Forget me not

There are those in international development who, when they look at the overall global system, argue that the right macro economic and international trade policies would do far more to enable people to climb out of poverty than community based projects to 'empower people to help themselves.' Many NGOs, in their attempts to be most effective with their resources, are going away from community or local projects and programmes, from schools to health clinics to supporting local governance to move 'upstream' and try to tackle the challenges of development at the level of national policy or at the level of British international, trade or aid policy.

Yet at the same time we see the rise of direct giving in a rise of 'people helping people' - individuals in, say, the UK wanting to give directly to individuals in, say, Uganda to support them in building that well/school/irrigation project/school fees. Which one is right? In general, changing the macro-level policies that so often hinders bottom-up style growth and innovation might be in the long run more effective. But this attention misses a - the? - key element of the global development process: the human element.

In small towns and villages and even some entire countries around the world, one often encounters people who experience having been forgotten. Aid agencies give money and attention and press to the still-struggling Haiti but ignore the earthquake in Peru, or the deforestation in Brazil (hardly a 'news' story), or the ongoing, never-attended to oil spills in Nigeria that continue to damage the water supplies of people everywhere or the refugees who have been refugees so long that their children have been born, 'educated' and built a meager life for themselves in refugee camps or . Name your forgotten problem of choice. And in those places, the experience of the world having forgotten about you is uite painful, adding to the material and financial pain that they already may be experiencing. Which is not to say everyone feels forgotten or wants to be in connection with the big wide world - some are quite happy to be disconnected from it, others don't know or don't care.

But for those who do care and do feel disconnected, that experience is not necessarily solved merely by macroeconomic policies. It might not be helped by an extra goat or a cow. But it can be eased through the intention and the attention on connection, at a very human level, between two people of different cultures and different perspectives: neither has been forgotten by the other. And in doing that, we can continue the long process of repairing some of the damage that our intattention has brought upon us.