Category:Culture and development: Difference between revisions

Example: Color and meaning in Bangladesh

When some organizations identified wells in Bangladesh as contaminated with arsenic, they were marked - red dots for bad wells and green dots for good wells. However there are behavioral barriers: people don't like unfamiliar wells; they can't see the effects of arsenic immediately; and people without experience of traffic lights may not know that red is bad and green is good.^[1] In fact, Bangladeshis like the color red more than green.^[2]

Blogger (and law professor) Eugene Volokh writes:

Not that this means you shouldn't do anything -- on the facts reported in this article, it seems pretty clear that it's better to have today's arsenic problem than yesterday's cholera problem (but then again, the article doesn't give enough information to say that for sure). All I draw from the article is that public health and development planners -- and any policymaker -- should have a sense of humility about the solutions they propose.^[1]

Another issue is red-green color blindness, though this mainly affects men, whereas women are the ones who most often collect water.

Community participation in development

In recent years development work has shifted from a top-down approach to a bottom-up approach. While sometimes this is rhetoric, there is also a recognition that participation (and preferably initiation) by the community is essential to an effective project.

This approach is more costly and time-consuming, but is also more cost-effective as it gives much better and longer-lasting results.

Three caveats:^[3]

• Participation is not a panacea, and does not suit every circumstance. The mother of a child dying of diarrhea does not want to "participate".
• Beware of manipulation - conscious or unconscious, e.g. when a "participatory social communicator" has preconceived ideas.
• Remember the opportunity cost - villagers do not have endless free time, and may be giving up time on productive work in order to participate.

See:

• Wikipedia:Participation (decision making)
• Wikipedia:Orangi Pilot Project
• The World Bank Participation Sourcebook

Latrines and gender equality in education

What do latrines have to do with education? Two of the Millenium Development Goals, one for universal primary education, and the other for gender equality, combine to generate the link to latrines. A web search for "girls education latrines" turns up numerous discussions that one of the barriers to girls attending primary school is a lack of safe and private latrines. For example:

http://www.ungei.org/news/index_688.html

The upshot is that school construction projects should include gender specific latrine facilities.

See also Wikipedia:Papyrus sanitary pad, which enables girls to attend school while they have their period.

Footnotes and references

See also

• Orangi Pilot Project on Wikipedia.

External links

• RDI Cambodia's Studio Projects Using methods such as storytelling and karaoke to spread information.
• No Average Days - a blog about teaching reproductive health and gender in rural Bangladesh, with many observations on culture.
• Equity for a Small Planet - links to audio of Arif Hasan of the Orangi Pilot Project, Pakistan, talking about the disparity between local governance and the way people live, using the city of Karachi as an example. Listen (RealAudio, streaming)

Blogs

• No Average Days - Teaching reproductive health and gender in rural Bangladesh.
• Pyjama Samsara - Relief/development/latrines in post-tsunami Nias, Indonesia.

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