We all know the kinds of "tools" that are used in more formal kinds of training.
Besides flip charts, white-boards, and overhead projectors, there are brain-storming sessions, check-ins, trust-building exercises, ice-breakers, roll-playing.What about the tools that people use?
When something that poor communities do in one place is found to be useful, it gets repeated. With repetition, that thing becomes a feature of their work and begins being used with more intention. The more it is used, the more it gets refined and standardized. Before you know it, you’ve got bona fide tool.
A people’s tool.
Through transfer and adaptation, which are at the heart of community exchange, these tools get reinvented in other places, creating new tools. As with all tools, people master them only by using them — tools that help them to negotiate with the state, to explore house design possibilities, to organise a savings scheme, to analyze conditions in their settlements. It is a quality of most of the really good tools that they educate and mobilize at the same time — they have a double edge — they have both practical and strategic value to communities in their struggle for land tenure, secure houses, basic services and jobs.Stocking leaders with tools:
Community leaders need tools in order to mobilize other poor communities, to form that critical mass which is prerequisite to bringing about real change. These kinds of tools are emerging gradually, from experiments and practical application — many are being actively used within exchange programmes. People now have a set of precedents, a protocol. They’ve been to other places, seen a variety of tools being used. They know how to use them, know what to expect, know what to do. They’ve become managers of their own learning.There is a need to explore this new paradigm in light of the globalization and new systems of internationalism which are now having an impact on local and national situations, but which are short on solutions that work for the poor.
How can we provide investments to actors in the Asian region to expand the capacities of informal settlements to negotiate for their own development needs?
A very important part of the exchange process is to explore new solutions in which priorities are determined by communities themselves, to try them out and spread them around if they work. When we look at the community processes that are bubbling along in Asia and in Africa, we have to ask whether there are negotiations going on between communities and cities? If so, what skills assist them to leverage these negotiations and what tools help build those skills?
In the following pages we take a brief look at a few of the TOOLS that are transferred in typical community to community exchanges supported by ACHR's TAP programme and Slum Dwellers International.
"When a reasonable Act once done is found to be good, and beneficial to the People, and agreeable to their nature and disposition, then do they use it and practice it again and again, and so by often iteration and multiplication of the Act, it becomes a Custom and groweth into perfection in this manner; and being continued without interruption time out of mind, it obtaineth the force of a Law."
Carter in Lex Custumaria (1696)
