Mwalimu Musheshe ~ Vision in Action in Uganda

I was delighted yesterday to see Mwalimu Musheshe visit MIT and share his experiences in Uganda helping rural people achieve their Vision in Action through the Uganda Rural Development & Training Program (URDT). Musheshe was hosted at MIT by one of our great systems thinkers, Society for Organizational Learning founder Peter Senge, and both his colleague Bryan Smith and senior doctoral student Jason Jay. URDT provides...

"...an aspiration-based, systemic approach grounded in the understanding that to achieve lasting development, people must become empowered in all areas of their lives, including education, health, economic self-reliance, human rights, and civic participation. [...In the 1980s, Musheshe] and a cadre of the initial Ugandan leaders came to Boston to learn about systems thinking, mental models, and creating personal and shared visions. Rather than follow the more typical aid strategies of technical and humanitarian assistance, URDT’s founders challenged a core mental model. "The biggest obstacle to development in Uganda," says Musheshe, "was fatalism, people who believed that they could do nothing to shape their future. All the outside help in the world would not change this -- it only reinforced it."

Having bold aspirations for prosperity and thinking systemically about development. Exactly right. I was especially pleased that Musheshe was able to meet my IDI colleague, MIT's Amy Smith, at his talk and afterwards we all swung by MIT's D-Lab space to see the many appropriate and empowering technologies our students are co-developing with partners in developing regions worldwide...