Ernesto Sirolli on Africa and the first Enterprise Facilitation® project in the Democratic Republic of Congo

From 1972 to1977 I worked for an Italian Agency of Technical Cooperation with African Countries call ASIP. ASIP was one of a number of private sector Agencies created after the passage of the Pertini Act of Parliament of 1971. Under the new law young Italians were able to volunteer for two years of work in Africa in programs designed and endorsed by the Italian Foreign Office. The role of my Agency was initially a recruitment and training role for young volunteers but very soon we became involved in designing the Technical Cooperation programs in a number of African countries including Zambia, Kenya, Somalia, Algeria and Ivory Coast.

What I experienced visiting our projects and our volunteers in Africa during the five years period was devastating. The experience shaped both my personal and professional life and Enterprise Facilitation®, the local economic and community development approach that we have developed over the past 30 years, is the direct result of it.

We failed miserably in Africa .Every single project failed to sustain itself and often we damaged the local people by introducing practices and technologies that were antithetic to local mores and inappropriate to local needs.

We started Training Farms by African rivers full of Hippopotami, only to see the crops eaten as soon as ripe, and we convinced the native people to come to work by “motivating” them with increasingly damaging enticements; from sunglasses and watches to beer and whiskey.

The Foreign Office started a faculty of Medicine in Mogadishu. My Agency sourced the books in the USA, had them translated in Italian and then established Italian Classes for students who, being well educated middleclass Somalis, spoke English.

During the period I came in contact with many foreign Aid Agencies working in Africa and I came to believe that it wasn’t only us Italians blundering in Africa. It seemed to me that all of donor nations had their own ideas of what the African people needed and were doing their blundering best to impose it onto them.

We collectively failed, and some still fail in Africa, because we made plans in our own countries and then we superimposed our programs, technologies and practices to people who did not ask us for our help and who did not need what we thought they needed! Our programs were about us, not them and without buy in from the locals we were always reduced to reward, motivate, cajole and bully people to do what we wanted them to do.

Instead of helping people do what they passionately wanted to do we paid them to do what we wanted done; as soon as the money would end the program would disappear!


Enterprise Facilitation is born of two ideas:

• Only go where invited
• Help people do beautifully what they love doing

The idea of “only going where invited” came from understanding the radical work of the German born economist Ernest Schumacher who, after working in Africa and Bangladesh in the sixties wrote “Small is Beautiful- Economics as if People Matter” (1973).

He famously wrote: “If people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid.” The implication is that we should only work with people who sincerely want to be helped and that we should wait to be invited before showing up with our own ideas.

“Helping people do beautifully what they love to do” comes from studying Positive Psychology also called “Growth”, “Third Force” or “Humanistic” psychology.

Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Adler, Fromm and a host of post Freudian and post behaviorist psychologists, hence Third Force, advocate a person centered, respectful approach to working with clients that is steeped in the belief that people are always striving for self improvement. The role of the “helper” is to “remove the obstacles” that are stopping the individual from “growing”. But the growth is unique to the individual and has to do with “their” needs and aspirations not the helper, the program managers, the Aid Agency or “society”.

The idea is that better individuals make for better husbands, wives, parents and citizens and that by facilitating personal growth, by helping people become proud of their achievements for instance, everybody benefits including the community at large.

Enterprise Facilitation is the result of thirty years community practice in facilitating the transformation of good business ideas into sustainable enterprises, but Facilitation, a la Carl Rogers, can be used in many other fields; from counseling to the delivery of education, social and health related services.

If invited we, Sirolli Institute International, a non per profit organization based in the USA and Canada, train the community leadership to employ an Enterprise Facilitator who, for free and in confidence, helps anybody who wants to transform a talent or a passion in a way to feed his/her family.

