COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT

Twelve Lessons on Participatory Community Development
Recorded by: Phil Bartle, PhD

1. Communities have a right to participate in decisions that affect their living and working conditions


2. Only participation with decision-making power is sustainable and creative.


3. Genuine participation requires community involvement in all phases of city, town and village improvements: planning, implementation, maintenance and monitoring.


4. Participation must build on gender equality and include youth and the elderly.


5. Capacity development is essential to promote equitable participation between women, men and youth.


6. Communities do have a hidden resource for participating in city, town and village development; capacity development can release this resource.


7. Communities are prime stakeholders among development actors to identify problems, improve and maintain their settlements.


8. Awareness and capacity development can make partnerships among communities, NGOs and municipal authorities more equitable.


9. Community development which is planned by external persons and only requires communities' free labour, is unlikely to be accepted by communities at large.


10. Planning of participation is one of the most frequently overlooked elements of community development.


11. Charity makes communities dependent upon aid.


12. Community development is an essential contribution to overall urban management.

COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT

Revealing Hidden Resources
by Phil Bartle, PhD

Abstract

Simply providing resources to a community encourages dependency upon more of the same. Sustainable development of a community, removal of poverty, improvement of self reliance, requires that the community use its own resources. While accepting certain kinds of outside help, it cannot do so in a way that it becomes dependent upon it. Fortunately, every community has resources, often hidden; and the task at hand is to identify and use them.

Introduction

Our goal is sustainable development, poverty eradication, community self reliance, in low income communities. We want to help. But our help can be dangerous; it can contribute to poverty, stagnation and dependency. What we need to do is to understand the nature of poverty and the nature of development better, so as to be able to provide genuine assistance, assistance that contributes to removing dependency on further assistance, not contributing to continued poverty and dependency.

Poverty is Not Absolute

No community is totally and absolutely poor. So long as there are living human beings in the community, then it has resources, enough to allow its residents to survive. If a community is only an archaeological site, with no living residents, then it is no longer a community. No living community is absolutely poor. "Oh!" you say, "but the people have no shoes, no clean water, poor nutrition, high child mortality, illiteracy, apathy, disease, ignorance, intolerance, and no facilities. They need help!" Yes they do, but we, who are interested in sustainable development, must be very cautious about the nature of that help.

Every community has resources.

It is important to remember that every community has resources. Why? If we are to strengthen those communities, we need to release those hidden resources. If we are to assist, we need to assist in ways that strengthen, not weaken the community. If we parachute resources into the community without also using internal resources, we contribute to community atrophy. It would contribute to increased dependence upon the outside, and therefore to continued long term endemic poverty.

What are Resources?

A resource is any good or service that is relatively scarce and relatively useful; in short it has value, it is wealth. Not just any wealth, however, a resource is something that can be used, or potentially can be used, as an input, as something that can be used for the production of some other desired output. It is the raw material of a productive activity; in the case of a community, it is the input for a community project. The most commonly considered resource of a community project is cash; cash is the most fluid or convertible form of resource, for it can be used to purchase or rent real resources (goods and services). Cash is usually scarce, however, and poor communities will have to seek non-cash resources, and try to turn them into cash, or into resources that will be useful to the chosen community project. Community resources include many non-cash goods and services.

Think of the kinds of resources that a community might need for its priority project. It needs land, a place to locate the project. It needs tools to operate the project. It needs raw materials that it will convert into the projects outputs, it needs labour to provide human energy for the conversion, as well as mechanical energy such as electricity sun, wind, water power. Another kind of human resource is mental, people who will help in the planning, monitoring decision making, management, report writing; all of those are resources needed, and can be provided from within the community. The important thing is not to undervalue those non-cash resources, and to put a fair cash value or market value on them (including the time and effort spent by the implementing committee and the executive committee of the community). There is a common tendency for community members to under value these, and a requirement for you, the mobilizer, to ensure that they are given a fair recognition of their worth.

Outside Sources

There are two main kinds of sources of inputs and resources from outside the community. They are (1) government and (2) assistance agencies. Government sources include the regular and fiscal budgetary expenditures of central, regional and district governments who may be responsible for providing goods and services, and ceded funds, to the community.

