Development projects initiated by communities themselves are real and more sustainable because they are implemented with local experience supported by available community assets.
Ann Hendrix-Jenkins, a workshop facilitator from Washington, United States of America, told a team of development experts from different organization in Lilongwe that the Community-Led Development movement is growing upon realization that development cannot be achieved with little or no involvement of the community members.
“Development can only be achieved if a community is given the opportunity to decide on and initiate the development that it thinks will sustainably and positively change its lives,” she told the team.
During the training, the development experts were advised to ensure that at projection inception level, communities where the projects will be implemented which have their input. “Let proposals for projects have input from the communities themselves. That’s one of the strategies we can employ to ensure that sustainable development is achieved,” she added.
One of the organizations championing Community-Led Development (CLD) movement is World Relief. World Relief Country Director, Gibson Nkanaunena says it is time organizations and every Malawian gets committed to changing lives.
“Let’s be committed to changing peoples’ lives. Let us work to actualize the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Let’s be champions of Community-Led Development. It’s time to change our mindset because mindset change is important in everything,” said Nkanaunena in his opening remarks.
During the training, it was noted that one of the practices contributing to continued poverty or slow development in communities despite introduction of various interventions by NGOs was that NGOs go to communities with interventions to introduce already decided.
“In most cases, it is the donors funding the NGOs that decide which areas to focus on. As a result, interventions are introduced with no tangible or sustainable change in the communities partly because the community members are not part of the implementers and therefore no ownership is achieved,” added one of the participants.
Community-Led Development ensures that communities are the initiators of projects with the movement playing a role of sensitizing or enlightening the communities on the assets they possess and how they can use the same assets to deal with the challenges they are facing.
As an umbrella body for all NGOs in Malawi, Council for Non-Governmental Organizations in Malawi (CONGOMA) was encouraged to assist by sensitizing NGOs on the importance of encouraging them to embrace CLD in their programming.
Generally, experience has shown that most projects are only introduced to traditional leaders leaving out the entire community membership unaware. However, at implementation stage, the participants observed, the community members in their ignorant state of the project are still expected to do work to implement the project.
Poor work, disunity and apathy towards such community development initiatives have been widely observed.