The poor are the real experts on poverty. This is why an innovative project was set up to pay attention to what they have to say. Siobhan Warrington reports.

In Pakistan poverty is everywhere. It is so ‘normal’ that it’s common to meet newspaper reporters who rarely visit rural areas because the lives of people there, however hard, appear to change little from year to year.And frankly poverty, unlike crime and politics, does not sell.

Against this backdrop it counts as an achievement that national newspaper, TV and radio journalists spent three days recording the lives of more than 30 rural people in Sindh province – people whose main qualification for being interviewed was their poverty.

These life stories were gathered by the Panos network and patners using a painstaking method of interviewing which emphasises patient listening and openended questions.The result was that those journalists are now more inclined to highlight the problems faced by the people they met and others like them.

These interviews were gathered using a method known as ‘oral testimony’, which sets out to record the fine detail of the lives of people in developing countries.This involves ‘active listening’ and encouraging the interviewee to dictate the direction of the interview. This particular approach was pioneered by Olivia Bennett, an historian by training who, while working as a development writer in the 1990s,was struck by the fact that development discourse was lacking personal perspectives.

“It seemed to me that while experts had written much research of value, there was a gap.We did not understand the complexities of why people made some of the choices they did.” she says. “Furthermore, development interventions tended to be based around sectors, such as health and education but there are no such neat divisions in people’s lives.”

Bringing together development experts and oral historians Panos began to explore taking the methodology of mainstream oral history a step further – adapting it to the contemporary development context.

Working first with Nigel Cross at the NGO SOS Sahel, in 1991 Panos published the first oral testimony collection At The Desert’s Edge: Oral Histories from the Sahel. Olivia Bennett continued to develop the method, and the turning point for her came later during an ambitious project to gather testimonies from hundreds of women affected by war.

Plenty of agencies were researching the issue, but nobody was asking the women themselves what they thought. Often seen as grief-stricken, powerless victims, the 200 testimonies challenged these stereotypes and revealed the women’s experiences to be far from uniform.This was the point that convinced members of the development community that oral testimony could break new ground.

“I’ll never forget one woman in Lebanon,” says Bennett. “(She) said that the real experience of war is not the shelling, but the struggle for years afterwards, coping with her disabled husband and rebuilding her family’s life.Oral testimonies have a habit of throwing into relief things you suspect are important, but have no idea how significant and farreaching. They are not necessarily new insights but hearing them first hand brings these experiences home and this has the power to motivate.”

Since those early days, the notion of giving voice has become widespread in development thinking.Now even the World Bank is championing the importance of individuals’ perspectives, having run a survey of 40,000 poor people in 1999 and discovering that people said, in their list of priorities, that having a voice came second only to improving their income.

Oral testimony is, of course, only one part of a bigger picture. It cannot change anything by itself, but it can raise awareness of what those most affected believe to be important.

A major challenge remains how to translate those individual insights and perspectives into changes in policy. One of the Pakistani communities Panos recently worked with organised a people’s assembly – a platform for people to speak out while invited policymakers listened.Twelve hundred people attended – almost a quarter of them women, not normally seen at public events.The stir caused by the assembly forced the national government to take notice of the community’s problems.

Panos continues to explore various ways to raise awareness – by engaging local and national media, facilitating meetings between the communities and policymakers, and even developing theatre works based on the testimonies.

In one of its early publications, Listening for a Change, it was claimed that if being poor means having less of a voice, then being the poorest of the poor means being the most silent of all. Fifteen years, and some 1,300 testimonies, later it is hoped that the oral testimony approach has gone some way towards helping communities set their own agendas for development.

Siobhan Warrington is Programme Director of the Oral Testimony programme in Panos London.

More Information
www.panos.org.uk/oraltestimony
www.panos.org.uk/desertvoices