Over the course of the last week #StopChildMarriage has been trending on Lifeline’s twitter account, no doubt because we mostly follow other NGOs, charities, international agencies, etc. Today one tweet made me stop and think about what is really driving this trend, and to a greater extent, development work as a whole. The tweet read, “You could be 15 & married. Uncomfortable? Me too. This is unacceptable.” This sentiment made me stop and think; are our good intentions for the developing world driven by discomfort with cultural difference?
I am certainly not advocating child marriage. Rather I’m asking, is something unacceptable simply because we’re uncomfortable with it? More importantly, is this discomfort with a culturally different “big picture issue” preventing us from understanding and addressing the culturally specific root causes of said issue? It seems unlikely that anyone in the development sector will be able to stop child marriage. Rather, it seems more likely that child marriage will someday end once the development sector collaborates with each community affected by child marriage to address the root causes of child marriage in that specific community. Maybe instead of #StopChildMarriage the hashtags could read #GirlChildrenDeserveEqualEducation.
What does all of this have to do with ILF? At ILF we know that more than any other factor, the success of any program depends on the community’s willingness to embrace the project. With this in mind, ILF designs a new stove for every community that we work with. We do this because we want to ensure that each stove that is distributed or sold is culturally appropriate and accepted. That way, more people will use our stoves and they will use them for longer periods of time. Then, someday, when enough people have integrated a fuel-efficient stove in to their daily routine, we as an organization can have a positive and substantial impact on curbing deforestation and indoor air pollution. Our programs hinge on embracing cultural difference so that we can address the “big picture issues” of deforestation, driving force of climate change, and indoor air pollution, killer of 1.9 million people every year.
If ILF was less focused on cultural adaptability, our hashtags (if we ever used any…) would read #StopGlobalWarming or #StopPrematureDeathInSubSaharanAfrica. Sure, these are the issues that we are ultimately trying to address, but more acutely we’re trying to address the underlying issues that make these global crises local realities in specific communities. We’re glad that we #ReduceBiomassConsumption and #ReduceIndoorSmokeInhalation. We’re glad that we work with communities to develop culturally derived solutions to global problems. If we in the development sector could put aside our discomfort with culturally different “big picture issues” then maybe we could work with different cultures and communities to more effectively address the root causes of these global, and yet culturally different, “big picture issues.”
Rachael Reichenbach
Program Assistant
Washington, DC
