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Posts Tagged ‘community-led’

Local, youth-led advocacy matters

Posted in activism, Cameroon, development, mapping, participation, politics, protection, smart aid, YETAM, tagged , , , , , , on June 3, 2011| 4 Comments »

‘If you are from an outside group that wants to work with a community, you need to know the community. You need to spend time there, sleep there, live there, before trying to help or come in with recommendations. Until you have lived together with the community, you cannot really give any savvy advice or support because you won’t know or understand the community’s reality. You won’t have ‘mastered’ the community.’

Kenneth Nyah from Partner Vision (PAVIS), the organization we are partnering with in Bamenda, Cameroon, on the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM) Project, gave us some great tips last week on how to do community-based, youth-led advocacy and support local action and change.

Timothy and Kenneth from Partner Vision (PAVIS)

Know the steps for good advocacy

  • Identify the issue that needs to be addressed.
  • Master the community by spending time there.
  • Identify the principle actions to take in the community, together with all the stakeholders.
  • Gather information and statistics that will support the case and help to shape the suggested solutions.
  • Synthesize information and statistics to make them easier for people to get a handle on and understand.

Model good advocate behaviors

  • Participation. All the stakeholders need to be included and the discussions need to be open.
  • Legitimacy. An advocate should be someone who practices what he or she preaches and lives the values that he or she is working for.
  • Accountability. An advocate has to be transparent and open and accountable for his or her actions and to the community.
  • Acting peacefully. An advocate should always look for ways to resolve issues in a peaceful way.
  • Representing the affected group. An advocate should be sure to understand the affected groups’ issues and viewpoints and to represent them, not his own opinions or agenda.

Be clear about your role as an outside organization

Kenneth described the main roles of an advocate or organization supporting local advocacy work as:

  • helping to empower the community to speak for itself
  • mediating and facilitating communication between people
  • ensuring that communication and dialogue happen
  • modeling behavior to people and policy makers
  • helping build coalitions so that local people can raise their issues and get resolutions.

Know what advocacy is not

  • An information campaign. Hanging up posters is not advocacy. You have to go deep into things, to take actions, to actually do something, not just ‘raise awareness’ or share information.
  • A public relations action. Advocacy is not an opportunity for you to create fame for yourself or your organization or political agenda. It’s about the community.
  • A strike or mob action. Advocacy should be strategic.
  • A pressure group. Advocacy does not mean ‘we want something and we are coming in to take it whether you like it or not.’

Remember who this is about:

First half of a storyboard by youth in Bamessing for video on early marriage.

You shouldn’t do advocacy without proposing a solution, said Kenneth, and the solution should come from the community itself, not from you. In community-led advocacy, the outside agency should not be bringing in its own agenda. It should not be manipulating people.

When working with youth, the agenda needs to come from the youth themselves. If the youth don’t have their own agenda, it’s very easy for people to manipulate them. Once you work with the youth to help them discover their community more, and to determine their own agenda for change, they will work on that and it can be very positive.

Youth-led and community-led advocacy is different than global advocacy campaigns which tend to be top-down. When people raise their own issues at local level, do their own research, identify their own solutions, discover the bottlenecks that get in the way of those solutions, and determine who to target with their advocacy actions, advocacy can be very effective.

One participant emphasized that even in global campaigns, local stakeholders need to be involved, because they are the ones who will give the stories, the statistics, and the effective solutions.

Find the information that already exists in the community

Collecting information.

Advocacy goes with facts and figures. You cannot do advocacy without figures, said Kenneth. And you cannot have figures without research. But there is much information that is already there, right in the community. ‘As outsiders,’ commented one person, ‘it’s easy to imagine that a community doesn’t have any information, but this is not true. We found so much information in the community.’

‘All the facts that youth needed to advocate for the water project* were given by the people in the community. The youth know who the key people are in the community. They know who has the information and the statistics. For example, there is a person who manages the local water system and who knows what the problems are with it. There is the chairman of the water board. These are people in the community who manage information! They have reports, they have meetings, they know these things. There is no need to come from the outside to do a big expensive data gathering campaign. You can go into the records that the community is already keeping. Working with the youth and community it’s very possible to find this information to support local advocacy.’

A role for ICTs

Another person shared the case of youth in Pitoa who identified malnutrition in the community. ‘The parents didn’t  identify malnutrition as a problem, they said it was not an issue. Maybe they were embarrassed that they were unable to give their children enough food. But the youth went with cameras, they filmed malnourished children, they went to the hospital to check the numbers. There is a whole ward there with malnourished children; they filmed there.  They made a video and showed it to the parents and the council and were able to get them to see that this is a problem in the community.’

