Today I read a couple of chapters about ‘conceptualizing poverty’ in the textbooks for my Africa into the 21^st Century class.  They prompted me to think again about the role of modernity in development, as I was asked to do in the first year of my studies.  I thought maybe it would be useful to talk about it here a little because I think its one of the important places that academic and ‘real life’ understandings of international development differ.

When we, as individual Canadians, go to make a donation to a charity that works in Africa or Asia or Latin America, what do we expect the outcome to be?  Are we expecting to change the life of an individual?  Do ‘our part’ to change the future of the developing world?  I think it is an important question to think about.

Thinking about modernity plays an important part of answering this question for a lot of people.  For instance, if we are acting to do “our part” to change the future of the developing world, what does that future look like?  For many, that future looks a little bit more like our world does (trading huts for houses, youth accessing education…phones, fridges, grocery stores).  This concept relies heavily on the notion that countries and individuals move through different phases of modernity, from primitive to modern.  In effect, it assumes that ‘all roads lead to modernity’.  That rather than being different, countries in the developing world are just ‘not yet’ like ours.

Something to think about when you’re planning where your money goes and what your own expectations of international development are, is whether or not you believe in this view, and if you don’t, what is the alternative?  And does this change how you give?

You can find a pretty good discussion of Modernization (and Dependency) Theory here.