Project Success Stories

There's no place like home

The face of rural Senegal is changing. The city is no longer draining rural areas of their educated populations, and young people are returning home to their villages. Many want to shape the future of their community, while others are returning to become community leaders. Even the roles of women have changed as they increasingly become strong voices in their communities. This shift is largely due to the community-driven National Rural Infrastructure Program (PNIR), which is helping communities invest in themselves.

In August of 2000 the Government of Senegal and the World Bank created PNIR to revitalize the livelihoods of 80 percent of Senegal's poor rural households. The goal of the program was to decentralize local governments and build capacity within the ministries responsible for implementing rural projects.

One of the biggest challenges faced by PNIR was creating effective local government in Africa's oldest democracy and increasing community participation in local decision-making. One way to achieve this was through consultative committees, comprising elected members of local communities and civil society representatives who would speak for the community at the local government level. Within PNIR, at least one-third of the consultative committee members had to be comprised of women, and to increase community ownership of micro projects, communities were expected to contribute 20 percent of project costs.

However, according to project TTL, Moctar Thiam, many communities balked at placing women on the board; therefore, at mid-term review, incentives to include women were added by offering a reduction in community contributions from 20 percent to 15 percent to communities with a higher involvement of women in the consultative committee.

As time passed, the impact of the increased input of women began to be felt in the development priorities. For example, while men requested funding for cattle stock, women identified water-points as a priority community need. The presence of the women on community boards-where they now comprise approximately 50 percent of memberships-allowed a broader spectrum of needs to be met.

The first phase of PNIR trained 10,000 people from the poorest 100 commune rurales (CRs) or local governments. Most training was in procurement, participation, supervision of works, and politics. Upon completion, the trainees returned to their communities to put their skills to work. Their first objectives were to identify community needs then raise money for specific projects, using different techniques to acquire funding. To gain outside funding, some invited NGOs to open houses and community fairs. Others decided to twin or jumelage with communities in France and other part of the world to raise money. Still others decided to privatize their social assets in order to build community economies.

After the first phase, significant changes could be seen. By 2004 the first 100 target CRs were doing better than wealthier counterparts. CR created ways to gain greater access to communal needs, such as water, health care, education, and other services. In fact, PNIR had made such significant improvements in people's livelihoods that it became politically difficult to limit coverage to 100 CRs, and other CRs were demanding that PNIR be extended to their areas.

In the second phase, PNIR will expand to 300 CRs and 6,000 villages, all of whom will receive more funding for their projects. The focus will be more on local development plans. PNIR will also merge with the successful Social Development Fund Project (AFDS), to create the Participatory Local Development Program (PLDP). PLDP will receive a proposed $100 million IDA credit and contain four components that will promote the full use of the CDD strategy at many levels to ensure that vulnerable groups receive the basic quality social and economic services.

On March 21, 2005, an impact evaluation was released on the national results of PNIR. PNIR commissioned two universities, Clermont-Ferrand in France and Saint-Louis in Senegal, to conduct an impact evaluation on the project every six months from its inception. They compared targeted communities with CRs who were not included in the first phase of the project. Among the result, was the finding that children living in targeted communities were healthier and weighed more as a result of improvements in the quality of health centers and improved access to clean water. Moctar said "the report proves that giving quality resources [to communities] has an impact."