The digital mapping that we are doing with the YETAM project (watch for a new post coming soon on this), said other participants, can provide the youth with an additional tool for local advocacy. ‘Youth went out to map their area. They saw the road network, they created a database about their schools, they saw the conditions of the hospitals and everything. Through mapping they were able to master their environment because they were there, collecting the data, tracing and making waypoints of everything. This fed very well into their advocacy work.’

*In this water project example, youth used their research, videos, interviews, focus group discussions and role play to advocate to community leaders, the village development union and the Ndop Rural Council around the water issue. The Ndop Council acknowledged the issue and Bamessing and its neighbouring communities succeeded in securing funding from FEICOM for the first phase of the Ndop water supply project for 214 million CFAs (around $450,000). Feasibility studies were done by the Ministry of Water Resources and Energy in collaboration with SNV and submitted to the Ndop Council. The project is expected to provide potable water in Bamessing, Bamali, Bamuanka rural and Bambalang communities.

Other successes of youth-led advocacy in the YETAM Cameroon project include that the Municipal Councils of Pitoa and Ndop approved financial support to youth micro-projects.  The Mayor of Pitoa municipal council approved 400,000 CFA (around $850) for the youth to spearhead actions to curb the high incidence of cholera in the council area. The Mayor of Ndop Municipal Council approved 500,000 CFA (around $1070) as council support for the youth to fight against the high rate of school dropouts in the Ndop council area. This support came in response to youth participation in the council budgetary sessions.

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Bamboo shoots

Posted in children, development, mapping, participation, protection, smart aid, youth, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 26, 2010| 4 Comments »

Bamboo Shoots training manual

I like to share good training guides when I come across them, so here is a quick summary and a link to Bamboo Shoots. It was originally created by Plan in Cambodia.

Bamboo Shoots is a training manual on child rights, child centered community development and child-led community actions for facilitators working with children and youth groups. You can download it here.

Bamboo Shoots was developed to: Increase children’s understanding of their rights as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); raise children’s awareness of their rights and build their capacities to claim them; create opportunities for children to recognize, identify and prioritize issues and problems or gaps in relation to child rights violations; and provide opportunities for children to influence agendas and action regarding identified and prioritized child rights violations.

Bamboo Shoots takes complicated concepts and breaks them down into easy language and engaging, interactive sessions. It also offers good resources and background material for facilitators so that they can manage the sessions well.

Part One:

I like this manual because it starts off right in the first chapter with the importance of setting the tone and the context for good child and youth participation. It provides ideas on selecting participants and facilitators, and gives a description of a good facilitator. It provides recommendations on the setting and practical considerations for managing a workshop with children, as well as good paragraph to help think through when and when not to include other adults in the training.

The guideline goes through the 6 principles for making child participation a reality:

  1. Non-discrimination and inclusiveness
  2. Democracy and equality of opportunity
  3. Physical, emotional and psychological safety of participants
  4. Adult responsibility
  5. Voluntarism, informed consent and transparency
  6. Participation as an enjoyable and stimulating experience for children

It shares Plan’s code of ethics on child participation and important steps to follow in working with children, as well as tips on how to establish a good working relationship with children, how to help children learn and develop their potential, how to help children build self-confidence and self-esteem, and how to encourage children to develop a responsible attitude towards others and a sense of community. There is a section on how to keep children safe also and an explanation of a facilitator’s ‘duty of care’.

A last section of part one lists common facilitation techniques and tools, such as: role-play, working in pairs and groups, idea storming, whole group discussion, questioning, projects, buzz sessions, drawing, photographs, video, word association, recreating information and more; and gives ideas on when they are most useful.

Part Two:

Section 9 on community mapping

The next section has very complete sessions on:

  • the concept of rights
  • the history of human rights, and international treaties on rights
  • children’s rights as human rights
  • duties and responsibilities in relation to child rights
  • making sure children are involved
  • child rights and daily realities and making a child rights map
  • gaps in fulfilling child rights
  • setting priority problems and violations of child rights
  • creating an action agenda and proposed solutions to the gaps identified

Each session comes complete with a pre-training assessment, reading material for facilitators and handouts for participants.

Part Three:

The last section of the manual helps facilitators take children through the steps to child-led community action, including children’s participation in all the program and project cycles: assessment, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

Needs-based vs. Rights-based

It also explains Plan’s rights-based child-centered community development approach, the foundations of that approach, and the difference between needs-based approaches and rights-based approaches. It goes on to cover planning and supporting child-led community action.

The last section of the guide offers a list of resources and references.

For anyone working with children, or even anyone looking for an excellent comprehensive community training package on rights and community-led action, I really recommend checking out Bamboo Shoots. Whether you are working through media and ICTs or using more traditional means for engaging children, this is a great guide on how to do it well from start to finish. I’ll be referring to it often.

