Faith-based development of World Vision Tanzania

ABSTRACT

This article examines how faith is intertwined in conceptions of development in the work of World Vision Tanzania, a faith-based organisation focusing on child welfare. Issues that are explored include the question how an apparently common faith setting constitutes and provides a source of social meanings and values for the assessment of human development as well as secular development concepts such as human agency and empowerment. The analysis shows how World Vision staff assign different values to Christian and non-Christian development when assessing the potential and achievements of the beneficiaries in terms of secular concepts. It is argued that a faith-based worldview in this context provides the foundation for the specific set of values and social meanings, which are examined in this article, and a source for these more generally when value judgements and assessments of agency, empowerment, freedom, and, ultimately, well-being are made. It is further suggested that, by employing ideas of freedom, agency, and empowerment and investing them with Christian meaning, World Vision is able to generate a portrait of itself and its beneficiaries that is positioned in a hierarchy of values where Christian ideals and secular development fuse and become paramount.

KEYWORDS:

• religion
• development
• Tanzania
• World Vision

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Academy of Finland for supporting this study as part of my research on “Religion and Globalization: Evangelical Christianity and Development in Africa” (grant number 251277) and the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology for providing me with research clearance. I am grateful to Anceth Jettah, Vivian Baitu, Sofia Joseph, and Deusdediti Mpanduji for their research assistance. Earlier versions of this article were commented on by Maia Green, Sirkku Hellsten (1962–2018), Anja Nygren, Barry Gills, Sarah White, Séverine Deneulin, and the participants of the Development Studies Association Conference in Bath in September 2015. I am particularly grateful to World Vision Tanzania and its staff for their generous and gracious collaboration during the project. I am indebted to Dr Marie-Louise Karttunen for patiently editing the language of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article is not the place to analyse the various definitions of religion and faith. Religion is used here to refer to a particular system of faith and worship, whereas faith is used to refer to an internalised, all-embracing spiritual experience and trust in something that cannot be proven. Hence, a person with faith would not perceive a dichotomy between the sacred and the secular.

2. These observations have enabled religion to be granted more space within studies of development, a trend which is evident in the rapidly growing number of important publications (Bornstein 2005; Clarke 2013; Deneulin and Bano 2009; Haynes 2007; ter Haar 2011; Hasu 2012, 2016; Tyndale 2006; Clarke and Jennings 2008; Tomalin 2013, 2015).

3. Louis Dumont discusses the principles of hierarchy and the principle of encompassing the contrary in his classic work Homo Hierarchicus (1980). His idea of hierarchy is that a hierarchy is a way of looking at the world and imagining social reality rather than a thing in itself. It is a system of difference or asymmetry, which arises whenever one makes a judgement of value. Hierarchy is a system where differences are encompassed and subordinated to the whole; it is a kind of holism (Strenski 2008, 25–26).

4. The identification of the informants indicates first the chronological number of the interview (e.g. 208), the year of the interview (e.g. 2012), the denomination of the informant (e.g. AIC for African Inland Church), and the gender of the informant. The acronyms for the denominations are mentioned in the description of the fieldwork. All names referred to in the article are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Päivi Hasu

Päivi Hasu is an anthropologist educated at the University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor in Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland, where she currently holds the position of a university teacher. Her past research and research interests have been in the field of anthropology of Christianity and involved an historical study of the ritual practices of the Chagga of Kilimanjaro, research on the charismatic movement within the Lutheran church in Tanzania, and studies on the new Pentecostal–charismatic churches in Dar es Salaam. Most recently, she has researched faith-based organisations and their development projects in Tanzania. CORRESPONDENCE: Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, PO Box 35, 40014 Jyväskylä, Finland.