It is important that the decisions to make these expenditures are done only after communication with the community. Decisions made by bureaucrats in faraway capital cities (national capital, regional capital or district capital) without involving the communities are as bad a charity; they contribute to apathy, dependency, and the sustaining of poverty.

While you as a mobilizer do not have a lot of control over how such decisions are made, you can contribute in two ways: (1) by encouraging and assisting government officers to dialogue with the community in your role of broker (explained more below) and (2) supporting and suggesting the development of policy papers in community development that support a governmental "enabling" environment in which central, regional and district plans are done only in response to the plans and priorities of the local communities. Assistance agencies come in several varieties. For any one community, the most common will be an international NGO, or a national NGO that is funded by an international one. (NGO means non-governmental organization; it usually implies a not-for-profit voluntary agency). Other outside agencies may be churches or their secular assistance departments, bilateral or multilateral projects.

Bilateral means government to government aid, including British DFID, American USAID, Canadian CIDA, Swedish SIDA, Danish Danida, and assistance departments of most wealthy and industrial countries such as Germany, France and Japan, as well as local agencies, often commercial companies, that are funded by the bilateral agencies. Similarly, multilateral agencies include those that are multi nation, including the United Nations and its many emergency response and developmental agencies (UNDP, Unicef, UNHCR, UNCHS, WHO, FAO, WFP). Multilateral also includes the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The International Red Cross claims it is not an NGO; it is an NGO. Like the bilateral agencies, the multilateral agencies usually operate through local private enterprises as consultancies, to implement their projects. Increasingly the international sources of assistance are calling for community participation and sustainable development. Again, your role can be one of broker, especially since foreign agencies are seldom well versed in local conditions and in opportunities for empowering communities by including them in decision making and developmental contributions.

The Charity Paradox

"Helping the poor," is a close to universal human value. The giving of alms or charity is included in the sets of values of the world's major religions. Government assistance to economically depressed areas in a country, international aid by the wealthy countries, and governmental subsidies and support to the disadvantaged, are all manifestations of this close to universal value.

Helping poor persons is not the same thing, however, as overcoming poverty. That is the paradox. Giving assistance to individuals in need may even contribute to the social problem of poverty rather than assist in removing poverty. Why? Giving alms to a beggar trains the recipient in begging, and reinforces his/her conviction that begging is the answer. Giving foreign aid to low income countries reinforces their notion that aid is their right, and can be used to fund their fiscal plans.

Look also at the motivations for giving alms. How does the giver benefit, and therefore has a vested interest in the survival of the custom? In many societies, rich people give money to beggars to appease their guilt because they know that their very wealth is obtained off the backs of the poor (Tolstoy). Giving alms reinforces begging, therefore reinforces the structure of inequality that keeps the elite classes wealthy, and sustains poverty. Do not despair. This paper dopes not argue to abolish aid or outside assistance. Nor does it advocate violent revolution. It argues that the way aid is given is important, and that the "how" must be understood; it is not to do more damage than good. Appeasing the poor (eg poverty alleviation) is not the goal; fighting and overcoming poverty is.

So what does all that -- the charity paradox -- have to do with mobilization? The paradox exists at many levels (individual, community, national, international). There are many social, political and economic forces that sustain poverty. If you are to fight poverty, especially at the community level, you need to understand the charity paradox among those forces. As a broker between a communal and its outside resources, you need to inform both of the dangers of charity. As any good military strategist will tell you, "Know the enemy."
The enemy is poverty.

Release the Resources

Your task as mobilizer is to encourage and aid the community to identify and use its local resources.

You need to reassure the community members that it is not in their best interest to hide their resources (or to hide knowledge of their resources) and to pretend to be more poor than the community is. They may be tempted to do so. Appealing to the pity of donors in that way is neither honest and honourable, nor effective in developing self reliance and empowerment of low income communities.

