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Empowering poor communities and groups, so that they exert agency over their own development, requires deference to their values and aspirations, insofar as these do not violate basic human rights and dignity. It also requires, among other things, helping these groups to develop decision-making skills that lead to practical actions based on their values, that can evolve into methods of sustainable self-governance and strategies to influence others.
Community-driven development (CDD) projects have increasingly included technical support and training for locally hired facilitators to work with community groups, helping them to plan the activities for which they will seek grant support. The facilitation is project-oriented, helping groups decide on the purposes for which they want to apply for a grant, and how to plan and implement their project
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Gaps and Opportunities
What has remained largely unaddressed in Bank-financed CDD projects is how to help community groups to improve the quality of their planning, evaluation and, generally, decision-making skills, so that they can be more adept in guiding and fostering their own development, in a broad, strategic sense. At the same time, the Bank has become increasingly concerned that CDD lending needs to be "scaled up" - integrated into fiscal systems, systems of local level governance, and systems of capacity-building for poor communities. There is now great interest in the Bank to develop types of CDD lending that build capacities and systems that are sustainable, at both community and local government levels.
One aspect of this evolution is a reevaluation of the role of facilitation and the methods that should be used, to have a much more comprehensive and lasting impact on the groups' or communities' decision-making capacities and their participation in local development on an ongoing basis. This would cast community investment projects not just as ends in themselves but also as "learning labs" through which communities would iteratively develop their abilities to plan, organize, mobilize resources and alliances, implement, appraise the process and make improvements as they proceed to their next challenge.
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