It’s imperative when doing international development work not to impose our paradigm on theirs. Last week I listened to a Millennium Promise webinar on sustainable energy sources for rural villages in Africa- very impressed by their quantitative and qualitative research and knowledge- Vijay was among the world’s foremost experts on the subject, and extremely knowledgeable on statistics, costs, systems, alternatives, and working models for scalability of access to energy for village clusters and nodes. The problem for me is that it seems as though the end result is to put Africa on the grid and connect every indigenous person in the world to a networked system of service, connectivity and billing… without any self questioning of whether this is the right thing to do or not… in whose interests would this ultimately be—the villagers, or large corporations providing the service? This march toward scalability of a network that must be monetized by business interests… isn’t this how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, even as they gain access to electricity? There was a Wall Street analyst of the energy sector on the panel, which both fascinated and horrified us. At least we didn’t need to wonder where they are coming from… it just would have been nice to have a seat at the table, to have a watchdog like BARKA to protect and preserve the interests of indigenous people, in solidarity with the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, to question the entire model and ensure that our paradigm is not being imposed on theirs.