It is important and necessary to guide community members in identifying internal resources. This can be exciting and fun. Our normal mobilizers' tools are appropriate here: a community or group meeting, a large paper on the wall with a felt pen (or a stick to write and draw in the dirt on the ground). Call for potential resources from the participants (as you would in a brainstorm session), such as a retired carpenter who may be willing to train some young members of the community, some unused land that could be used for a communal facility such as a clinic or school, some unemployed youth who can provide energy and enthusiasm, some farmer or other food producer and some people willing to prepare that food for communal labourers who donate their time and energy, some loyal and trustworthy community members willing to put in time and thinking to design a community project.

Do not analyse suggestions when they first come up (you want to encourage everyone to contribute ideas; some shy participants may fear criticism). As in a brainstorm, you set aside criticism and cross talk; simply list all the suggestions on the wall. Explain that they can be analysed later. Remember to point out that cash is not the only resource, many non-cash resources are valuable. How valuable? A monetary evaluation of the cash value of non-cash resources will eventually be needed for an accurate project design, but can be done later by the community executive committee. Money and wealth, although related, are different things.

When identifying resources in this way, however, do not forget to include potential cash resources. These may include: a fund raising event, a raffle or local lottery (if legal), a sale of donated goods (I have seen a wealthy business person from the city pay a thousand dollars for a glass of water in a public auction in his rural home town). Encourage innovative and non-orthodox thinking by participants, even to suggest things that might not later be done (here you just list them, not analyse them). Just because something has not been tried is no logical reason for not listing it here.

Struggle to Strength

It is well known by biologists that living organisms become stronger in adversity. Sports enthusiasts know that physical exercise strengthens their bones and muscles. Teachers and psychologists know that mental exercises strengthen mental capacity.

So, too, in the sociological realm, a community, group or organization that faces adversity becomes stronger. Not total adversity that kills the organism or organization, but incremental adversity that builds up strengths.

What does that knowledge teach the mobilizer? If communities are given everything as charity, they become atrophied (immobilised in weakness). If, as adviser and guide to a community, you inform them of this principle, if you guide them towards making their own communal decisions, towards taking the time and effort to choose their goals, identify resources and make their own community action plans, you help to empower them and their communities.

If a community struggles, it becomes stronger.

The Mobilizer as Broker

Knowing that potential resources lie outside the community, a mobilizer for that community acts as a "broker" between the community and those sources (including government and assistance agencies). A "broker" is some one who acts as a "go-between" selecting and introducing parties that may not already know each other, and assisting in negotiations and communications between those parties (like a marriage broker).

As a broker, the mobilizer also increases awareness and understanding by both sides. Both the sources (donors and government) and the community members should learn about such principles as (1) "Sustainable development assistance, not charity," (2) "Identify and use local resources," (3) "Struggle to become stronger," (4) "Nothing for nothing," (5) "Help comes to those helping themselves," and other principles in this series of training modules.

Sustainable Development

It is a mathematical impossibility (as well as anti-developmental) to assist every poor community in the world using outside resources. Too many poor communities; not enough available resources. The key to sustainable development, the eradication of poverty, is to release the hidden resources that already exist within all those poor communities.

This is an investment; in order to release those resources, they must be identified, they must be acknowledged both by the community members and the outside donors, and management training must be invested in releasing them. Donors can be more useful in directing their assistance resources towards the training and awareness raising needed to release those resources, than in buying pipes or roofing, and giving aid in other ways that increase dependency rather than self reliance.

Because paper and ink are relatively expensive, it would be out of financial range to produce enough hard copies of the required training material for every rural village and urban neighbourhood in every least developed nation on this globe. It is financially feasible, however, that eventually every human settlement (from rural village to urban neighbourhood) will get access to the Internet. That realisation lies behind the motivation of producing this series of training modules on this internet site (http://www.scn.org/cmp/). The elimination of poverty can be a realistic global goal, with the combination of (1) these methods and (2) the world wide web.

COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT

People Development; Not Hardware Development
by Phil Bartle, PhD

Many people, including politicians and news journalists, when they visit community sites of a programme like this, want to see the facilities (eg the latrine, road, clinic, water pump, or school), and judge the success of the programme by the physical construction. While those may be the objectives of the communities themselves, they are not the objectives of community strengthening.

