July 16, 2009
Abdoulaye Wade has been president of Senegal in West Africa since 2000. During that time, he has been one of Africa’s most enthusiastic proponents of economic development. “I don’t want money,” he has said, “and I don’t want hand-outs. I want trade agreements.”
I thought of President Wade while reading an essay in the book In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty. The essay by Andreas Widmer, co-founder of the S.E.VEN. Fund, “A Mind for the Poor,” provides the principles for economic development that the stories and ideas in the book illustrate. Widmer learned these principles in, of all places, a pastoral counseling class at seminary.
Father John, the instructor, warned his students of four traps into which would-be counselors fall: “employing crisis intervention instead of counseling, having sympathy rather than empathy, being a codependent, and playing the redeemer.”
“As I listened further,” writes Widmer, “it struck me that counseling and development are susceptible to the same set of traps.”
If someone’s spouse dies, crisis intervention is the correct response. Filling the refrigerator with meals, running errands, and being a shoulder to cry on are necessary immediately after the death, but over time these become harmful. The need for crisis intervention shrinks over time as the need for counseling grows.
Regarding development, Widmer writes:
Humanitarian aid and economic development are different both in their nature and in what drives them. …Humanitarian aid seeks to relieve imminent but passing threats. It is much like crisis counseling. Economic development comes later and is more like long term counseling.
He then addresses sympathy and empathy. “Sympathy,” Widmer writes, “occurs when we make someone else’s problem ours.” This is the best response to a crisis when a friend or the poor can do little or nothing to help themselves. Sympathy offers a solution that we prescribe and pursue.
Empathy, on the other hand, “is the ability to look at a situation from another person’s perspective.” Empathy is a walking with people through their problems, adding advice and encouragement. Rather than prescribing solutions, empathy is empowering.
Widmer notes:
Many good people who want to assist the poor identify with them and want to help them directly. That usually means “solving” the problems of the poor for them, through government or other outside intervention. These solutions are driven by sympathy; they take over and attempt to act in place of the poor themselves. In that sense, they paternalize the poor and deny their right to self-determination.
Sympathy, to use the old adage, gives out free fish. Empathy is about the freedom to fish.
Remaining in the crisis intervention mode and providing prescriptive sympathy lead to the third trap: dependence and codependence. Widmer believes that we have already arrived at the point in development where “’helping’ others becomes a form of enabling them to perpetuate their need for help.” There is a foreign aid industry that needs the poor to stay poor and needy, a sad situation for everyone.
The final and most dangerous trap—dangerous because it is the most destructive and the most seductive—is the redeemer trap. In a crisis, a redeemer coming to the rescue is a God-send. Long term, however, there is only one Redeemer and forcing our rescue efforts on others invariably leads to new crises.
