The development sector is struggling with the “Helper’s Dilemma.” The dilemma is how to be helpful without eroding the self-efficacy of those who are being helped. (Self-efficacy is the belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task; confidence in the ability to exert control over one's own motivation, behavior, and social environment).
Help requires a helper and a receiver of that help. By definition the helper has some resource (e.g. material, knowledge, skill, money) that the receiver lacks, which puts the helper in a one-up position with the receiver, and is the source of the recognition, on both parts, that the helper can withdraw the help at his/her discretion. Over time that dependency tends to produce conflicting feelings of appreciation and resentment in the receiver of help - appreciation of the help and resentment that the receiver is not in control of his/her own life and must act in a way that the helper views as appropriate or risk losing the help.
Donors in the International Development sector offer assistance to developing countries across a range of issues, health, agriculture, water safety, etc. Yet in many situations donors perceive their assistance has not been as effective as they anticipated. Donors have attempted to encourage greater effectiveness by more precisely specifying the terms of the assistance and by added monitoring and reporting from the receivers. This has increased the concerns of the receivers about issues of disenfranchisement, agenda setting, hidden power dynamics, and national ownership. The Helper’s Dilemma is being experienced on both sides of International Development.
In posing this dilemma, I am not implying that we should stop offering help to others. Providing help, when help is needed, is part of our basic humanity. It makes society possible. It is also basic to the growth of and the transmission of knowledge which makes human progress possible. Helping is a necessary quality in our interactions with each other as individuals and as countries. And certainly, when we see those that are starving, in pain, or facing a disaster, our impulse is to alleviate their suffering - we want to and should reach out to help.
But we also need to take time to step back and think about how we might offer help in a way that does not produce the unintended consequences of the Helper’s Dilemma. I have been wondering if a possible way might lie in the principle of generalized reciprocity. With generalized reciprocity, the receiver does not need to reciprocate to the specific individual (organization or country) that provided help, but is expected to reciprocate to others in the larger community, perhaps at some delayed time.
I wrote a blog post, “Pay It Forward” in which I attempted to design help built on the principal of generalized reciprocity. I suggested that, for example, a village that has received support from an NGO to successfully reduce E.coli in its water supply could “Pay it Forward” by a team of those villagers going to a sister village where contaminated water is still causing diarrhea and could help to reduce E.coli there. I suggested that NGOs and agencies, could support “Paying it Forward” by providing the funding to first help an initial clinic or village and then by paying for the time and travel of the villagers to work with another facility or region, replacing the current model where the NGOs themselves attempt to spread a success.
There must be many ways to employ the principle of generalized reciprocity in development work. The Peace Corps would seem to be one such model, where those who help, live among those who receive, perhaps affording the receivers opportunity to reciprocate through the sharing of food, caring or even laughter. Positive Deviance is also based on generalized reciprocity as told in the Save the Children initiative in Vietnam in the 1990s. There 64% of the children were malnourished. Researchers identified families (positive deviants) that had well-nourished children and found that those families were collecting and providing the children with foods that were not considered appropriate for children and feeding them 3-4 times a day rather than the typical two meals a day. The researchers devised a training program, led by the positive deviant families themselves to help other families incorporate the newly identified foods. At the end of two years malnutrition had fallen by 85 percent and was then sustained year after year.
If we, who work in KM, put our minds to it, I think we could find many other ways to build generalized reciprocity into international development work. I welcome other examples and ideas.