How Susila Dharma Britain is working to bring about long-term development in some of the world’s poorest countries.
by Hamid Kennedy
Each of us is touched by the multitude of stories from the developing world of individuals or communities living in poverty. Many of us want to do something about this and we often contribute to international charities either financially or by volunteering our time.
A large proportion of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and western governments direct significant resources towards making sure that citizens in the developing world have access to basic health and education services. Most people are supportive of this work and believe that these are appropriate areas to focus limited resources on. There is good evidence to show that this support has helped to achieve better health and education outcomes in countries like Tanzania and Mozambique.
Susila Dharma Britain (SDB) is a great believer in ensuring people have access to health and education services, and along with other Susila Dharma organisations have, and are, supporting a number of health and educational projects around the world. Nevertheless, SDB is also keen to ensure that any assistance we provide should help to bring about ‘sustainable’ or long term development. At the moment governments and INGOs tend to measure success by measuring the number of children and citizens who have access to education and health services. They tend not to ask whether access to these services can be sustained, whether the balance of their support is appropriate, or what the cost of funding one area above another is. Even when they do ask these questions it isn’t always easy to pull back from supporting fundamental services such as health and education.
SDB reflects this more global position, but on a much smaller scale - however unlike some national governments and INGOs SDB has taken the strategic decision to re-examine where we focus our limited resources. Our plan over the next few years is to ensure our assistance is both broadened, in terms of the areas we support, and refocused on ‘sustainable development’.
The question of what is ‘sustainable development’ and what isn’t is a difficult one to answer and can often lead to rather long discussions between development professionals. From SDB’s perspective the Oxfam TV advertising campaign slogan from the 1990’s summarises the question quite well:
‘Give a man a fish and he’ll feed his family for a day, give a man a net and he’ll feed his family for a lifetime.’
It is of course possible to apply this concept to a range of different areas and in SDB’s case we began to look at this from the perspective of health and education projects. It wasn’t long before we began to realise that INGOs and Western Governments could (and do) fund a certain number of school places, or build and fund a certain number of health clinics – but how long can they continue to do this? Is it appropriate to fund these places and facilities for ever more? Actually the answer to this is no because, if you choose to spend your limited resources here year after year, you won’t be able to help other people in other areas or countries. You’ve tied up all your resources by continuously funding the original schemes.
Susila Dharma Britain is keen to use its limited funds to have a geometric as opposed to an arithmetic impact. It wants to make sure that its funds are used to help as many communities as possible and that it doesn’t tie up its modest funds funding one or two projects for an indeterminate amount of time. For these reasons our focus, when providing support to projects or activities, has now shifted to assisting activities that help to bring about medium to longer term sustainability. We have also moved away from funding capital costs (i.e. buildings or vehicles) and to a lesser extent running costs (i.e. administrative costs like salaries). We now direct our funding towards activities with definable deliverables, with clear start and finish dates. This is not to say that we won’t consider, or in the case of existing projects continue to support, some of the ‘capital/administrative cost’ elements but we now expect to see that there are well developed plans in place outlining how maintenance and/or running costs will be funded over the longer term. For example SDB support will now be directed towards funding vocational training centres, or the development of a not for profit social enterprise associated with a particular project, or by providing assistance in obtaining accreditation with national networks/structures (opening up national and regional funding streams to partners).
Our strategy is to support a wide portfolio of projects and in the shorter term this will mean shifting some of our support from health and education type projects (which have traditionally received a high proportion of our limited funds) towards other activities such as micro-credit or innovative local based solutions to problems such as the lack of wood for fuel. We’re keen to support smaller scale projects that wouldn’t be able to get funding from anywhere else, projects that help citizens help themselves. Our belief is that these sorts of activities also have a positive impact on the more mainstream development areas such as health and education. For example if through our support we’re able to assist a woman or a man set up a small enterprise then not only do you find that this enterprise is used to feed their family you also find that any disposable income earned (however small) is used to better the chances of their children. All the evidence from development research shows that people use this income to fund their children’s education or to purchase medical treatment for their children when they are sick. From a sustainability perspective it also means that local community schools and clinics become much more viable over the longer term as they are able to charge modest fees.
Susila Dharma Britain’s currently distributes approximately 60,000 pounds a year to projects around the world. One of our strategic aims is to double the yearly amount we provide to projects. This is an achievable aim should more Subud Britain members – more than the 6% who currently provide support - feel moved to donate on a regular basis. If you’d like to contribute to our vision of a ‘sustainable future for all’ we’d encourage you to set up a ‘Gift Aided’ monthly standing order (doesn’t have to be very large) – contact our treasurer Stephen Weil on swweil@btopenworld.com for further details. Individual one off or group donations are also very welcome.
Hamid Kennedy
Susila Dharma Britain Trustee.