Development

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Even though there were some signs of transparency on the websites, it could be observed that there still remains some distance from the local reality, and sponsors can’t anticipate all the different sorts of local realities. World Vision claims to offer cultural interchange between sponsor and child, but this is generally very limited. Letters from child to sponsor are usually censored to remove requests for money, complaints from disillusioned families and all mention of politics. Professional letter-writers and translators are sometimes used to handle the correspondence or staff may dictate letters to children according to a sample provided in a manual. The sponsors know very little about the children. If you don’t know the ancestral history of the child you are sponsoring, you could take on the ancestral history of the child coupled with any witchcraft and jealousy imbedded in the child’s history. The sponsor, helping save Africa, ends up themselves to some of these spiritual forces in the child’s history. You could be sure no child-sponsoring organization and sponsor will ever consider a child’s ancestral history. Escobar suggests a co-operation and the involvement of grass roots groups as one possible direction to address these disastrous complications that may arise from the distance from local realities.

Online reviews on World Vision’s performance gave the impression that they are an organization that is aware of the critics, and respond with some changes. A lot of changes have been made on their website over the course of time as a result of criticism. Escobar however believes that development agencies like World Vision could only make significant changes by addressing some of the key assumptions of development, and to understand issues with the development paradigm and the context under which they arose. Escobar points out that it is not a coincidence that the rise of development came with the decline of colonialism and the rise of the United States as a new global power. Colonialism was replaced with a new supposed humanitarian imperialism. (Escobar, 1995: 26). For this well-intentioned people to actually make a significant change, they must let go of the notion that they have to save Africans from themselves. This represents a whole set of desires and attitudes that are rooted in the white savior mentality that must go away. In essence, there should be an attempt to localize autonomy, and a focus on people deciding how they want their society to look, rather than have an outside vision enforced upon them by the likes of World Vision, and experts. While localizing autonomy will not be the magic solution to the problem of development, particularly child sponsorship, it will be a step in the right direction.