I think any research, any intervention particularly in poor populations which does not firstly have a focus on what are you going to leave with that community after you leave, is fraught with a host of ethical questions. Especially when one works with poor communities and people, this question should be addressed a priori right at the outset, because anything less than that is tantamount to exploitation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is no question that we learn a lot from these projects, that we learn both in terms of not only the evidence but also how to implement, evidence-based interventions. We learn how people perceive wisdom from outside which may not be very firmly embedded in local social customs and cultures. But whatever we do, we always tell them at the outset, not only what we are doing but what are we going to leave with them once we leave; and that\u2019s one of the reasons why we are especially keen on working with the government\u2019s community-based programs. Because, a lot of our pilot interventions and projects once they are embedded within the communities own intervention programs will stay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ll give you an example: many of these community volunteers and health workers, young girls that we train in areas where we do research in, are girls who will remain in that community; and even if they don\u2019t do exactly what they have been taught to do, they will do something similar; or they will improve on what they are doing. Many of our support staff that we put in for research purposes, we are very clear when we hire people, we\u2019ll hire them locally; and we would very commonly hire girls; and the reason is very simple that not only do we provide employment to a lot of people and a safe working environment where they can work, but we also leave a major asset behind in that community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You know, there is a very famous aphorism to say: \u201ceducate a woman, and you educate a family\u201d. I think that is grossly underestimated, you educate a girl and you educate a several girls and you educate a community. So, our experience on working with civic society representatives both at small and medium scale has been very satisfactory. We learned more than, you know we\u2019ve given back. But in general our focus is always that our intervention should be sustainable in several shapes and forms and they should at the end be more positive in terms of contribution to the society itself. Sustainable at one end by the government\u2019s own program that they should be learning which impacts on the programs own future implementation strategies their core curricular content. Sustainable also in terms of giving these civic societies some mechanism of keeping structures intact even after we leave. So, support groups or community committees are all voluntary, we don\u2019t put in any resources and if people see it working they are able generally to keep that together as a social capital in their area. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thirdly, as I just said we selectively and deliberately work with the poorest of the poor. We will pick people from the lowest income quintiles, we will specially focus on girls because we know that even after we leave those assets will remain in that community; and believe you me irrespective of all social class cultural barriers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Societies change, and I\u2019ve seen inbuilt hard ingrained behaviour change within a few years of us working with those communities for me to understand that an important component of working towards improving health and other outcomes in these communities is actually working with the people as partners not as pejorative kind of didactic education strategies as working with them and learning from them and giving back to them exactly what you think, should be an interactive learning process. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think any research, any intervention particularly in poor populations which does not firstly have a focus on what are you going to leave with that community after you leave, is fraught with a host of ethical questions. Especially when one works with poor communities and people, this question should be addressed a priori right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1131","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1132,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1131\/revisions\/1132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}