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Building on traditional social capital
Dispersed settlements, far from urban centers, make it costly and physically
difficult to provide services. Public servants, especially teachers, are
recruited from urban centers and are reluctant to live in villages. Absenteeism
is high, and villagers often distrust outsiders. Agricultural experts sent to
marginal rural areas sometimes view the local people as too poor or uneducated
to develop themselves. The result is either benign neglect or costly (and only
partially successful) interventions. By building on long-standing traditions,
one poor village in Morocco found a way to improve
its quality of life (Box 4.6)
Box 4.6
"Cultural translators" as catalysts to upgrade livelihoods in Ait Iktel, Morocco
Ait Iktel is in the High Atlas Mountains about 100 kilometers from Marrakech.*
Per capita incomes are low, 2,500 dirham ($250) a year, much of it from migrant
remittances. In the mid-1990s the village had no electricity, and in drought
years potable water was a 3-kilometer walk. Primary enrollment was 5 percent
for girls and 20 percent for boys, who attended the state public school about 5
kilometers away.
The village's most valuable asset was its traditional social capital,
characterized by village elders managing by consensus- building and an
equitable, shared distribution of the limited resources (brush forest, water,
and communal grazing land). The village's social capital enabled the community
and its social, musical, and religious traditions to survive over the
centuries. More recently, it has enabled the community to shift toward a
development dynamic unprecedented in this region's history.
In 1995, when Ait Iktel faced a third consecutive year of drought, the
villagers pooled remittances and two of the villagers (Ali Amahan, then
director of the National Monuments of Fez, and his cousin Mohamed Amahane, a
mechanical technician at a phosphate mining company in Casablanca) organized
the men to construct a well. Assuming the vital role of "cultural
translators"-people who understand modern management methods and are also
steeped in the local traditions-the two men noticed how spontaneously and
efficiently the women organized the water distribution and maintenance of the
well and decided the community was ready to do more. The water project's
success set off a development dynamic that continues today.
The villagers established an association, Ait Iktel pour Développement, working
under the village assembly's traditional authority. The village assembly, a
traditional patriarchal authority structure that brings together all the chefs
de familles, manages village affairs, resolves disagreements, and makes
decisions based on unanimous agreement. The association mobilized the migrant
remittances for community development projects and set up a "village work
bank." Each family contributes five labor days a year on projects.
After constructing the well, Mohamed and Ali asked the assembly about building
a school for girls, but the village priority was to upgrade the access road and
purchase an ambulance to help reduce maternal deaths. After these two projects
were completed, Ali and Mohamed again raised the possibility of setting up a
girls school. Again the village assembly had another priority: electricity.
Mohamed designed a project that fit the income levels of the villagers: a small
generator for all the homes in the central village and solar panels for more
remote locations. It was critical to the building of social capital that
everyone contribute to and benefit from the project. In 1997, on the night they
all celebrated lighting up the village, the assembly agreed to a school for
girls.
The villagers were not opposed to sending girls to school, but they were
dissatisfied with the schooling provided by the state. The poor quality of
instruction did not prepare students for jobs in the village or the city, and
it cut children off from local agricultural and artisanal roots that could
provide them some livelihood. The association selected an unemployed university
graduate from the village to be the teacher. The villagers refurbished an
abandoned house for the school room using their own materials and set school
hours to allow time for girls to do their chores. They also wanted year-round
classes (with vacations coinciding with village events, planting, and
harvesting).
Classes were taught in the native language, and the curriculum was Arabic,
French, math, and on Fridays handicrafts taught by the village women. These
represented major changes from the state system. By the second year enrollment
of girls ages 6 to 20 went from 5 percent to 90 percent. To accommodate demand
the villagers built a second school in 1998. After three years, many girls had
graduated but had no prospect of continuing to the next level. In 2000 a
national NGO (Support Committee for Rural Girls' Education)** set up a
scholarship program for girls to continue their education.
Over a period of three years, each project contributed to a development dynamic
that expanded the villagers' modest asset base, and that continues to this day.
Incomes increased somewhat, but the time budget increased dramatically, so that
people had more time to devote to advancement rather than to survival.
Electricity allowed children to study at night, women to continue working on
handicrafts, and the villagers to afford an electrically operated irrigation
pump. Readily available water and electricity cut down on girls' time for
fetching water and wood. Health advice is now available on video in the
community center (65 percent of families have begun using family planning). The
irrigation system has doubled summer crops during the dry season and allowed
for some crop diversification. Thanks to the ambulance, there have been no
maternal deaths in childbirth.
Total project costs of $300,000 ($300 to $400 per person) were covered by a
grant from the Japanese Embassy (60 percent), savings from remittances (25
percent), and the villagers' labor (15 percent). Maintenance costs are covered
by the villagers, and teachers receive their salaries from the association
through a transfer from the education ministry. The grant cost of scaling up
this level of service nationwide would be roughly $1 billion a year over five
years. The ministry of agriculture's annual budget is about $2 billion, most of
it devoted to investments for farmers on more productive land, even though the
majority of farm families inhabit marginal lands.
Source: * See Amahan
(1998); Mernissi
(1997); interviews, field visits with Association Ait Iktel du
Développement, 2000;
**http://www.cssf.ma/.
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