“Who dares to teach must never cease to learn”
John Cotton Dana.
This was my experiential learning a couple of weeks ago as I facilitated a session on “Conceptions and Measurement of Poverty”, under the sub-topic: “What is Poverty”, under Module I: “Understanding Poverty in Rural Uganda” of the CPAR Uganda project: “Mentoring Young Adults into Innovators Against Poverty.”
A total of 12 young adults (seven women and five men) are among our first cohort and whose mentoring period with us has begun on 21st January 2020 and will likely last the rest of the year.
One way in which we, mentors and the young adults that we are mentoring, nurtured our appreciation of how poverty is measured was by using mind maps to do a discourse analysis of text. For our practical learning, we used an article titled: “Small holder farmers are the solution to poverty – UN” that was published in the New Vision in February 2014.
Our process was to read the article together, reading one paragraph each and in turns, as we underlined the key words. The first two paragraphs, for example, read:
“The UN agricultural development fund has been asked to focus more on promoting small holder farmers to reduce poverty. The call was made during the 37th session of the Governing Counsel of IFAD in Rome.
Fabrizio Saccomanni, the Italian minister for economy and finance, asserted that ensuring small holder family farmers have adequate access to credit and investment is of paramount importance for poverty reduction.”
The keywords in these first two paragraphs that are relevant to our discussions, for example were: “SMALL HOLDER FARMERS”; then “REDUCE POVERTY”; then “ADEQUATE ACCESS TO CREDIT and INVESTMENT.”
We then applied our learning from using “Poverty Problem Trees” and we organised the words in accordance to the cause-and-effect logic of poverty problem trees.
Massive learning all round as we discussed and agreed on where to place each card, of which each contained a set of key words.
By Ms. Norah Owaraga, Team Leader and Lead Mentor.
CPAR Uganda Ltd 