Dear all

Am inspired to comment on this subject against a background of attempted war and conflict in my country Kenya after a flawed election process.My name is Emma Njoki Wamai, a director at Ecosandals in Kenya. Ecosandals Ltd.is a social enterprise that makes sandals and it is located in one of the shunty towns where post electoral violence had escalated and we are hoping that peace prevails to enable us continue running our production facility and to embark on international sales to the north Americam market which we have been looking forwrd to in this new year.

The stories from Nepal are uplifting,that even in the midst of conflict social enterprises can thrive.Thanks and looking forward to hearing from you all.

Emma

Emma, we have been following the election in Kenya and its aftermath, and wish you and Ecosandals, Ltd. much luck. Fortunately for READ, the villagers have all worked to protect the libraries and their sustaining businesses, as the profits from the businesses and the services provided by the libraries benefit each and every one of townspeople.

Just a quick note to say I think this is one of the most significant events we've ever hosted on the Edge, because it really brings home vividly the fact that everything we do is done in a context, and that the contests vary widely in ways that can set up extraordinary obstacles.

We all need to know this, because our own contexts are, in their way, as important to us as our aims and objectives. We tend to think straight ahead, like an arrow speeding on its way

but unless we also allow for the cross-winds, which can be considerable, we are likely to miss the mark.

Thanks so much for starting this conversation, Toni. It's inspiring, to say the least.

Charles, you are right on target! We have a great love in our world for "cookie cutter" models and quick fixes, and life is not like that. One really has to adapt the strategy to suit the context. It would be interesting to study which development methods work well in different types of conflict situations. What are some really good development strategies where there are religious conflicts, for example?

Hi Toni and everyone, I work with Educate the Children, which also conducts programs in Nepal. We run integrated community development projects that combine scholarships and school improvement, women's literacy and empowerment, and agricultural development (details are on our website: http://www.etc-nepal.org). Like READ, Educate the Children hasn't had excessive problems in dealing with the war in Nepal. I basically agree with Toni's general assessment, though I do think ethnicity played a strong role in that conflict (the Maoist template, if they would have won the war, was to divide the country into ethnic homelands). Indeed, in our work with women's groups we've discovered that the groups that are heterogeneous in their caste and ethnicity are far less solidary and stable. Nevertheless, we didn't witness any "ethnic cleansing" there (though that impulse does play a role in some of the ongoing conflicts in the Terai area that borders with India).

Anyway, my point in posting was not to debate finer points of the conflict in Nepal but to agree that it is the method of working that makes all the difference in how well an organization can handle conflict zones. A few of the things that make a difference for us are:

• Like READ, Educate the Children only works with local communities, it does not work through or accept funds from, the government. - Before we start working in a community we spend several months introducing ourselves, our methods and our vision of what can be achieved. We will only start working once we have a written invitation to do so. - We commit to a 5 year process of change and phase-out our activities over the course of a 6th year. - Every year we conduct a planning process where we consult with the community about what to do in the coming year. While we have a progression of activities that we work through (e.g., work with women's groups eventually leads to the formation of cooperatives by several groups joining together) a year long calendar of activities is only fixed through the consultation process. This makes our agenda transparent and it also gives everyone some yardsticks for accountability. - We have an open book policy: we discuss how much things will cost and will provide an accounting to the community. - We have no foreign staff in Nepal, only Nepalis

Basically, these and other facets of our work lead to transparency and build an extraordinary degree of trust between ourselves and the community. I think that for us the lynchpin is the 5 year commitment. Too many organizations in Nepal and everywhere else are hit and run, their activities occur only over a few months or at most a year or two. In my opinion, it takes months to introduce ourselves, and up to another 18 months to be known well enough for the community to really have faith that we won't just disappear like so many others do. This doesn't mean that for two years nothing happens, quite the opposite; we have to achieve a lot in that time for people to believe us and take us at our word. But after we get about a two years into the total process people do the math: "these Educate the Children people are true to their word and we only have 3 or so years left of them being here." It's then that the real change begins to happen because people believe that it is possible, they don't constantly hedge against the expectation of abandonment.

