At UN, elites mull Millennium Development Goals. Did the poor weigh in?

Talk of the Millennium Development Goals at the UN General Assembly this week’s brought home one very clear fact: Western thinking about development is elite-driven.

I’m headed home from a couple of days at UN Week in New York, where I was fortunate to get to attend several events relating to a review of the Millennium Development Goals. I’ll have a lot more to say about that debate, TEDxChange with the Gates Foundation, the Mashable/92Y Social Good Summit, and the Clinton Global Initiative in the days to come. The summits and meetings are covering a huge range of topics, some of which are being honestly debated and discussed and others of which have been reduced to a series of feel-good talking points backed by questionable statistics and assertions.
This week’s events brought home one very clear fact for me: Western thinking about development is elite-driven. Almost entirely.

It’s partly understandable; the primary goal of the Clinton Global Initiative, for example, is getting the rich and powerful to make commitments to save the world in various fashions. While this work is targeted at the poor, their voices are absent in the conversation. While there is a lot of discussion of the need to capture human capital in developing countries, we didn’t hear from anyone who had actually lived the experience of escaping poverty. We didn’t learn how families survive on $1 a day from people who have no choice but to make it work.

(Top 5 Millennium Development Goal success stories)

There’s something very discomfiting about sitting in a hotel ballroom full of rich people talking about the best ways to help the world’s poorest people when almost none of the latter are present.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy hobnobbing with influential people as much as anybody.

I love getting to hear people like Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus speak and am still astonished that I got to go. But just as there are limits to what I can tell you about life in central Africa, there are limits to what elites from developing countries can describe about their countries as well.

Rich and poor, privileged and not – the contrasts are rarely clearer than at events like these, where the presence of the poor is limited to pictures in slide shows while wealthy people hobnob over cocktails and abundant buffets.

Am I the only one who would rather hear about what life as a poor woman in Ethiopia is like from an actual poor Ethiopian woman? Wouldn’t she give listeners more insight and perspective than yet another celebrity who’s been “touched by Africa” (and it’s always “Africa,” never the specific country) on a two-week trip organized by an NGO and a PR firm?

Couldn’t leaders of small-scale civil society organizations in Pakistan tell us more about their struggles to provide services, promote democracy, or build peace than the experts who supposedly know them well? Doesn’t a woman who’s managed to find foster families for hundreds of orphans in her Congolese community know more about accomplishing tasks on a shoestring budget than most of us ever will?

The world’s poorest people aren’t often welcome in these forums. Not really.

It’s too bad, because ignoring the expertise of the poor – or only considering it when translated by the famous for the masses – hasn’t served them or us very well thus far.

I don’t know what keeps them out of the discussion – culture, language, visa restrictions, or just being overlooked. What I do know is that talking about development while excluding from the conversation those who need it most is a mistake. We need the voices of those we want to help.

Badly.

--- Laura Seay is an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who blogs at Texas in Africa.