wfn.org | Development Case Study, Honduras Workshop

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National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA
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NCC4/21/99    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

See Sidebar: "Development Case Study: Bolivian Village's 
Lesson for NGOs"

SEARCHING FOR NEW OPTIONS FOR LATIN AMERICA'S POOR
Church-Related Development Experts Explore Sustainable 
Economic Alternatives
By Paul Jeffrey*

 TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- With the gap between rich and 
poor growing wider in the Americas, a group of church-
related development experts gathered in Honduras in April to 
explore sustainable economic alternatives for poor 
communities.

 The April 6-12 gathering, sponsored by Church World 
Service - the relief, development and refugee assistance 
ministry of the (U.S.) National Council of Churches - 
brought together 26 people from 11 countries throughout the 
region. They shared their own experiences, visited several 
projects in rural Honduras, and plotted new strategies they 
hope will help improve the lives of the poor whom they 
serve.

 "Every day in Latin America, the poor are getting 
poorer and the rich are getting richer," Fredy Murillo, an 
advisor to the Honduran Central Bank and an active lay 
member of the Reformed Church of Honduras, told participants 
in a keynote address about the region's economy. Murillo 
said that economic globalization, along with structural 
adjustments prescribed by international financial 
organizations, have exacerbated class differences in the 
region.

 Murillo blamed the region's "illegal and immoral 
foreign debt" for much of the problems, reporting that many 
new loans or grants made to governments in the south, rather 
than remaining there to foment economic development, "are 
returned the same day to a bank in Miami as payment on the 
foreign debt."

 Murillo called for wider participation of civil society 
in economic decision making. "These issues are too important 
to leave in the hands of government officials," Murillo 
said. He said Christians have a particular role in fomenting 
new values in societies "where the political leaders are 
either corrupt or anachronistic."

 In a final declaration, participants stated that the 
effects of globalization and foreign debt on the region have 
been "catastrophic," leaving the poor feeling "demoralized 
and powerless." They said this was especially felt among 
young people, who "see no options for the future."

 They observed that many people in the region only find 
hope in the possibility of immigrating to another country, a 
factor they said underscored the need to encourage strong 
local organizations that work to improve the quality of life 
in poor communities.

PARTICIPANTS DISCUSS SUCCESSFUL PROJECTS

 Participants in the meeting discussed several projects 
that have shown positive results in helping the poor build a 
space for life despite the hostile environment that 
surrounds them. 

During two days in the Honduran countryside, participants 
visited several communities in western Honduras where the 
Christian Commission for Development (CCD) has carried out 
successful projects with residents of rural villages. 

In the community of La Majada, for example, they spoke with 
women who run a communal lending bank that has been so 
successful that it has been duplicated in several other 
nearby villages. CCD provided seed money and training to the 
community when they began the program. Since then, villagers 
have administered their own loans to each other.

 Jose Enrique Espinoza, the director of CCD's 
microcredit program, told participants that the program 
works "only when it's developed on a foundation of years of 
education and organizing." He said another element to 
success was the participation of church leaders, who in his 
experience "help maintain an ethical character to the 
program."

 Yet while microcredit works in some places, in others 
it isn't appropriate. "If they know the money comes from the 
churches, the people we work with think that it's a gift, no 
matter what kind of paper they sign, and they simply aren't 
going to pay it back," said Conrad Mason, a development 
officer with the Caribbean Council of Churches in Barbados. 

 Participants shared success stories of poor communities 
in their own countries where positive change had taken 
place.

 Fredy Urroz, a provincial director of the Nicaraguan 
Council of Churches, told how 13 people in Comejon, a small 
town near Masaya, decided to start gathering spoiled fruit 
and other natural waste from the municipal marketplace. They 
composted it, and now sell 200 tons a month of organic 
fertilizer to coffee growers in the area who sell organic 
coffee to Europe. The coffee growers pay the small 
cooperative $40 a ton for their fertilizer, one-sixth what 
they would have to pay for chemical fertilizer.

 "They identified something no one else thought was 
valuable," Urroz observed, "and found a way to make a living 
off it. They aren't rich, but they're surviving."

 Gabriela Silva Leite, a Brazilian sociologist who 
founded an association of prostitutes in Rio de Janeiro, 
told participants in the Tegucigalpa meeting how economic 
control of her city's Carnaval celebration has been taken 
away from the residents of poor neighborhoods where the 
yearly Afrobrazilian festival has its roots. 

She said the poor used to make the fancy-and now costly-
costumes that Carnaval participants don for the nightly 
revelry, but today much of that production has been taken 
over by the wealthy. "The control of Carnaval began during 
the military dictatorship," Silva Leite said, "and has 
worsened in recent years. Carnaval and its economic benefits 
are today controlled largely by mafias."

