Development Point: Leadership Development and Peer Education

Development Point: Leadership Development and Peer Education

In my opinion, having outsiders coming into the village, whether it’s workers from developed countries or local NGO workers who live in the city, isn’t as effective in terms of educating groups on a broad scale as having someone from inside their social network educating them instead.

From my observations and experience, a teaching technique called peer-education, is one of the most effective ways of facilitating behavioural change. This is based on the idea that people are much more willing to make changes in their lives if someone of whom they association themselves with closely is able to make the same change in their lives. The traditional development way of teaching, having ‘experts’ come in and explain information to the local people, isn’t as effective because development workers, whether ex-pats or local NGO workers, are still seen as ‘outsiders’ by most people in the local group. What happens a lot of the time is that these ‘experts’ explain to the group what their best option is, but the majority of the group doesn’t consider themselves as being people able to carry out that option. These local people do acknowledge the outsiders as ‘experts’ and give them a huge amount of respect, but as with almost any group, they feel that the ‘outsiders’ don’t really understand what it is really like to be inside that group.

So therefore, if the expert says to a group of farmers “All you have to do is plan your crop better”, the local group probably believes that planning their crop better will help. However, they usually justify to themselves that for one reason or another, there are circumstances in their own lives that allow the expert to plan their crop better and succeed, but those same circumstances aren’t available in their own lives. Therefore, they usually don’t end up following the advice because they justify that it isn’t appropriate for them. The local group has a real hard time ‘identifying’ with this expert because they don’t see very many connections between that person and themselves. They maybe see the expert as coming from a rich country, or having parents in positions of influence, or not having to deal with HIV/AIDS, and therefore they say to themselves” it is easy for the expert to come in and give me advice. But they really don’t understand what it is like to be me and if they were put in my same circumstances, they too wouldn’t be able to plan their crops better”.

This is in no way saying that there isn’t any way that people in possession of more knowledge or experience in a specific field aren’t able to affect behaviour of groups. It is just saying that there are techniques that can be used by this expert to reach a larger number of people in these groups as compared to the traditional methods. If the people in the group are able to see someone, of whom they can identify more closely with, make changes in their own lives, then all of a sudden they feel that there isn’t any justifiable reason that they too shouldn’t be making that change and will usually give it a try.

So, how do you do this? Well, you identify leaders in the group who want to accept this change and then focus on helping them succeed (those familiar with the “Leadership Incubator” at the U of C, please don’t mock how similar this sounds). Most groups almost always have a type of person who is much more willing and able to take the initiative on new ideas. These leaders have the ability to be ‘trend setters’ because they posses attributes that the rest of the group can identify with and are much easier to relate to as compared with the ‘expert’. You then find ways to work with these leaders to create that change (which most of the time is way easier because they are very self-motivated).

Then, after that leader is able to demonstrate that they can be successful, work to create mediums so that this local leader can share and inspire the rest of the people in the group so that they identify with them and then choose to create their own change. This approach operates using more of an inside out technique, rather then the other way around. It also makes things a lot easier for the development worker as well because then their main focus shifts to only have to do monitoring and evaluation and therefore they can use more time and resources in other areas.

This theory also correlates with the reason why Engineers Without Borders really stresses learning the local language and trying to live a lifestyle as close to the local people as possible. By doing this, you are able to take steps that make yourself more identifiable to those local people. Therefore, you earn more respect from them and increases the chances of them not only understanding you, but also choosing to do something about the information that you are giving them.

This also just isn’t a theory for development work either. One brief example that sort of illustrates this (but not completely because I’m too lazy to put the time into thinking of a better example) back in Canada, is that time and time again you hear from ‘experts’ that to stay healthy, the best thing you can do is eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly. I would say that most Canadians would state that they want to be healthy. But I wouldn’t say that a lot of people eat a balanced diet and regularly exercise, despite the fact that almost everybody knows this. Having correct information does not necessarily correlate to behavioural change. Many times, what it takes is seeing someone around you who you can associate with, such as a close friend, to take the lead and this inspires you to do the same.

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