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I have the great pleasure of hosting blog pieces from our exemplary partners on this platform. Today’s blog comes from our Ugandan-based partner, S.O.U.L. Foundation. Too often in the international development sector we rely on weighty jargon- like the term Community-Driven Development. It’s all the rage among funders and practitioners! Except no one really knows what it means. Fortunately, we have examples like S.O.U.L.’s model to give us tangible examples of what it means for a community of beneficiaries to truly create and drive their own vision for development. Please read, enjoy, and be inspired!

Photo credit: S.O.U.L. Foundation
This is a guest post by Andrea Koris, 2015-2016 Global Health Corps Fellow at S.O.U.L. Foundation.

The scene: a red dirt road, long and winding, empty save for the dust of a distant truck. Dark clouds rumble overhead, a distant rainstorm stirring up the banana palms. A young woman named Edisa–23, pregnant, and alone–stands on the side of the road, worriedly surveying her options. If she walks left, she will end up at the local health center in three hours. If she walks right, she will be at the traditional midwife’s house in thirty minutes. She braces herself against the contraction rolling through her and, as it subsides, she makes the only possible decision given her lack of transportation: head to the local midwife. While she might have a safe and uneventful delivery, she could be the 1 in 44 Ugandan women who die every day at the hands of an unskilled birth attendant. It is a dangerous risk she is forced to take.

The location: eastern Uganda. Settled deep in the rural villages of Jinja District, the committed and passionate staff at S.O.U.L. Foundation hear stories like Edisa’s everyday. Pregnant women in rural areas face incredible odds when navigating access to safe, qualified maternal health care. Lack of health information, money, male involvement, and proper medical care leads to an epidemic of maternal mortality, with 343 per 100,000 Ugandan women dying in childbirth every year. These women are often the poorest of the poor, living in the most remote corners of the country.

The protagonists: As a community development organization, women like Edisa reside at the center of our mission. Founded in 2009 by young American nurse Brooke Stern, S.O.U.L. was built with the intention of piloting a new vision for aid by asking women like Edisa what they needed and–just as importantly–how she would like to be involved in building a new road. Stern forged the foundation of S.O.U.L. on strong community partnerships, implementing a co-ownership model to development. The effectiveness of this model is most evident through S.O.U.L.’s new community-designed maternal health program.

Photo credit: S.O.U.L. Foundation
At S.O.U.L., we make the road by walking. Rather than wait for experts from outside to tell us what is needed, we trust that women like Edisa know exactly what to do if given the opportunity. Artful listening in places traditionally colonized by outside forces does not come naturally. S.O.U.L. has spent years developing trust, competency and shared leadership within the community and has itself transformed as an extension of the community. What resulted from our alternative design efforts was a collaboratively created maternal health program, conceptualized by the very women and health workers benefitting from the program’s services. As a result of this exciting new stakeholder investment, the program addresses each complex dynamic that contributes to maternal mortality specifically in the eastern region of Uganda.

The epidemic: According to the World Health Organization, maternal mortality results from a set of factors that may prevent women from accessing the maternal care that they need. These three groups of factors (known as the “Three Delays Model”) describe the variety of challenges that women face, dependent on their socioeconomic standing and cultural context, when trying to access maternal care. The “Three Delays Model” involves the following:

1. Delay in decision to seek care, due to:

• Limited or poor previous experience with the health care system
• Poor understanding of complications and risk factors in pregnancy, and when to seek medical help
• Lack of financial resources

2) Delay in reaching care, due to:

• Distance to health centers and hospitals
• Availability of and cost of transport
• Geography (e.g. rough dirt roads or mountainous terrain)

3) Delay in receiving adequate health care once at a facility, due to:

• Poor facilities and lack of medical supplies
• Inadequately trained or poorly motivated medical staff
• Broken referral systems between or within health centers