To mobilizers, the facilities are only a means of animating social change in the communities.

Our objectives belong to the "social change" aspect of development. We encourage and assist community based organizations to build new facilities or rehabilitate and maintain existing ones.

The objectives of the community, therefore, are focussed on the physical objects, eg the clinic, the road, the school, the foot bridge, the water supply, the latrine. The objectives of strengthening community capacity, in contrast, focus on the people, how they are organized, how they relate to external and internal leadership and governance, attitudes, behaviour, skills and institutional organization.

The objectives of community empowerment, therefore relate to the "people element" of development, and the physical infrastructure and its construction and maintenance, is seen as a "means" not as an end. The orthodox sectors (water, education, health) are secondary in importance, so long as the choice of type of activity is chosen by consensus and is identified as a community priority.

When you see a school built by a community, it is not only the result of the community management training, it is (and was) the means or strategy whereby we used community action to increase the capacity of that community to develop itself. The clinic is not the success; the ability of the community (to choose, plan, and construct it), is the success.

COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT

Factors of Poverty; The Big Five
by Phil Bartle, PhD

What are the major factors of poverty?

Poverty as a Social Problem:

We have all felt a shortage of cash at times. That is an individual experience. It is not the same as the social problem of poverty. While money is a measure of wealth, lack of cash can be a measure of lack of wealth, but it is not the social problem of poverty. See "Principles." Poverty as a social problem is a deeply embedded wound that permeates every dimension of culture and society. It includes sustained low levels of income for members of a community. It includes a lack of access to services like education, markets, health care, lack of decision making ability, and lack of communal facilities like water, sanitation, roads, transportation, and communications.

Furthermore, it is a "poverty of spirit," that allows members of that community to believe in and share despair, hopelessness, apathy, and timidity. Poverty, especially the factors that contribute to it, is a social problem, and its solution is social. We learn in these training web pages that we can not fight poverty by alleviating its symptoms, but only by attacking the factors of poverty. This handout lists and describes the "Big Five" factors that contribute to the social problem of poverty.

The simple transfer of funds, even if it is to the victims of poverty, will not eradicate or reduce poverty. It will merely alleviate the symptoms of poverty in the short run. It is not a durable solution. Poverty as a social problem calls for a social solution. That solution is the clear, conscious and deliberate removal of the big five factors of poverty.

Factors, Causes and History:

A "factor" and a "cause" are not quite the same thing. A "cause" can be seen as something that contributes to the origin of a problem like poverty, while a "factor" can be seen as something that contributes to its continuation after it already exists.

Poverty on a world scale has many historical causes: colonialism, slavery, war and conquest. There is an important difference between those causes and what we call factors that maintain conditions of poverty. The difference is in terms of what we, today, can do about them. We can not go back into history and change the past. Poverty exists. Poverty was caused. What we potentially can do something about are the factors that perpetuate poverty.

It is well known that many nations of Europe, faced by devastating wars, such as World Wars I and II, were reduced to bare poverty, where people were reduced to living on handouts and charity, barely surviving. Within decades they had brought themselves up in terms of real domestic income, to become thriving and influential modern nations of prosperous people. We know also that many other nations have remained among the least developed of the planet, even though billions of dollars of so-called "aid" money was spent on them. Why? Because the factors of poverty were not attacked, only the symptoms. At the macro or national level, a low GDP (gross domestic product) is not the poverty itself; it is the symptom of poverty, as a social problem.

The factors of poverty (as a social problem) that are listed here, ignorance, disease, apathy, dishonesty and dependency, are to be seen simply as conditions. No moral judgement is intended. They are not good or bad, they just are. If it is the decision of a group of people, as in a society or in a community, to reduce and remove poverty, they will have to (without value judgement) observe and identify these factors, and take action to remove them as the way to eradicate poverty. The big five, in turn, contribute to secondary factors such as lack of markets, poor infrastructure, poor leadership, bad governance, under-employment, lack of skills, absenteeism, lack of capital, and others. Each of these are social problems, each of them are caused by one or more of the big five, and each of them contribute to the perpetuation of poverty, and their eradication is necessary for the removal of poverty.

