Making Decisions, Not Bricks: Collaborative Decision Making in Community-Led Development Projects
Below is an excerpt from an article written by OneVillage Partners staff for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies with the University of Minnesota. You can find the full length article here.
In the far east of Sierra Leone, the village of Grima completed amajor public consultation with OneVillage Partners, a community-led non-government organization (NGO). The community members chose the priority issue that they and OneVillage Partners would address jointly with a development project. The majority voted for improved sanitation systems. The community members began to dance in celebration. A community member exclaimed to the OneVillage Partner staff, “We have had six NGOs come into our community before yours,” he said. “This is the first time we have been asked which project we thought was necessary!”
This approach of creating opportunities for communities to lead their own development projects is called Community Driven Development (CDD). This methodology directly involves those who will benefit from the project in its development and implementation. “Poor people are often viewed as the target of poverty reduction efforts. Community Driven Development, in contrast, treats poor people and their institutions as assets and partners in the development process” (Klugman,2002, p. 303). This approach is efficient. “Where poor communities have direct input into the design, implementation, management, and evaluation, returns on investment and the sustainability of the project are enhanced” (Woodcock&Narayan, 2000, p. 243). Projects that are community-driven also improve accountability structures in their implementation, through shared decision making and building social capital (Klugman, 2002). Social capital “refers to the collective power of relationships, connections, and networks among and between people”(Rasmussen, Armstrong, & Chazdon, 2011, p.38). Bytapping intosocial capital, CDD programs leverage this collective power to improve socio-economic wellbeing.
CLD projects are a response to the growing awareness of inequities of the traditional ‘top-down aid’ model. William Easterly, author of The Tyranny of Experts (2015),and others have written about the ineffectiveness of development assistance from foreign governments and how the practice perpetuates colonial systems of dependency on those donors. International aid has often been used as a system of control of the poor recipients by the donor countries, and this has provoked criticism of aid models (Sueres, 2016). This neo-colonialist exchange has created systems of ‘donor dependency’ on international funders as governments rely on foreign entities to implement services for its poorest citizens. Conversations with citizens of poor countries reliant on aid demonstrates that “some connect their dependency on outsiders to a growing sense of powerlessness...they feel that aid agencies’ interaction with them diminishes their power to manage their own lives” (Anderson, Brown, & Jean, 2012, p. 21). Even NGOs are starting to warn against the dangers of donor dependency. A paper published by the NGO ActionAid cited the civic degradation that comes with this dependency, “because governments focus their attention on relations with aid donors rather than with their own people, and citizens focus attention on provision of services by donors or NGOs” (Thomaset al., 2011, p. 18). CLD projects aim to break this donor dependency by encouraging local ownership of projects. OneVillage Partners goes a step further by encouraging local decision making and control of development projects.
OneVillage Partners implements a CLD approach that trains local volunteers to actively lead decision making in project design, and implement that project in partnership with the organization. This collaboration has organized successful civic actions, improved social capital, and measurably improved well-being in ruralcommunities in Sierra Leone. OneVillage Partners’ mode of partnership is an example of Riane Eisler’s Cultural Transformation Theory, focusing on Partnership systems. Dr. Eisler’s work demonstrates how societies orient toward either a hierarchical Domination System or a more egalitarian Partnership System. These systems are characterized by four key interactive components: family and social structure; gender roles and relations; rear, abuse; and narratives (Center for Partnership Studies, n. d.). OneVillage Partners impacts each of these components through programming that fosters the development of new systems of local partnership that improve a community’s health and wellbeing immediately and sustains those gains over the long term.
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