S.O.U.L.’s program has three stages that address each of the delays, as well as the specific ways in which the “delays” manifest throughout rural villages in eastern Uganda. The first stage of the program combats lack of health education through the creation of a Maternal Health Education class, which provides women in the villages a chance to learn about childbirth, pregnancy danger signs, prenatal nutrition, financial preparedness, and newborn care from a Ugandan midwife. Operational since October 2015, the class has served over 460 women and men and is actively changing health beliefs and behaviors across the region. The second stage of the program focuses on building alternative transport and communication networks to break down the delay in reaching medical care. S.O.U.L. is currently building an SMS mobile platform that will serve as a motorcycle taxi dispatch system, which rural women can access at any time in the event of pregnancy complications or the onset of labor. The third and final stage involves the creation of a birth center and midwifery school to dually address the delay in reaching the health center, as well as the delay in receiving adequate care once arrived at the facility. The birth center and midwifery school will embody the mission of S.O.U.L. by providing subsidized, beneficiary-centered services through a shared community investment plan.

The finale: a community empowered through partnership to address the health needs of its mothers and daughters. The S.O.U.L. Maternal Health Program is unique and one of a kind because it is designed by mothers, for mothers. No donor agendas, no imposition of external ideas. Given the opportunity to solve the challenges they face in accessing health care, the women of the rural villages of Jinja engage with the program in an unprecedented way. Everyday, women like Edisa are learning how to prepare for pregnancy so they are empowered with safe options. They are birthing the future of Uganda–one that they designed, themselves.

Photo credit: S.O.U.L. Foundation

Source: World Health Organization Bulletin, “Applying the Lessons of Maternal Mortality Reduction to Global Health“

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In March 1968, a K-129 Soviet nuclear submarine cruising in the Pacific Ocean mysteriously disappeared from Russian radar. Following an unsuccessful search by the USSR, the United States, using sonic triangulation, secretly located the sunken submarine 1500 miles northwest of Hawaii. An operation was proposed to deploy a ship to recover the wreck of the K-129, its nuclear warhead and cryptographic material.

The Forty Committee, consisting of representatives from the White House, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and U.S. intelligence agencies, met to consider the feasibility of recovering the submarine. The Forty Committee had been created in 1970 to provide greater oversight over U.S. covert missions.

The State Department was represented by Ronald Spiers and Edward L. Peck, respectively the Director and Deputy Director of INR. The Forty Committee tasked the CIA with developing a salvage operation for the sunken submarine. This was easier said than done.

Dubbed Project Azorian, the plan was to build a special ship that would, under the cover story of deep-sea mining, covertly raise the K-129 and recover its contents. The ship would need to remain utterly stationary over the wreck to lower a crane to a depth of 16,000 feet, the deepest recovery operation ever attempted, and then have the mechanical ability to raise the submarine. (By comparison, the Titanic was at a depth of 12,500 feet.)

All of this would have to be done without the Soviets recognizing that it was their submarine the ship was after and not manganese nodules from the seabed, which is what the Hughes Corporation claimed when it was building the 63,000-ton Glomar Explorer.

After several delays and major cost overruns, the Glomar Explorer finally began recovery operations beginning on July 4, 1974. Three weeks later, on August 1, the Glomar began lifting the K-129 off the ocean floor. Or at least parts of it. William McAfee, as INR Deputy Assistant Secretary, observed the failed first attempt, as two-thirds of K-129 broke off and sunk back to the seafloor. A second attempt was planned but abandoned because only small fragments survived the disintegration of the submarine when it hit bottom.

The value of the materials salvaged was hotly debated. The CIA managed to recover two nuclear torpedoes, sonar and mechanical equipment, as well as the bodies of six of the crew, who were given military burials at sea. The CIA considers Project Azorian a great intelligence success of the Cold War.

