By Alice Nascimento
MediaGlobal News Service in Port Au Prince
PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI, 14 December 2007: At first view, the colorful murals surrounding Carrefour Feuilles’ triage center are simply a collection of paintings whose vitality brightens this otherwise bleak section of Haiti’s capital.
However, at a closer look, the paintings show a deep blue ocean giving way to a rising sun whose rays of light revitalize a community, underscoring a word painted directly at the center’s entrance: IBSA. Adjacent are the names of three countries now widely known and respected by the citizens of Carrefour Feuilles: India, Brasil, Sud Afrique.
As part of a partnership among these three countries, known by their acronym, IBSA, a fund for poverty reduction has sponsored a community-based project. The project’s goal is to establish a waste collection system, including a triage and a compost center in the community of Carrefour Feuilles in Port au Prince.
Though the entire country’s trash-collecting system is largely incapacitated and inadequate, garbage disposal in Carrefour Feuilles is particularly poor.
Piles of trash inundating the streets have fomented a vicious cocktail of insecurity and disease. Not only does the garbage obstruct transit and clog the city’s drainage system and canals, it also serves as barricades for rival gangs roaming the streets. The situation has been exacerbated by a lack of basic education about proper trash disposal. As a result, heaps of waste have grown, demoralizing the community.
Thinking outside typical Western approaches to development, IBSA decided to address Haiti’s complex problems through an equally complex initiative, putting into practice an idea that is prevalent in the reports of many international development agencies, but seldom realized: Community ownership.
When it created the project in 2005, the IBSA Fund established a basic framework while still allowing the community to have creative input and operational control over its development. By institutionalizing a real sense of ownership in the project, IBSA ensured that the inhabitants of Carrefour Feuilles took their future into their own hands.
Employing a total of 222 workers from Carrefour Feuilles, in a country where over 75 percent of the population is unemployed, the waste collection system is owned and operated by members of the community, most of whom have previously faced difficulties sending their children to school and providing their families with basic necessities.
The project aims to reconstruct the social fabric of the neighborhood by uniting and organizing the community to address trash disposal. It tackles issues of health and sanitation while also constructing a favorable environment to advance the country’s peace process.
“This is not an orthodox solution to development,” Francisco Simplicio, Chief of the Division of Knowledge Management at UNDP’s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation, which acts as the IBSA Fund’s secretariat, told MediaGlobal. “It doesn’t fit under one criteria. Is it environmental? Yes. Is it about good governance? Yes. Is it about peace building? Yes.
“A different group of countries have emerged with a different vision. Their discourse is different. Instead of abiding by the norm, IBSA said, ‘You know what, let me try something different. Let me try things my way,‘” he added.
The IBSA partnership was developed in 2003 as a pioneer of South-South cooperation, uniting three large emerging developing nations to assist countries facing comparable problems.
Those advocating South-South cooperation believe that the experiences of the three countries, similar to those of other developing nations, have made them better equipped to address development-related problems.
“When a Brazilian peacekeeping soldier walks into Port au Prince’s bidonvilles, he doesn’t feel as estranged or out of place in that environment,” Paulo Cordeiro, Brazil’s Ambassador to Haiti, told MediaGlobal. “He recognizes its facets, he has seen similar things.
“IBSA lives the realities of the countries that it is trying to assist. So why not share the little that we do have for the betterment of others facing the same kinds of problems?” Cordeiro asked.
Though it currently has projects all over the world, IBSA’s focus on Haiti is a means of providing strategic support for capacity building in a country often referred to as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
“IBSA’s support has been crucial,” said Eliana Nicolini, the project’s coordinator. “If each country can contribute just a little, and if they knew that this little could do so much in another country, then I think cooperation and solidarity would be much more institutionalized.
“I wish communities in India, Brazil and South Africa knew the extent to which they were collaborating, and indirectly supporting each person in Carrefour Feuilles. It’s not just about the money. It’s about sharing experiences in those countries with similar conditions. It’s solidarity – it’s the sense of solidarity through cooperation.”
Some claim that such a partnership may create a paradigm shift.
“The IBSA Fund is one of the instruments of the dialogue to affect poverty and hunger,” said Simplicio. “It creates opportunity for alternative visions.”
In twenty years Brazil’s economy is expected to be larger than the economies of France and the UK, while India and South Africa are rapidly industrializing. South-South cooperation is not only about democratizing the development agenda. It is also about reinventing it through the lenses of emerging powers.
