Comments on: How poor people get through crises: some excellent 'rapid social anthropology' from IDS and the World Bank

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:23:02 +0000

I really like the new scholarship of actually talking to a lot of people who are in the category of folks you’re trying to understand, rather than positing an overlapping generations model and tuning parameters to match statistics which were made up on the spot by the poor schmuck whose job it was to produce them.

By: Halima Begum

Halima Begum — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:00:52 +0000

(Please use this version – couldn’t see an edit function to correct spelling… ) Thanks!

Like the idea of rapid social anthropology… For me, anthropology as a process is too slow for the world of interventions and real-time data by itself is too temporary, so this approach gives us a half-way house between the two, and where adaptation and flexibility are important, I can see this approach gaining credibility quickly in organisations that want to build more resilience.

Informal social capital and networks are important and will always be the invisible and priceless glue that bonds people/communities together at times of crisis, though I don’t think this points to a redundancy around the role of the state. The state is a sum of what individuals and their value systems make it – the mutuality, reciprocity and trust that individuals build between them is surely replicated in formal state structures? One doesn’t dilute the other, but mutually reinforces the value of both social capital and the role of the state in working together effectively. Suppose key is having access to the formal and the informal coping options, and having the choice.

Sometimes, or all the time, the poor have to be resilient because they don’t have other choices…

By: Jennifer Lentfer

Jennifer Lentfer — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:29:07 +0000

Low-wealth individuals and communities systemically mobilize resources (though often labeled “informally”) through a system of self-help and mutual assistance, which Wilkinson-Maposa and Fowler have coined as “horizontal philanthropy” or “philanthropy of community”. It is very important for development practitioners to recognize that emerging grassroots initiatives are born of this system, rather than just from external interventions, and to ensure that our support builds upon these systems, rather than bypassing or even thwarting them.

Wilkinson-Maposa, S. & Fowler, A. (2009). The poor philanthropist I-IV: How and why the poor help each other. Cape Town: Southern Africa-United States Center for Leadership and Public Values.
http://www.impactalliance.org/ev_en.php?ID=14913_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC

By: Seamus Anderson

Seamus Anderson — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:13:41 +0000

Thanks Duncan.
I too enjoyed the launch, and think the study has great potential. I like the idea that the World Bank can say openly that in times of crisis ‘the state was absent’. That has potential to influence policy for UN and government donors.

At the same time, states that had pre-existing safety net programmes like Serbia or Kazakhstan were better able to provide support to vulnerable groups. So it seems like a ‘both – and’. Perhaps there needs to be a greater, more deliberate emphasis on building informal social capital. This study certainly brings some rich understanding of just how informal social capital works, how valuable it is and how poor people experience it.

I was also very struck by how the report identified local faith organisations as highly valuable in times of crisis. In some ways this is obvious, but it was interesting to see this come out in the report and the discussion on Tuesday. Perhaps there is more we can do to strengthen the resilience and capacity of these valuable faith organisations to be more effective in times of crisis. I suspect there is great potential for sustainability here.