How can the predatory nature of development efforts be tamed?

Innocence and decency has proven fatal for most borrowers as they soon realise that private contractors working in cahoots with financial institutions and development agencies will have calculated their gains using tools whose underlying parameters are not made visible to farmers.

MANY rural communities in low-income countries are fed up with the predatory nature of external development initiatives. According to the Word Web dictionary, a predatory animal is one that lives by catching and preying on other animals.

Predatory tendencies also include living by or victimising others for personal gain.

When development agencies move into rural areas, local communities often have no reason to suspect that such agencies have a predatory agenda.

Suspicions start rising when development agencies continue to recycle the same ideas under different names when rural people who continue to wallow in poverty in spite of millions spent in their name by development agencies. Any development agency that has spent more than three years in one community has become a predator by becoming part of the local community furniture.

A simple comparison between rural communities that have been working with NGOs for years and those that have not been working with NGOs reveals marked differences in terms of autonomy and self-determination. Very few communities have transformed from subsistence to commercial agriculture through development interventions. Instead, it is communities that rely on their own resources such as remittances that have a sustained presence in agricultural markets.

Those supported by NGOs often stop producing surplus commodities for the market as soon as a development project comes to an end. To the extent development agencies use rural communities to get money and not fully develop those communities, such predatory tendencies are worse than money laundering. Unknown to development agencies is that rural people desire the good houses, health and nutrition associated with cities.

Predatory rural finance Predatory patterns are more prevalent in rural finance initiatives. While it is said funding targeted at improving rural finance has increase, the majority of rural people remain outside formal financial ecosystems. In fact, the majority of rural dwellers associate banks and other financial institutions with exclusion rather than inclusion. Many smallholder farmers, traders and rural entrepreneurs have nasty experiences with financial institutions. Some of the financial inclusion models have been introduced as contract farming arrangements where farmers receive inputs and other support services instead of real money.

Innocence and decency has proven fatal for most borrowers as they soon realise that private contractors working in cahoots with financial institutions and development agencies will have calculated their gains using tools whose underlying parameters are not made visible to farmers.

“When you think you have done what is needed, you are asked to provide more information. After signing off every document, most promises are not met and you are compelled to supplement agricultural activities with your other income sources.” The above lamentation is now common across Africa.

In several conferences and workshops, commitments to avail finance that can catalyse other sources of finance at the local level have been announced and documented for decades.

There are even dozens of books and university courses on rural finance but on the ground the situation has remained the same.

Local innovations like village savings and lending associations are not adequately used to anchor and stimulate local economies. Instead, such bedrocks of self-reliance and resilience are being cannibalised into mobile money through ICTs. This does not improve financial circulation in the local economy as most of the money is drawn away to big cities, leaving the local economy resorting to traditional barter systems. Harnessing multiple sources of

evidence If development agencies and financial institutions shunned predatory tendencies, they would be able to assist local communities in generating more income and better lives from local resources. They would realise that there is a difference between charity and transforming local communities through agriculture.

They would also not waste money on policy making because they would know that policies can only go so far because they are tied to political regimes.

Full article on www.herald.co.zw