Too often, “development” is described using big words: frameworks, indicators, road maps, targets. These things matter. But when I look back at the projects that truly made a difference, they all started with something much simpler: listening.
In many communities I’ve worked with, people are used to outsiders arriving with ready-made solutions. A training, a toolkit, a new app, a quick survey. We ask questions, collect data, take photos, and then we leave. Months later, life looks almost the same.
Real change begins when we slow down long enough to understand how people see their own problems. What does “safety” mean to them? What does “opportunity” look like? How do they describe “dignity” in their own words? When we listen carefully, we often discover that our assumptions were wrong, or at least incomplete.
Listening is not a soft skill; it is a method. It shapes how we design projects, how we prioritize budgets, and how we measure success. For example, a project might be labelled “successful” because it reached a certain number of beneficiaries. But if people felt disrespected in the process, or if activities created new tensions in the community, can we really call that development?
As a practitioner and a researcher, I’ve learned that community voices should not only appear in the “background” or “context” section of a proposal or thesis. They should influence the core questions we ask, the indicators we track, and the outcomes we celebrate. Listening is not just the first step; it must be present at every stage of the project cycle.
Development work will always involve some degree of power imbalance—between funders and implementers, between researchers and respondents, between organizations and communities. We cannot pretend this doesn’t exist. But we can choose how we use that power. When we listen with humility, we turn development from something we do to people into something we build with them.
In the end, listening does not slow us down; it saves us from moving fast in the wrong direction.