Let us look briefly at each of the big five in turn

Ignorance:

Ignorance means having a lack of information, or lack of knowledge. It is different from stupidity which is lack of intelligence, and different from foolishness which is lack of wisdom. The three are often mixed up and assumed to be the same by some people. "Knowledge is power," goes the old saying. Unfortunately, some people, knowing this, try to keep knowledge to themselves (as a strategy of obtaining an unfair advantage), and hinder others from obtaining knowledge. Do not expect that if you train someone in a particular skill, or provide some information, that the information or skill will naturally trickle or leak into the rest of a community.

It is important to determine what the information is that is missing. Many planners and good minded persons who want to help a community become stronger, think that the solution is education. But education means many things. Some information is not important to the situation. It will not help a farmer to know that Romeo and Juliet both died in Shakespeare's play, but it would be more useful to know which kind of seed would survive in the local soil, and which would not. The training in this series of community empowerment documents includes (among other things) the transfer of information. Unlike a general education, which has its own history of causes for the selection of what is included, the information included here is aimed at strengthening capacity, not for general enlightenment.

Disease:

When a community has a high disease rate, absenteeism is high, productivity is low, and less wealth is created. Apart from the misery, discomfort and death that results from disease, it is also a major factor in poverty in a community. Being well (well-being) not only helps the individuals who are healthy, it contributes to the eradication of poverty in the community. Here, as elsewhere, prevention is better than cure. It is one of the basic tenets of PHC (primary health care). The economy is much healthier if the population is always healthy; more so than if people get sick and have to be treated. Health contributes to the eradication of poverty more in terms of access to safe and clean drinking water, separation of sanitation from the water supply, knowledge of hygiene and disease prevention -- much more than clinics, doctors and drugs, which are costly curative solutions rather than prevention against disease.

Remember, we are concerned with factors, not causes. It does not matter if tuberculosis was introduced by foreigners who first came to trade, or if it were autochthonic. It does not matter if HIV that carries AIDS was a CIA plot to develop a biological warfare weapon, of if it came from green monkeys in the soup. Those are possible causes. Knowing the causes will not remove disease. Knowing the factors can lead to better hygiene and preventive behaviour, for their ultimate eradication. Many people see access to health care as a question of human rights, the reduction of pain and misery and the quality of life of the people. These are all valid reasons to contribute to a healthy population. What is argued here, further than those reasons, is that a healthy population contributes to the eradication of poverty, and it is also argued that poverty is not only measured by high rates of morbidity and mortality, but also that disease contributes to other forms and aspects of poverty.

Apathy:

Apathy is when people do not care, or when they feel so powerless that they do not try to change things, to right a wrong, to fix a mistake, or to improve conditions. Sometimes, some people feel so unable to achieve something, they are jealous of their family relatives or fellow members of their community who attempt to do so. Then they seek to bring the attempting achiever down to their own level of poverty. Apathy breeds apathy.

Sometimes apathy is justified by religious precepts, "Accept what exists because God has decided your fate." That fatalism may be misused as an excuse. It is OK to believe God decides our fate, if we accept that God may decide that we should be motivated to improve ourselves. "Pray to God, but also row to shore," a Russian proverb, demonstrates that we are in God's hands, but we also have a responsibility to help ourselves. We were created with many abilities: to choose, to cooperate, to organize in improving the quality of our lives; we should not let God or Allah be used as an excuse to do nothing. That is as bad as a curse upon God. We must praise God and use our God-given talents.

In the fight against poverty, the mobilizer uses encouragement and praise, so that people (1) will want to and (2) learn how to -- take charge of their own lives.

