While some development organizations have faltered during the Covid-19 crisis, others have managed to broaden their reach in response to the unfolding human crisis. One of the central reasons why some organizations in the development industry have been able to respond to the crisis well seems to be because of the relationships within the organization and with recipients of their interventions. What can we learn about the efficacy of development interventions through a relational approach? And how can a relational approach assist us in understanding which development interventions are sustainable during a crisis?
Our study of two development organizations in the Gauteng province of South Africa brings emphasis to the importance of the quality of relationships between people in ensuring effective responsiveness during a crisis. For example, one of the organizations in question described themselves as not particularly efficient, as they put an inordinate amount of time into what they called “doing the heavy lifting”: developing trust, becoming increasingly vulnerable through open and difficult conversations, being accountable to each other, and protecting the dignity of those in need.
“People-centered approaches to development are increasing in interest, but the nuances of relational dynamics remain under-researched.”In the development sector, a lot of research is going into why certain interventions are sustainable and others are not.1Examples of this research include: Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville, and Antonio David Cattani, The Human Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Vishwas Satgar, The Solidarity Economy Alternative: An Emerging Theory and Practice (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014); Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (France: 2009); David Lewis, “‘Big D’ and ‘little d’: Two Types of Twenty-First Century Development?” Third World Quarterly 14, no. 11 (2019): 1957–1975. People-centered approaches to development are increasing in interest, but the nuances of relational dynamics remain under-researched. It seems that the relational dynamics of an organization may be key to ensuring it is able to adapt, thrive, and meaningfully reach the people most in need.
The current economic crisis and development organizations in South Africa
The worldwide spread of Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on the global economy. The pandemic poses serious challenges to the current way that our economies and societies operate and has exposed the fragility of insular political, economic, and social systems. The national lockdowns to reduce the spread of the virus have resulted in an economic slowdown, which has affected every aspect of South African society, as it has globally. This has come at a time when South Africa has already been struggling with unabated poverty, food insecurity, and high levels of unemployment.
The consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic have had far-reaching implications for the role that care and development organizations play in the lives of millions of South Africans. The more than 220,000 NGOs registered with the South African Department of Social Development, as well as many community-based organizations, perform crucial development, humanitarian, and advocacy functions and are an integral part of the fabric of our society. But the pandemic has resulted in economic downturns across the globe, which also affect the availability of resources from local and international individuals and larger donors to organizations that primarily focus on human development and interventions to help address issues of poverty and unemployment. Covid-19 is an ongoing event that makes care-based groups and organizations extremely vulnerable, and some NGOs are already experiencing a decrease in funding or fear funding cuts in the future.
“While there are still questions on how extensively these networks have developed, the crisis and its knock-on effects have resulted in changes, some for the better.”The unique challenges of the pandemic have also changed the way community organizations work. Organizations that typically worked in silos bundled their expertise and resources to form collaborative networks. While there are still questions on how extensively these networks have developed, the crisis and its knock-on effects have resulted in changes, some for the better. However, a large part of how NGOs and other care organizations function is through a network of relationships, some within the organizations and others between the organizations and the people they support, donors, sponsors, businesses, government, and various other stakeholders. How these relationships function is less clear. Our research explores the significance of these relationships in development during a crisis.
A relational approach to development interventions
A relational approach joins the inexhaustible and varied “people-centered approaches” to development and highlights the importance of measuring subjective perceptions of relationships and deepening our understanding of the relationships involved in development interventions. “People-centered” approaches are continuously developing but have in common a focus on the role people play in shaping their economic lives and prioritizing the welfare of people and the environment over profit and growth. People-centered approaches understand development to be embedded holistically in complex systems of relationships.
For our research, a relational approach was applied to two organizations in South Africa that have played a role in providing critical support to people economically affected by the Covid-19 crisis and the accompanying lockdown. We used a relational approach with relational indicators as our framework to measure and analyze the perceptions of relationships of these two care organizations. These indicators included communication, time/continuity, information, power, and purpose/commonality in relationships.
The two organizations in our study revealed the centrality of relationships. The larger of the two organizations is an NGO based in Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, with 175 full-time staff members. The NGO follows a more traditional organizational structure with management and staff who work on different projects with urban communities, including children, teenagers, the elderly, parents, students, homeless people, sex workers, and drug addicts. In 2020, the organization had 55 Early Childhood Development Centers in the city, a 100% pass rate of students in their study programs, and made 30 job placements. The organization is widely known in the city since its founding in 1992 as a faith-based organization. Due to several limitations, we were only able to measure the relational dynamics of those working in the organization. A relational focus is ingrained in the philosophy of the organization and is evident from the language used by one of the managers:
Our dream is to enable and support [our] programs and [our] employees to grow and reach their goals to ignite change, nurture togetherness, and heal communities… we value partnership and involvement where it supports our vision to truly ignite change, heal communities, and nurture togetherness.
During the strict Covid-19 lockdown measures, when many companies and other organizations were scaling down, this organization saw an increase in income and was able to start two additional projects, particularly for homeless people in Pretoria. Their relational footprint in the city has cultivated trust between the organization and the recipients of care and the sponsors of care, which increasingly led people with resources to support them during the crisis.
