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
