Gopal Chitrakar / Reuters
The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) has been engaged in community development work for most of its 50-year history. It has, therefore, lived and breathed the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) long before the United Nations created them in 2000.
PWRDF provides a holistic approach to development, and all eight MDGs are interconnected in its work. The goals are: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV and AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and establish a global partnership for development. PWRDF staff say it is impossible to isolate and focus on any one of these goals. Instead, the goals must be seen as part of a larger project of holistic development.
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
To move toward holistic development, PWRDF works through partner organizations around the world and within Canada. Those partners are either church-based or secular organizations and community groups, and many of them have been in a close relationship with PWRDF for up to 20 years. Most of those partner organizations have a strong focus on community development that includes health education, food production, and human rights.
PWRDF does not provide a ministry to partner organizations; it is in partnership with them. That means being in dialogue and working with partner organizations on an equal level. It is therefore no coincidence that the PWRDF Board of Directors has representatives from four partner organizations who sit around the table as full members. Their perspectives are invaluable and cherished.
While the MDGs have a strong focus on the eradication of poverty-and the goals frame poverty in economic terms-PWRDF focuses on strengthening the community. A strong community incorporates human rights, health education and practice, a solid education for women and children, and sustainable agricultural practices. A strong community leads to the eradication of poverty within that community.
The distinction is important. The United Nations and its MDGs approach the issue from an economic and human rights perspective. PWRDF, too, applies a human rights lens to its community development work, but it approaches community development from a biblical perspective, holding up the dignity of the individual and strength of the community. PWRDF works with and through its partners to strengthen individuals and communities across Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin and South America, and the Caribbean, and within Indigenous communities in Canada.
Because the holistic approach to community development is foundational for PWRDF, the eight MDGs could not be considered in isolation from each other in its work.
What is interconnected development?
Here are some examples of how elements of PWRDF’s work-sustainable development, food security, microfinance, health care, and education-are interconnected.
PWRDF helps enable the MDGs by supporting sustainable development (afforestation, reducing/eliminating dependence on chemical fertilizers, etc.) and improving access to safe water and basic sanitation. The benefits of this work are far-reaching: soil will yield sufficient crops and people will be well-fed so that they can perform their daily work; people will not spend scant resources on chemical fertilizers that harm the environment; the environment will support a community learning to treat males and females equally; children, mothers, and the entire community will reap the benefits of health care and health education in a world that is healthy; women will not have to walk so far to get water, and the water they gather will be wholesome.
Bobby Yip / Reuters
The work PWRDF supports in food security and microfinance would not be possible (or would be severely limited) if people did not receive proper health care and health education; if people did not learn that women and men function best when regarded and treated equally; if women were spending many hours each day walking to water sources and carrying heavy containers of water many kilometers; if people did not learn that the created order needs to be cared for and rebuilt through afforestation, reducing use of chemical fertilizers, being careful with the placement of latrines, etc.
PWRDF staff regularly consult with partner organizations to see what the local needs are and how they can best be addressed. The end result is a menu of partner organizations spread across a region, each with specific strengths and a focus to provide a very specific local need
Glen Spurrell, PWRDF’s Africa program officer, says that all eight MDGs can be found in the work being carried out across Africa. And while PWRDF is not involved in providing universal primary education because it is the local government’s responsibility, a number of its educational and health-related programs enable healthy children to attend school. Its programs to promote gender equality, for example, raise the level of awareness and understanding within a community that enables girls to access an education rather than simply remain in a home, doing household chores.
Stories of interconnectedness
Does PWRDF make a difference? Glen Spurrell says that, through health education programs provided by partner organizations, birth weight is increasing. “There is a half-kilogram gain in birth weight. That is significant.” The agricultural and water programs provided by PWRDF partners have also led to a significant difference in the lives of women across Africa.
Since water is the lifeblood of most communities-for crops, drinking, and cooking-many have water stories to tell, including this one from Asia. Englanded is a community of Indigenous farmers who grow vegetables on mountain slopes in the Philippines. Each household owns an average of 1.3 hectares of agricultural land, consisting of small, terraced plots. In 2007 the village farmers approached the diocesan office of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines (ECP) to find out if they could help them provide easier access to a water supply. In their dreams, the farmers imagined having running water to each home in their community. In reality, entire families would spend hours walking down the mountain slope to fetch water in plastic containers, then walk back up the mountain to empty their jugs into pails or tanks to be used for household chores and also to water their crops. This was a difficult and painstaking process.
Their request for help turned into the creation of the Englanded community organization. With technical and financial assistance from the ECP, the community dug a well and used an electric pump and a network of pipes to supply water door to door for their homes and their gardens.
The community organization, seeing the benefit of working together and working with other organizations, is looking beyond their water needs. They have begun to grow their vegetables in greenhouses to develop a market economy, and they are tackling health and education issues. PWRDF provides financial support to the ECP, and PWRDF staff were able to see firsthand just how they are making a difference in communities such as Englanded.
PWRDF’s work within Latin America covers most of the MDGs. There is a strong focus on food production, gender equality, and human rights, particularly because of the difficult plight of women in many Latin American countries.
A PWRDF delegation visited the Centre for Women’s Human Rights in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 2007 and heard firsthand from the women and families who had been supported by the centre. Throughout Mexico, the centre provides legal support for cases involving the disappearance and assassination of women, and works with the Mexican government to raise awareness about and reduce violation of women’s rights.
PWRDF has a long history of working with minority groups, refugees, and migrants. There are about 175 million people, or 2.9 per cent of the world’s population, currently living temporarily or permanently outside their country of origin. PWRDF has built a strong connection with dioceses across Canada that have developed their own refugee sponsorship programs. Likewise, it works with partner organizations around the world that have a similar passion for work among minority groups. One example of this is PWRDF’s work with the St. John’s Cathedral HIV Education Centre in Hong Kong, the first faith-based organization to undertake an AIDS ministry. Established in 1995, its main focus is to provide a reproductive health program for the 226,000 Asian migrant workers in that city, most of them Filipinos and Indonesians. Building upon those connections with the migrant workers, there is a related ministry dealing with human rights issues around employment and education.
PWRDF has a long history with the fight against HIV and AIDS, the sixth MDG. The Partnership for Life campaign was a resounding success in raising awareness of HIV and AIDS across the Anglican Church of Canada. And the financial response from Anglicans was overwhelming. The partnerships with organizations in the Global South continue to be strong, and those education and awareness programs will continue to be supported until HIV and AIDS is no longer an overwhelming threat to the lives of so many.
Even though the focus of the UN’s MDGs is the Global South-Africa, Asia, Latin and South America, and the Pacific-PWRDF also focuses on those issues within the Canadian context. It works with and through Indigenous partnerships across Canada, striving to help bring dignity to native communities as they work hard to preserve their cultures and languages. Poverty exists within Canada’s Aboriginal communities, and child poverty is rampant in places as dissimilar as the native reserve and the heart of Toronto. Women are murdered in Vancouver’s East Side, on the streets of Winnipeg and Edmonton, and in homes across the country. Issues of human rights exist in our own backyards.
The UN’s MDGs are to be achieved by 2015, but whether the world will eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by then remains to be seen. In 2008, PWRDF is celebrating 50 years of international development and relief work and, as long as poverty and injustice continue in our world, PWRDF will continue to work through partner organizations on local, specifically designed community development programs. PWRDF and those partner organizations will be there beyond 2015, engaged in the same kind of work that they have been doing for the past 50 years. It will do so on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada, and it will carry on that work as long as Anglicans continue to support it through their financial contributions.
