If you look around poor communities in Asia today, there’s an awful
lot going on — learning, building, innovating, negotiating — moving
forward in a thousand ways.
No need to be modest - Asian grassroots organisations are on the cutting
edge of people-driven solutions and represent a powerful pool of skills
and expertise.
This is something we know now, but fifteen years ago, there was also a
lot going on, but nobody knew much about it, all those struggles were
isolated, as though locked away in separate cupboards.
That’s where horizontal exchange comes
in.
When some solution seems to work in one place, horizontal exchange
creates opportunities for more communities to learn about it and
piggy-back on the experience, so good ideas spread around.
Usually this means community leaders (and sometimes
government officials) come to get hands-on training and then take the
message back home and to other cities.
The more these national groups get exposed to
regional processes, the more you build a regional mechanism for
diffusing innovation, by and for people, directly.
A growing number of grassroots groups in the Asian region — and their
supporters — have embraced this form of direct, experiential learning,
and over the past fifteen years, the exposure process has mushroomed in
scale, matured in focus and expanded in variety.
Exchange is now an inherent feature of how the regional network
operates, and how the poor learn.
As more and more exchanges are organised within the
region, an increasing — and increasingly varied — core of expertise
comes out of those exchanges.
If one settlement in India, for example, has
grappled with a serious infrastructure problem, there is your resource
for other communities to learn from.
Another settlement which has navigated a bumpy negotiation for
alternative land becomes another resource.
The Asian network now has a set of core organisations which operate as
resource team, in which everyone knows each other, understands each
other’s strengths and weaknesses and knows how best to combine and
work together.
The investment stays within communities and within the region — it’s
available, affordable, there’s a better language and cultural fit.
This resource pool provides a healthy
counterbalance to a development paradigm which keeps sending
international experts over to tell communities what to do, and which
still holds considerable sway over Asian development and development
resources.
In that model, experts come in, innovate and then go away, taking the
learning with them.
In the exchange model, learning stays within communities because the
vehicle is people, who are rooted in their local process — and who do
not go away.
One of the most powerful aspects of exchange is
that it expands your repertoire of options — you don’t have to have
it happen in your own back yard any more. People don’t have to work
out all their systems by themselves — they can import that process to
help them if they need to. And that’s what the larger pool
offers.
In the following pages we take a brief, backward look at a few of
the important milestones in the development of a regional and
international exchange
process.
