Episcopal Press and News
Kenyans Learn (and Teach) Development Ways at UCLA
Episcopal News Service. March 28, 1985 [85070]
LOS ANGELES (DPS, March 28) -- Twelve provincial development officers from the Anglican Province of Kenya are working at UCLA's African Studies Center in a special three-month training program.
The delegation, including six priests and six laypersons, is headed by the Ven. John Kago, secretary of the Province. Each of the others is a diocesan development officer in the Province.
The program is the result of grants from the U.S. government Agency for International Development and from the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief and Venture in Mission programs, money from the latter having been raised by the Diocese of Florida's Venture campaign. The grants established development offices in each Kenyan diocese, training for the officers, and program money to help the newly appointed officers work with local communities for effective local projects.
According to Kago, the Church's participation in the program is part of "a wholistic approach to evangelism. The Church must be concerned with the whole man and the whole woman." Helping individual local persons better their own communities and living conditions is part of that approach.
At UCLA, the visitors work directly with the Rev. Stephen Commins, director of the Center's Development Institute. Their curriculum includes both theoretical and practical approaches to development work as well as extensive training in working with villagers to evaluate their local needs and to mobilize their work to meet those needs.
"If you tell people what to do, then they become dependent on you," notes Kago. "If you are working with them, then they own the project. And they work even harder and the project becomes more successful because it is part of them."
As in many African countries, development needs are so great in Kenya that the efforts of all are needed -- church and other voluntary agencies as well as the state. "They approach the problems from different angles," says Kago, "but they all work together and consider their contributions as complementary to one another's. There are no rivalries, and no duplications."
According to Commins, this is one of the largest groups to be trained simultaneously at the African Studies Center. Their presence here was a factor in the convening of an Inter-Anglican Development Conference involving participants from several other countries. (Editors: See DPS 85060, March 21)
The Center's Development Institute is a joint effort of the University and the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief. The Institute trains both overseas students (now including many from South America and the Pacific Islands as well as Africans) and American students planning to go overseas in development projects.