Capturing Best Practices from Georgia

Photo: Mercy Corps Georgia

A key element of successful community mobilization is the level to which the community gains and maintains the sense of power and ability to work on their own problems by mobilizing resources both from within or by partnering with other institutions and groups. As we approach community mobilization projects it is important to remember that we are capable of disempowering the community if we are not careful about we use the resources at our disposal. How we approach community mobilization projects illustrates how we work on development in general.

The key elements in community development are: (a) the respect of differences and experiences between “the development agency” and the “client community”, (b) acknowledgement of resources each party brings to the process and (c) the clear division of the responsibilities and accountability of each of the parties. It is important that we become critical while using the term “beneficiary” - once we start thinking about the people we work with as beneficiaries, we have set up a power dynamic that is conducive to true development.

Mercy Corps, as well as many other agencies, “does” community mobilization. What makes Mercy Corps efforts original are some of the approaches that I witnessed in our Georgia model, such as:

1. Presentation of the project to the community, and allowing the community to decide if they want to participate or not. It demonstrates our respect for THEIR vision of their community development, as in the end it really belongs to them only.

2. Budget allocation - this is perhaps revolutionary in "community mobilization" - actually giving the money to the community, or an informal community committee, to manage and to procure goods and /or services necessary to complete the project. Many NGOs use a more traditional approach, choosing to do the procurement themselves, because they believe that this minimizes the misuse of the funds - but it also minimizes the effect on the mobilization and distorts the power relationship.

3. Financial community participation - when the community invests financial resources (or sell their chicken to raise the money for the community project) they have a vested interest in overseeing the spending of their (and donated) resources by their representatives. This makes them the best financial monitors possible and also sets a stage for expectations of financial accountability by their governments (local or national). Hence, we do not only facilitate the community mobilization, but also participatory governance and citizen's expectations/demand for accountability and transparency.

4. Transparency seems to be a key element here, and by transparency I mean transparency of the process, the resources and the results. The posting of the project budget and financial reports (by the community committee) in public places is another approach unique to this project. Mercy Corps’ challenge is how we apply our accountability and transparency in practice and to which degree we implement the principles we expect from our partners and clients.

The critical moment in the communities' sense of ownership over the process, and hence, the true mobilization, started after we began to change our approach and stopped treating community members as "beneficiaries" that provide volunteer labor as a community counterpart for the construction of houses. Rather, we started looking at them as "equal" participants in the process, understanding that they have the most vested interest in the quality of construction and thus "sharing" the control over the resources and the end result (in this case, the house). In a country where 48% of the population live below poverty line and the rural poor have for years been dependant on foreign aid for survival, we are only beginning to pave the road to the mobilization that would survive not only this project, but would make the communities more equal partners in the future.