team of volunteers boasted previous experience in Malawi, including the design and publication of a holistic teacher-training manual specifically oriented to rural Malawian preschool teachers, as well as involvement in various other education and development projects around the world. However, our initial intentions were still quite blind but fortunately our willingness and openness to learn more than made up for this. Our original aim was to build a preschool and to prepare the local community to maintain it via some form of income generating activity.

We succeeded in completing and designing a beautiful preschool about twenty kilometers from Blantyre with the Umodzi-Mbame Community Based Organization. However, what we failed to realise was that the community in which we built the school did not have a tradition of actively pursuing their own positive cultural changes and would continue to neglect their own development after our arrival and eventual departure. This is something that by now is very well known through out Africa, although it is almost completely unheard of in the developed world. Most people who have never visited the African continent find it impossible to imagine that a developmental gift of any kind, especially a school for young children, would not be appreciated and used to its full potential by the beneficiaries. How little do they know! Upon realizing that the school we built was not going to be the community’s school but would remain our school and our project, we decided that it would be better to create a model preschool to serve as an example of holistic Early Childhood Development (ECD) for the surrounding community. We recruited teachers from the local community based on experience and, as the school opened in October, 2006, began to give them training in holistic ECD. With the support of Malawian government stakeholders, especially the Blantyre Department of Social Welfare, as well as UNICEF, the model preschool began to truly serve its purpose as preschool caregivers from the surrounding community began to approach us with a desire to participate in the teacher-training program. Now this seemed much more logical to us, this is how development can and must work. We did not have to force our ideas on anyone regarding teacher training, people were witnessing something that was working and wanted to take advantage of it themselves. For these communities the initiative to learn about early childhood development and how to implement it was already rooted in their efforts; it didn’t depend on us! There is one community in particular which approached us from the very remote village of Kantimbanya, about halfway down the escarpment to Chikwawa. After learning about our preschool education program, they invited us to visit their own programs. Throughout Malawi, the middle generation has been dying due to the HIV/Aids pandemic, leaving large numbers of vulnerable children and elderly with no one to care for them. Volunteers emerged from the Kantimbanya community and for several years they had been running four preschool centers, a homebased care program for the sick and elderly and garden-assistance programs for the food security of the region. What we found to our surprise was that these programs had emerged without the assistance or initiative of any government or non-governmental agency: it was the first true grassroots development we had ever witnessed! We even got the impression that the closer a community is to the tarmac road, the more tainted they are by dependency on foreign aid: conversely, the more remote a community, the more inclined it is to address their own needs. In our work with this community we allowed a new approach to NGO/Community partnership to develop. We do not tell them what they need for their own good; they of course know this already. We simply need to listen and identify how we can be of assistance to them, providing the opportunities for them to formulate their own developmental agenda. Beyond including their teachers in our teacher-training program, we have so far assisted them in legitimising their existence by registering with Social Welfare as the Tiyende Pamodzi CBO and also by helping fund a maize mill to generate income for their active programs. They are now working to develop a Model Community Centre which will act as a learning resource for surrounding communities with their own developmental initiatives. This experience has been of such value for us that we formed our own Civil Society Organization called ‘based on Needdriven Grassroots Ownership’: what we consider to be the necessary platform for sustainability in any community development endeavor or organization. More simply put, the name of our organization is boNGO, which in Chi-Chewa means ‘the brain’, the logical starting point for development of every kind. For more information contact: bongomalawi@gmail.com