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1) Supporting community empowerment in face of constraints There is much support in this consultation for community empowerment processes: lessons learned of successes and failures need to be shared more widely. These interventions have comparative advantage in areas with weakly connected markets, where large numbers of capability poor households reside, where Michael Lipton's Plan A, and macro-economic restructuring will have less impact. Vinay Chand has responded to earlier contributions, making valid points about constraints faced by community empowerment interventions. He refers to limited commitment of national agencies, funding constraints across ministries of agriculture, and donors not supporting second phases of projects. It remains that traditional project design is rarely suited to risks associated with multiple constraints that comprise centralised command structures, limited outreach, inequitable access in existing service provision, limited capabilities in public extension services for supporting community empowerment process and limited government recurrent funding combined with governance issues. Multiple constraints combine to reduce probability that empowered self help groups will reap benefits, translating improved choice into accessing provision of pro-poor technology, know how and other services in the absence of more in depth analysis of constraints and opportunities.. 2) Definition of empowerment The World Bank's definition of empowerment is useful; it provides a sense also of the type of analysis that is called for to diagnose the organisational and institutional context with which to support the growth of voluntary associations and to provide them with means to transform preferences into desired outcomes. 'Empowerment is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make effective choices and transform those choices into desired action and outcomes. Central to this process are actions which both build on individual and collective assets of the poor, and improve the efficiency and fairness of the organisational and institutional context which govern the use of these assets.' 3) Empirical analysis A deeper empirical analysis of alternative pathways at the stage of design typically pays off. A thorough diagnostic of constraints and solutions with open discussion of findings in workshops with local stakeholders will reveal extent of agreement across local stakeholders about instruments with which to promote an enabling environment for promoting livelihoods of deprived individuals and groups and reducing vulnerability. Funding projects or programmes can be decided once the local context for the intervention is made clearer. If at the design stage, diagnosis is partial, incomplete in its analysis of institutional constraints and opportunities, not empirical in nature, risk increases of poorly designed interventions, with objectives that do not translate into measurable progress and impact at household levels. In contrast, empirical surveys that seek to test specific hypothesis about constraints, where findings are presented for validation to fora that include representatives of the poor and civil society as well as extension staff, generate value as a reality check. Such surveys do no necessarily need to be entirely quantitative but replicability for trend analysis is essential. Such diagnosis with subsequent dialogue with government and other stakeholders to generate a pro-poor institutional context has a premium, but in my experience they are not yet common. Such interaction following empirical analysis may point to the case for precisely targeted interventions. One outcome may be to validate the case for targeting assistance to relatively homogenous groups of deprived households, e.g. to already existing voluntary informal women groups at grass roots level. This pathway is followed in parts of Asia. Diagnosis may point to the case for improving legal and regulatory frameworks that represent obstacles for dispersed voluntary associations of resource poor households to register as legal entities, accumulate financial and other assets, and federate. Diagnosis may point to local power structures that encourage 'free riding', capturing resources, not respecting the bylaws of voluntary associations. Beyond creating enabling environments, adapting legal and regulatory frameworks, a range of measures can be devised that promote local governments to give recognition and assistance to supporting the growth and maturity of CBOs. They may comprise grants to enable local governments to permit CBOs to transform their preferences into desired action and outcomes, legislation that enhances women participation in local council decision making, etc. There is a case for combining rights based approaches with a menu that assists eligible households and groups to transform early on their choices into desired action and outcomes. Normally such institutional change is associated with programmes rather than projects, though the latter may initiate the change process. 4) The 'Core Programme' empowerment concept Conducting participatory workshops, with a structured analysis of processes and multiple constraints pays off, also during evaluations. In the Southern Province in Zambia in 1999, I facilitated with an evaluation team two such workshops with local stakeholders including extension staff, researchers, provincial and district chiefs and civil society. Workshops took place in the beginning and at the end of the three week long evaluation of a household food security project, when the evaluation team had conducted its own empirical survey. Workshop participants from the project area first themselves with facilitation analysed project performance and participatory processes in multiple dimensions with methodology agreed to by the workshop. The evaluation team then presented its own findings and in instances even raised the score for performance set by local