Aids and Autonomy

From the lecture of Mr.Ikegami about "Global Citizens", Mr.Ikegami gave one example which was a Japanese NGO worker in Cambodia.

The worker held a meeting at a village in Cambodia and asked one question. "What is the most necessary in this village?" he said, so the people in the village discussed and worked out that a school would be the most necessary.

However, the Japanese worker did not build a school, which greatly disappointed people in the village. Because the people could not wait for the useless Japanese worker, they built and maintained a school by themselves.

The disadvantage of aids is that people tend to heavily rely on them; people cannot be independent from them forever. Thus, what the Japanese worker purposely did actually encouraged the people to be independent from the aids.

I found this person very intelligent, and if you again think of sustainable human development, this strategy worked well in a very innovative way.