Pri's blog

It is amazing how my post on the White Saviour Complex of Development Consultancy reached so many people once I included  it on LinkedIn  and tagged it appropriately.  Over a 1000 reads.. a bit overwhelmed by it all.  Also, given that right now it is at the forefront of my mind, I was pleased to see drop into my inbox an initiative that provides an alternative.  Maybe there is a case to be made for a collection of such alternatives - so here goes. The first paragraph of Kristen Cheney's ISS blog  on Children as Experts could be easily paraphrased to present the problematic of the white saviour way of doing development, or in this instance, development research.  Here's my modified version. My changes in italics. " It is often assumed that social research is the domain of experts - and that those experts are necessarily researchers from the global north. Most development research is northern-led and northern-centric, not only ignoring southern voices but denying dive

photo taken from  https://e11e99.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/identity-in-a-post-colonial-world/ I am sharing some thoughts that I picked  randomly from a relatively progressive Christian facebook page (Sojourners)that I follow, mainly to help me counter the rather misinformed opinions of my true believer Christian friends (brown not white).  The article is called , 6 HARMFUL CONSEQUENCES OF THE WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX, BY RYAN KUJA  and is so relevant to the northern development consultancy space that many of my (white) friends and colleagues occupy (and that I too sometimes venture into) that I thought to use it to write a blog post that I can share with that community.   R yan Kuja confesses that he was "never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls"  but admits that "the engine driving [him] was the white saviour complex..... The other Westerners [he] worked with believed [they] had it all pretty much figur