Critical consciousness-raising amongst poor Rakhine villages in rural Myanmar

Rakhine State has become the poorest part of Myanmar over the past decade, with the 2014 Census painting a compelling picture of underdevelopment in comparison to the rest of the country. Rakhine State is also home to significant conflict, primarily known internationally as the home of the repressed Rohingya Muslim population. Almost all international attention focuses on the needs of this population. However, the almost 2 million ethnic Rakhine Buddhists, also live with both grinding poverty and a profound sense of disempowerment by the State. Blamed by the government for violence and human rights violations against the Muslims, and suffering their own alienation and marginalisation at the hand of the State, rural Rakhine villagers are a poor, under-serviced and largely neglected population living in an isolated region prone to natural disasters. This chapter examines critical consciousness-raising work that has taken place over the past few years through a locally-led community development programme amongst ethnic Rakhine Buddhist communities, in two of the poorest rural townships: Mrauk-U and Kyauktaw. Believing that effective community development empowers the marginalised, powerless and poor to achieve a better life and higher level of well-being for themselves, in the context of a 'community' or social group, the local NGO Community Development Education train and resource rural village facilitators to mobilise and lead their communities in small-scale, asset-based community development. Recent field data collected in workshops with the facilitators in 2016-17 highlight significant new awareness, not only around the opportunities and process for implementing their own effective community projects, but also of their human rights, the human rights of ‘the other’ (their Rohingya Muslim neighbours), and what this means for their relationship with both authorities and one another. These recent insights by the facilitators and their implications will be examined in this chapter, within the troubled ethnic and political context.