How a village water project taught me that the loudest voices in a community meeting are rarely the ones carrying the heaviest loads. And why that distinction can make or break development work.
The Walk We Never Took
She left at dawn with an empty jerrycan and returned hours later, her back bent under its weight. Every day, twice. But that was not her biggest problem. This was the reality I somehow missed when my team and I arrived at the village with our assessment tools, our participatory frameworks, and our conviction that we already understood the problem.
The situation looked simple from where we stood: no water source nearby, one distant well, and women making the long round trip on foot every single day. We had funding. We had technical expertise. We had the right intentions. So we did what development professionals do. We organized community meetings, gathered inputs, and we installed boreholes across several villages in the groupement, bringing water infrastructure closer to households that had never had it.
On paper, it was a textbook success. In reality, it was a lesson I am still learning from.
“We had heard the community. We had not yet heard the women. That distinction matters more than most projects are willing to admit.”
Participation Is Not the Same As Inclusion
In hierarchical societies, and I have worked in enough of them across Cameroon and the DRC to know this well, public meetings have a predictable architecture. Men arrive first, sit in front, and speak with authority. Women arrive later, sit at the edges, and speak carefully, if at all. We, the outside facilitators, unconsciously mirror that architecture. We write down what is said loudly. We treat consensus as genuine when it is often just the silence of those who have learned that objecting is costly.
That is exactly what happened. Our process was participatory in form but not in substance. The decision to prioritize boreholes reflected men’s preferences more than women’s. And on a question about water, a resource whose burden falls almost exclusively on women that is not a procedural flaw. It is a fundamental failure.
We only discovered this when, weeks after installation, we noticed something troubling: the women were not using the new boreholes as much as expected. When a colleague sat down informally with a group of women outside the meeting structure, away from any formal agenda, we finally understood why. What they told her changed everything I thought I understood about the project.
What the Well Was Really For
The first thing several women said was straightforward but uncomfortable: if they had been genuinely asked to rank priorities from the beginning, many would not have chosen boreholes first. Some said they would have preferred a classroom. A classroom, they explained, represented a path out. A way to ensure their daughters did not spend their own lives making the same daily walk.
That answer unsettled me. But it was the second thing they said that completely reframed the project in my mind.
The long walk to the distant well, exhausting as it was, served a purpose that appeared in no project document. It was theirs. It was one of the only regular spaces where women could gather without supervision or interruption, to share news, check on one another, organize tontines, discuss family matters, and sustain the informal networks that held their community together. It was social infrastructure. It was also invisible to us, because we had never asked.
“What we saw as dead time was, in part, social time. What we classified as a burden was also a resource, one we dismantled without knowing it existed.”
I am not romanticizing the exhaustion of carrying water for hours. I am saying that infrastructure is never only infrastructure. A borehole changes rhythms, relationships, and social ecologies in ways that purely technical assessments cannot capture. The women were not against the boreholes. Most agreed that having water closer improved their daily lives. But their full reality was more complex than the visible problem we had rushed to solve.
The Blind Spot That Most Projects Share
This is not a story about one village or one poorly designed project. It is a story about a structural pattern in how development work gets done.
Too many projects begin with a visible hardship and move too quickly toward a technical answer. No water nearby? Drill boreholes. Low yields? Distribute inputs. Poor school attendance? Build classrooms. The logic seems obvious until you remember that communities are not engineering diagrams. A woman carrying water is not managing a single problem. She is simultaneously managing childcare, economic survival, community ties, emotional labor, and the future of her children. If she tells you a classroom matters as much as water, she is not confused about development. She is expanding it.
The fish farming project I led years ago taught me the same lesson at a cost of two years and most of our budget: the village we came to help had been politely playing along with a solution they had never wanted. When we finally stopped designing for them and started listening to them, a third of the original objectives were achieved in a single year. With a third of the remaining funds. The community’s knowledge had been there all along. We had simply never created conditions for it to reach us.
What Real Participation Requires
If we are serious about participatory development, we need to stop treating public meetings as proof of inclusion. They are not. They are proof of attendance.
Real participation requires separate spaces where women can speak freely, not alongside those whose authority shapes what is safe to say publicly. It requires asking not only what people need, but how they rank those needs, and why. It requires being genuinely prepared for answers that contradict our assumptions. And it requires accepting that the purpose of participation is not to validate what we were already planning to do. Its purpose is to reshape the project.
Had we listened earlier and more carefully, the question might not have been boreholes or nothing. It might have been: What do you want first, and what would you want us to protect in the process? The women themselves might have designed a more intelligent sequence than the one we imposed. That is the point. Communities deserve more than a seat at the table. They deserve the power to change what is on it.
Listening Is Also a Form of Justice
There is a tendency in development circles to treat listening as soft and construction as real work. I have come to believe the opposite.
When women tell you that a project reflects men’s priorities more than theirs, they are not complaining about a process. They are naming a political truth: that what counts as a problem, and what counts as a solution, depends entirely on who has the power to define both. When they tell you they might have chosen a classroom before a borehole, they are not misunderstanding development. They are telling you what development actually means from where they stand.
The field teaches these lessons more honestly than any conference room. And it teaches them at cost, cost measured in time, in trust, in the slow erosion of community goodwill when projects solve the wrong problems well.
A borehole can reduce fatigue. It can save hours. It can improve health and dignity. But it cannot substitute for voice. It cannot correct exclusion by itself. And it cannot become a symbol of participation if the people it was designed to serve were never genuinely asked to define the problem.
People are not transformed by projects designed above them, around them, or in their name. They are transformed when they are treated as agents of their own priorities.
A borehole can bring water closer. But only listening can bring development closer to justice.
Photo Credit: Jainath Ponnala on Unsplash
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