The Art of Listening

Ernesto Sirolli, one of the world’s leading consultants on economic development, retells a story from his time working as part of an Italian NGO in southern Zambia in his TED Talk “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!” Recounting how they tried to teach the locals to grow tomatoes along the banks of the Zambezi river, Sirolli describes how his team felt: "We were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, 'Thank God we're here'". He  further recalls:

 

When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything

 

And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!" 

 

And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." 

 

"Why didn't you tell us?"

 

"You never asked."

 

The TED talk touches upon a point made by Dr. Samantha Nutt in her book Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid (as discussed in our previous blog post). Both Sirolli and Nutt explore one of the critical issues behind the failure of many aid organizations around the world: They simply don’t listen. This is not a new critique of aid and development. The Post-Development school of thought has been arguing a nuanced version of this idea since the 1990s. Post-Development theorists look at how the conversation surrounding development is constructed to portray non-Westernized nations as “underdeveloped” and Westernized nations as “developed”. This binary leads to the view that “underdeveloped” nations lack something -- that something being Western economic and political systems. There is more depth to this critique, and I recommend reading the Oxford Research Encyclopedia’s page on it.

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But you might be wondering, how does this relate to aid in general? Well, once the idea of development is set up with this developed/undeveloped binary in mind,  various conclusions can be drawn from it. One is that since these “underdeveloped” nations and the peoples living in them haven’t followed a Western model, they clearly must have no clue what they’re doing. But you know who does? That’s right. We do. Since they obviously don’t know what they’re doing, we should show them what to do; we should impose our ideas of development onto them. As Sirolli said: “Thank God we’re here”. Thus we come in and show them how to develop. We simply don’t listen. All we know is that they don’t know how to live in a modern, developed way. All we know is that they are lacking something that we have. We think we need to educate them, teach them our ways: the right ways. So we don’t listen to them when they explain their systems to us. We don’t listen to them when they tell us that our system can’t just be imposed onto them. We don’t ask them why there’s no agriculture in that fertile valley.

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Aid has become paternalistic. It is seen as a gift from the more developed to the less. It is seen as something to be practiced only by the developed. But as is blatantly clear from Sirolli’s story,  this often doesn’t work out. Why? Because we need to listen. To begin with, nobody knows the local land and socioeconomic conditions better than the locals. Locals are imbued with a deep understanding of place that anybody coming from outside would struggle to obtain. Locals know about the geography, economy, culture of their place; they understand how this place functions and can best understand what they need, as they know themselves what they have and lack. But in the current paradigm of aid this doesn’t matter because as J.K. Gibson-Graham argues, underdevelopment is seen in terms of a ‘lack’. Underdeveloped nations and places are lacking in something which then needs to be built up. However, if we instead look at development in terms of what is there, what one already has, what resources and socioeconomic system are already in place and instead of seeing them in terms of their distance from western models, decide to build up off of them, we can move past this. Locals understand what they have better than anyone else, and if we want to help them build up from that, then we’re going to have to listen to them. 

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Though there has been a movement to focus on local initiatives all across the world, not all aid organizations practice this equally. War Child is one of the groups which makes a concerted effort to practice this form of aid. According to the War Child website, 98% of their staff are from the countries they work in, and they are engaged with local partner organizations in each of those nations. War Child is largely staffed by those who know the intricacies, and conditions of where they are from, those who know how aid should be practiced in that region. This is incredibly important for humanitarian organizations as it shows that they don’t view the locals as “underdeveloped”, but instead see the importance of local knowledge. War Child listens, they hear what the people who are local to the regions they are working in have to say on their situation, condition, and structures and through employing them, involve this deep knowledge of place in their functioning.

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Even now, in many examples of aid around the world, Sirolli’s words “Thank God we’re here” can be heard echoing from the mouths of aid practitioners. But as the Post-Development school examined, aid practitioners coming in with this sense of superiority simply don’t listen. Instead, we must look to examples such as War Child, where work is done in a manner through consulting local knowledge about the context of the region. This should represent a paradigm shift for aid, a call to action sung through the words “Thank God they’re here”.