In several countries, government ministries and civil society are working
together to strengthen and expand community-based initiatives. The Bangladesh
Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) is the largest and one of the most
impressive scaled-up examples of community schools. Other promising projects
include the Community Support Program for primary education in Baluchistan and
El Salvador's Community-Managed Schools Program (EDUCO). In Nicaragua, with its
diverse and hard-to-reach populations, the ministry of education devolved
managerial and budgetary autonomy to local school councils with reasonable
success. Private companies are also getting more involved in education
promotion and in "adopt a school" initiatives.
Health outreach, microsavings, and credit are other badly needed services in
remote areas.34
Donors and health ministries are teaming with NGOs to get trained midwives and
health visitors (rather than expensive clinics staffed with doctors and nurses)
out to villages on a routine schedule with medicines, family planning, and
nutrition advice. Other examples include the following:
In Orissa, India, the international NGO CARE is setting up microenterprises to
produce insecticide-treated mosquito nets to reduce malaria and to help poor
villages generate income.
A community-based health and antimalaria program was launched in 1992 in
Tigray, Ethiopia, with 714 volunteers serving more than 1.7 million people in
some 2,000 villages.
Private banks in Lebanon are sponsoring NGOs to promote microsavings in remote
mountainous areas. Vans go to villages, collecting savings, making small loans,
and depositing the savings in the nearest bank branch. A few combine mobile
banking with health outreach services.
Scaling up community-driven development to a large number of villages is
critical to improving livelihoods on fragile lands. Some government ministries
are embracing new approaches, but often the leadership, will, and know-how of
government officials are lacking-keeping promising initiatives at a modest
level. Local motivation and capacity for collective action are the main
prerequisites for scaling up successful community initiatives, but an enabling
national environment combined with grant funding are critical complements.
There is a long history of qualitative studies on community development, but
careful econometric evaluations are more recent. The results of the econometric
research on the effectiveness of community development initiatives are still
sketchy but the findings indicate that community-based projects are directed to
the poor and can improve service delivery. Much depends on the village context
(homogeneous groups have a higher success rate), on whether the design is
sensitive to and scaled to local realities, whether the government is committed
to the projects, and whether the approach is gradual, monitored, and adapted as
necessary.35