 Silva Leite's organization, DAVIDA, began four years 
ago to chip away at that monopoly, training the children of 
prostitutes how to design and sew the costumes. By last 
year, the group had garnered contracts for more than 600 
costumes, many of them costing hundreds of dollars apiece.  
And, like the Nicaraguan garbage composters, they get much 
of their raw material for the costumes by hustling around 
after the parades picking up discarded costumes. 

This year, Silva Leite reported, the 70 children in the 
program collected almost 900 pounds of clothing, feathers, 
and other costume material. It will be recycled into 
costumes for the next Carnaval, she said.

 "While we're helping the children learn a marketable 
skill and generate money for their families, income that in 
many cases will lure them away from the easy money to be 
made from running drugs," Silva Leite said, "we're also 
helping them learn about the cultural roots of Carnaval. 
With them we're fighting to recover the Samba Schools as 
genuine neighborhood organizations, which is what they were 
before the mafias came in and took over."

SUCCESSFUL PROJECTS ARE COMMUNITY-INITIATED

 According to Margarita Banda, an Argentinian economist 
who participated in the Tegucigalpa meeting, projects like 
those in Comejon and Rio de Janeiro provide good examples of 
the poor having "a nose" for finding niches in the economy 
where they can make a profit. "Their success comes from 
their astute business sense, from being able to smell 
opportunities that others cannot," Banda said. "Sometimes 
it's as simple as planting your crops a little earlier or a 
little later in order to sell your harvest at a better time. 
It means being creative, and it means being flexible, 
because as soon as you're successful someone will imitate 
you. And these are almost always small initiatives." Banda 
said non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that work with 
the poor need to learn from these examples as a way of 
helping communities discover new alternatives.

 According to the Rev. Oscar Bolioli, the director of 
CWS programs in Latin America and the Caribbean, successful 
projects have several factors in common. "The initiative for 
the project has to come from the community, not from someone 
sitting at a desk in the city," Bolioli said. "The project 
also has to make use of resources at hand in the community. 
In other words, the members of the community have to 
contribute to the project."

 The mark of a valuable project, Bolioli reported, is 
that it "offers people permanent and sustainable 
alternatives, and returns to people their self-esteem while 
building their capacity to resolve their own problems."

 He warned there are no magic formulas, however. "What 
works well one place may not work in another," Bolioli said. 
"There are wide cultural differences throughout the region. 
While there are some technological advances that can often 
be adapted across cultures, such as improved cooking stove 
designs, we have to avoid the temptation to copy what was 
successful elsewhere, and we need to look hard at the 
process by which successful projects are developed. That 
means rethinking who we work with, how we work with them, 
and who really benefits from our work."

 Bolioli said NGOs in the region are undergoing an 
identity crisis. "Are NGOs facilitators of change for the 
poor," Bolioli asked, "or are they merely consumers of a 
product that's available, people who take advantage of 
poverty to earn a living?"

 From his New York City office, Bolioli oversees CWS 
funding for projects throughout the region. "It's obvious 
when you read the proposals that many are written by people 
behind desks, in comfortable offices far from the poor," he 
said. "The proposals are well written, well-presented. Yet 
they come from agencies where people may spend a third of 
their time writing reports for funding agencies, where the 
organizational machinery consumes a large part of the 
money."

NGOS NEED TO ACCOMPANY, FOMENT ALTERNATIVES FOR THE POOR

 Bolioli said the Tegucigalpa gathering helped reveal 
"the need to reevaluate the role of NGOs, the need to 
democratize NGOs and help them really accompany the poor and 
foment alternatives for the poor."

 The need for NGOs to change is accentuated by the 
withdrawal of several European agencies from Latin America 
in recent years. "There has been a massive, at times sudden 
and even brutal disappearance of support from European 
partners," Bolioli said. 

While he acknowledged that this stems in part from the 
Europeans' analysis that situations are worse in other parts 
of the world, primarily in Africa, Bolioli suggested foreign 
funders have to work harder to understand the cultural and 
political nuances that dampen the prospects for change. He 
claimed the Europeans grew disenchanted with "a region that 
no longer seems as exotic as before, where the revolutions 
are over and where people just go on being poor."

 Bolioli said that while CWS has not reduced its 
assistance to the region, neither has it increased. "For 
three years we've maintained the same level of funding, 
which because of inflation means our real support is slowly 
declining," Bolioli said. "Given the way poverty is growing 
worse throughout the region, the organizations with which we 
work must do a better job of being effective, of using the 
same amount of money and achieving more. That's what we came 
to Tegucigalpa to discuss."

- end -
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* Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central 
America.
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