Community Development Sixty Years of Global Experience

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Community Development Sixty Years of Global
Experience

• Portfolio Committee on Provincial and Local
  Government
• 19 September 2006
• Hans P. Binswanger
• Institute for Research on Economic Innovation
• Tshwane University of Technology

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The major intellectual and political battles over
the last 60 years

• How to help and/or empower poor communities and
  people
• Who is in charge of planning and execution
• Who controls the money
• Productive projects Via cooperatives,
  communities, or individual projects?

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Three different approaches to communities

• Service Delivery Approach Government or other
  service providers consult communities and
  beneficiaries, adapt their services and deliver
  them through their own staffs
• Intermediary model Government or other
  facilitators work with communities, but take a
  strong management approach, including selection
  of projects, technology, construction, and
  financial management. Communities co-finance
  projects and run and maintain them
• Empowerment model Outside facilitators help
  communities in diagnosis, design, and execution.
  Communities manage funds, contracts and
  implementation

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Three different approaches to local development
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Local and Community-driven development

• The emerging consensus
• Integrated local development is a co-production
  of communities, local governments, government
  sectors, and private organizations
• Roles need to be properly defined, and actors
  need to be fully empowered to execute their
  roles, in particular with finances

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Where did this consensus come from?

• Mahatma Gandhi as an advocate
• He would have said that he believes in holistic
  development, not just income
• Sector-specific approaches
• Community Development in India
• The Comilla Model
• Area Development programs 1970-1990
• Community-driven development, Social Funds, Local
  government approaches

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Sector-specific programs are the oldest approaches

• Irrigation, health and education bureaucracies
• Agricultural research, extension services,
  forestry departments
• Agricultural credit institutions, often replaced
  by micro-finance institutions
• Rural engineering departments, housing
  departments, water supply

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Do sector-specific programs serve the poor?

• The global record of sector-specific programs to
  serve the poor, vulnerable and marginalized is
  miserable
• They rarely reach into deep rural space or
  informal settlements
• They tend to service the better off members of
  the community
• They are rarely accountable to the users
• They are often corrupt

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Community Development in India

• 1948 pilots of S. K. Dev, advocating a holistic
  and integrated approach
• Key elements Diagnosis, planning, empowerment,
  community development workers in each village,
  coordination at the block level (like rural
  municipality)
• Mobilization of the communities and poor peoples
  own resources

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Scaled up nationally in less than ten years

• Managed by a special ministry of community
  development
• But reality departed from the ideals
• Block development plans developed by technicians
• Program transformation to a service delivery
  approach by central agencies
• Little community empowerment, NPO and local
  government involvement

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More on India

• Community development program achieved little
  until 1970, at which time the program and the
  ministry was disbanded
• It was to be replaced by
• Technology-driven approaches
• Sectordriven service delivery, and intermediary
  approaches
• A plethora of programs for special target groups

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Elected local governments created in the late
1950s

• But not empowered with fiscal resources,
  therefore achieved little
• New thrust towards decentralization came back
  only in the 1990s
• Now India is moving towards the co-production
  model, but lagging behind in the empowerment of
  communities and local governments financially

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The Comilla Model in Bangladesh

• Akhter Hameed Khan, and the Bangladesh Academy
  for Rural Development, starting in 1960
• Same elements as CD in India, emphasizing a
  holistic development, mobilizing the strengths
  and resources of the poor
• Plus a lot of emphasis on institutional basis for
  local development, technology, irrigation, and
  cooperatives, more elaborate coordination
  mechanisms at local level

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Scaled up nationally (from 1970)

• via the Integrated Rural Development Programme
  (IRDP),
• eventually replaced by Bangladesh Rural
  Development Board (BRDB)
• that became a large centralized bureaucracy,
  using the service delivery model
• Absence of local government involvement, little
  community empowerment

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More on Bangladesh

• As a result of dissatisfaction with the central
  state-driven programs, NPOs developed, including
  the famous Grameen Bank
• Some of these have achieved national coverage,
  usually with government funding
• They are focused on specific sectors and rarely
  use an empowerment model to support communities
• Local government has never been fully empowered

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More on Bangladesh and India

• Despite shortcomings, these countries have
  achieved significant development of
  infrastructure, food self sufficiency, rapid
  economic growth
• But they are still lagging badly in poverty
  reduction, human capabilities, and social
  development

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Productive projects have always been a problem

• Less successful, less sustainable than
  infrastructure projects
• Often supply-driven, fail because of lack of
  markets
• Cooperative and/or community enterprises have an
  enormous record of failure, all around the world
• The reasons are largely conflicts over incentives
  to work, consume and share profits
• The variant of labor-managed have also done
  poorly
• Some cooperatives do well in provision of inputs,
  marketing, finance, and other facilitating role
• Individual enterprises do best

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The (Integrated) Area Development Approach 1969
to 1995

• Inspired by Comilla model
• Emphasizing holistic area development, community
  autonomy, role of local government, NPOs and
  sector specialists to achieve programs designed
  locally/communities

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Hundreds of such programs were designed