Additional Resources:

Minimum standards for child participation in national and regional consultation events

Protocols and documents to help ensure good quality child participation

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

Insight Share’s rights-based approach to participatory video toolkit

Related posts on Wait… What?

Child participation at events: getting it right

Community based child protection

Child protection, the media and youth media programs

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Salim’s ICT4D advice part 2: innovate, but keep it real

Posted in development, ICT4D, ICTs, mobile and technology, Kenya, m4D, mapping, smart aid, youth, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 1, 2010| 2 Comments »

Salim (left) with Solomon in Kinango community.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Plan’s Kwale District office in Kenya has been a role model for Plan on how to integrate ICTs into community-led programming to help reach development goals and improve access to children’s rights.

I talked with Salim Mvurya, the Area Manager in Kwale, last week and asked him for advice for the tech community (0.15), corporations (1.19) and development organizations (1.57) who want to build in ICTs for moving towards development goals. He also comments on the importance of realizing that development is changing (4.43). You can watch the video below or at this link. If you’re not patient enough to watch a 6 min video (often I’m not!) or don’t have a strong connection, see the transcript below.

You can also view Part 1 of the video, where Salim gives some background on how Plan Kwale has been using ICTs in their programs since 2003 (1.11), shares ideas about the potential of new ICTs (3.42) and talks about some key lessons learned (5.03). Or you can read the Part 1 transcript here.

Transcript Part 2

ICTs and Development Part 2: advice for tech community, corporations and development organizations

My name is Salim Mvurya, I’m the Area Manager for Plan in the Kwale Development Area.

What advice can you give to outside tech people who want to develop something for a place like Kenya?

I think that to get an idea externally is a good thing, but that idea has to be blended with grassroots. It has to be contextualized, because there are very many good ideas which may not be appropriate at the community level. So I think my advice, for people who have ideas, who have never been to Kenya or Africa or in the field, is to leave the process to be home grown, so that the ideas that are coming from outside are building on existing issues, so that the ideas are also looking at what kind of skills and what can be done on the ground, and looking also at issues of sustainability. So it’s very important for somebody from outside the country to be sensitive to local conditions, local context, local skills and also looking at putting ideas that can be self-sustaining.

What is your advice for corporations who want to support the use of ICTs in development?

Corporate organizations who are interested in making a contribution to ICT for development, I think it is important that they foster and have partnerships with grassroots organizations that can really give them the issues because, OK, most corporations are very innovative, but working with grassroots NGOs and civil society that can give them the practical sense of those ideas, I think would be a good thing to do.

What is your advice for colleagues trying to successfully integrate ICTs into their programs?

One thing for organizations that are thinking of utilizing ICT is that you need local capacity. Like, if you have a field office, for example, Plan has development areas, in development areas, particularly for Plan, the ICT technical people should also have an opportunity to lead the ICT for development. What I have seen in the few years that I have been trying this is that it requires also the ICT function to be more available to communities. It requires the ICT function to also work around the program issues that the team is thinking, so it’s not just about looking at systems, looking at computers, but looking at how can all these ICT skills be able to help to develop programs. How can the ICT function be able to support innovations that are also going to enhance problem solutions at the community level. How can we use ICT to strengthen our interventions in the community?

And I must say from experience, that the ICT coordinator for Kwale has been more of a ‘program’ person, and I think that is why we are seeing all these gains.  I remember when we were designing the community-led birth registration one afternoon, we sat together and we were thinking, how can we put all these ideas together and include ICTs in it, so I think it’s about having an ICT function that is responsive to the program issues on the ground and not necessarily sitting somewhere and looking at softwares. You know, even designing a software that would be more responsive to what is happening on the ground, like looking at issues of child protection and seeing how can ICT help the response mechanism. Looking at issues of accountability and seeing how ICT can make a contribution to accountability processes in community.  So I think that is the kind of ICT that would be appropriate in the field, but also an ICT function that can learn. You know, learning from other people, but bringing the lessons closer home to see what can work, and what can’t work.

Any last advice for development organizations around integration of ICTs?

The message that I would want to give to stakeholders and development organizations is that a lot is happening in the world in terms of ICT.  Also recognizing that development is changing… ICT is providing opportunities for greater advocacy and accountability, and I think getting the interest for looking at all this and trying to say ‘what does this mean for development’ I think is very very critical. The youth constituency is emerging as very critical and they have interest in ICT. I know in Kenya youth have been trying different things, different groups, but I think ICT is providing an opportunity for them to strengthen accountability but also to be able to get skills that they can use as individuals that can also make a contribution in economic development.

Related posts on Wait… What?

Salim’s ICT4D advice part 1: consider both process and passion

Youth mappers: from Kibera to Kinango

A positively brilliant ICT4D workshop in Kwale, Kenya

Is this map better than that map?

Modernizing birth registration with mobile technology

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