Practice

How does child centred community development work in practice?

1. Staff immersion:

Staff live in or near the communities and spend time getting to know and understand them before initiating any project activity.

2. Participatory community assessment:

Staff assist the community to assess its situation, ensuring that the poorest members are involved. Groups of men, women, children, and young people often start working separately but then come together to agree on what are the main problems affecting children.

3. Participatory planning:

The groups agree on what they will do together to address the problems they have identified and make a community development plan. Consultations are held with local government and local NGOs to agree on how they will support it. Local resources are committed and this helps to make sure our activities are sustainable.

4. Commitment of support by Plan:

Once all local organisations have committed what they can, Plan identifies what it should do to support the plan.

5. Sponsorship:

The community - often with children leading the process - agrees which children should be sponsored. Sponsorship enables relationships and understanding to be built across cultures and puts a human face on development.

Sponsorship provides long term flexible funding which enables Plan to make long term commitments to communities and help to break the cycle of poverty in which families are caught.

6. Putting the activities in place:

Community groups work together with us to implement the plan. Children and young people often have their own activities such as children’s clubs and drama groups, but they may also be members of community development committees on topics such as health. As part of these committees they take part in discussions with local and national government on the needs of their communities.

7. Reflection, monitoring and evaluation:

During the planning process communities set aims for themselves and meet regularly to discuss how they are doing. Periodically, Plan facilitates evaluations that involve all groups in assessing their achievements and this forms the basis for planning new activities. In particular, Plan looks for ways to appropriately involve children in evaluation and feedback.

8. Building community groups and organisations:

A very important aspect of Plan’s work is building the skills of community and local organisations so that they can continue to make improvements in their situation in the long term. This requires a lot of training.

9. Scaling up and influencing policy:

Successful development methods are shared with partners at local and national levels and through them expanded to new areas. Plan also helps children, young people and adult community members to talk to decision makers at local and national levels. Through our advocacy work, Plan seeks to influence decision makers to improve the lives of children through better services and the commitment of more resources.