded by the big players in global development were short-term, non-holistic programs that did not seem destined for creating enduring change. The efforts to ‘build schools’ but not invest and commit to pedagogy, systems, learning materials and sustainability left the implementer with a deliverable but often the local community no better off in the long run.
What was the ultimate outcome of programming or infrastructure building that perpetuated imbalanced and unequal relationships between granter and grantee? Why were local actors, who knew their community best, often left out of the final decision-making? There had to be a better, more sustainable, and more equitable way of doing things.
In 2011 I went to Tanzania to meet an incredible and well-tested group of local change-makers, the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Africa. These Tanzanian religious sisters’ mission focused on the most vulnerable and marginalized members of their community. They ran programs for pregnant teenagers, children who lived on the street and children with disabilities–society’s castaways. They were there for the most at-risk members of their community when no one else was. The sisters felt they could have an even larger impact by empowering women through the power of quality education. They dreamed of building a model, high-quality residential school for girls in a remote and under-served region where only a small percent of girls ever completes her secondary education.
Their aim? To break the chains of generational poverty while empowering women and freeing them from still-practiced destructive cultural practices such as Female Genital Mutilation and child marriage.
Their greatest barrier to creating that change? Access to the necessary resources. They knew their community better than anyone, and they knew what it needed. They also knew what it didn’t need — control by outsiders whose own short-term interests often overshadowed the actual priorities of the community they sought to “help”.
Here was an unmatched opportunity to support a community-designed initiative that had the potential for long-term systemic transformation and replicability in a sector which I believed desperately needed a new theory of action.
In response, I founded the Girls Education Collaborative in 2012. GEC was founded as a nonprofit that could begin by supporting the sisters vision in Tanzania and if the pilot tested well, could then support efforts like theirs all over the world. As our name suggests, collaboration is at the heart of GEC’s work: we didn’t want to tell the sisters or other communities what they needed or give them things they didn’t — we just had to listen to those who knew their communities best. For GEC, collaboration is not a sales pitch but rather an organizing principle.
Collaborative is in our name because we believe that the only way to permanently reduce the number of girls out of school is to support and sustain the vision of local change makers already on the ground.
On the micro level, that meant raising the money and providing technical partnership to help the sisters build and now grow the Kitenga Girls Secondary School.
On the macro level, that means leaving space for expansion of our work beyond Kitenga because for the girls education movement to achieve long-term change, we — philanthropists and sector specialists — need to support local thinkers and doers around the world.
That means de-centering ourselves from the narrative, being willing to relinquish the steering wheel of any given project, leading with open ears and serving hands, and giving up on proprietary models of doing things a certain way. Our current collective introspection on equity and racial justice leads to the same conclusion.
Is it time to willingly release our hold on the steering wheel so others may drive?
It is.