So what does this mean for dealing with conflict? Here's an example from a few years ago. The Maoists were demanding a 20K "contribution", which for us is a lot of money. Our Nepal Director, who is a woman, managed to get a meeting a regional commandant and she put our budget in front of him, pointing our that there was no line in there for paying them off and that if they insisted they should decide which school wouldn't get support, which students wouldn't get scholarships, which agricultural projects would have to be abandoned so that they could have their payday and furthermore that they would have to tell the community because we had already promised that such and such things would be done. Though it sounds improbable in retrospect, that was the end of the matter: such was the trust of the community in what we were doing that the Maoists didn't want to tell people that they were undermining our work there.

I don't think this would work everywhere. I lived in Colombia for several years and there are parts of that country where good works would make no difference. Furthermore, on the whole the community folk in Nepal were not a primary target in the way that ethnic or social cleansing wars are (e.g., there are areas in Colombia that became depopulated because of right-wing paramilitary militias telling entire villages to move or die). In that respect Nepal is a unique case.

This is such a ripe topic, I hope others chime in. One final note though, the topic title is a bit misleading as social entrepreneurship doesn't really seem to be the focus. That is fine by me, I think your questions framing the discussion are appropriately not limited by that subject.

Hi, Chris and thank you for chiming in! You and ETC do wonderful things in Nepal!

Let me address one point - this is about social entrepreneurship in a country that has been torn apart over the past 13 years:

• "social", because READ Global links educational development, through library/community centers, with other social organizations (including ETC) that help with microfunding, medical clinics (one library community center has a doctor who has actually performed more than 1000 vaginal prolapse operations in a room set aside for women), agricultural workshops, etc.
• "entrepreneurial", because the method for ensuring the support and sustainability of the development work is establishment of a business (hotel, clinic, etc.), managed by the village library committee, whose profits fully sustain the library as well as provide jobs in the community and feed extra money back into villages for other needs - stipends for poor children, a bridge over the Kali Gandhaki, so that students do not have to walk several miles out of their way, an addition for the school, money for the local Red Cross, and . . . very importantly, jobs.

Very honestly, my sense is that Nepal is not unique, although it does have some unique factors; and that, although this model might have trouble in Colombia, where right-wing militaries are moving villagers and people around, there are many other places in the world where the systemic approach that it offers - social, educational and economic - would be very helpful and could be explored.

A more important question is whether any sort of development would work under the Colombian circumstances you describe, and, if so, what type or types?

I'm stunned by both the courage and the trust displayed in this paragraph:

QUOTE: The Maoists were demanding a 20K "contribution", which for us is a lot of money. Our Nepal Director, who is a woman, managed to get a meeting a regional commandant and she put our budget in front of him, pointing our that there was no line in there for paying them off and that if they insisted they should decide which school wouldn't get support, which students wouldn't get scholarships, which agricultural projects would have to be abandoned so that they could have their payday and furthermore that they would have to tell the community because we had already promised that such and such things would be done. Though it sounds improbable in retrospect, that was the end of the matter: such was the trust of the community in what we were doing that the Maoists didn't want to tell people that they were undermining our work there. :UNQUOTE

Charles, you are right on celebrating the courage of the ETC Executive Director. This is a good example of something working. Now, let's look at other types of conflicts and development/social entrepreneurship solutions that have worked: - What sorts of development activities have worked in religious or ethnic conflict situations? Have they helped to defuse the conflicts? - What conflict situations make development impossible?

As today is the last day of this conversation, we want to share the news that with the help of a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries initiative, READ Global intends to double the number of libraries, triple the number of countries in which it operates and bring the number of people whose lives it touches to about two million.

This is the second honor bestowed on READ by the foundation, which awarded the USD $1 million Access to Learning Award to READ Nepal in 2006.

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is honored to support READ Global’s work to connect more people to a new world of online information, communication, and opportunity,” says Martha Choe, director of the foundation’s Global Libraries initiative. “By using computers and the Internet in public libraries, people can learn professional skills, search for work, enhance their education, and communicate with family and friends around the world.”

As we expand into other countries, we truly hope that the strategies we have been employing in Nepal and India will be successful in other countries. Again, if you have approaches to entrepreneurship and development that are unique, please do keep in touch with us and READ Global, as we welcome new ideas and thoughts. Thank you. Toni

Hi Toni --

Just a quick note to say that the discussion here continues. We start another event on Tuesday, to be sure, but this one will move down to second place in our list of events, and people are still discussing the number two and number three events currently on our list as we speak.

