Working with urban people is different than working with rural people
But it’s not necessarily harder! That was one of the interesting conclusions that yesterday’s Innovation Forum organized by the Social Innovation Lab, reached. The thematic area of focus: Urban. The (trick!) true or false question: Is working with urban people harder than working with rural people? The purpose: To discuss questions and compare notes on cross program/cross country challenges and opportunities of working with urban poor to help BRAC develop its urban strategy.
Increasingly, many at BRAC feel a growing need to design programs specifically for urban communities and contexts. In the last month, the Social Innovation Lab has approached many programs to catalog the various BRAC activities operating in urban areas. There are many, suggesting that opportunities to create linkages and synergies could be identified and leveraged. In addition, implementation strategies can be informed by the BRAC Research & Evaluation Division’s ongoing studies on the dynamics of urban poverty.
Most of the forum was dedicated to discussion, focused on describing the differences in the people and settings in rural and urban areas. Participants shared their rich experience and insights into how the urban poor suffer from a deep sense of ‘insecurity’ about where they live and what they do for a living. Concepts of family, neighborhood and community change dramatically once rural people migrate to urban areas. That in turn causes each household to become isolated and hampers efforts to organize them. However, the harsh economic realities that force the urban poor to leave their rural communities and “view children as income-generating assets” also bring out the best of the latent entrepreneurial potential that they have. Urban areas thus appear to have both a better pool of skilled labor with a higher potential for resource mobilization and greater access to amenities like healthcare. The Executive Director put it nicely when he said, “…both push and pull factors play a role in urban migration.” That is, while things like river erosion ‘push’ people towards urban areas, the presence of economic opportunities and absence of “bars” when it comes to women working act as ‘pull’ factors to draw them in.
The momentum and ideas generated in the discussion were channeled to a group brainstorming activity. Each cluster was given five minutes to write down one recommendation to help BRAC develop an urban strategy. The output is presented below.
1. Frame a strategy which conforms the interest of different stakeholders to the program objectives.
2. A pilot can be done in not more than 4-5 slums and consider integrated program approach.
3. To keep Tenancy and tenurial security at the core of all interventions/programs.
4. Take an occupational group based approach and avoid duplication of services provided by other NGOs.
5. Programs should be context oriented – require need based initiatives.
6. A baseline survey regarding the context has to be done before starting any program to make it more effective as slum context varies from slum to slum.
7. ‘Urban’ should be treated as a cross-cutting issue as ‘Gender’ has been.
8. Reflect on informing the urban dwellers of the services already existing in the community.
9. A guideline on collaborating with Government and other stakeholders to provide basic services such as access to water, health, fuel that they are entitled to as citizens.
10. Partnership with media to strengthen awareness among slum dwellers on their basic rights and spread knowledge on perception of community.
11. Understand the conditions and systems that define urban areas and the resources available to BRAC.
12. Contact RED for Impact-assessment.
Overall, there seems to be trade-offs and balances required for effective programming in both ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. It is hard to say that working in one is harder than the other, as both are challenging but offer unique opportunities. What is clear as a result of the discussion in the forum is that ‘urban’ needs to be acknowledged as a thematic area that needs to be studied much more closely and that BRAC programs feel the need to explore how to best address urban issues – in a more collective, and perhaps coordinated manner. Looking at other innovations occurring in urban South Asia may inspire our thinking. Exciting opportunities to expand the conversations to other arenas, such as the recently launched Bangladesh Urban Poverty Forum or UN’s Solution Exchange, can also be explored. We will follow up with specific ideas soon!
If you think we forgot anything, or want to add something, please feel free to post any comments/questions/additional resources here!
This sounds like an excellent and productive discussion as BRAC takes its urban agenda forwards. It also highlights of how important it is for BRAC to keep records of its experiences as it starts working more broadly in urban poverty reduction – of what works, as well as what doesn’t. Right across the developing world, the ‘urban poverty’ question is being recognised more, so these lessons will have repercussions both within and outside Bangladesh.
I particularly like the trick question, ‘is it harder?’ as the starting point for the discussion, given that this (false) belief is one of the major barriers to great urban programming. The reality is, we don’t really know – we think it is, partly because of the numbers, and partly because of a lack of experience. Bangladesh may be experienced and successful in poverty reduction, but this has been strongly rural-focused, and urban programmes are much more recent. Understanding more about what works in urban areas will need both a stronger understanding of urban poverty, and what makes it different to rural poverty, as well as what works/doesn’t work in programme design. As the discussion above discusses, BRAC is well-placed to make important contributions on both the knowledge and programme side!