How I becomes we: why voice is the link between us and the world

By Michael Onsando

What makes us

If you go far back enough in history, communication and community become the same word. They both start out as communis, an old Latin word that means common, public, general or shared by all. Who ‘I’ am may be the territory of the individual, but everyone has a stake in who ‘we’ are.

When we speak, we participate in this act of community building. We begin to carve out a space for “I” in the shared “we.” But when does I become we? And how does it happen??

Busara is a collective of individuals, each with their own perspective on the world. Busara sits within a larger ecosystem of development organizations in the Global South. Which each sit within a larger ecosystem of development organizations.?

Through our voice, we seek to make ourselves known to the world and thus make the world known to us. To build Busara’s voice, we have, in the past year, created online and offline avenues where individuals and organizations can express their views and hear the views of others. In doing this, we hope to create a future that is truly communis.?

What we have asked this year and what was asked of us

Understanding what is shared by all involves asking questions about the elements involved and exploring their relations. At Voice, we have facilitated asking questions like “What does it mean to be a Global South organization?”

We have created frameworks for navigating contexts when all researchers are often one (sometimes more than one) step removed from their research environment. We even mapped out our experiences applying behavioral science in India.

While these publications offer a contribution to knowledge, these are all areas in which we don’t expect anything we put out to be final. If anything, by putting work like this out, we invite the world to interact with the work and perspectives of an individual or group of individuals within the organization and allow us to learn together.

This process is not always roses and butterflies. Sometimes the resistance is external. Something we put out is challenged, and we need to explain ourselves further and listen to the critiques. Sometimes we are afraid to speak up, or our partners are afraid. Afraid of the repercussions of putting something out. That in trying to build ourselves the communities we seek (around peace, justice, and progress), we might isolate ourselves from the communities we need (funding and partnerships).?

Still, there are good days. Like when we hold Tara Mistari, our research and learning festival that Mareike Schomerus writes about in this Yearbook, and as a result, the cross pollination of information across the organization skyrockets. Or when a Twitter space creates an environment to navigate complicated organizational conversations publicly on things like gender pay gaps (which Stanley Ngugi elaborates on more in this Yearbook).

Two tasks for Voice: Consistency and awareness

This past year, Busara’s voice strategy consisted of two words: consistency and awareness. By making sure we are consistently putting work out to the world, we were looking to get its attention. Now more people are looking. The discipline needed for consistency is always a challenge, which is why we had to grow awareness within Busara of how important it is to interact with the world through the knowledge we create. Researchers at Busara are running RCTs or qualitative surveys; they analyze data and prepare reports. Many times asking them to then work on packaging this information for different people may seem like an added step too far. Especially when the next project beckons and time is tight.

2024: everything again, but better

But precious time cannot mean that we do not do it, or that we do not do it well. This is why in 2024, we are simply adding one more word to our strategy - quality. We will spend the year defining quality standards across the organization while still keeping up a consistent, steady pace for continual awareness. This, we hope, will continue to carve out a space for Busara as a voice in the larger landscape that has something of value to offer. A space where we are all together creating the rules and policies that govern what is shared by all.