What strikes me most when I read about, and listen to, Molly Melching is her humility and willingness to learn about the people of a society she loved from the first time she met them. It led her to create a model of development that is rooted in believing that people themselves will willingly change social norms if they understand how such norms hold them back from creating the kind of society they want for themselves.

It is not the ethos of most international development organizations, who want to change people so their societies look more like ours, and Tostan’s community empowerment model does not look like the one that is used by most western international development agencies. But you cannot argue with the results achieved over the past 30 years.