Africa Christian Leaders' Gathering

AFRICA CHRISTIAN LEADERS’ GATHERING

Partnerships across the Worlds of Faith and Development

Katherine Marshall, the World Bank

November 16, 2004, London

And so these men of Indostan

Disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion

Exceeding stiff and strong,

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong![1]

            Stories may be the most powerful tool we have to communicate ideas, and so they have, from time immemorial, been the stock fare of mothers, preachers, griots, artists, journalists, Martin Palmer ,and many others.  This poem is one of countless versions of an ageless story that crops up in virtually every religious tradition.  It was first told long, long ago, in ancient times before the “Common Era” and has never faded (it is used as training material for many institutions, including the US Peace Corps).  In some versions, blind men grope to see what beast is before them; in others, it is seeing men groping in the dark.  The common theme is that each feels a piece of what we, the observers, know well is an elephant.  Whether grasping the trunk, feet, tail, or hide, each man is convinced that he recognizes a familiar object.  They are firmly convinced: “exceeding stiff and strong”, yet in none of the stories do they share experience and work to find a common denominator, or even to wonder about the differences they perceive.  They fail to come to any sensible understanding of the reality, even though they do have the different elements to hand.

            The tale of the blind men and the elephant is a powerful metaphor of the paths that faith and development institutions have traveled over the past 60 years.  We are here today in large measure because we are convinced that we need to bring our collective light to the very global problems we face, critical among them poverty, environmental degradation, abuse of rights, and imperviousness to the importance of diverse cultures and life views. 

The World Bank and Religion?

            The World Bank, over its 60 year history, initially had remarkably little contact with the world of religion.  It was absent from most project analysis and documentation, general institutional vocabulary, research agendas, dialogue with countries, speeches, and internal staff training.  Even today it scarcely figures on the website.   There were evidently some encounters with churches, temples and mosques, but they were driven by specific individuals and thus proved both patchy and ephemeral.  Underlying this disconnect were two clear assumptions: that the worlds of religion and development were, appropriately, quite separate (reflecting western traditions of separation of church and state); and that modernization and modernity, the realm in which the World Bank operated, was intrinsically secular.  Even today, too many raise their eyebrows at a description of the work we do to link faith and development, or even at my title, which focuses on dialogue, ethics and values.  While the importance of religion as a basic element of life, and particularly its vital importance for poor communities the world over, is increasingly understood, this understanding has been slowest to permeate the worlds of finance and economics.

            A related characteristic of the World Bank’s history is worth highlighting here, because it extends well beyond to other development institutions: a tendency to speak and operate in a technical framework and vocabulary.  The language of ethics and values, of spirituality, of “the soul”, has rarely been employed.  Let us be very clear: the World Bank and other development institutions are profoundly ethical institutions, in their origins, the passions of their staffs, and the structure of rules governing, for example, procurement and project evaluation.  But you would find it difficult to divine that from the normal institutional prose, which tends to be figure-laden and quite dry.  Some consider that it is “preachy” in the certainty of tone and tendency to prescribe.

            This picture of separate worlds of faith and development, of “ships passing in the night” has changed and is still changing, for several different but intertwined reasons.

            The main reasons, which bring us here today, are twofold.  First, the move to explore new relationships with the world of religion reflects a growing appreciation that there are enormous areas of overlap, convergence and shared concern and knowledge about a core common purpose of faith and development institutions: to work WITH poor communities to improve their lives and ensure them a better future.  Second, there is a growing awareness of the critical challenges at the global level which demand our common alliance and efforts.  Among our common passions and challenge is the determination to focus on Africa and recommit ourselves to this special and remarkable continent.  At the broadest level, and with the metaphor of a common journey in mind, we face a complex and dangerous road ahead in world affairs, and we need to travel it, where we can, together.

            Before elaborating on this positive scenario, let me note a darker side of the picture, to ensure that it is clear that we understand and appreciate it well.  The criticism of the World Bank and other development institutions from many religious leaders and institutions has been part of the process of awakening the institutions to new ways of seeing problems and programs.  The most striking example is the Jubilee Campaign that focused so sharply on debt issues; it has clearly helped to advance a process of change in policy and approach to poor countries at a global level.  There are, though, many other issues where unfortunate negative images of development work have been seen and vividly portrayed through faith institutions – structural adjustment, the drive to globalization and free markets, privatization, user fees, cash crop projects, among other knotty topics that are daily fare in development work.  It has taken much careful dialogue to advance beyond mutual condemnation and misunderstanding to an appreciation of why such different images have taken hold. 