When the organization was asked during a group discussion how Covid-19 changed the organization, a majority of the group agreed that the crisis created relational opportunities and helped the organization grow. One of the managers commented that there was more regular and intentional contact between the team members and recipients of their care even if it was difficult to move to online communication,
A lot of effort was made that everyone was included. WhatsApp groups were created. We wanted to use other means that were the most accessible for everyone. A lot of effort in terms of checking in, intentional effort… In the communications, there was support and a bigger appreciation for one another…the fact that we can work together, follow-ups, awareness of one another’s well-being. People talked more regularly and made an effort.
Another member commented,
The nature of our organization, a lot of what we do, is engaging with people with needs. So, it’s an inspirational thing of engaging closer with the community.
The smaller organization has a different model since the lines between the givers and receivers of care are less clear than at a typical NGO. Relationships are viewed as crucial to its goals and identity. This organization, in the west of the city of Johannesburg, has been practicing what they call “alternative economics” for the past three and a half years. They describe this as being rooted in “community” and “sharing” the resources that they have as a group. Each group member gives 2 percent of their monthly income (when they are employed) to share with people in their relational networks who need financial and other support. Through WhatsApp, members of the group share identified needs (their own or someone they know), discuss these, and decide together which needs will be responded to and how.
In this way, this organization has been able to distribute money, food, and other resources to families in need across Johannesburg quickly and meaningfully. In particular, they provided aid to families that other organizations felt they could not access because, while others were still “trying to figure out how to build connection,” this organization already had the connections with community partners. Each of the families they support has a long-standing relationship with their organizational network.
One of the central themes that emerged in a group discussion is that they were well positioned to deal with the pandemic and the effects of the lockdown. This organization had paid particular attention to the relationships within their organization and has a robust relational network within affected communities. As one member stated:
We had something that worked well under [the] Covid situation because it was relational, responsive, quick. We could see all these big bureaucratic entities struggling on how to get help to people. They did not actually have the relationships.
On several occasions, reference was made to “heavy lifting,” which one member described as “the hard work that was done in the early stages” of their emergence as an organization. Another member spoke about the “slowness of the relationship,” referring to the fact that these were built intentionally, over time. This allowed the organization to be “responsive” rather than “reactive.”
The members of this organization stressed that their way of working would not typically be perceived as efficient, in that it is slow and time-consuming. Decision-making is oftentimes painful as every person in the organization has an equal voice and vote, and each one is fully heard before deciding. But they did find it to be effective. As one member put it,
…in terms of who we are, we are very inefficient. But on the other hand, when Corona hit, we could get money to specific households within a day.
This organization would have difficulty functioning outside of the relational network that it had carefully fostered over a long period of time at great cost. This relational network enabled this organization to very quickly access additional funding from donors and get resources to those at the greatest levels of need. What emerged from discussions with this organization was the careful attention they gave to the relationships they fostered. Members emphasized the importance of being vulnerable, compassionate, respectful of the dignity of all, and wary of being “victims of charity” as central to their way of being.
“Success” in terms of their interventions was defined by both organizations not in terms of growing resources and the numbers of people they support, but in the dignity of their care. It was evident that caring with dignity sometimes comes at the cost of being able to intervene at a larger scale because building relationships and being attuned to protecting the dignity of those in need is time-consuming.
Relationships at the center of development interventions
“From a foundation of healthy and robust relationships developed over time, needs can be met quickly, meaningfully, and with the dignity of all intact.”There are a growing number of people-centered approaches to development in response to the “technical” approach that has tended to dominate.2
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010More Info → This research adds its voice to these people-centered approaches with a particular emphasis that the relational dynamic needs to be central to the work of development interventions and organizations. From a foundation of healthy and robust relationships developed over time, needs can be met quickly, meaningfully, and with the dignity of all intact.
Although it is difficult to imagine up-scaling such a relationally costly approach, we can take some notes from how the “informal” economy operates. Large sectors of economic activity in many African countries, including South Africa,3
Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2020More Info → operate in this informal way, which depends on the networks of relationships between people, even across national borders. Goods are moved and traded with relative ease in informal economic networks, to the extent that some would argue that the informal economy, were it to be possible to measure, would more than double the GDP of some countries.4David Neves and Andries du Toit, “Money and Sociality in South Africa’s Informal Economy,” Africa 82, no. 1 (2012): 131–149. In a similar vein, based on the strength of relationships between people, aid and resources can be distributed quickly and meaningfully, as has been evident from the organization in Johannesburg that used their relational network to distribute food and resources to those most in need.
We have an opportunity to consider up-scaling these relational approaches through measuring the relational dynamics between individuals, groups, and organizations to better manage the gaps in relationships and the critical decisions on how to distribute limited resources fairly and responsibly. A relational approach also gives us a more nuanced perspective on the dynamics in development, how we can build deeper levels of accountability between various stakeholders, and how to be more accountable in the kinds of interventions that are required.
