Narratives of Hope "It Starts Within Us"

Documenting Development through Stories of Change

‘Poverty was screaming in my household, at one time I ended up thinking that poverty was mine.’ Sarah Matongo

It Starts Within Us is the product of a group of Zimbabwean NGOs who sought to discover their relevance in promoting development. They named this exercise ‘Makadii-Linjani’, or ‘How are you doing?’ and engaged with communities to discover if their development partners had benefited from their intervention – or not.

This important book not only documents stories of change but interrogates the process of evaluation, allowing members of marginalized communities to speak for themselves, and providing the reader with a ‘narrative of hope’. We discover how the need to change and develop begins with the harsh realities of poverty – exacerbated in Zimbabwe in the past decade by the effects of an economic, social, and political crisis of debilitating proportions.

Insights about how a people-centred approach to development can be sustained, even in difficult operating environments, will be of interest to any development practitioner, researcher or academic as well as to the general public interested in restoring development to a country that has seen much that has undermined the process.

The Makadini-Linjani project and this publication is supported by the Church Development Service (Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst – EED), an association of protestant churches in Germany.

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