Beneficiaries in rural Sierra Leone communities voice their opinions on a pilot project
Intangible aspects of a project are often as important as the tangible results
Community involvement is key to a successful and sustainable development project
FREETOWN, December 5, 2008 -- The results of Sierra Leone’s Community Driven Development Project, known locally as GoBifo, were showcased November 19 – 25 in a series of community voice platforms, branded as open days, across the Bombali and Bonthe Districts where the project is being piloted in 27 wards and 124 villages.
“GoBifo has empowered me a lot to know how we as a community can go about addressing the complex development challenges we face here on daily basis,” said Theresa Banya, leader of Sembehun village. “I now know how to engage the local and central government and NGOs, who often come with resources meant for us but are sometimes secretive about the details.”
GoBifo, which literarily means in Sierra Leone’s common Krio language “forge ahead,” is a World Bank administered trust fund of US$1.8 million provided by the Japan Social Development Program to support capacity development for strengthening social capital at the community level.
“In addition to my newly acquired skills in soap making, gara dying and micro-business management, the GoBifo project has given me and my colleagues sufficient orientation and exposure to demand from aid providers, who come with development assistance for our community, that they either tell us at the beginning all about what is in the kitty for us or have no dealings with us,” said Agnes Koroma, who heads a skills training program, supported by GoBifo, for women in Massama Village.
“The GoBifo project,” she added, “has made us see with our own eyes and feel with our own hands.”
Software gains as important as hardware gains
The World Bank’s Daniel Owen, who leads the GoBifo project for the Bank, participated in the open days.
“The showcased results show what the project has accomplished in terms of both hard and software gains,” he said. “Visible project results such as school buildings, culverts, drainages, wells, latrines, cassava processing machines, soap making, gara dying, vegetable gardening, sport promotion, among others, can be conceived as hardware gains.”
Owen also pointed to the software gains, which he said are equally important outcomes of the project but which are not immediately visible, such as “skills and knowledge gains by communities, improved community networking, positive changes of attitude and evidence of greater mutual trust and collective action in the communities”.
This dual picture, according to Project Manager Sullay Sesay, tells a story about aid effectiveness and how the software gains of a project in particular can be crucial to its sustainability.
“For example,” says Sesay, “the construction of a GoBifo supported community storage facility in Mogbondo village near Mattru in just four days sends a message about the intensity, effort and time the villagers put into the implementation of the project.”
A school building towards which the Kathalla village near Makeni contributed 68 percent of the project costs signals a very high level of community commitment to the project, he added.
“These are just two examples… that demonstrate how software results can be as equally profound as the hardware outcomes that our eyes first see when we visit project communities.”
The open days, according to Sesay, were organized with the dual aim of “sharing lessons from the accomplishments and drawbacks of the pilot project” on the one hand, and providing the opportunity for “beneficiary accounting on the process and results of the project in both hard and software terms” on the other.
Communities drive development, not just aid agencies
In a keynote address during the open days events, Makeni Abdul Rahman Dumbuya, Provincial Secretary of the Northern Region, called the GoBifo activities in his region of administration “a resounding success story which deserves to serve as a model for emulation and replication by most development partners in the country whose mode of interaction and interface with impoverished communities are largely scrawny, superficial and sloppy”.
“For any donor funded community development program to be successful and sustained, the commitment of beneficiaries towards such programs should be ensured and sustained,” Dumbuya added.
This is exactly what the GoBifo project is doing, he said.
“The GoBifo methodology does not consider beneficiaries as mere end-users of development products and services. GoBifo, instead, considers the beneficiaries as both producers and end-users of development products and services.”
According to Dumbuya, the GoBifo project has empowered beneficiary communities “to eat what they choose to cook for themselves and not what others choose to cook for them”.
RSS