When we started counting, we saw that what we have is more than what we don’t

Too often the development process zeroes in on what a community lacks; what it needs. Working with its Ethiopian partners, Oxfam Canada strives to turn that dynamic on its head.

The cash box, which contains the women’s savings, is brought to each meeting and an accounting of the funds saved and loaned is presented.

Using an approach dubbed asset-based, community-driven development (ABCD), every effort is made to identify and build on a community’s strengths. The process starts by involving everyone – women and men, young and old – in a detailed mapping of the physical environment, productive assets, social and physical infrastructure, knowledge and capabilities of all the community members.

This inventory of fields, water, woods, livestock, crops, skills, schools, organizations, tools, talents and traditions constitutes a very empowering picture. As one man says “When we started counting, we saw that what we have is much more than what we don’t.” In another community, a woman puts it this way: “We have everything but we saw ourselves as poor.”

The mapping also serves as the foundation for community conversations about how to build on these assets, tapping under-utilized resources and applying skills in one area to another, diversifying production or starting a new venture.

As well, the mapping helps make explicit things that often go unnoticed or under-valued. For women, this can mean their work for the family and the community as well as their productive work is acknowledged publicly for the first time. This can be especially powerful in Ethiopia where women traditionally do all the reproductive work and most of the productive work. They even build the houses!

As another part of the process, the community looks at how it spends its cash. Often it will find its largest cash expenditure is chemical fertilizers. In an economy where labour is more readily available than capital, this can prompt a rigorous look at composting readily-available cattle dung. It can also prompt the community to rethink how much it is spending on weddings or liquor as compared to school fees or other necessities.