Despite the effective role that faith actors and faith-based organizations, or FBOs, can play in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and providing aid, certain misconceptions can limit their operations. A better understanding of religious engagement could lead to a more effective aid system, experts say.
“The pervasive secular mindset in development training and discipline over the years has caused us to miss opportunities to have a greater impact by understanding faith,” Esther Lehmann-Sow, partnership leader for faith and development at World Vision, told Devex in an email.
According to research, more than 80% of the global population identified as religious in 2010, and one study suggests that believers of the world’s most popular religions are still growing in number.
Part of our Focus on: Faith and Development
This series illuminates the role faith actors and their communities play in strengthening global development outcomes.
As trusted members of the community, religious leaders often play an important role in peace building and information dissemination. For example, U.K. charity Muslim Hands trains imams across Africa and the Middle East to embed hygiene training within their sermons.
Faith actors bring a range of benefits to development work, including an ability to tap into different resources and their relationships with local communities, said Emma Tomalin, professor of religion and public life at the University of Leeds.
However, myths about the ways FBOs operate could be limiting the amount of people they reach with support. Devex asked experts which myths they felt to be the biggest barriers to development work and how to overcome them.
1. FBOs only help people of the same faith
A faith-based ethos or origin does not necessarily mean that an FBO is only willing to work with partners and communities with the same belief system. This is one of the biggest misconceptions Muslim Hands faces, Fundraising Director Yasrab Shah told Devex, noting that “united for the needy” is the organization’s tag line. “That doesn’t mean united for the Muslim needy — far from it. It’s actually globally. Wherever we have a network of partners, we reach out and try to do aid work,” he said.
Believing an FBO only offers support — whether health care, education, or access to water — to those of the same faith can prevent potential sector partnerships, affect fundraising abilities, and ultimately limit an organization’s reach. Other groups with religious-sounding names are likely to face the same misconception, Shah said.
This isn’t always a hindrance, though. Last year, Muslim Hands saw donations come in from many new, non-Muslim donors — aiming to support those affected by the crisis in Yemen — who thought the organization would have a stronger reach and network due to its faith connection, Shah said.
“Yemen is a war-torn country and a very difficult place to work. But because we have registered offices on the ground and people who understand the culture and the faith, that’s seen as a strength,” he said. An organization’s ability to understand local faith can act as a “unique selling point,” he added.
2. All FBOs aim to convert people to their faith
One of the most significant misconceptions is that all FBOs are going to proselytize to people as a condition of their support, Tomalin said. While such an approach might have been more commonplace with missionaries — particularly during the colonial period — this is much less likely be the case now, she said.
“At no point is that ever what we’re attempting to do,” Shah said of Muslim Hands. “There’s a difference between saying we are faith-based and massively driven by the tenets of our faith, but that doesn’t then spill over to say, ‘As a condition of giving aid, we’re asking people to consider converting into the faith.’”
Rather than being a misconception encountered in the field, Lehmann-Sow said, donors and Western audiences are the ones who tend to have these misunderstandings about World Vision’s work.
Shah said a donor — also faith-affiliated — recently asked whether conversion or preaching is a condition of Muslim Hands’ support. The question led to a transparent and productive conversation in this instance, Shah said, but if other donors are not so forthright and the question mark around proselytism and conversion remains, FBOs’ funding could be in jeopardy.
World Vision “never hides that we are Christian and we are enjoying having these conversations with donors and others [are] waking up to this,” Lehmann-Sow said.
“The pervasive secular mindset in development training and discipline over the years has caused us to miss opportunities to have a greater impact by understanding faith.”
— Esther Lehmann-Sow, partnership leader for faith and development, World Vision3. Faith actors aren’t set up for managing development admin
Within the sector, some believe that faith actors — specifically those operating on a more local level — aren’t well set up to manage the finances and produce the donor reports required in development or aid work, Tomalin said. That’s often not the case, and if it is, it’s likely because faith actors have been historically excluded from the aid and development system, she said.
Many people argue that the relationship between the sector and faith actors is instrumentalized with the needs, interests, and demands of faith communities overlooked, Tomalin said, characterizing the global aid business as “top-down.”
“[Local faith actors] want to learn. They want to participate and really value being taken seriously, because it’s not even that they’ve been knocking on doors; they just don’t know which doors to even knock on. And often the secular humanitarian system doesn’t know they’re there, and they’re burdened by all these prejudices and assumptions that create biases,” Tomalin said.
This can be remedied by bringing local faith actors into the fold, she added.
4. Faith is an archaic way of doing development
“Faith has been considered a leftover old way of doing development, something that can be cured by education, but this is an arrogant, Western view,” Lehmann-Sow said. “There is good and increasing evidence about the role of faith and faith leaders in wellbeing, providing hope, leading to people making more positive decisions about their health, and supporting mental health.”
The United Nations Development Programme’s guidelines on working with FBOs and religious leaders state that engaging religious — as well as secular — actors “helps to create a truly representative coalition and minimizes the importance of religious differences.”
In Sierra Leone and Liberia, faith actors were found to be “transformational” in the response to the Ebola crisis once they were engaged. They used religious texts to interpret biomedical messages on Ebola control and prevention, tackled the stigma that Ebola workers and survivors faced by preaching acceptance, and provided psychosocial support.
Recognition is growing around the benefits of understanding faith perspectives, Lehmann-Sow said. “It’s an amazing encouragement to see how many donors – secular, atheists – are realizing extinguishing faith is not key to development,” Lehmann-Sow said.
Tackling misconceptions
Increased collaboration between faith actors and those in the development and humanitarian space can go a long way, Tomalin said.
A Tearfund and Islamic Relief project in South Sudan set up a two-way model to increase understanding between local faith actors and humanitarians. Meetings and workshops were set up to discuss humanitarian standards and reporting, as well as religious literacy and the importance of faith actor engagement. This helped build the skill sets of faith actors, better equipping them to operate as project partners, Tomalin said. It also helped humanitarian workers better understand the value of faith-led partners.
“International humanitarian actors need to open themselves up to learning from LFAs [local faith actors] and to true capacity sharing,” according to a report on the project. Everything starts with listening and conversation, Lehmann-Sow said.
“We need more work on this overlap that looks at this two-way communication,” Tomalin urged.
Devex, with support from our partner GHR Foundation, is exploring the intersection between faith and development. Visit the Focus on: Faith and Development page for more. Disclaimer: The views in this article do not necessarily represent the views of GHR Foundation.