The opinions expressed in these articles are
not necessarily shared by WFDD.
Kamla Chowdhry: Achieving Millennium Development Goals: A view from Ghandi’s window
Kamla Chowdhry is a member of the UN panel for
Millennium Development Goal focused on Water and Sanitation. In this
article she argues that the Millennium Development Goals will not be
reached without a paradigm shift taking place. Sustainable development
is not merely an economic or technical question. It needs a sense of inner
awakening, of “spirituality” if results are to be achieved. Chowdhry
illustrates what she means by this through the example of Ghandi. “If we
wish to achieve the MDG’s and ignite the people of the world into action,
we will find outselves at Ghandi’s door”, she says.
Len Abrams: Faith, Development and Poverty – Some reflections
Having been involved in development professionally all his
working life and having held to a living Faith for even longer, Len Abrams, a
Christian who works in a secular development institution, has been spending time
trying to think more clearly about how the two relate to each other. “Although
these thoughts have been derived from personal experience”, he writes, “they
seek to address a broader topic than merely ‘me, my faith and my work’ but the
larger questions of poverty, development and the role of faiths and faith based
communities.” The article is also available on the web site run by Abrams:
www.thewaterpage.com
Michael Mckeever: Moral Economics
Michael Mckeever is Economics Instructor at the City College of San Francisco.
He has also set up the Mckeever Institute of Economic Policy Analysis (MIEPA):
www.mkeever.com
He has used the WFDD’s booklet Poverty and Development: An
Interfaith Perspective as the basis for an essay which attempts to illustrate the
interaction of traditional economic thought with the moral perspective outlined in
WFDD’s book, chapter by chapter. Mckeever who believes that “economic theory
without any moral content can and does create much misery” aims to stimulate
discussion about the issue of morality and economic theory. “It is similar to the
theories of nuclear fusion and genetic manipulation”, he writes. “Were these
theories left in the hands of practitioners and unregulated by social concerns,
they would permanently damage the world. Economic theory is now left in the hands
of economists and it is wreaking havoc.”
Christopher Candland, Faith as social capital: Religion and community development in Southern Asia
In this paper, Christopher Candland, Assistant
Professor in the Department of Political Science at Wellesley College
and Principal Advisor to the U.S. Advisory Committee on Labor Diplomacy,
focuses on the contributions to the formation of social capital of
four religious organisations working with impoverished communities
in South East Asia. The key questions he aims to answer are:
How significant to progressive social capital formation are the
values of the organisers of the involved communities?
How significant is a linkage of programmes to community norms?
Under what conditions do religious organisations help to promote
levels of social capital that generate higher levels of education,
literacy, health, employment, and other public goods that increase
social opportunity?
David Loy: Buddhism and Poverty
Does Buddhism have anything special to contribute
to our understanding of poverty and how to alleviate it? David Loy,
Zen Philosopher and Professor in the Faculty of International Studies
at the University of Bunkyo, Japan argues that it does. Whilst
economists of our day, he says, tend to live in an idealised,
one-dimensional world of statistics and equations which do not
accurately reflect human values and goals, Buddhism is more
down-to-earth in its understanding of the sources of human ill-being
and well-being. Buddhism can help us to see why the development
approach taken for granted today is failing and to envision more
viable alternatives.
Ritva Reinikka and Jakob Svensson: Working for God?
Ritva Reinikka (Development Research Group of the
World Bank) and Jakob Svensson (Institute for International Economic
Studies, Stockholm University) look at a set of micro-level data on
primary health care facilities in Uganda to address the question: What
motivates religious not-for-profit (RNP) health care providers? They
show that RNP facilities hire qualified medical staff below the market
wage; are more likely to provide pro-poor services and services with a
good public element; and they charge lower prices for services than
for-profit facilities, although they provide a similar (observable)
quality of health care. RNP and for-profit facilities both provide
better quality care than their government counterparts, although
government facilities have better equipment. These findings are
consistent with the view that RNP are driven (partly) by altruistic
concerns and that these preferences matter quantitatively. They also
show that financial aid leads to more laboratory testing of suspected
malaria and intestinal worm cases, and hence higher quality of service,
and for lower prices, but only in RNP facilities. They conclude:
“These findings suggest that working for God matters.”
Joan Anderson, Successful Dialogue,
Soka Gakkai International (SGI) Office of Public Information
Joan Anderson, a Buddhist who works with the Japanese Soka
Gakkai International (SGI), gives a thoughtful reflection on the nature of
dialogue, in celebration of SGI’s “Year of the Expanding Dialogue” (2002).
She includes some challenging “commandments” for carrying out true dialogue.
Dialogue, Joan concludes, occurs when we reveal our true self and it is
“the only legitimate weapon for realising peace”
Dr. Mabid Ali Al-Jahri: Islamic Finance:
An Efficient and Equitable Option
Dr. Mabid Ali Al-Jahri is the Director of the Islamic
Research and Training Institute (IRTI) of the Islamic Development Bank.
In this paper he deals comprehensively with four questions: (1) Why all
the fuss about the rate of interest? (2) Is Islamic finance, as an alternative
to interest based debt finance viable and efficient? (3) What Islamic finance
implies for the whole economy? (4) Given that Islamic finance is really viable,
why it has not been adopted at a larger scale? The paper is written for bankers
and financiers but is also accessible to the layperson.
Gordon O.F. Johnson, The African Conundrum:
What would God have us do? December 2002
The author is an adjunct scholar at the Acton Institute
for the Study of Religion and Liberty. Arguing that debt relief, foreign
assistance and increased trade are not sufficient to solve Africa’s problems,
he suggests that the flaw at the heart of the “African conundrum” is the
concentration of power within Africa itself and argues that the solutions
may lie rather in the establishment of a just rule of law, the independence
of the judiciary and the freedom of the press. He underpins his thesis
with a theological argument, based on his vision of “God the Entrepreneur”.
Peter Kanyandago, The Aids Scourge and
the African Humanity. Is God African?
In this powerfully challenging article, the Ugandan
Catholic priest and anthropologist, Prof. Peter Kanyandago, asks how
it is that if we agree that we are created in the image of God,
therefore meaning that our human existence is divine, the historical
and current way of dealing with Africa shows the contrary.