            We are hopeful that the efforts of the past years, including prominently the work of the Alliance of Religions for Conservation (ARC) in making real the common interest in protecting environment and culture, the explorations of poverty and culture led by the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD), work on HIV/AIDS by many institutions including Religions for Peace (WCRP), Christian Aid, CARITAS, and the two year dialogue involving the World Council of Churches (WCC), the World Bank and the IMF, focused on economic models for development, are working to change the picture to one that reflects the complex richness of experience. 

While the many institutions we represent here will have healthy differences based on their experience and their mandates, there is emerging a common appreciation that the shared values and passions require much more dialogue, mutual knowledge and respect, and an array of alliances and partnerships.  Second, we are working to build on specific areas where there is clear common interest.  Protection of land and water resources, providing water for all, education, and health are obvious areas where faith and development institutions need to work more closely together.  And third, this common learning process challenges the development institutions, at least, to rethink their dry and technical approach and to take on board much more of the thinking and language of ethics and values.

The Global Challenge

            Let me briefly set our work in the very global context of the Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).[2]  This may seem abstract when compared to the urgency of a challenge facing women in a village who need water today, or the humanitarian demands of Darfur.  It offers, however, a powerful link that can inspire our common work and provide a common thread in our discussions and work.

We need to bear constantly in mind that we live in a world badly and dangerously out of balance, and that we need to fight the enormous poverty that persists to this day.  The numbers are brutal and frightening.  To cite a few: some 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 a day, and close to 3 billion live on less than $2 a day.  More than 115 million children are not in school: two-thirds of them are girls and 40 million are children with disabilities.  Over 40 million people are HIV positive; over 3 million people died of AIDS in 2003.  The numbers go on and on, but they paint a picture of great misery and unnecessary and premature death; billions of people have little to no opportunity to lead a decent life and develop their potential. 

We all agree, I am confident, that humanity’s most critical challenge is to end acute poverty and fight for social justice.  Poverty in the world today is an outrage, not only because of the misery it causes but because we so clearly have the means to defeat it.  From ancient times, wise religious leaders have taught compassion and love, have seen the faces of poor people, have heard their voices (even when they were silent).  We were reminded here that this core of concern is at the very heart of the Christian Gospel.  Churches have a wealth of experience, an array of instruments, infinite compassion and love, and a community of believers. 

The good news is that for perhaps the first time in human history a powerful consensus has developed that the global community must ensure that all people, everywhere, have a minimally decent standard of living.  The Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, were affirmed by every head of state at the Millennium Summit at the United Nations in September 2000; it issued a clarion declaration affirming the unified goal of overcoming the scourge of poverty.  Again at the Monterrey Financing for Development Conference in March 2002, voice after voice joined a chorus of agreement and determination to meet these goals by 2015, the target date.

The eight goals include halving global poverty, and touch on education, health, water and sanitation, environment, and gender equality.  The MDGs challenge the global community to do what is needed to achieve the goals, based on a covenant, that involves trade reforms, more development assistance, better governance including citizens’ participation in determining their own destinies, and good, honest use of development funds.  As Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, says again and again, today “there is no place to hide”, because everyone had so clearly agreed to act to address the problems of poverty.   The imperatives are clearly before us.

That is why we (in the international development institutions) are deeply convinced that   the full engagement of faith communities will be central to achieving  the Millennium Development Goals to fight poverty.[3] 

The news, though, is not encouraging, as many goals are not “on track”.[4]  The reasons are complex, and include the many competitive priorities for major countries and leaders (terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq, humanitarian crises).  They also reflect the failure to date to capture the full imagination of many citizens to the challenges.  That is why there is so much talk now of the new mobilization for the MDGs, with the UN Summit of Leaders in September 2005 a major rallying point.  We are convinced that this mobilization requires many elements, among them, critically, new kinds of partnerships and alliances.  The ethical dimension of the challenge is an area where faith leaders can bring special insight and conviction.  This mobilization and “recommitment” cannot succeed without all our common efforts.

Thus, one challenge for this meeting is to situate our discussions and our work in this broader context.  Among other challenges, it forces us to pose, from an early stage, the question of scale.  While we take inspiration from the wonderful achievements of so many communities, and know well that miracles and wonders can be done, we need to challenge ourselves to ensure that these wonders are conceived and developed with the scale of the problems at least in the back of our minds.  Our dream is indeed a just world, free of poverty; we have a long road to travel before we get there.

The Nature of New Partnerships: Mind, Heart, Soul and Hands

            My next set of comments reflect on the specific challenges of building the new kaleidoscope of partnerships that we envisaged in organizing this meeting.  This effort needs to build on two major lessons we can draw from our recent history: the problems we face in today’s troubled world are complex, and the motivations of human beings and institutions are far more intricate that we often imagine.  This means, in terms of the challenge of engaging the potential of faith communities, that we, all of us, need to see this as our common fight, with us working as allies.  We need to address both our different views and perspectives.  Only thus can we achieve the potential in which we have so much faith.