stakeholders. These two workshops with stakeholders, chaired by the Chief Provincial Agricultural officer, in view of non appropriate design and severe funding constraints, reformulated the project. They formulated a menu approach under a cost-effective 'Core Programme'; the menu comprised beyond empowerment, support, inter alia diffusion of propoor livestock extension and a community development fund to provide for self-help in generating village level infrastructure. Remarkable was that the extension staff decided to allow eligible communities to decide over their budget line, and also request type and source of facilitation and extension support. Facilitation and extension staff services to each eligible community, including transport, would be paid by a small fixed proportion of the budgeted cost. This core programme concept represented a break with the traditional ministry project approach, where decisions are heavily dependent on original staff appraisal report projections and where funding, controlled by the centre, is too often much curtailed and delayed. Given the provincial level commitment, the agricultural ministry as well as the donor decided to endorse the core programme approach. 5) Rising trend of malnutrition in the project area was not known Transmitting essential data to stakeholders about rising malnutrition, proxy for non monetary poverty, across the project area and its implications gave decision makers impetus for change. Zambian resource persons presented to the stakeholders - data previously unknown to the latter. Resource persons informed stakeholders firstly that CSO data showed that stunting prevalence in the province had risen from 30% in 1990 to not less than about 45%-50% in 1996-1999; secondly, that interviewed women in three pilot sites found food shortage, including fertiliser shortage, to explain about 40% of the variation in stunting; other explanatory factors included limited access to drinking water and women's disempowerment reflected in short child spacing. The core programme design envisaged that trends in stunting would be monitored across supported communities. 6) Women CBOs call for sanctions against free riding With increasing capability, maturity and recognition of voluntary associations, local governments begin to see possibility of using CBOs as instruments for outreach, off loading their own personnel. Moreover, CBOs may be spearheading efforts to raise governance standards, becoming 'whistle-blowers', calling for sanctions against free riding and poor local governance. In Nepal, at least anecdotal evidence is found for that organised women take collective action against 'free riding', or capture of resources by local elites. In Nawalparati district, leaders of a women groups in 1999 informed me of a case when they had intervened to report embezzlement within the community forestry group. Male members of the community forestry executive committee in the VDC had ousted women members of this committee, so as to be able to continue to illegally cut and sell timber for private profit across the border in India. The larger local women group wrote a letter to the VDC, members marched on a Saturday morning to the VDC head quarters to deliver their protest. The VDC leadership took notice; embezzlers were ousted, whilst former women members returned to the executive committee. 7) Women CBOs become instruments for outreach, off-loading government extension services In Nepal, the central government has created an enabling framework for women CBOS. The effort has paid off. CBOs have registered, in many ways they have attained a high degree of capabilities even beyond financial services and resource mobilisation for essential public goods. CBOs since many years have federated within VDCs (similar to Panchyats) and across districts; local governments have begun to realise their potential regardless of ethnicity. Local governments had begun to use women groups as agents for outreach, saving its own manpower and financial resources. In 1999, I visited one VDC in the Hills (Palpa) that had contracted such registered women CBOs as intermediaries, as agents to undertake outreach activities, e.g. identify deprived women who would be eligible to receive credit for micro-projects such as piggery. Such groups also up to a point educated mothers in child health, nutrition and growth monitoring. 8) Women CBOs intervene against alcoholism Alcoholism in India and elsewhere, serves to maintain poverty, deprivation, gender abuse, inequity in access to resources, but is difficult to control. A women group in Vellore, Tamil Nadu in 2002 reported that they had evicted and banned the liquor sellers from their village; sales of liquor were connected with violence to women and misery. The police had not been able to intervene, but sanctioned the women's activity. Women's activity is consistent with study findings. Research has shown that women are induced to participate in savings and credit associations so as to protect their income from husbands' propensity for wasteful consumption (Baland). 9) Promoting evaluations generating wider learning about outcomes of empowerment interventions Documenting and testing best practices in the design and evaluation of projects that seek to support community empowerment processes has value. Inducing donors to more consistently use rigorous practices in design and evaluations of intervention, not least those targeted to populations in the weakly integrated areas, and to share lessons learned in open 'country programme' workshops, would assist in empowering governments and local stakeholders in the 'South'. Adoption of relevant cost-effective methodologies in programme or project design should then increase. This may be a tall order to achieve, but alternatives are not attractive. DFID leadership in setting standards and networking could make a difference. Best wishes, Per A. Eklund Consultant <address removed> <address removed>
Please visit dfid-agriculture-consultation.nri.org.