HISTORY

The World Faiths Development Dialogue was set up in 1998 as an initiative of James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank and Lord Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury. Its aim is to facilitate a dialogue on poverty and development among people from different religions and between them and the international development institutions.

The focus is on the relationship between faith and development and how this is expressed, both in considering decisions about development policy and in action with impoverished communities all over the world.

WHAT WE ARE

In our globalised world there is more opportunity than ever before for organisations and groups from different religions to work together on development issues. Nevertheless, there is still relatively little co-operation among people from different religious traditions, either in the practical work they do or at the level of policy discussions, even though they may be saying and doing similar things.

At the same time, the World Bank and United Nations organisations such as the UN Development Programme, have been working often from a very different perspective but with the same aims: to combat poverty. There have been few points of contact between them and the religious institutions, however, and what interchange has taken place has often taken the form of criticism from either side.

Despite all the scientific and technological advances of our time, the numbers of people living in poverty are growing and the gap between rich and poor is rapidly widening. It is therefore urgent that people on all sides of the “development” debate should get together to listen to each other and see where co-operation is possible. Dialogue will always leave room for disagreement but it should also point to where common ground is to be found.

The World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD) was set up in 1998 by James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, and Lord Carey of Clifton, then Archbishop of Canterbury, to help to promote a dialogue on poverty and development, both among the different faith traditions and between them and development agencies, such as the World Bank.

On the one hand the development institutions have a great deal of technical expertise and analytic skills to offer. Their financial resources are infinitely more extensive than those of the religious communities and they have access to other powerful institutions. On the other hand, people from the religious communities come with intuition and knowledge gained from their focus on people as spiritual as well as material beings and from their practical experience with the poor. Of course many people combine within themselves these two worlds but serious differences can arise, not only on matters of principle but on the grounds of vested interests.

WFDD’s Work Plan for 2003 (available on the web site) aims to bring out what is positive in both arenas and to see if there are ways in which the religious communities can contribute more vigorously through debate and action to bringing about an improvement for the poor.

WFDD is thus focusing on promoting the participation of religious communities in national and international fora on poverty and development. An initiative which should help to achieve this is a series of workshops on the relationship of faith to development. Two (in Ghana and Tanzania) will be focused on Islam and Christianity and the third (in Thailand) on Buddhism. It is hoped that one outcome of the workshops will be some manuals on faith and development.

At the same time, case studies of religious involvement in development work are being collected. The aim is to describe what characterises the work of religious communities and how, if at all, it differs from that of secular organisations, both with regard to the goals they are aiming at and with the way they go about working with the poor (see web site).

Another WFDD project is on Faith in the Global Economic System. This is to analyse the ways in which the faith communities engage with the present economic order, either critically or supportively, or both. The methodology will be highly consultative and we hope that as many people as possible from the WFDD network will join in.

From the October 2003 to the end of March 2004, WFDD and the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham in the UK, will be holding a series of seminars on alternatives to global capitalism. Proposals arising out of specific faith or ethical stances will be exposed to critical debate.

At the beginning of the year, WFDD concentrated on producing a faith-based comment on the first draft of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2004 Making Services Work for Poor People. The comment is available on the WFDD web site or from the office address.

A programme of a different sort is oriented to developing the Millennium Development Goals – a series of concrete targets, such as halving poverty by the year 2015, set by the international community and to which almost all the countries of the world profess to be working. With this programme it is hoped that closer co-operation in practice might be reached between some of the religious communities whose programmes need resources and the World Bank which is eager to encourage larger-scale projects.

As part of this endeavour, WFDD is co-operating with the Development Gateway web site to help faith-based programmes to become more widely known.

WFDD is an independent organisation, a Company Limited by Guarantee under UK law and a Registered Charity Number 109 5148