Two Goats is a place for sharing ideas, tools, resources, and lessons learned in managing international humanitarian and/or development projects.
The blog name is a reference to an “aha” moment for me, Lynn. I was in a poor-by-my-standards community in Northern Sudan and was talking with some men and women about who in the area needed development assistance – in other words, who was poor in their community.
It came down to goats. Households without goats, or with only one goat, were poor; households with two or more goats were not. Simple.
More than anything else, that conversation drove home for me the principle that “poverty” and “development” are very personally defined. I’ve since listened more carefully to how people frame development in their own terms, and I have a growing list that I keep returning to.
Development is:
- building a roof that doesn’t leak.
- access to reliable education for one’s children.
- sleeping on a bed instead of a mattress on the floor.
- purchasing a good set of clothes.
- owning two goats.
