local resource based implementation
Regional development can be effective when it develops and enhances the role and responsibility of local resources, say human workforce. If you would like to achieve something worthy and sustainable to a particular group of community, you could do so by allowing local staffs — in a project team, to exercise their parts enthusiastically.
When local staffs, who share common traits in culture and customs with a group of people to whom the development activities are directed, are in lack of authority necessary to demonstrate, the outcome of project may come irrelevant or meaningless to the life of community. Community development is never about how you make people adopt to something new, but how you assist people to generate their own ideas and practices.
A rural development project in Ethiopia illustrates an example that explains how the extent of authority given to local coordinators has to do with the successful project implementation. The project assigns foreign practitioners in agriculture a task of examining the viability of garlic production for income generation. Unfortunately, the experiment went without practical involvement of local staffs in the process. With a negative result on the trial, the project concluded that garlic is not appropriate to cultivate in the land.
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Local coordinators, having a faith that garlic cultivation could be an excellent tool for income generation based on the agricultural understanding of the area, wanted to help with the experiment, but they could not so for they were excluded. But, after sometime the same local staffs got an opportunity to lead the experiment again, and surprisingly the project could see garlic growing vigorously all over the test farming area. The project changed its plan and began to cultivate garlic, this time being organized by the local coordinators. Beside the high production rate, it turned out that more participants joined in the farming program of the project because the method of practice was carried out similar to the way that the local people manage their farming.
As it is mentioned above, effective capacity building of a community relies on how it assures and strengthens the engagement of local staffs according to their passion and abilities in project implementation. Development practices should be structured in a way that local partners are provided with sufficient space to get their voices out and thus be able to put them into practice with a project supporting them with required resources.
This even goes as far as allowing them to design and develop a scheme of budget allocation of project. Consider that how frustrate it will be when an individual with the title of project manager is responsible for leading a set of activities when there is no room for them to decide where, when, how resources are to be used? Successful implementation of community development is possible when a project manager is able to manage the project with a comprehensive understanding of the process and exercise over the budget execution.
Lets be mindful that local staffs can communicate with people more effectively and sophisticatedly than foreigners whose understanding of the culture and society is limited. Accordingly the local staffs can draw active cooperation from people since they understand well what they really need and what means and tools to employ to achieve a goal with the respect of local way of life. After all, it is not to argue who does what, it is about how we do what we do better.