I reflect here briefly on four dimensions that we need for these partnerships to develop; they are too often the caricature image of our various institutions.  In the battle ahead, we need to combine mind, heart, soul and hands.[5]

We need to bring experience, evidence, and creativity to the task.  Experience is not easy to transmit, and evidence, facts, and statistics are not as straightforward as many believe: it will not surprise me if here today people argue with equal confidence that poverty is growing worse, or that the share of poor people is declining.  But we must look facts in the face and we can use them to learn and to clarify.  This is the intellectual, mind dimension of our challenge, and it has its own dangers, including intellectual arrogance, bogs of complexity, cylindrical divisions among professions like economics and business.  There are many analytic challenges ahead, and they have surfaced in every presentation and paper prepared for this meeting.  We need to understand, for a start, what we are doing, and learn from our collective experience.  In short, we need the rigors and science of the mind, but it is not enough.

We know well that we cannot succeed in any human endeavor without caring and compassion.  There is a twist here; we do need charity, in the sense of direct care for those who face destitution.  But a focus on the arguments and instruments of charity alone can and will lead us astray.  And looking at misery also can lead to despair, fatalism, romanticizing  of the past, perhaps the worst enemies of the heart.  We need to keep the gift of a human face as an image in looking to every technical problem; we need that sense of caring.  We need, even in moments of crisis, to keep our minds on the causes of crisis and how to address them, together, at the same time that we provide help to our brothers and sisters.  We need to focus on relationships built on caring and respect, as well as on trust.  We need wise hearts.

The meaning of soul goes far beyond what I can articulate, and I know well that it is what brings many of you here.  Suffice it to say that we cannot fight poverty without tending to the dimension of spirituality in human beings and its many institutional manifestations, in religious institutions, leaders, and movements.  A focus on the soul can give us the wisdom to reflect more deeply on what we are trying to achieve.  Calling for a focus on soul means listening to the wisdom that comes from religious leaders and recognizing the quest for meaning, the real sense of larger purpose.  We need to beware the pitfalls of false certainty, of exclusiveness, of over abstraction in the face of real problems like the suffering of women and children.  But without this dimension, our work can be arid.  The call to consider soul  is a call to critical qualitative dimensions of our challenge: courage, integrity, a sense of stewardship.

We live in times of rich rhetoric, transmitted so widely by communications magic.  Yet we suffer, and nowhere more than in this challenge of fighting poverty, the gap between rhetoric and reality.  This is perhaps the most significant challenge we face – to maintain momentum, to translate our words and commitments into action, over long periods of time and in the fact of difficulties and competition for attention.  We need to bring our hands to this effort (our effort and our financial resources), to make sure that words mean and lead to action.  There are traps here too – too much focus on action, the risk of duplication of efforts, overlapping and competing mandates, lack of follow through, lack of engagement with and respect for the people affected.  But at the core this battle is about translating our ideas and ideals into reality with the many means at our disposal.

Traditional images parceled the world and its challenges among institutions with head, heart, soul and hands.  This is a dangerous fallacy.  Even as we work to creative new partnerships and alliances, we need to see the role of each element for us all.  The churches are not only about heart and soul, the international institutions are not only about mind and brawn (money). 

Some Challenges Ahead

We have, together, a remarkable agenda.  Some of the potential I see in this effort:

(a)    We can tap the wells of compassion that we see, at their finest moments, in congregations all over the world and use this to bridge divides of regional and  cultural differences, rich and poor.   The MDG message is rich and important, and we can and must build upon it.  We need, though, to recognize that it is not always easy to translate into terms that a congregation or community leader will grasp as a priority and actionable subject that applies directly to them.  Finding ways to convey the message that this framework has broad application and needs to engage each and every community is a central and continuing challenge.  The message that success in the fight against poverty is not only essential but also achievable needs to be conveyed forcefully and effectively.  Fatalism – a sense that poverty shall always be with us, that little has been achieved – needs to be addressed and combated with evidence and fervor

(b)    Build alliances and partnerships, often in unlikely geometry.  We cannot afford to allow simplistic characterizations to blind us to the potential and complex motivations of our fellows.  Creative alliances can work modern miracles.  We can combine our resources of mind, heart, soul and hands in new ways.  There are countless examples of what works when hands are joined, whether the leadership that changed the course of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Uganda, the Buddhist role in the revival of Cambodia, church leadership in steering the transition in South Africa, the work of Fe y Alegria for education across Latin America, and countless community development efforts that transform lives across the world.

