Extending the Understanding of "Participation"

Part II of a series: What We Found - Haiti

Participation is a concept often emphasized in development literature and coursework that refers to the value of community participation in a development project. Ideally, a project will be community-led. As foreigners coming to work in a particular community, we know that we need to make sure our assumptions and methods are checked by the community’s articulation of their needs, dreams, and desires.

Yet what I learned in Haiti is that tools meant to encourage participation (such as: participatory learning activities, appreciative inquiry model, and stakeholder and gender analyses) are equally important for Haitians working in the development field. Though any Haitian is surely more of an “insider” than I in this context, they still function as “outsiders” in many of the communities in which they might work.



While teaching our one-month community development seminar for church leaders, I witnessed how “participation” is not an intuitive concept. Perhaps because Haitians have been trained by the example of so many INGOs operating in their midst, they also forget about the value of including all members of society in the development process. Or, perhaps this is simply a common trait of human nature -- we tend to place our own values and assumptions above any others. Every society carries their particular prejudices and blind spots, which keep them from embracing all people with open arms. For the Protestants in Haiti, their prejudices include a dislike of Haitian Catholics, who they say distort the Gospel through their adherence to voodoo. Protestants may also turn on each other; denominational divides can be strong. Gender disparities may keep women’s voices silent in the development process, though the Church does some positive work by supporting women’s initiatives.

The urban-rural divide is significant in Haiti. Rural villages are remote and difficult to reach on Haiti’s rocky roads. Many village inhabitants never leave their communities. Their lives are lived out ascending and descending steep mountainous slopes far from urban centers like Port-au-Prince. Their worldviews would of course differ from those of university educated, middle-class developers who have had greater exposure to Western worldviews in Haiti’s larger cities, even though they share the same national heritage.

What we Found: Participatory learning activities, appreciative inquiry, asset maps, and other tools designed to foster community input and participation are just as important for national development practitioners as they are for foreigners. Nationals may assume that they understand the full context of the community issues they face, but they will always benefit from analytic tools that can help them discern 'root causes' and invite input from all sectors of the community throughout the project cycle.

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In 2010 I spent 4 months in Haiti with my classmates Sarah and Gina. We were completing our graduate studies in International Development from Eastern University, and we embarked on a final semester as co-learners and, oddly enough, teachers in Port-Au-Prince and beyond. As part of our final assignment as interns, we reflected together on lessons learned from our time applying our practical and theoretical understandings of community development (especially international community development) within our Haitian context. This series called "What we Found" includes excerpts from my reflections made in 2010.