Opinion

Waiver: The following article reflects the views of its respective author and not necessarily the ones of CCIVS.

Learning from the South

By Cedric Medland, Programme Officer for Volunteer Action for Peace.

Twenty five years ago at the second SIW “North-South Seminar” in 1979, the orthodoxy was very much that the Northern partners had all the answers and the partners in the South were on the learning curve. The Northern partners had the money, the power, access to visas and decades of experience. Because the Southern partners could not get visas and therefore had no significant sending programme they took incoming fees from the Northern volunteers.

In 2009 when I took part in the CCIVS Africa-Europe exchange project I realised that some of the Southern partners are now much larger and more professional than many in the North and one of the great advantages is the control they have over the development of their national project programmes.

In the North the partners are dependent on their local project partners to provide their national project programme. If a project sponsor decides to cancel a project, however good it has been, there is nothing we can really do about it.

In the South partners control the development of their own programmes because they control a large part of the financing of their projects.

This allows particularly effective projects to be repeated. Some with parallel MTV programmes allow a round the year support, reinforcing particular messages on e.g. personal health or environmental values to become established. In terms of sustainable development this is far more effective that a two-three week moment that most Northern projects provide.

The perennial presence of international volunteers reinforcing the same work objectives with the same communities also encourages the development of local branches recruiting project participants, providing training, sending delegates to the national level, developing the institutional human infrastructure of the southern members.

Now we see the southern members of CCIVS having larger, more sophisticated, structured programmes of projects involving far more people. Perhaps it is time for the North to start learning from the South?

I believe that we should all be moving away from basing our income on sending fees and instead we should all start charging hosting fees and reduce our income from sending. In this way we will be encouraged and rewarded by developing our own programmes. The more successful quality projects we can host, attracting more volunteers, the more income we can make. With a secure income we can choose which programmes of projects that we want to specialise in which would make it easier for us to obtain funding.

My final point is that if we do not change we will be left behind. In the 1970s the sending organisation was a necessity to be able to find out about projects in the South. Now there is no logical reason for using a sending organisation as the individual volunteer will find all the information that s/he needs on the website of the hosting organisation. One thing that history teaches is that we need to adapt or we too will become history.