ITURI FOREST PEOPLES FUND

Why was the fund started?

With tears streaming down her face, ImaNjede hands her 3 month-old daughter, Atauma to Gilda. "Zilda , Zilda, save my baby " she pleads with a sense of desperation and faith that we can do miracles. Atauma lies on Gilda's lap shivering, even though her skin is on fire and she is covered with sweat from an acute attack of Malaria. Gilda crushes a chloroquine tablet between two spoons, adds honey to try and mask its bitterness and tries in vain to get Atauma to swallow the medicine. Gilda and ImaNjede know it's hopeless, and before midnight Atauma dies. Why does this still happen, when illnesses like Malaria are treated elsewhere in the world? How can anyone watch babies die on their lap, without wanting to change things, make things better?

In 1985, this sense of wanting to do something, drove a team of researchers -- Robert Bailey, Bryan Curran, Gilda Morelli, and David Wilkie -- who have lived and worked with the Efe hunter-gatherers and Lese farmers in the Ituri forest for years, to look for ways to help the community to establish their own health clinic and school. For the last 20 years, the government of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) has, through intent, corruption and mismanagement, allowed clinics and schools to crumble and close for lack of support. One important step to helping the Efe and Lese was to establish the Ituri Forest Peoples Fund - a special project of Cultural Survival. The fund raises money to help support the teachers and provide books and medical supplies not available in the forest.

Development assistance not development dependency

The Fund, however, is less concerned about ensuring that financial gaps are filled, and more interested in helping the Efe and Lese develop the technical and political skills to provide for themselves. Creating the social and economic systems needed to ensure that families have consistent, long-term access to medical care and primary school education is extremely difficult given local community capacity and the economic and political turmoil in the country. The greatest challenge has always been achieving a balance between doing too much and not doing enough for the Lese and Efe. Since Belgian colonial times the Lese and Efe have learned to expect the state and more recently "The American Researchers" to take care of their problems; few of them saw the problems as their own. Even when they do, they lacked the technical skills, social institutions, and financial resources to solve them independently. The challenge was to set the scale of assistance at a level and a pace that the community was capable and willing to take responsibility for.

For the last 13 years, we have worked with the community to establish a sense of shared commitment to running the clinic and school. The community gradually developed its own institutions and opinion leaders, and took sole responsibility for managing the clinic and school; deciding how users of these social services must contribute to their upkeep. Robert Chambers (Chambers 1983) has long argued that long-term and consistent support at a scale determined by the community is the key to evolution of the capacity and willingness within a community to manage its own development. It was through this long and gradual process of self-empowerment that the Lese and Efe community developed the strength to keep the schools open during the recent civil war even though they had been cut off from Fund resources