Community Mobilization Impacts in East Georgia

Photo: Tamuna Kvaratskhelia/Mercy Corps

Empowering communities to solve their own problems and act as agents of social change is one of the main aims of the East Georgia Community Mobilization Initiative.

Two tools have been developed to monitor and assess the program. So far they show success in changing attitudes and increasing capacity for action, but also the challenges in predicting sustainability.

Since the program began in 2000 over 190 communities have organized and elected Community Initiative Groups (CIGs) and implemented over 260 projects with input from their members, the government, the private sector and Mercy Corps. Mercy Corps facilitates an initial action planning workshop, where resources are identified and priorities selected, and provides capacity building training and support in project design, proposal writing, budgeting and financial management. After the implementation of the first project, the CIGs become more independent, and other skill areas such as conflict resolution, leadership and advocacy, become the focus of support. Before approval of a third phase project, communities are required to have carried out activities without Mercy Corps resources and demonstrating that they are pro-actively including the needs of the most vulnerable in their projects.

A central principle of the process is transparency, which is promoted through the participation and inclusion of a broad spectrum of the population and public display of information about project including budgets and expenditures. This is necessary in minimizing actual and perceived corruption and generating trust, which in turn facilitates greater participation and community ownership.

To monitor this process, two tools have been developed.

The first tool is to be used by the Mercy Corps regional teams during three-month planning meetings to identify examples of positive, negative and no change in mobilized communities. Regional representatives identified various indicators of expected change:

The examples are discussed in detail and actions to promote positive change in other communities or prevent and resolve negative examples are included in three-month plans. The information also provides useful anecdotes for senior manager's understanding, reports and strategy planning.

It is a quick, simple tool that encourages program staff to initiate discussion on a wide variety of program issues and share the challenges they are facing in a non-threatening way. The indicators can be refined and new dimensions examined as the program develops.

The second tool examines in-depth the empowerment impacts of the program, based on breaking down the concept into a number of categories, which are explored through a semi structured interview with the CIG and community members. It was developed as part of a mid term evaluation of the empowerment impacts of the program and is now being used by mobilizers to evaluate the community mobilization process at the end of the third phase project.

The categories are:

1. Moods and Attitudes such as hope, confidence and belief that something can be changed; creating an atmosphere that supports ongoing action.

2. Human Capital means the skills, knowledge and understanding community members have: improved human capital increases the community’s potential to take action and empower themselves.

3. Institutional Capacities includes the existence of legitimate leadership and institutional structures, and modes of organisation including networking: institutional capacity increases the efficiency and coherence with which a community can respond to its own situation and make use of resources to do so.

4. Community Cohesion means factors such as trust, unity, altruism and shared values: the presence of these factors enables communities to act for the common good whilst respecting differences, and channel energies towards mutually beneficial goals.

5. Political Agency means having knowledge and belief in authorities, and access to them, as well as those authorities responding to communities’ interests: in so far as power rests with governments, community members need to have a meaningful relationship with them in order to maximize their own power.

6. Shared Material Assets such as roads, buildings, equipment and land: where communities have shared assets, and reasonable access to them, these can serve as resources for collective action.

7. Information Flow such as the presence and accessibility of sources of information, equipment for receiving it, and spaces and opportunities for communication: information is vital to participating in society and taking optimum decisions, and communications nourish the community’s relationships with itself and with society.

Although the tool requires strong analytical skills, the mobilizers already have deep knowledge of the communities where they work, and the training and support required to effectively use this tool is useful for their understanding of the process that they are engaged in.

So far, these tools have found the project has made major achievements in changing perceptions and attitudes, and increasing capacities for action.

The challenge for the program is increasing political agency in the context of weak and corrupt government and poor enabling environment, while the challenge for the monitoring system is predicting whether the empowerment impacts achieved so far can be sustained in the long term.