Take Responsibility to Positively Affect the Grassroots.

In my work at Innov8 Consultoria I do a lot of work with agricultural-related business and Non-Governmental Organization. I facilitate strategy development workshops, work on capacity building and organisational development interventions. The role of the NGOs in development and raising the standard of living in our rural areas in highly commendable and should continue. A number of other community actors have also taken the responsibility to make a difference at the grassroots and at household level. I have also met many individuals that have done many commendable things in their rural spaces. Efforts are there but they are not enough. Unless we start seeing the potential of our rural spaces and investing in them proactively, development will be a distant song playing on foreign radios. Should we choose, you and me can do something where we are, with what we have to change the rural development narrative. 

What is regrettable and disheartening is that there is a significant portion of capable and resourced people that have abandoned their rural areas and left them at the mercy of anyone-to-whom-it-may concern and whatever-may-happen there. To use a rural home is just a burial is to abuse a family and national treasure. We can never rise to greatness as developing nations so long as we ignore the rural areas and allow them to be abused for cheap political egos without tangible development. Many people have over the years been playing their part in rural development and it is clear that the new frontier of interest and opportunity is developing rural areas, empowering our people and positively impacting the grassroots. Tooting high sounding verbiage and development rhetoric to small pools of urbanites that are not willing to take personal responsibility while ignoring the great rural majority at the grassroots will hold future generations of our nation hostage to debilitating poverty. 

Take responsibility: If not you, who?

In most areas in Africa, even for city denizens your primary identity is the rural home of origin. In the colonial era, the first interview question used to be: "Where do you come from?" You could not be taken seriously is you referred to some urban area as your base. Much has changed since. 

In Zimbabwe your rural district is still identified in your national identity number. For a few senior citizen, even your kraal is identified in your national identity. To drum interest in the rural areas as a ticket into circles of power is to abuse our heritage. We must start taking active responsibility for our rural destinies. It is gross irresponsibility to treat rural homes as places to bury and confine the poor, aged, sick and dying. This change starts with a change in attitude and mindset. To be cloistered within the urban comforts and forget that the rural areas are not another country, but part of who we are is to be self-deceived. Without taking personal responsibility and interest in developing our rural spaces we will forever be a lost people with confused and stinking priorities. We will be known for singing great ideals and emotive choruses but doing nothing worthwhile to transform and uplift our own heritage.