WHAT WE ARE
In our globalised world there is more opportunity than ever
before for organisations and groups from different religions to work together
on development issues. Nevertheless, there is still relatively little
co-operation among people from different religious traditions, either in the
practical work they do or at the level of policy discussions, even though they
may be saying and doing similar things.
At the same time, the World Bank and United Nations organisations such as the UN
Development Programme, have been working often from a very different
perspective but with the same aims: to combat poverty. There have been few
points of contact between them and the religious institutions, however, and
what interchange has taken place has often taken the form of criticism from
either side.
Despite all the scientific and technological advances of our time, the numbers
of people living in poverty are growing and the gap between rich and poor is
rapidly widening. It is therefore urgent that people on all sides of the
“development” debate should get together to listen to each other and see where
co-operation is possible. Dialogue will always leave room for disagreement but
it should also point to where common ground is to be found.
The World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD) was set up in 1998 by James D.
Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, and Lord Carey of Clifton, then
Archbishop of Canterbury, to help to promote a dialogue on poverty and
development, both among the different faith traditions and between them and
development agencies, such as the World Bank.
On the one hand the development institutions have a great deal of technical
expertise and analytic skills to offer. Their financial resources are
infinitely more extensive than those of the religious communities and they have
access to other powerful institutions. On the other hand, people from the
religious communities come with intuition and knowledge gained from their focus
on people as spiritual as well as material beings and from their practical
experience with the poor. Of course many people combine within themselves these
two worlds but serious differences can arise, not only on matters of principle
but on the grounds of vested interests.
WFDD’s Work Plan for 2003 (available on the web site) aims to bring out what is
positive in both arenas and to see if there are ways in which the religious
communities can contribute more vigorously through debate and action to
bringing about an improvement for the poor.
WFDD is thus focusing on promoting the participation of religious communities in
national and international fora on poverty and development. An initiative which
should help to achieve this is a series of workshops
on the relationship of faith to development. Two (in Ghana and
Tanzania) will be focused on Islam and Christianity and the third (in Thailand)
on Buddhism. It is hoped that one outcome of the workshops will be some manuals
on faith and development.
At the same time, case studies of religious
involvement in development work are being collected. The aim is to describe
what characterises the work of religious communities and how, if at all, it
differs from that of secular organisations, both with regard to the goals they
are aiming at and with the way they go about working with the poor (see web
site).
Another WFDD project is on Faith in the Global Economic System. This is
to analyse the ways in which the faith communities engage with the present
economic order, either critically or supportively, or both. The methodology
will be highly consultative and we hope that as many people as possible from
the WFDD network will join in.
From the October 2003 to the end of March 2004, WFDD and the Centre for the
Study of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham in the UK, will be
holding a series of seminars on alternatives to global
capitalism. Proposals arising out of specific faith or ethical stances
will be exposed to critical debate.
At the beginning of the year, WFDD concentrated on producing a faith-based
comment on the first draft of the World Bank’s World
Development Report 2004 Making Services Work for Poor People.
The comment is available on the WFDD web site or from the office address.
A programme of a different sort is oriented to developing the
Millennium Development Goals – a series of concrete targets, such as
halving poverty by the year 2015, set by the international community and to
which almost all the countries of the world profess to be working. With this
programme it is hoped that closer co-operation in practice might be reached
between some of the religious communities whose programmes need resources and
the World Bank which is eager to encourage larger-scale projects.
As part of this endeavour, WFDD is co-operating with the
Development Gateway web site to help faith-based programmes to become
more widely known.
WFDD is an independent organisation, a Company Limited by Guarantee under UK law
and a Registered Charity Number 109 5148
