By Stacey Faella and Kara Weiss
If insanity is defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result, the international development community is insane. It has spent trillions of dollars in foreign aid over the last 60 years — and often in the same tired ways, like meeting with government representatives in windowless boardrooms and trusting enormous international NGOs to effect change in faraway communities.
Flashy projects, without thinking through the long-term maintenance and sustainability of these efforts or the impact on local economies, have proven to be a failure. Think: schools and hospitals in the absence of qualified teachers or healthcare providers or water pumps in the absence of funding to maintain them over time. And as it turns out, despite a tremendous inflow of aid money, the National Bureau of Economic Research reports, “One half of the African continent lives below the poverty line. In sub-Saharan Africa, per capita GDP is now less than it was in 1974, having declined over 11 percent.”
Writ large, the traditional, top-down model of aid has failed. But that doesn’t mean every attempt has been a failure.
Contrary to traditional aid, community-driven development (CDD) puts the decision-making power directly in the hands of the community the grantor is trying to serve. It’s up to the community to decide what they need — not the government, and certainly not a foreign NGO. Community buy-in is established from the beginning.
For CDD to work, the community must be involved and empowered at all points in a program’s process — not after key decisions have already been made but from the very beginning, and not just as an audience but as architects. The conversation never begins with questions like, “Where do you want the school we’ve decided you need?” But rather: “What does your community need most, and how do you want to get it?”
At its heart, what differentiates community-driven development from more traditional forms of aid is how it includes citizens at every stage of the process. CDD is built on the radical philosophy that communities are themselves best suited to determine what they need, and, if provided sufficient resources, to create and sustain it. At its best, real community inclusion can lead to lasting results. No more crumbling wells. No more understaffed hospitals. No more deserted schools.
Lately, however, we’ve been hearing a different narrative. A report published earlier this year by 3ie (International Initiative for Impact Evaluation) attempts to synthesize the findings of 23 CDD programs from around the world. The report came to the conclusion that CDD programs fail to lead to governmental and social impacts and that these objectives should be abandoned. “People may have participated in making bricks, not decisions,” the authors conclude. “Many people may be aware of the program and the community meeting, but few attend the meetings and fewer still speak or participate in decision-making.”
But the initiatives profiled in the report are, for the most part, not reflective of CDD. At the core of CDD is the requirement that the process be community-driven. If the evaluated programs were unsuccessful in sufficiently engaging the community — such that most did not actively participate or feel a sense of ownership in the decision-making process and resulting project — then these programs may be local, but we would argue that they aren’t community-driven. When community members don’t participate, how can we expect a program to yield the full benefits of participation?
To further illustrate this point, among the programs evaluated, on average just over half of households were aware of community meetings that were taking place, less than 40 percent attended meetings, and around 10 percent actually spoke at meetings.
What we wish the authors had stated more directly is that they found a lack of rigorous attention to the key driver of successful CDD: community facilitation, which is when women and men, young and old, in the community actually have the opportunity to engage together and define a vision, plan, and take action. Without this, a project may be local, but it’s not community-driven.
Evidence across region and sector show that improved participation leads to increased project impact and sustainability. In fact, the programs that were selected to be part of the meta-analysis (combining results from multiple studies) had no criteria for minimum acceptable levels of facilitation — and no standards for community participation and inclusion.
If the problem with CDD as it stands is that projects are not actually being driven by the community, what can we do? Well, we can resolve to only support projects that are. And what you’ll find is that not only does the level of community participation and decision-making look better, but the outcome data actually are better.
As an example, the CDD program Spark MicroGrants invests somewhere in the neighborhood of twice the time and money into the facilitation process as the programs included in the 3ie paper. As a result, Spark is able to avoid the repeated shortcoming of traditional CDD programs highlighted in the 3ie report: the dreaded “funnel of attrition.”
The funnel of attrition refers to a declining number of people involved in each stage of decision-making: from knowing about the program, to showing up to meetings, to participating in meetings, to finally helping make decisions. Moreover, the report observed that the funnel of attrition affected women more than men: “Women are only half as likely as men to be aware of CDD programs, even less likely to attend the community meetings and even less likely still to speak.”
By contrast, Spark MicroGrants sees female participation consistently higher than male participation: 58 percent of attendees are women while 53 percent of participants are men. This is particularly significant considering the traditionally male-dominated cultures in which Spark works, such as Uganda, Burundi, and Ghana.
If we believe that participation is a key component of community-driven development, then we ought to know what it means to have genuine participation. We would suggest that weekly to monthly community meetings are necessary, based on data showing that increased facilitation leads to increased impact and sustainability across the programs; that a significant number of households should be present; that women should make up at least half of the attendees; and that citizens should not only get to show up and voice their opinions, but have decision-making power over their future.
The 3ie report’s data regarding community participation was shockingly thin; only nine out of the 23 programs 3ie researched were able to produce data on this. This bears repeating: only 39 percent of the programs had data on community awareness and participation. It seems like a stretch for a program to call itself community-driven and fail to collect the key data that would indicate whether the required participation was actually being achieved — and misleading to claim that CDD is a failure based on such thin data.
We have to avoid the impulse to equate the reporting of failed programs with a failed idea. If you parse rather than aggregate the data, you see that CDD is a model that works when done right.
When we make an effort to learn from both failures and successes, we can define the conditions necessary for a CDD program to succeed. Chief among these conditions are high investment in facilitation and exacting attention on clarifying desired outcomes; giving locals open options instead of a predetermined menu of project options; weekly to monthly meetings that are structured and where attendance is required; and making gender balance a requirement in the facilitation process.
We cannot write off an approach to development that moves power closer to citizens. We cannot decide to pull funds out of a program objective when the most critical element was underinvested in, to begin with. Rather than dropping our ideals, we must invest in them through clear program objectives, funding, and evaluation efforts. We must stay the course, replicate what we know works, change what doesn’t, and continue to pursue a world in which all people are empowered to determine their own futures.
