At the Centre for Disaster Preparedness (CDP) in The Philippines, we have always dreamed of contributing to system change in development. But we were also conscious that persuading and encouraging those in the status quo will always be difficult as they wittingly or unwittingly contribute to perpetuating the system we seek to transform.
We are excited to announce that the 2023 #ShiftThePower Summit will take place in Bogotá! The Colombian hosts for this global event, which will take …
Working in civil society in Mozambique is a challenge. Not only is the country classed as repressed by the Civicus Monitor, but the northern province of Cabo Delgado has been subject to an armed insurgency since October 2017, claiming thousands of lives and displacing an estimated half of the province’s population.
Many advocates of localization would prefer to ignore the issue of racism, hoping that it will go away or that localization can somehow reform the system without tackling the neo-colonial mindsets on which the current system is built.
The public in donor countries should be entrusted with more than this half story – their tax paying vested interests combined with a current propensity to engage in social change efforts should instead be leveraged.
Background: Dalia believes in achieving holistic development. This means our community development approach focuses on the ecological, local economy, social and cultural dimensions. As a …
The deliberate use of the hashtag #ShiftThePower was intended to provoke. Frustrations about the shortcomings of philanthropy and development aid are nothing new. However, it has always been very hard – and there have been few incentives – for those on the receiving end of aid to call out the practices and behaviours of funders and other big international players, let alone suggest that the power that they wield might be contributing to the problems that they are meant to be solving. In that sense, a truly global summit could provide a space to start such a conversation: if it was going to work, the elephant in the room – ‘the P-word’ – needed to be named loudly and incontrovertibly from the start.
These are real-life situations that are purely hurtful where the Global South organisation encounters three hurtful behavioural patterns – superiority, arrogance and dominance. In these situations, one chooses to either exercise extreme humility or risk not having funding for their organisations. These scenarios might appear normal to some organisations especially in this environment where civil society might be competing for funding or where funding is on the decline
I came to see that in our dependency we had forgotten our collective dreams and our treasure trove of skills and local resources. Organizations like Dalia, and the Dalit Community Foundation, remind us that we can revive our aspirations by trusting our abilities to realize them.
