We at Actionaid undertake our social change initiatives from a rights perspective. We have moved towards campaigning and lobbying for pro-poor policy and social mobilization of the poor and marginalized for collective action. However, working on attitudinal change and developing innovative ways to bring about this change remains a difficult area to address.

ActionAid considers this aspect of change as primary to the process of long-lasting change and we have developed some innovative modules. Fighting Poverty Together talks about attitudes related to social hierarchies that have been internalized by the poor and marginalized. These attitudes often continue to prevail even when they come out of poverty. Often this results in the adoption of the same patterns of oppressive behavior that others used to suppress them. Unless we break this cycle by changing peoples attitudes and values we will not be able to fully bring about any meaningful and lasting transformation in the lives of people.

It is increasingly recognized that unless people are shaken out of their apathy, fatalism and resignation, and unless an emotional reawakening and reinvigoration takes place, no collective awareness or action on human rights in a real sense will take place. Peoples creative energies, the primary resource for any change, can never be harnessed unless their spirits are revived and a sense of dignity restored. Until this is done people will continue to be mere recipients of material aid rather than active and creative participants in a process of change.

Conversely, one of the chief mechanisms of suppression has been to take away from a people their means of cultural expression, their songs, their stories, their dramas and spectacles, all the avenues through which they could dream of a better life and a better future. By taking away from them their right to dream they have been pushed into a subhuman existence, voiceless and dreamless, with no opportunity at all to think beyond the fulfillment of immediate needs.

For these reasons, ActionAid has been organizing these festivals around the role of cultural activities in attitude transformation.  We look upon the event as an extremely useful opportunity to exchange experiences of the Manganhaar communities from both sides of the border in the peace context and to take steps towards formulating a wider, policy level approach towards cultural action.