• Funded by World Bank, AFDB, DBSA, IFAD, bilateral
  donors
• Most of them, reverted to planning by
  technocrats, used the service delivery or
  intermediary models, ignored any local government
  which might have helped, and suffered enormous
  coordination problems
• They did best on delivery of infrastructure, but
  failed on most other objectives
• Income growth often not achieved because of lack
  of technology
• Few viable institutions left behind
• The approach was abandoned around 1990

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The Coordination Problem

1. There is a huge diversity among poor areas, poor
   communities and poor people
2. No central agency can even keep track of this
   heterogeneity or design and implement development
   programs
3. Even when plans are developed locally or by
   communities, central agencies rarely can deliver
   on them individually in a service delivery mode,
   much less so in a holistic integrated approach
4. The tree major approaches we discussed all
   developed the so called stove pipe model to
   delivery of programs, and then attempted to
   coordinate the stovepipes locally, such as your
   development nodes
5. All attempts at such coordination failed

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Components and costs of a typical land reform
project
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But government programs are fragmented into stove
pipes(LRAD, CASP, RDP housing, MAFISA, Land
Bank, Khula, AgriBEE, LandCare, AgriSETA, etc.)
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One Stop AgriBEE Shop
AgriBEE Municipal Council Coordinates, appraises
and recommends projects
Orientation and training of beneficiaries
If you want to acquire a farm and develop it
(LRAD)
If you want to set up an agri-business
If you want to develop your farm in the communal
areas
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Lessons from this review

• Strong ideals and strategies of holistic and
  integrated development degenerated upon scaling
  up
• Centralization, disempowerment, inability to
  coordinate and integrate
• The programs did not strengthen the institutional
  framework for local and community-development
• They did not devolve functions and development
  resources to communities and local governments
• They lost their social objectives, and instead
  were often captured by elites
• NGOs have rarely graduated beyond the service
  delivery and intermediary model

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Overcoming the legacy of failure
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Local (Government) Development Funds

• Pioneer United Nations Capital Fund, now being
  generalized
• Bottom up planning starting at communities, each
  of which lists its priorities, complemented by
  priorities at local level
• Selection of projects in open district
  development committees in the presence of
  community representatives
• Financed out of a fungible fund held and managed
  at local level
• South Africa has implemented this model in the
  local development grant
• But it is requiring much too complex panning,
  usually done by consultants rather than the
  communities and local development committee

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Community-driven development (CDD) (over a
hundred programs around the world)

• Communities are in charge of the choice of
  project and its design, choice of technology, the
  money to execute the project, their contributions
  to the project, the contracting and financial
  management
• Communities are coordinated at local government
  level, have access to professional facilitators,
  and the technical resources of the sector
  agencies. They may use their money to buy
  additional technical services
• In the best programs communities get a budget
  based on per capita and other norms, and allocate
  it to their projects in their development plan

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How is CDD done?

• Diagnosis, planning, integration, and monitoring
  usually done via PRA techniques
• They get training in financial management and
  planning
• They learn mostly by doing
• The communities have to co-finance the projects
  in cash, labor, or local materials

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Recent impact evaluation of Brazil CDD program

• Over 250000 communities reached, over 300000
  community projects, at a total cost of about 10
  billion rand
• Mostly focused on essential priorities such as
  electrification and drinking water, but also
  productive and social projects
• Communities achieve projects faster, cheaper, at
  the same or better quality as intermediary or
  service delivery approaches, sustainabilility of
  projects is fairly good

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Impacts in Brazil

• Access to infrastructure and quality of housing
  has increased
• Child mortality and incidence of several
  communicable diseases have declined
• All household assets have increased, but increase
  is not statistically significant
• Productive projects do less well than
  infrastructure projects
• There has been a very quick and large increase in
  social capital at community and local levels, and
  that capital does not depreciate

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Social Funds

• Started by using the intermediary model
• Communities and projects identified in
  consultation by central staff of SF
• Moneys not in the hands of communities, but
  intermediaries and facilitators, including NPOs
• Execution largely managed by the intermediaries
• Communities expected to contribute, and to manage
  the projects once completed
• Social Funds are not an integrated approach,
  rarely builds institutions, does little for
  empowerment
• It has not been scalable to more than 500 to 1000
  projects per year per country
• The social funds are evolving towards CDD
  programs

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The recent synthesis Local and community-driven
development (LCDD)

• It is a co-production of communities, local
  governments, sector agencies, the private sector
  and NGOs
• Coordination at local level
• The money and authority does not flow in
  stovepipes They are devolved to local
  governments and communities
• Local governments and communities are held
  accountable for use of funds and for achieving
  their own and mandated development objectives

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Implementation of the synthesis is a huge
challenge

• Lack of trust in communities and local
  governments
• Exaggerated planning expectations
• Many political battles about control over money
  and other resources

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Weaknesses and future challenges for LCDD

• Communities, local governments prioritize
  infrastructure first, followed by productive
  projects, rarely social projects
• But they are not that good at productive projects
  because they find it hard to link to broader
  markets and input supply systems
• A CDD approach to delivery of welfare services
  and social safety nets does not yet exist
• only fragments of responsibility are devolved,
  such as selection of beneficiaries, and
  requirements to contribute labor and food