Me and the NGO staff, We Live like Azungu; Malawian Moral Economies of Development

This article explores how rural Malawians used an NGO’s presence to negotiate their changing intra-community responsibilities. It responds to a perceived incompatibility between development and kinship-inspired moral economies by exploring how “becoming developed” became a (contested) way to fulfil intra-communal obligations and entitlements, which were previously enacted through resource sharing. It also shows how villagers’ understanding that donors were a patron for their entire community encouraged them to make demands on the NGO’s project’s beneficiaries. These findings should persuade practitioners to consider how their projects will be reinterpreted through community-embedded concepts of obligation and the effects of their mere presence on local meanings of development.