However, it was not able to get one of the sought-after SS-4 nuclear ballistic missiles, nor apparently, the code books or decoding machines. The project was also massively over-budget, costing about $800 million, or around $3.8 billion today, which led many critics to conclude it was not worth the effort. (According to the Congressional Budget Office in 2014, the modern SSBN(X) submarines would cost about $7.7 billion each.)

Read about the operation to retrieve a hydrogen bomb which was accidentally dropped off the coast of Spain.

“We were doing remarkable things, which were being cleared without the upper working-level people being aware of them at all”

Edward L. Peck, Deputy Director for Coordination, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 1968-1971


PECK: I was the Foreign Service Officer who was detailed to monitor, on a continuing…basis, what they called the Vulnerable Platform Intelligence Collection Program.

I carried around my neck passes to various parts of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to CIA, to NSA [National Security Agency], to NPIC, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, and I coordinated for State Department all of the programs involving ships, planes, submarines, satellites, for peripheral and overhead intelligence collection….

The CIA would present a proposed covert action to the Forty Committee, which included in it a statement that the Department of State had already approved it. I was finally able, after a long struggle with my bosses, to convince them that that was not the way it should be done.

What’s the purpose of having the meeting? What’s the purpose of having our membership if the CIA submits our vote? The paper shouldn’t say that. Our vote should come out in the meeting.

So when they changed the procedure to the way I wanted it, it forced people to take longer and harder looks at what the CIA was sending forward. It also put the State Department more firmly into the approval system. It was a long hard struggle….

Some years later the papers printed our successful efforts to pick up the parts of that Russian submarine that had sunk in the Pacific….the Glomar Explorer….

I’d been clued into that program years before, and they weren’t going to clear but just one or two people in the State Department, outside of those who needed to know because they were processing the papers. I was able to get my bosses to secure [Under Secretary of State U.] Alex Johnson’s approval to widen dramatically the number of people who were cleared for some of these programs.

Because in those days — those were the early days of the Nixon years — we were doing things, remarkable things, which were being cleared without the upper working-level people being aware of them at all.

“I thought the operation was high risk, that putting that big a ship in that area would catch Soviet attention”

William McAfee, Deputy Assistant Secretary, INR, 1972-1986


McAFEE: I was the backbencher on the Forty Committee….the senior-level committee that coordinated covert operations or highly sensitive intelligence activities. For instance… the ship that raised the Soviet submarine, the Glomar Explorer….The CIA developed a plan to raise a Soviet submarine that sank out in the Pacific.

It was first presented to the Forty Committee as a $28 million research program to see what we could do about raising it. Everybody goes along. It gets approved step by step and eventually the cost is between $300 and $400 million. If that price had been set initially, more questions would have been asked. They built the ship [the Hughes Glomar Explorer]….

I thought the operation was high risk, that putting that big a ship in that area would catch Soviet attention. A warship, even if sunk, remains the property of its nation, but the Soviets never focused on it. The operation almost came off.

When the submarine was being raised, the CIA had me out as the guest of honor Sunday for a briefing on the status [of the operation, so we] knew where it was and how far up it was. It was exciting.

On Monday [came] the catastrophe when the ship wobbled. They had lost a good bit of the submarine. There never was a detailed release on what was achieved intelligence-wise. The operational failure came when one of the claws holding the submarine broke.

Finally, they decided on a second try. We thought that they were pushing their luck to think they could go back to that same area and do it again, particularly since twin crews had been briefed, but the ship was getting ready when one of the crew members got drunk in a bar on the West coast and told about being in on this macho project which got in the press. This killed it off.

[Nevertheless], the whole project showed CIA’s great operational capabilities. When the Air Force planned to develop its stealth bomber, they went to CIA to talk security procedures because they wanted to know how Azorean, which had so many people involved, had been kept so secret.

And I think primarily it was initially a good cover story, deep ocean mining, briefing fully as few as possible, putting as little down on paper as you have to, not leaving papers where they can be worked over. It was a good security system, and the project certainly proved the feasibility of what was planned, politically and operationally.

