Which concepts are the most relevant to me, my organization and/or international development? What are the take-aways?
1. Ensure gender is at the center of what we do. Free and empower women who often prove to be the responsible family members who will push for change.
2. Use bottom-up approaches, working people-to-people, to achieve self-reliance. Increase dialogue between local development efforts and national level efforts. This includes listening among donors and collaborating together. Consider development as a means to create freedom of action and being as an important concept.
3. Do local level empowerment, starting from the bottom up: local governments, groups and others. Work with local systems and cultures.
4. Emphasize effectiveness of development efforts over efficiency (fast mobilization, quick hits, etc.). Effective development efforts take more time, slowing down the process to achieve greater buy-in and participation. Starting slowly, first empower people and give them ownership of the activities. Spend time with people to build trust.
5. Highlight social transformation in development efforts to achieve the people’s self-reliance. Assist developing the person’s whole life and destiny.
6. During project implementation, build in communication mechanisms to achieve feedback. Follow up on the feedback.
7. Re-invent the current aid model; build in more adaptability.
8. Include systematic feedback mechanisms, which go beyond the project. At the end of an aid effort, aid providers should do a client (aid recipient) survey to determine, “How’d we do?” In impact analysis, include local client feedback.
9. Develop cost-effective methods for doing M&E, such as developing a local capacity to do M&E.
10. Ensure accountability in development programs, which is largely absent now.
11. Differentiate between the donors, e.g. U.S., European, etc. when listening for cumulative and long-term impacts.
Thanks to IDEA for sharing these take-aways from the recent Mutual Learning event, which I was sadly unable to attend. These are positive, realistic and implementable goals to work towards.
All the best,
Dan
From John Marks, Search for Common Ground:I found the DFID paper to be eeelclxnt. Unfortunately, however, it almost totally focuses on governments and multi-lateral organizations and mostly leaves out the work of international NGOs like Search for Common Ground. My colleagues and I believe the kind of activities that we and other NGOs carry out is an extremely important component of peacebuilding. We would define the missing element as bottom-up peacebuilding that is implemented across entire countries. Our descriptive term for this is “societal conflict prevention.” It involves creating an environment in a particular country so that there is popular support for the actual negotiation of peace agreements and so that even the most contentious problems and differences can be dealt with, without violence. In sum, we believe that peacemaking needs to be both a top-down and a bottom-up process, and that, if the latter is not included, agreements are much less likely to take hold. We are convinced that agreements at the governmental level are necessary, but usually not sufficient, and the DFID paper does not, in my view, capture this.The study does, nevertheless, briefly mention bottom-up, peacebuilding, without defining it, when it cites the work of Safer World and Kenyan Concerned Citizens for Peace (CCP) to establish reconciliation structures in Kenya. Even here, there is no mention of the key role the media and popular culture can play in changing mass attitudes and behaviors; nor is there any sense of a comprehensive or “societal” approach to peacemaking that can be catalyzed and enhanced by international NGOs like Search. We very much believe that this kind of work should be included as an important part of the overall toolbox for conflict prevention – in addition to the contribution of governments and international bodies. Click for a short paper I have written on “Societal Conflict Prevention,” with particular emphasis on how it worked in Burundi. Lastly, I believe the paper should cite as an impediment to peacebuilding the increasing trend of donors, including DFID, to place a growing part of their resources in trust funds controlled by agencies like UNDP and the World Bank. Unfortunately, these agencies are often unresponsive and bureaucratic. For example, earlier this year we finally received actual funding for a conflict prevention project in an Asisan country that had been approved two years earlier. While everyone would hope that multi-lateral organizations would function better and that incidents like this one would not happen, they repeatedly do. National donors, by putting more and more eggs in multi-lateral baskets would seem to be making it more and more difficult to carry out targeted, timely peacebuilding.
I am curious to know if this is a post by John Marks or whether you are quoting John. I know John well and admire his organization. Let me know.