The Road to Self-Reliance
Robert Fox, Executive Director, Oxfam Canada
The ABCD Method
In the Horn of Africa, Oxfam Canada is pioneering an exciting new approach to building self-reliance that is becoming a model for others in Africa and around the world. By focusing on a community’s strengths and supporting a process called “Asset-Based Community-Driven” development, or ABCD, tremendous advances are being made.
Too often, the traditional approach to development has shone a spotlight on a community’s weaknesses, highlighting all the things it lacks and all the things it needs. Using this approach, the community is encouraged to look outside to seek solutions, relying on others for answers, for know-how and for resources.
Oxfam, in close collaboration with the Coady International Institute and three local NGO partners, is turning this approach on its head, working with partners to help communities identify and build on their assets and capacities – what they know, what they do, the resources they can tap. The process starts with a detailed mapping of the community and its environment engaging the whole community in drawing up an inventory of its assets – knowledge, skills, tools, livestock, land, water, access to markets or services, local associations and institutions. They list everything from their labour to the stones that line the seasonal streambed to their livestock to their water source to the grandmother who teaches young girls to sew.
They also look to see where assets are lost to the community – where their limited money goes, whether they are losing skilled workers, whether they could increase the return on their labour if they processed the things they produced.
By recognizing these assets and then mobilizing at the community level to build on them, a process of change is set in motion.
Assessment of Woleta, Ethiopia
In the community of Woleta in the central highlands of Ethiopia, work on ABCD began in 2002. The community was very poor, with most families living on less than $1 a day. Hunger and meager diets undermined people’s health. Few girls attended school.
As part of their inventory of assets, the community identified their cereal bank as key. Productive millet producers, they had set up the bank several years earlier with support from Oxfam Canada and Hundee, a local NGO. Before creating the bank, they were paid barely enough for their crop to cover their costs of production, in part because they were selling into the market at the same time as all the other producers – when prices were at their lowest. And they were selling at that time, in part because they were anxious to get cash as quickly as possible to pay back the loans they had taken out to buy seed, fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide.
The cereal bank allowed them to pool their crop and get a better return, selling when prices were higher and holding back more for their own consumption. Several years later, they now had a reliable store of grains year round, could sell into the market when it was advantageous and no longer needed to buy seed, instead relying on their own stock. The bank is operated by a group drawn from the producers with women filling a majority of the executive positions because they are more knowledgeable about the quality of the cereals and more trusted in handling the collective’s cash.
Improving the Community: Cattle, Gardens, and Compost
Building on this base, they looked to other ways they could improve their lives. Knowing they knew all about raising oxen – used to pull their plows – the community decided they could take those same skills and use them to raise cattle. Cattle are smaller, cheaper and most important, produce milk with high fat content, allowing them to make butter, an important staple in the Ethiopian diet. Starting small, they purchased a few cows and gave them to the poorest women in the community, generally women who were raising families alone. These women agreed the second-born heifer from their cow would be passed on to another poor women in the community, growing the number of households each year who benefit from this initiative.
The cows make a tremendous difference to the household economy. Owned by the women, the cattle are often the first assets that are in the woman’s name. By producing milk which is daily churned to butter that is then sold in nearby markets, it gives the women a small but regular daily cash income. This gives her greater independence and diversifies the family income making them less vulnerable. It also helps diversify the family diet, improving their nutrition and health. Over time, bulls are replacing oxen in their fields. Most importantly, with their increased income, women are able to pay school fees for their daughters. Since this program has begun to grow, the number of young girls starting school – and staying in school – has increased markedly.
Another innovation grew from conversations with elders who told of traditional farming techniques that had been abandoned as the area grew more arid. After terracing farm fields to retain rainwater and diverting small streams to irrigate garden plots, the community began to grow vegetables, again diversifying and improving their diets and providing a ready cash crop that could be sold into local markets.
Noting the cost of fertilizers was a big drain on the limited household income, women were taught how to compost using animal dung and household waste, producing enough organic nutrients to fertilize naturally their plots of land. It’s lots of work but it reduces their costs of production – and their exposure to chemicals. As well, they are looking at ways to capture the rainwater that falls on their roofs and make best use of the trees they have planted around the community – trees that are helping change the microclimate, increasing moisture while limiting erosion.
More expensive or specialized tools and equipment have been purchased collectively and care is taken to see that support is directed to those in the community who are most poor.
Additional Initiatives
While the community isn’t waiting for outsiders to meet their needs, they have organized to get the government services they are entitled to. Capitalizing on their construction know-how and using traditional materials – mud, stone and wood – they built a series of new classrooms to accommodate the increased number of students and demanded the government provide the teachers. They built a new health post and demanded the government provide a medic. They improved the roadbed to the local town and demanded the government improve transportation services and send agricultural outreach workers more regularly.
Each of these initiatives built on their strengths, increasing their resilience and reducing their vulnerability. Each drew on skills and knowledge that were held by some in the community and shared those skills and that knowledge to their collective benefit. Each was respectful of the natural environment. And each helped to strengthen the social fabric of the community itself, increasing their power, confidence and self-esteem.
The Women and Girls of Woleta
One of the most important measures of change was the impact on women and girls. Many of the innovations the community introduced added to the already heavy burden on women: work in the cereal bank; in tending the cattle and churning and marketing butter; in composting; in terracing and tending vegetable gardens; in the construction of the schools and clinic. This in a culture where women already do most of the productive and reproductive work: plowing and harvesting the fields, building their homes, tending for their children, the ill and the elderly as well as cattle and household animals.
The women of the community acknowledge the increased work but they also value the cash income that flows from it, with its attendant power and increased independence. They value the fact that in stark contrast with only a few years ago, almost all their daughters now attend school. They note the increased recognition of their leadership, not just within their homes but in formal community structures. And they cite newly adopted community laws that make early marriage, abduction of women and female genital mutilation illegal.
All of these changes – to the economic, social, political and legal status of women and girls – point to a fundamental shift in the community; change that will be sustained over the long-term.
Oxfam Canada’s Role
In all of this, what was Oxfam Canada’s role? Oxfam provided training and funding to a local Ethiopian NGO – in this case, the Hundee Grassroots Development Initiative – to work with the community to support the mapping of assets and the seepage from the community economy and to help identify ways to build on those strengths and reduce losses. Working in collaboration with the Coady International Institute in Nova Scotia, training in the ABCD approach was provided both on the ground and in Canada. Ongoing support has been provided to our local partner, linking them to other Ethiopian communities and partners where we are supporting the same process. Beyond the mapping process, funding and support is also provided to civic education and extension workers. As well, we are participating in an action research project to document and share this experience with other communities and agencies around the world.
In the coming years, we will be continuing these efforts to promote ABCD as an innovative and effective approach to development and an excellent example of “best practices” in the global effort to end poverty and injustice.
To succeed in this objective, changes to policy and practice are also needed at the national and global level. Yet the encouraging experience of the people of Woleta show that given peace, some control over their resources, a modest level of support and the opportunity to build on their strengths, communities have considerable power to make the best of their circumstances and make a real difference in their lives.
For more information:
The Coady International Institute
Hundee Grassroots Development Initiative
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