Can we Punch Hunger??? - …Well not on our own!!!

 On Friday the 10^th of September we had a lecture by Rakesh Rajani, where we discussed our campaign objective and whether it is actually possible for us to reach our objective (an objective that we had decided on, only one hour before Mr. Rajanis arrival) regarding policies on biofuel investments that won’t compromise food security in Tanzania. He started out questioning our newly constructed objective by saying is it really going to make a difference for the people involved? Maybe working with policies and thereby working from the top down is not the way forward? Maybe we need to start on a ground level and see what qualities are actually already in the group of people that we are working with, which in our case are the small-scale farmers, and what can be used in combating their issues. Their being a key word, for that is what this is, it is their fight and we therefore need to make them involved and use their power. We need to see what is powerful in these people and connect with that. This can be exemplified in an exercise we did last week, where we in two groups had to plan a fictive party – the first group had to always say ‘yes, but…’ to all the suggestions given and the other group had to say ‘ yes, and…’ This led to a result where the first group didn’t manage to plan a party and the other one managed to plan several different ones. What we can learn from that is that if we build on the resources, which are already there, we can get further.

According to Mr. Rajani it is often the NGO’s agenda that decides the topic of a campaign, but the job of the NGO should instead be to listen to the people’s stories and not teach them about wrong and right. We are not the ones who should be heard, we are the ones that should make sure that the effected people are being heard. A quote from the lecture is: ‘Campaigns don’t change the world alone – people change the world!’ This means in order for us to make this campaign work we have to get the effected people involved. Now the question is, how are we going to do that??? This we don’t have the answer for yet, but hopefully we will be able to figure out a solution within the next couple of weeks.

One thing is for sure, Mr. Rajani encouraged us to be critical of our own campaign and our own role in this campaign, and this is a really important element in making a campaign, and something we really need to think about in the future. This is also a call for people here on the blog to comment on some of our posts, and be critical to what we write, because sometimes in the process of work you need to be pulled out of your mode and to have a wake up call.