SPIERS: [The Glomar Explorer]– that particular operation certainly had foreign policy implications. I thought it was a waste of money to try to bring that submarine to surface because it was such an old vessel. When the Navy began to lift it, it fell apart and not much of use came from it in spite of all the costs.

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Robert Mitchum, Rip Torn, Nick Nolte, Hugh Grant, Roman Polanski, John Travolta, Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn, Nicholas Cage, Sean Connery, Rob Lowe, Kelsey Grammer, Tim Allen, Mark Wahlberg, Robert Downey, Jr., and of course everybody’s favorites Woody Allen and Bill Cosby. They all have three things in common. They are rich, famous and Hollywood celebrity big shots. They all were either accused of or convicted of sex related crimes or other assorted crimes. Hollywood and the film going public never turned its back on any of them. They are lionized for their films, acting roles, and hailed as influential art, entertainment and even cultural standard bearers.

Now we come to Nate Parker. The seventeen-year old rape charge, trial and acquittal of him has been debated endlessly, with some even going so far as to slap the word “rapist” over promotional posters for his film, Birth of a Nation, and hinting at or outright calling for a boycott of his much acclaimed film based on Nat Turner’s slave rebellion set for an October release. The American Film Institute, however, did take action and postponed an originally August screening of the film until later in the year. And yes, the Parker controversy does and should force another hard look at the still much too lax legal treatment that rape and sexual violence gets. Even so, Fox Searchlight Pictures, the film’s backer, says the film is still a go, and legions have rallied to Parker’s defense. They should because: A. It’s an old case B. He faced the charges and was acquitted and C. the timing of the allegation being played up almost two decades after the case is suspect given that it’s raised on the eve of the release of his much anticipated and welcomed biopic on Nat Turner.

The Parker flap raises another question. As is the case with all the Hollywood and historic artistic bad boys. That is, can the artist and their art be separated? It can and is.

Composer Richard Wagner was a raving, unabashed, anti-Semite, Hitler’s idol, notorious sexual philander, and bigamist, and fugitive. Yet no one would dare suggest stop staging. Conducting, or playing or listening to his towering operatic works that defined and redefined the operatic genre, and are the universal standard in opera and classical music.

Ernest Hemingway was a world class boozer, womanizer, and sexual abuser. Yet no one would dare suggest that his works which define the best in American literature stop being read, filmed, and enjoyed by millions.

Then There’s Allen and Cosby. They are near universally reviled as sexual reprobates, and one has a heavy duty criminal cloud hanging over him. Yet, no one would dare suggest that they their films, and albums should be watched and listened to and patronized.

The Parker controversy also casts an ugly glare on the notorious celebrity double standard. The celebrities that have found themselves plopped on the legal hot seat have a huge advantage that the average Joe couldn’t even begin to dream of and would likely face long prison terms for. It’s not just the ability of celebrities to cast their spell over a fawning public that gives them a colossal edge over the average working stiff when they are hauled into court. It’s also their deep pockets. They can afford to hire the top legal guns, crack private investigators, and publicists. This more than levels the legal playing field for them and enables them to go toe-to-toe with prosecutors. Prosecutors know that every legal move they make against celebrities will be intensely scrutinized and more often than not criticized, and second-guessed by the media and the public. More likely they will see them as victims of a vengeful, and jealous legal system bent not on prosecuting their heroes for alleged crimes committed, but on persecuting them because of who they are.

This was not the case with Parker. He was hardly a known Hollywood or fan quantity when he was charged. He was a college guy then. But he’s moving in the film big leagues now and that will serve him well before, during and after Birth of a Nation hits the theaters. Whatever benefit he gets from the celebrity attention and treatment–good and bad– will be no different than other celebrities ripped for their bad behavior have gotten.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a consultant with the Institute of the Black World and an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio-one. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK-Pacifica Radio.

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