Silent Majority: An International Development Simulation
by Catherine LaineOctober 11th, 2006
This weekend I attended the first annual Caribbean Students’ Conference at MIT entitled “Technology and Society in the Caribbean”. Of the multiple workshops that were offered, I thought this one was particularly interesting. It was entitled “Drinking Water in Haiti” and was run by Jules Walter (a member of the team who recently came back from Haiti), Sarah Bird and Alia Carter. During the presentation, they had the participants do a 25 minute role play (adapted from Wheelchairs for the World by Amy Smith).
The 25 minutes are divided as follows:
- 5 minutes to read a brief describing one’s role. There are 5: Donor, NGO, Local Government Official, Urban Community, and Rural Community.
- 5 minutes to meet with other participants playing the same role, share information and make sure everything is clear.
- 15 minutes to meet with the other 4 people in one’s assigned group.
If you are curious and want to do the roleplay: here is the information you will need.
Drinking Water in Haiti Info sheet (pdf)
Drinking Water in Haiti Presentation (pdf)
Drinking Water in Haiti Role Play (pdf)
The participants found it enlightening.
Spoiler warning! Spoiler warning!
If you don’t want to know what the main point of the simulation is yet, don’t read on.
What happened during the simulations
The people assigned to be the donor, NGO, local government official and urban community didn’t know that the representative from the rural community was given special instructions. He/she was not to speak unless spoken to. He/she was only to answer questions directly, and not to volunteer information. This was meant to simulate the access that a rural community was likely to have with the other parties in the real world. In many reallife situations, a rural community has no real option but to wait for the other parties to initiate contact despite the fact that they are to be the enduser/beneficiary of the project and that their buyin is critical for overall success.
In most of the roleplay groups, the other 4 members didn’t notice that one person was being particularly taciturn. If they did, it wasn’t obvious to them that a game of 20 questions was in order. As a result, some important information that could have helped the project be more successful was never obtained.
So here is a question that this experience brings up. How do development projects involving very different parties with very different objectives get done well if a group of very similar people can’t adequately communicate when sitting inches from each other? Bottom line is that it is a nontrivial task. But the simulation isn’t meant to leave would be international development folk feeling hopeless. Rather it lets them know what they are up against. To really involve all the stakeholders around a project, when everything from language to bad roads to unreliable phone connections conspire against you, takes a lot of attention, patience and perseverance.