The first Enterprise Facilitator, Fabrice Ilunga Mujinga, was trained, and will continue to be trained, by the Sirolli Institute both long distance and during his regular visits to the USA. It is hoped that future projects in the African continent will be established with Assistance of our first African’ Enterprise Facilitator (who speaks French, English and Swahili on top of two local languages) as soon as he will have completed his training and at least one year practice in his community.

For more information please contact us: info@sirolli.com

Deficient or Sufficient?

You may be interested in a new Brookings Institution report, "Restoring Prosperity", that makes the case for the state's role in the revitalization of older industrial cities -- indicating that parks were used in the past to shape cities, and can be used to help remake them today. Here's an excerpt:

"states need to recognize and leverage the physical assets of cities that are uniquely aligned with the preferences of the changing economy, and then target their investments and amend outmoded policies so as to help spur urban redevelopment. States should focus their resources on upgrading crumbling infrastructure in cities and older areas; provide support for major
projects—such as waterfront redevelopment or improving large public parks—that have the potential to catalyze reinvestment in the core; and implement laws and policies that encourage, rather than inhibit, the management and marketability of vacant and underutilized urban properties."

To read the entire report or an executive summary, see the link : http://www.brook.edu/metro/pubs/20070520_oic.htm

Now this is a great example of a 'deficiency led' approach to regeneration. The underlying belief is that

"our city is not doing as well as it could because it does not have enough of the 'right kind of people'. If we can attract more of the 'right kind of people' to make us economically prosperous then everything will be all right. So let's beautify the parks, build wonderful office spaces with subisdised rentals and then attract the 'right kind of people' into the city. Once we have done this they will create jobs and the wealth will trickle downwards and outwards to local people as they get jobs. As long as we can attract more of the 'right kind of people' than competing cities we will indeed 'move up a league'."

The logic is, on the surface at least, sound. This thinking results in large scale investment and visible improvements in the city (which developers and politicians like). Along with the great office space, modernised railway station, growing airport and the investment in parks may also come a half dozen or more lap-dancing clubs and a night club and bar scene that is at best a 'mixed blessing' but well that is the price of prosperity in a modern city.However the money does not trickle downwards and outwards. Local people on the whole do not benefit from the jobs created - certainly not the well paid ones - and the gap between the rich and the poor in the city continues to widen.

Now supposing that we had made some different assumptions? That local people have passion, skill and aspirations? That if we develop a process that enables local people to explore and develop their own skills and passions, and use them to make a living doing work that they love - then who knows what they might achieve? This model of development assumes that all of the resources that a community has for its own sustainable development are already there. They just need to be harnessed.

This is based on an assumption of sufficiency. And it can work.

Economic Gardening

Economic Gardening is a process of economic and community development that works on the premise that sustainable development starts from where a community is at. Everything that the community requires for its own development is already present in the community - intelligence, passion, commitment and motivation. Development happens by nurturing these resources and helping them to flourish. Economic gardening is about looking for, and building on, the assets that the community already has. It is an asset based approach that seeks to create jobs and opportunities by supporting companies, actual and latent entrepreneurs that are already in the community.

Economic Gardening contrasts with 'Economic Hunting' - trying to attract companies from other communities. This is a 'deficit based' approach to development. It assumes that development depends on attracting something that is missing (an employer) into the community. Such 'Inward Investment' strategies are usually both expensive and risky. We have seen inward investors negotiate tremendous deals from local governments and then continue to request support to keep their business in the community. They usually have no real loyalty to the community - they are simply there because of an inward investment offer that was put on the table. Even when the inward investor is successful and is retained in the community - usually the profits generated are not retained locally but go back to shareholders elsewhere.

In our experience the gardening approach to community and economic development is lower risk, lower cost and leads to more sustainable long term economic development than inward investment and economic hunting strategies. It also promotes the development of local people in pursuit of their own passions, dreams and interests, rather than as the labour market 'cannon fodder' of the new employer. It also fits with our own values and beliefs. First you grow people. Then they grow communities, social enterprises, businesses and economies.