(c)    Dialogue on the tough issues: we have a long agenda of difficult issues that we need to address through respectful and probing dialogue.  Ecumenical and interfaith efforts can achieve miracles.  We can work to address the host of fractious issues among faith and development institutions.  To name four: 

(i)      Corruption is a nagging issue invoked constantly to suggest that aid is wasted. Corruption needs a frontal, thoughtful, energetic approach from us all. There are many practical tools that we can use both to monitor use of funds (transparency, community involvement) and ways to make the daunting areas of procurement, accounting and audit work well and for the common good.

(ii)    The roles of public and private actors in fighting poverty deserve careful attention and thought.  At issue are, inter alia, how we assure social welfare, regulate markets, guarantee quality education, fight HIV/AIDS, health, and assure women’s rights.  Deep skepticism about pubic institutions can lead in unintended directions, for example encouraging a plethora of direct giving to individuals that can, in some circumstances, undermine the effort to address the larger systems. 

(iii)   The challenge of HIV/AIDS for Africa and other parts of the world is so great that it deserves a special place in dialogue and strategic consideration.  It belongs on every agenda.  This is not a health problem alone, and its repercussions for social order, agricultural systems, education, training, etc across Africa are vast.  The efforts to engage faith leaders across Africa in the many dimensions of the HIV/AIDS challenge are inspiring but this is a long marathon and much more is needed.  It is encouraging that other parts of the world also see the critical role of faith communities in bringing leadership to the common global and national efforts to fight HIV/AIDS.  A major and heartening example is an international interfaith effort in Chennai, India, that will take place December 1-2, which promises to bring together major religious leaders (including the Dalai Lama), government officials, media leaders, Bollywood stars, private business, and NGO[6].  We need many more efforts like this.

(iv)        One of the most contentious and divisive issues among and within faith communities and between the worlds of faith and development is the role of women in society and particularly women’s reproductive health issues and rights.  These issues have both practical and symbolic importance.  Lying at the core are issues of identity, cultural heritage, individual versus community rights, and pitting tradition versus modernity, no other set of issues seems so to have colored the relations between faith and development institutions over the past decades, generally in a negative light (on both sides).  Yet few issues have such vital importance for social welfare and stability – whether in education policy, child health and nutrition, small business development, and achievement of human rights.  We need to find ways to engage in dialogue on these sensitive issues in ways that promise to advance understanding, build on such common ground as concern for maternal health, violence against women, and HIV/AIDS, and address the areas where there is real disagreement.  Leaving this issue as a “sleeping dog” is both unproductive and damaging to the broader objectives that we share.

(v)          Links between equity, economic development, and social justice are increasingly coming under an analytic spotlight.  While disparities in income, abilities to meet basic needs and access to health and education have long been hallmarks of life for the poor and dispossessed, their impact goes beyond physical deprivation.  They are accompanied by vast differences in political influence and social status for individuals as well as communities.  There are clearly profound ethical issues at play here, but also it is becoming increasingly recognized that such inequities have wider implications and actual manifestations.  Poverty alleviation becomes much more intractable.  Crime and violence will often escalate.  The ultimate consequence is that institutions (both public and private) are undermined, the climate for public investment is poisoned and the potential for social unrest increases.  In other words, the fabric of society unravels.  These are extremely arduous challenges and require dialogue, partnerships, analysis and action. 

(vi)        Mobilize alliances around environmental challenges, including community conservation of resources and global issues like the challenges to the oceans and global warming.  ARC’s pioneering work in highlighting the links between cultural traditions, teachings of world religions, and contemporary understandings of environmental challenges is an inspiration for a wide range of potential work and leadership in this area.  Other exciting avenues are working with young people (who capture environmental challenges with remarkable ease) and ensuring that gender dimensions of the issues are well taken into account.

We need to work together to build useful and meaningful ways to hold ourselves to account and to learn from experience.  These are complex problems, that call on all the resources of all who are represented here.  We need to learn from each other.  We can use the framework of accountability that the MDG effort has generated to good ends.  We can go beyond with a pact of mutual accountability where we share each other’s experience as we move ahead.

Concluding Comments

            In closing, I return to the tale of the blind men and the elephant, who, as the poet describes, “railed on in utter ignorance of what each other mean(t)”.  We often find ourselves seeing the world in different lights, from our different positions, with our different senses and sensors, living different moments, hearing different facts and interpretations.  We cannot afford, though, to continue in that traditional mode of “railing in ignorance”.  Nor can we, as each of the ancient tales has done, forget to include women integrally in our efforts of exploration and dialogue.

            The experience of exploring the intersections of the worlds of faith and development is inspirational.  The very differences of vocabulary, time frame, and perspective offer us rich insights that we can use for the common good.  This wonderful meeting is an example of how we can defeat the ancient tradition of the blind, and bring our collective light, and passion, to a new way of working together.