Anniversaries offer all too rare chances to reflect, looking back but also ahead. Last week in Senegal, Cadre des Religieux pour la Santé et le Développement (CRSD), a coalition of leaders focused on religious approaches and institutions, brought together by the theme of family welfare, celebrated a decade long journey. Ten years ago, core challenges in all their dimensions were far from clear and the journey was never a straightforward or easy one. The venture began with the glimmer of an idea and has resulted in a dynamic, results-focused institution and program. The journey, variously described as a “miracle” and “improbable,” followed many twists and turns, with lessons that have echoes of profound abstract and ethical messages and far more mundane and practical reminders of organizational imperatives.
To tell the story in a nutshell: the Senegalese government joined a nine country alliance in 2011, the Ouagadougou Partnership. Supported by a coalition of multilateral and bilateral organizations and foundations, its central focus was family health, in a region with strikingly high maternal and child mortality and among the world’s largest share of young people in the population. The focus was family planning, but the topic involved age of marriage, community attitudes towards government and values, and many others: in short, a host of proposed changes that involved social, cultural, and political attitudes and behavior. The partners recognized that religious actors could play vital roles, with emphasis on potential negative aspects, but with Senegal’s history of religious engagement on health issues the plans looked positively to religious “champions” to support the program. However, thinking was frankly broad and vague.
The World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD), the small NGO I lead, had deep Senegalese roots that included collaborative relationships. Luck played a part: Sheikh Saliou Mbacké, a colleague with wide international experience in interfaith matters and a colleague and friend, was at a turning point in his career and was game to take on the challenge. And exemplary Hewlett Foundation support stands out as sustained, always helpful, and enriching, in the best sense of the term.
Exploratory discussions led to a tentative and modest program launched in 2014. Starting with exchanges with leaders and a few health experts to establish a knowledge base, visits of groups of religious leaders to senior leaders and to comparable programs in other countries helped to craft a program that took efforts countrywide, buttressed by media programs and continuing dialogue and debate that linked theological approaches and listening to people’s pragmatic concerns. With care, the informal alliance grew to what Senegal terms an “association” and then, with processes well defined, an NGO eligible as a partner for international foundations and government bodies.
There is widening recognition that religious engagement on development and humanitarian work is essential for success, but how to make that idea work demands care and meticulous attention to context. So what lessons might we draw from the Senegal experience? I highlighted five during the anniversary celebration.
- Action! Dialogue and learning are essential to any program, of course, but without links to action frustrations are inevitable. CRSD never imagined their alliance as a delivery mechanism, but their focus on knowledge and serving as a referral to health services established sufficient action links to propel learning and links to delivery of material services. As an integral part of the national program, the intricate ties between allaying fears, projecting positive and “faith consistent” arguments, and specific knowledge formed a good package. Personal factors played a role, with different CRSD members able to highlight issues like the respective roles of men and women in family planning decisions that were not at the forefront of the overall program.
- Deliberate approach. High mortality demands urgent action, but a rushed approach would have failed and created obstacles, given multiple complexities and the fragmented knowledge base at the outset. Vision and courage have been essential ingredients for CRSD’s leadership, but also persistence and patience. It was tempting to move rapidly, but the deliberate approach adopted, whether by necessity or foresight, is clearly part of the story of success. Finding practical ways to balance a sense of urgency with care and willingness to move step by step has been a feature of the journey.
- Networks. There’s much talk of networks, but less clarity on what it takes to build and sustain constructive networks that support a sustained set of goals. CRSD’s assets included wide-ranging relationships and access to senior religious leadership across Senegal’s quite complex religious landscape. That needed to be translated into an operational understanding of what a network could do (and what it could not). Meeting regularly, well-planned collective visits, and solid communications account for a remarkable story of network building.
- Personal relationships. Personal relationships count everywhere, but the CRSD experience underscores their particular and vital force. In my experience durability of relationships has particular importance in interreligious work. Trust can never be taken for granted, and there are many distinctive challenges when they cross religious divides. And as we know all too well trust is an elusive and vital factor. CRSD and WFDD’s leaders focused from the outset on personal relationships, and the anniversary events highlighted that the cordial and constructive exchanges among very different people were the result of care and a deeply human approach to personal relationships that have stood the test of time.
- Partnership. We say often that in this increasingly interconnected world new forms and creative approaches to partnerships are essential. Likewise, tensions among foreign and local partners and those holding purse strings and those seeking funding are seemingly inevitable. The complex partnerships that CRSD and WFDD have navigated offer a host of lessons. A positive starting point for the effort was the personal relationships that provided a foundation, but so did an openness on all sides to learning from each other. Anticipating challenges and a healthy discipline on financial matters helped. There were moments when power dynamics colored discussions, but the commitment to mutual learning and flexibility when disagreements arose account in part for the sense of a partnership that genuinely brought out assets and experience of different parties.
While “strategic religious engagement” is a rising priority for international affairs, ideal models are elusive. That is hardly surprising, given wide differences in situations by country, sector, and religious landscape. The lessons I have highlighted here are hardly the stuff of revolutions, and they might be criticized as overly “soft.” But the more we explore what accounts for an improbable journey and solid outcomes in a demanding environment, the more topics that might qualify as “soft” imperatives come to the fore. A vision and solid technical analysis is vital for success in religious engagement, and so is purposeful investment in human relationships and capabilities. Courage, care, curiosity, and sustained commitment, however hard to replicate, offer vital benchmarks in our continuing search for sustained, lasting, real results.
