Friday’s Poetic Pause: Evaluation Led by Poetry?

Today let’s weave our stories of change, lest we die
for today captured, is a future refined

Today’s story is an inspiration to a bigger dream and rekindling the extinguished
flame of hope.

Today’s story is a walk towards self-realisation
Sounded by the ancient drum beating in all of us
The drum that releases original creation and ingenuity
That gives birth to a people empowered
Empowered to begin the change

Yes, it’s possible!
It starts within us.

By Rumbidzai Faith Masawi

***

In mid-2007 a group of Zimbabwean NGOs undertaking a collective capacity-building programme known as the Programme for Institutional Learning and Exchange (PROFILE) embarked on an exercise to discover their relevance in promoting development. Sixteen participating organizations took on a Joint Research and Reflection exercise called the “Makadii-Linjani Journey” using the Most Significant Change evaluation methodology. The resulting insights and lessons from their work appear in Narratives of Hope ‘It Starts Within Us’: Documenting Development Through Stories of Change, published by Weaver Press.

This poem was written and recited by Rumbidzai Faith Masawi at the Orientation Training Workshop for Makadii-Linjani research teams, at Kadoma, Zimbabwe in November 2008. As stated in the book’s preface, “Little did [Rumbidzai] know that it would become a piece of art that would serve to illuminate the journey the partner organizations were about to begin.”

2 Comments

  1. this is powerful stuff, it is amazing how poetry enables one to capture the essence in few words
    it helps me to see how those who work in development have for many years used language that is dead (jargon, the same dead language) – poetry brings things alive

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