I hope you may be able to return and join us as the conversation continues to unfold... and would like to thank you in any case for a highly stimulating week, reminding us of just how difficult the issues facing social entrepreneurs in some of the most conflict-ridden parts of the world can be.

QUOTE: What sorts of development activities have worked in religious or ethnic conflict situations? Have they helped to defuse the conflicts?

What conflict situations make development impossible? :UNQUOTE

I'm afraid I'm not in a position to answer those very important questions directly.

I come up against an issue of metrics when I think about these questions.

In what we think of as peaceable situations, where there's the quiet rumble of conflict that's normal to such situations, we can measure the success or failure of our initiatives, within limits, because the variations in background noise aren't enough to disturb our metrics. But trying to measure anything, and conflict resolution in particular, in the midst of a major conflict zone, is like trying to tell if you've adjusted the picture on your wall that was leaning a little to the left correctly, in the middle of an earthquake.

Anyone who wants to know if your efforts have "ameliorated" the conflict will have to rely on something other than conventional metrics of "impact" to make their determination. Only a ceasefire, truce or cessation of conflict will really show up as a reliable indicator of progress, and that may be the result of negotiation, fatigue, group migration, a shift in the dynamics of remote entities involved in proxy warfare, weather changes, who knows…

There's a second issue here for me, but I'll save it for a second post.

When I read that powerful quote of yours, Antonia:

QUOTE: What sorts of development activities have worked in religious or ethnic conflict situations? Have they helped to defuse the conflicts?

What conflict situations make development impossible? :UNQUOTE

I also come up against an issue having to do with thought.

When you really get down to it, conflict resolution is a matter of changing minds and hearts, isn't it? There's plenty of talk about "winning hearts and minds" as a key aspect of modern warfare, but the realities of when and how one set of emotions can be replaced by another, or a strongly held attitude changed to allow greater nuance or an essentially different understanding... these things simply don't show up when we look at the list of targets for social entrepreneurs to work on.

We understand housing, it's physical, we can see the lack of it when there are people without roofs over their heads, and its presence when there are buildings to shelter them. We understand hunger, and the provision of nutrition. We understand education, which begins, just barely begins to get at the issue of changing minds.

But thought itself as a target for change? It's invisible.

There's an interesting conversation I stumbled on recently in the blogosphere. Here's blogger Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye back in 2005 talking about the differences between oral and literate cultures, following on the work of Walter Ong SJ, and the significance of that impact for the situation in Iraq:

http://theglitteringeye.com/?p=1187

Fully understanding a foreign culture requires a cognitive shift, or perhaps a series of them. We have to come to grips with a different sense of reality, of truth and its importance, a different sense of time perhaps, of the relation between history and present time, of narrative, of honor and shame… even of the respective values of life and death.

Cultural anthropologists are aware of some of these issues, depth psychologists of others, comparative theologians, linguists

even literary criticism has some of the insights we need to approach cultures which may be an invisible blend of the archaic, the medieval and the post modern.

The nuances found in these disparate disciplines mold the daily speech patterns, the "listen and respond" patterns that shape discourse, and conflict resolution takes place within them, within constraints that we are barely aware of.

To shift the balance of cognitive skills in a direction more hospitable to understanding the alien, the other?

How and where does one propose a program for that?

The needs for food, shelter, work, healthcare: these are blatant, these are obvious, these are areas which can be documented, with proposals made, funds granted, work done, measurements taken.

But cognitive shift? The ability to hear the other, in conflict, and to respond in a manner that the other can hear?

This seems to me to be both crucial in importance and almost impossible to achieve. It simply lives, as a topic, too far outside the boxes we've built.

Oh, Charles . . . we need to sit down over wine (or beer) and talk. You have raised some dynamite issues. Let me add one comment first that relates to time and communication with and among different societies. Piri Popescu, in his book "Amazon Beaming" talks about time in industrial and in non-industrial societies. In industrial societies, we have a very large "past", a thin line that we call the "present" and which we leap over to get to the future. The future is "What do you want to be when you grow up?", "What is your 5-year plan?" etc.

In non-industrial societies, there is often not really a past. Rather, you have "tradition", which is the past made present. Everything that is not part of tradition is basically "thrown away", not relevant. The future is also different, and is "See that tiny bush. It will make a wonderful canoe for my great, great,great grandchild."

When these views of time clash, it is hard, as one side cannot even begin to understand the other, unless you recognize the differences and work within them.