Dishonesty:

When resources that are intended to be used for community services or facilities, are diverted into the private pockets of someone in a position of power, there is more than morality at stake here. In this training series, we are not making a value judgement that it is good or bad. We are pointing out, however, that it is a major cause of poverty. The amount stolen from the public, that is received and enjoyed by the individual, is far less than the decrease in wealth that was intended for the public. The amount of money that is extorted or embezzled is not the amount of lowering of wealth to the community. Economists tell of the "multiplier effect." Where new wealth is invested, the positive effect on the economy is more than the amount created. When investment money is taken out of circulation, the amount of wealth by which the community is deprived is greater than the amount gained by the embezzler. When a Government official takes a 100 dollar bribe, social investment is decreased by as much as a 400 dollar decrease in the wealth of the society.

It is ironic that we get very upset when a petty thief steals ten dollars' worth of something in the market, yet an official may steal a thousand dollars from the public purse, which does four thousand dollars worth of damage to the society as a whole, yet we do not punish the second thief. We respect the second thief for her or his apparent wealth, and praise that person for helping all her or his relatives and neighbours. In contrast, we need the police to protect the first thief from being beaten by people on the street. The second thief is a major cause of poverty, while the first thief may very well be a victim of poverty that is caused by the second. Our attitude (as described in the paragraph to the left) ) is more than ironic; it is a factor that perpetuates poverty. If we reward the one who causes the major damage, and punish only the ones who are really victims, then our misplaced attitudes also contribute to poverty. When embezzled money is then taken out of the country and put in a foreign (eg Swiss) bank, then it does not contribute anything to the national economy; it only helps the country of the offshore or foreign bank.

Dependency:

Dependency results from being on the receiving end of charity. In the short run, as after a disaster, that charity may be essential for survival. In the long run, that charity can contribute to the possible demise of the recipient, and certainly to ongoing poverty. It is an attitude, a belief, that one is so poor, so helpless, that one can not help one's self, that a group cannot help itself, and that it must depend on assistance from outside. The attitude, and shared belief is the biggest self justifying factor in perpetuating the condition where the self or group must depend on outside help.

There are several other documents on this web site which refer to dependency. See: Dependency, and Revealing Hidden Resources. When showing how to use the telling of stories to communicate essential principles of development, the story of Mohammed and the Rope is used as a key illustration of the principle that assistance should not be the kind of charity that weakens by encouraging dependency, it should empower. The community empowerment methodology is an alternative to giving charity (which weakens), but provides assistance, capital and training aimed at low income communities identifying their own resources and taking control of their own development -- becoming empowered. All too often, when a project is aimed at promoting self reliance, the recipients, until their awareness is raised, expect, assume and hope that the project is coming just to provide resources for installing a facility or service in the community.

Among the five major factors of poverty, the dependency syndrome is the one closest to the concerns of the community mobilizer.

Conclusion:

These five factors are not independent of one another. Disease contributes to ignorance and apathy. Dishonesty contributes to disease and dependency. And so on. They each contribute to each other.

In any social change process, we are encouraged to "think globally, act locally." The Big Five factors of poverty appear to be widespread and deeply embedded in cultural values and practices. We may mistakenly believe that any of us, at our small level of life, can do nothing about them. Do not despair. If each of us make a personal commitment to fight the factors of poverty at whatever station in life we occupy, then the sum total of all of us doing it, and the multiplier effect of our actions on others, will contribute to the decay of those factors, and the ultimate victory over poverty.

The training material on this web site is aimed at poverty reduction on two fronts, (1) reduction of communal poverty by mobilizing community groups to unite, organize and take community action, and (20 reduction of personal poverty by the creation of wealth through the development of micro enterprise. You, as a mobilizer, are in a key position to have an effect on the big five of poverty factors. By conducting your mobilizing and training for poverty reduction, you can ensure your own integrity, hinder those who would corrupt the system, and encourage all your participants to practice the attack on factors of poverty in the course of the actions they choose, when guided and trained by you.

The big five factors of poverty (as a social problem) include: ignorance, disease, apathy, dishonesty and dependency. These, in turn, contribute to secondary factors such as lack of markets, poor infrastructure, poor leadership, bad governance, under-employment, lack of skills, lack of capital, and others.

The solution to the social problem of poverty is the social solution of removing the factors of poverty.

Community Awareness; Health and Hygiene: