Miloš Kroulík's List: Encyklopedie rozvojových studií

• While in the WV office, Bornstein focused part of her research on the child sponsorship project, which is the largest funding component of World Vision's work.More than once she was able to observe sponsors that showed up with great hope to meet their sponsored child, only to be disappointed when WV employees were unable to locate the child.This pointed to the intense logistical support needed to maintain an individual child sponsorship program that is meant to induce direct personal relationships.When asked why WV maintains such an overhead heavy program, the response given explained that the project literally represented the personal intimate relationship Christians can have with Jesus, and therefore was vital to the mission.From Bornstein's vantage point she found an ironic contradiction."The personal relationships of child sponsorship built through correspondence, existed alongside the impersonality of the monetary exchange of child sponsorship" (p. 73).She was able to interview a man who had been sponsored as a child and found that in fact he had felt as though he were a part of another family, accepted, and had also experienced great loss when the sponsorship ended.In other interviews and through observed conversations between families with sponsored children and WV staff, it became clear that sponsorship may also have the negative impact of disrupting existing family relationship, dividing communities and even creating a sense of inferiority among parents that felt undermined by the provisions their children received from sponsors.Bornstein summarized by framing the program of child sponsorship as a "double edged sword," which can have both a negative and positive impact on children, families, and communities.

• Basic Needs
• After the disappointment with growth, after the dead end of “employment” as interpreted in industrial countries, and after the limitation and irrelevance of egalitarianism and redistribution, basic human needs were the next logical step in development thinking. The basic needs approach emphasized that income increases are not enough to reduce poverty. Mass education, safe water, family planning, health services, and other services depend on public action. Some poor people are incapable of earning income. The basic needs approach has also always called for participatory community involvement and self-governing institutions in the design and implementation of projects and programs. The best shorthand way of describing the basic needs approach is: incomes + public services + participation.
• The basic needs approach has at least four advantages over previous approaches to growth, employment, income redistribution, and poverty eradication. First, the basic needs concept is a reminder that the objective of development is to provide all human beings with the opportunity for a full life. However a “full life” is interpreted, the opportunity for achieving it presupposes meeting basic needs. In the previous decades those concerned with development have sometimes lost their way in the technical intricacies of means—growth rates, production, productivity, savings ratios, export ratios, capital-output ratios, tax ratios, and so on—and lost sight of the end. They also emphasized the economic component of development at the expense of nonmaterial ones that contribute to human development. They came near to being guilty, to borrow a term from Karl Marx, of “commodity fetishism.” Being clear about the end obviously must not imply neglecting the means: on the contrary, it means efforts are directed at choosing the right means for the ultimate ends that are desired. In the past, planners have moved away from one aim of development, which is meeting basic needs, to some conglomeration of commodities and services valued at market prices, irrespective of whether they are air conditioners or bicycles, luxury houses or rural shelters, whether they benefit the rich or the poor, and irrespective of noneconomic costs and benefits such as human rights, freedom, and participation. The basic needs approach recalled the fundamental concern of development, which is human beings and their needs.
• Second, the approach went beyond abstractions such as money, income, or employment. These aggregates have their place and function; they are important concepts and, though in need of revision, should not be abandoned; but they are useless if they conceal the specific, concrete objectives that people themselves seek. To consider basic needs is to move from the abstract to the concrete, from the aggregate to the specific, from commodities to people.

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