When traditions clash, it is hard to find a common ground, as it is often too easy to simply dismiss the values of another society that do not match yours.

Sometimes, however, an outside factor can force a society to rethink their ways. For example, we were in a small town called Khobang on the back end of the Annapurna Trail in Nepal, discussing building a printing operation with a good sized printing press to sustain three different libraries in the area. The library was to be in the district capital, Jomsom, three towns up the trail. These towns have often competed with each other and even waged war against each other.

Where up until about 18 months ago there was only a trail, now there is a road and cars, motorbikes, taxis, etc. can go from one place to another . . . an incredible change.

We were explaining that it really no longer made any difference where the printing operation was, because you could live in Khobang and be in Jomsom in 15 minutes - less time than it took to take the goats to the pasture above the village. Moreover, with the road, all of these tiny villages were going to be connected and interdependent. A printing operation could really both benefit and link these tiny communities that had been separated by lack of infrastructure.

On top of the road, these communities are also tied together suddenly with internet. This was a revolutionary way of thinking for the people - a total change in how their world had operated for "umptyump" years, a change that demanded a whole new cognitive approach, sense of time, responses to each other, etc.

I'm up for the wine, and very interested in the issues of time and reality

partly because they tie in closely with the nature and impact of ritual, and I'm a sort of freelance liturgist at heart, but also because I'm working on some documentation re Islamism, and time-as-narrative, with the age of the Companions of the Prophet ever-present, is right at the heart of that work, that understanding.

So, are you in Incline, or nearer Annapurna?

So much to say and ask, and much of it drifting away from our topic here... I'm hipbone at earthlink dot net

perhaps we should go to email?

QUOTE: This was a revolutionary way of thinking for the people - a total change in how their world had operated for "umptyump" years, a change that demanded a whole new cognitive approach, sense of time, responses to each other, etc. :UNQUOTE

On the one hand, I am delighted by the shift here, the internet, printing press and library bringing people together... but I'm also an admirer of the earlier cognitive style, and of the rich diversity of the cultures we are weaving together with our "web"...

It's a rich puzzle to me, in fact, how we can work to "conserve" cultural diversity (much as the Norwegians are working to conservve genetic diversity by storing crop seeds below the permafrost at Svalbard) while enabling connectivity.

But maybe that should be the topic for another event here.

Although your issue of conservation of cultural diversity is fascinating, let's save that topic for another moment and try and wrap this up with a final point. When John Abizaid talked in Reno, he made clear that if we expected to win the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan with guns alone, we were sorely misguided. We need to focus on education, health, job development, economic and social infrastructure. But we need try other methods of doing this - ones that actually reach down to the people who are the foot soldiers for revolution - and benefits their lives in a meaningful fashion. READ is one model that is highly successful, and we need to utilize it and other creative approaches if we ever hope to enjoy the luxuries of peace and global understanding.

Amen to that.

Though I've never attempted to deploy social enterprise in a country in conflict, there's been an inclination in our work toward the prevention of conflict, for instance our founders efforts in Russia post perestroika with a bottom up alternative approach to the Defense Enterprise Fund.

In Russia he was fed a drugged sandwich by corrupt minor FSB officials and arrested at gunpoint, then given the offer of yeilding a £25k donation. He declined and as a consequence got a black mark (presumed) on his visa and was unable to return.

Later in Ukraine, having put forward a development plan for the repatriated Islamic population of Crimea, a proposal which weight the cost directly with the equivalent number of Tomahawk Cruise missile a government official demanded something less than transsparent at the 11th hour and was staggered to be refused.

As verified by the interpreter, the conversation when like this.

"Who are you to say I can't do this? We can go around you"

"Try it, I have copyright and will block you all the way, go £*%! yourself!"

"What does it matter to you, it's not your money"

"I assure you it is my money, mine and every US taxpayers"

When he got over to London with me, we discovered that UNDP were tring to implement it regardless. They were asked politely to back off and did. They had apparently budgeted 200 times what the proposal cost to produce.

No project, no funds, but he did make a point about graft and now the powers that be have come alongside.

It was his original premise that social business could counter the threat of terrorism and conflict and that too has since gained wider acceptance. We believe that Peace can be engendered at a fraction of the "investment" made in Iraq and have the money back.

Just a quick note, in case anyone sees this, that Nepal seems to be going through a pretty rough period right about now.