What Is The Ethos Of Hope Child

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The slogan “Give an man a fish…” fetishes notions of self-sufficiency and sustainable development practices in such a way to obscure the potential pitfalls and problematics of such an approach. China Scherz compares two, very different organisations operating in central Uganda . The first, Mercy House, is Franscian mission which follows an ethos of giving to the “needy” indiscriminately and providing for the direct needs of poor and orphaned children . The second, Hope Child adopts the fashionable ethos of “sustainable development” and places emphasis on providing trainings and workshops, and auditing and measuring outcomes . Hope child is popular with donors in the West because it satisfies their beliefs in the importance of empowerment, …show more content…

Indeed, the orthodoxy of “sustainability” and “detached” development comes into conflict with Ugandan values of ‘interdependence, philanthropy and spirituality’ . Katy Gardener suggests we need to get away from simplistic and unhelpful distinctions between and “Independent Northerners” and “Dependent Southerners” and realise we are all embedded in networks of dependent social relationships . Gardener asks us to imagine the outrage of the British public if they were declined basic services such as health care and education and told instead to “stop being dependent” and were instead offered workshops to empower them to be “self-sufficient”—British people are not so different to the Ugandan people. Gardener calls on us to explore the politics of provision and move away from simply arguing that dependency is or is not a bad thing . Shah suggests that now we have accepted that dependence is “fine” and that we all involved and live within dependent relations with others, that we need to move towards tracing the differences in dependence—different types of dependency will have different implications for poverty, inequality, politics, hierarchy and social relations …show more content…

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" has both affected the course of development and ideas about welfare, and is also emblematic of the fear of dependency which has come to characterise welfare discourse and policy. The discussions here about assumptions of who and who is not a legitimate dependent, of the moral implications of dependency and of the ‘fetishisation’ of sustainability and self-sufficiency suggest that issues of welfare, need, poverty and independence are far more complicated, nuanced and variable than the self-evident development orthodoxy would suggest. It would appear, from the ethnographic material discussed in this essay, that most people seem to care more about whether they get fish and less about how they should get it. I argue that or focus should not be whether dependency is a negative or a positive, considering that dependency can be both enabling and disabling, and that we are all, in various ways, dependent on others for our well-being. Negative moral ideologies of dependency are relatively new and ideas about dependency are variable across time and space—through different historical and social contexts. When thinking about dependency and welfare, we need to look beyond ideological presumptions and preconceptions and give more consideration to how people see themselves and the social relationships and various dependencies which they are implicated

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