Ernesto Sirolli at the World Indigenous Business Forum.

Indigenous development needs to come from Indigenous people and everyone else needs to shut up and listen—that was the message of Ernesto Sirolli at the World Indigenous Business Forum.

The founder of the Sirolli Institute fired up the audience by talking about the importance of taking development from the academics, politicians and thinkers and putting development in the hands of the people.

“We white people are a bunch of arrogant bastards, that’s it, finished, my speech is finished,” said the passionate Italian.

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He has heard all the stories of mistakes and people walking into a community and explaining what they would do to help, and realized that it wasn’t working.

“I want to shut up and listen. I want to help the people do beautifully what they love to do,” he said.

“The only thing we have to do is shut up and listen.”

To make development work, you need to engage people on what they are passionate about.

“Every human being has a dream and the dream is to have more, to be more, and to become the beautiful person that you know in your heart of hearts you can become,” Sirolli said.

“Wisdom is about allowing the people with the passion to come forward.”

As Sirolli explains it, development walks on two legs: responsive and strategic. What every community needs is an enterprise facilitator to capture the passion and information of people one-on-one and an economic development officer to implement the strategic plan. These two people change information, one knows what they have, the other knows what the people need for their businesses.

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Another piece needed for the reclamation of Indigenous development is changing the language, Sirolli said.

“I am kind of outraged that indigenous development is not the domain of Indigenous people,” he said, after reading the Wikipedia entry that “Indigenous development refers to a variety of coordinated efforts, usually by first world organizations, to support progress in modernizing or bettering life...”

“It is absolutely outrageous that Indigenous development is defined by somebody else, toying with you, experimenting with you,” he said.

“We’ve seen the result of the experiment, the result of the experiment is embarrassing for NGOs around the world.”

By the end of the forum, a working group spent two hours to come up with a new definition to submit to replace the one on Wikipedia. It reads,