Breaking Down Barriers to Poverty Reduction
A Message from Chad McCordic, Country Director
Historically in humanitarian aid and international development, communities haven’t had much choice in the type of aid they’re given. Because of the way most grant funding works, organizations must offer communities specific types of aid or development projects. This type of aid follows a top-down and one-size-fits-all approach to supporting communities. However, in my time with OneVillage Partners here in Sierra Leone, it’s been encouraging to see community-led development become more mainstream in aid and development. Community participation has become a pre-requisite for delivery of aid, meaning that the people being served are viewed not as passive recipients, but rather as active collaborators in addressing poverty reduction.
The Lead program is OneVillage Partners’ latest effort to even more directly enable communities to address their challenges from multi-dimensional poverty. Last year, we piloted this new initiative, which trains community members in writing grant proposals, building off the adult training that we do in the Community Action program on project design and the Nurturing Opportunities for Women (NOW) program in budgeting. Where we are more hands-on in these programs, we are intentionally taking a step back and putting more trust into communities, so that they can continue to develop tailored solutions to address poverty as they see necessary.
In Lead, volunteers from different communities write proposals for small grant funding to address a specific need in their community or collaborate across villages to work together on a larger project. We established transparent criteria to measure the proposed project’s impact and effectiveness, and we fund the projects that meet those standards. The projects we funded last year are just wrapping up their initial implementation. In the community of Grima, they successfully rehabilitated their maternal health clinic, including providing 24-hour lights through a newly installed solar panel system. This project will improve healthcare for over 10,000 individuals in the area. In Mamboma, the community not only rehabilitated and electrified their community center, they funded and rolled out several youth-focused business and livelihood workshops.
We should point out that the idea of directly funding grassroots projects is not new (though it is still rare). Sparks Microgrants, an organization that is also part of the Movement for Community-Led Development, has been operating with such a model for nearly a decade now in East Africa. We’ve learned from them and others, and we’ve learned a lot on our own, too. These lessons have helped us shape a stronger program as we begin training new Lead cohorts this month.
One of the key lessons that we learned in the Lead pilot is that regional collaboration can’t happen without a supportive framework in place. Communities can’t work together on projects if there isn’t a direct line of communication between them and local government structures. We have already started to address this by inviting local government representatives to learn about the program as the community does. This connection enables communities to address poverty reduction and improve wellbeing on a larger scale, and ultimately allows them to develop what their vision of a thriving community looks like.
What does it look like to them? It looks like a community that “meets basic needs,” but also a community “that shares information, within a village and among neighboring villages.” It looks like “transparent leadership,” and it’s also a community that has strong “protection of children, particularly girls.” This will be the vision that leads them forward in the Lead program.
Learn more about the Lead program.