Customers at Whole Foods may have noticed new decorations adorning the registers a while ago: photographs of smiling inhabitants of poor countries. This is the work of the Whole Planet Foundation, the grocery store’s philanthropic arm, which is running its eighth annual
Customers at Whole Foods may have noticed new decorations adorning the registers a while ago: photographs of smiling inhabitants of poor countries. This is the work of the Whole Planet Foundation, the grocery store’s philanthropic arm, which is running its eighth annual “prosperity campaign” to achieve a “future without poverty.” Shoppers can donate their bag credits — the five-cent rebate they receive by forgoing plastic bags — to a microfinance fund.
Combining this with traditional donations, Whole Foods hopes to raise $5 million to fund forty thousand small loans to “impoverished entrepreneurs” around the globe. They say that these direct financial transfers, unmediated by government agencies, can “empower the poor and the communities around them.”
In many ways, this is the age of the micro, of thinking small and acting locally. Microloans are only one part of the broad move toward “bottom-up” development, which seeks to enroll the poor directly in anti-poverty campaigns.
The World Bank has invested heavily in this area. Its acting chief economist describes communal participation as “a central tenet of development policy,” and in the past fifteen years the institution has doled out over $85 billion for community empowerment and government decentralization.
In 2006, Muhammad Yunus, the public face of microcredit (and a partner of the Whole Planet Foundation), won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2009, it went to Barack Obama, who began his career as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago.
Much of the enthusiasm for tackling poverty in this way comes from the feeling that top-down, expert-driven solutions haven’t worked very well.
Big dams designed to provide irrigation and generate electricity have displaced millions of people (between forty to eighty million in the twentieth century) and created huge reservoirs that have proved ideal breeding grounds for disease-bearing mosquitoes. Family planning campaigns have devolved into state-sponsored forced sterilization sprees. Government attempts to jump-start the market with “special economic zones” have turned into land grabs as private developers seize peasants’ property and then hire those they have dispossessed at extremely low wages.
You hear one of these stories and it’s easy to write it off as a mistake. You hear fifteen and it starts to look like a pattern.
Development is a fiendishly complex business, with cultural, sociological, ecological, and economic aspects. Maybe relying on foreign experts, who tend to be drawn toward stark diagnoses and one-size-fits-all fixes, is the wrong way to go about things. Maybe it would be better to let poor communities themselves decide what would be best for them. After all, they’re the ones who can actually see what’s happening on the ground, and they have good reason to care about getting it right.
That is the thinking behind the recent embrace of small-scale, participatory projects. Local wisdom in the place of expert knowledge, many small projects rather than a few big ones, communities in charge of their own developmental destinies. It sounds refreshing.
What few realize, however, is that there is nothing new in this approach. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States, United Nations, and dozens of governments throughout the world launched a massive, global community development campaign throughout the Global South.
We are only now uncovering its history.
It Takes a Village
Community development as we know it today began in Etawah, a medium-sized district in northern India. In 1948, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru engaged an urban planner from the United States, Albert Mayer, to see what could be done to “build up community life” in India’s villages. Nehru offered Etawah as an experiment.
Nehru asked the right person. Like many of his compatriots, Mayer worried about what mechanization was doing to the United States, particularly to its community life. He appreciated what he saw in Indian villages. Rather than focusing on material outcomes (more abundant harvests, better livestock), Mayer concluded that he should solicit the “felt needs” of Etawah residents themselves. That way, they could come up with their own “folk-solutions.”
Remarkably, it seemed to work. Using only available technology and local resources, villagers built schools, roads, and sanitary wells. Etawah quickly became famous. President Truman praised it in his speeches, Eleanor Roosevelt visited it, and Mayer’s work was covered in Time, Life, the New York Times, and the Ladies Home Journal.
Building on Etawah, India launched a nation-wide community development program in 1952, on Gandhi’s birthday. The United States gave tens of millions of dollars, the Ford Foundation took a central role, and the UN sent over streams of experts to help. To encourage village communities still further, India’s government embarked on a campaign of “democratic decentralization,” replacing appointed local officials with elected ones and entrusting village councils with some of the business of economic planning.
By the mid 1960s, the community development program covered all of India’s villages. To fully appreciate that achievement, consider that those villages collectively contained around ten percent of the global population.
From India, community development spread outward. The United States set up a Division of Community Development within the State Department to help with funds and expertise. Later, it established the Peace Corps to send young people abroad to assist directly. By 1960, more than sixty countries had community development programs.
Surveying all of this, Nehru concluded that community development was by “far the most revolut