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Community Empowerment

KIAT Guru: Engaging communities to improve education in Indonesia

Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez's picture
Indonesia successfully reduced its poverty rate over the last two decades. Yet, this growth was accompanied by one of the fastest increases in inequality in East Asia and the Pacific.  While the poverty rate in urban areas has fallen to 8.2%, in remote and rural areas it remains around 14%.

This inequality is exacerbated by the persistent poor quality of public services, such as education, in rural and remote areas. While various government initiatives have improved access to education, quality and equity remain major challenges for those in rural and remote areas.
 
To address these issues, the World Bank has partnered with the government of Indonesia to launch a pilot project called “KIAT Guru,” which aims to improve teacher presence, teacher service quality, and student learning outcomes, while enhancing community engagement and participation in remote areas.

“We [have] two different mechanisms. One of them is community empowerment… The community develops a service agreement with schools so they can agree upon the five to seven indicators that they think are a priority,” says Dewi Susanti, Senior Social Development Specialist, who leads the project.

In this video, Dewi Susanti and World Bank Senior Director Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez (@Ede_WBG) discuss the KIAT Guru project and the lessons learned from its early stages.  
 
KIAT Guru project

Integrity Idol: How a reality TV show is changing minds about public service

Roxanne Bauer's picture
In an age when celebrity culture and corruption appear to be omnipresent, it’s quite refreshing to be reminded that there are good people doing good work day in and day out.  These people work in our school systems, hospitals, charities, and as part of government bureaucracy.  Yes, bureaucracy.   

As Blair Glencorse states, “bureaucrats and civil servants can serve citizens in the way that they are supposed to.”  With this in mind, the organization he founded, Accountability Lab, created Integrity Idol, a global campaign run by citizens in search for honest government officials. It aims to “highlight the good people in the system” as way to establish a culture and expectation of honesty and personal responsibility in government postings. Integrity Idol began in Nepal in 2014, spread to Liberia in 2015, and now includes Pakistan and Mali.

The process of selecting an Integrity Idol is participatory from beginning to end. Local teams of volunteers travel across their countries gathering nominations from citizens, hosting public forums and generating discussion on the need for public officials with integrity. From the long list nominees, five are selected in each country with the help of independent panels of experts. These finalists are then filmed and their episodes are shown on national television and played on the radio for a week, and citizens can vote for their favorites through SMS short-codes and on the website. The winner in each country is crowned in a national ceremony in the capital.

Here, Glencorse discusses Integrity Idol back in 2014, when the program was just getting started in Nepal.  Nominations are now open in Pakistan, Nepal, and Mali. To nominate a candidate in one of these countries visit www.integrityidol.org.
 
Integrity Idol: How a reality TV show is changing minds about public service

How to help communities protect their lands

Rachael Knight's picture
Kenya Land Alliance facilitates a meeting
with the community of Chara, in Tana
River county

The scale of the global land grab is staggering. While international actors have made excellent progress establishing complaint boards, issuing principles for responsible investment, and securing commitments from multi­national corporations, these protections do not chart a clear course of action that communities can follow to protect their lands and natural resources before an investor arrives seeking land. 

The problem is that once an investor arrives to “consult with” a community, it may be too late.  After a deal has been made in capital city conference rooms or in clandestine meetings between chiefs and company representatives, communities are forced on the defensive. At this point, all they can do is try to mitigate the negative impacts of investors' plans rather than assertively proclaiming their legal rights, demanding that the investor abide by FPIC principles, and then choosing whether to reject the investment or accept it on terms that ensure that the community benefits and prospers.

Meanwhile, many of the “investors” grabbing land are national or local elites unaccountable to international  institutions  –  the cousin of the President or the nephew  of the Minister – who operate with complete impunity, protected by powerful connections to government, the judiciary and the police. Such individuals do not answer to shareholders or complaint boards, and are not the least bit concerned with principles of corporate social responsibility. If a community’s land claims  are unrecognized or undocumented – and if the community’s leadership is weak or corrupt – the easier it is for these elites to manipulate their power to claim what land they want.

To have a fighting chance against elites’ bad­faith actions, communities must proactively take steps to know and enforce their rights, prevent their leaders from transacting land without community approval, and seek legal recognition of their land claims.  And they must do so before elites and investors arrive. 

The Accountability Lab: Building a community

Roxanne Bauer's picture

Blair Glencorse of the Accountability Lab discusses the importance of community-driven development and how filmmaking can engage people in accountability goals.

Many organizations and development professionals have found that reaching initial benchmarks is sometimes easier than sustaining them. However, with clear goals, development progress can be sustained in the long-run.

According to Blair Glencorse of the Accountability Lab, setting goals that are context-specific is critical. The Accountability Lab, he says, meets “people where they are, not where we want them to be,” and takes into consideration the varying levels of literacy, numeracy, and other practical skills of their clients when designing a program.

At the same time, a program is only as strong as its supporters so encouraging community members to speak up is equally important.

Taking a holistic approach, the Accountability Lab works with young people in Liberia, training them to create documentaries on issues related to accountability.  The up-and-coming filmmakers then present the documentaries to their communities at film festivals to spread awareness and get people involved in tackling the tough issues.
 
VIDEO: Accountability Lab: building a community

 

Challenges for Community Radio in India's Rural Development

Abhilaksh Likhi's picture

India’s 12th Five Year Plan (2012-2017) talks of challenges emanating from the economy’s transition to a higher growth path, the structural changes that come with it and the expectations it generates. One pertinent challenge in India, in the context of economic growth at the rate of 8%, is the extent of progress towards the multi dimensional process of inclusive growth. Without doubt, the latter should result in lower incidence of poverty, significant improvements in health care, universal access for children going to school and increased access to skilled development.

These parameters are more critical for an estimated 833 million people in India who continue to live in rural areas and a very large proportion of whom, both men and women, are either wholly or significantly still dependent for their livelihood on farm as well as non-farm activities. A plethora of centrally sponsored flagship rural development programs such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) have been given special impetus aimed at building rural  infrastructure and providing basic services with the aim of reducing poverty. These are mandated to be implemented by the provincial governments through institutions of local self governance in the gaze of the well oiled administrative district machinery and increasingly in collaboration with the civil society.

An unprecedented injection of public funds during the 12th Plan Period through decentralized governance, calls for a renewed focus on the dynamics of grassroots empowerment that could enable rural communities to access information about their rights and entitlements made available under these programmes, both by law and policy. This consequently also has implications for accountability in the reach and impact of the public delivery system that the poorest approach. The key question, thus is, what kind of an accessible communication medium, amongst today’s robust social media, should be utilized during the next four years extensively to sensitize and empower the poorest in rural areas in partnership with civil society?  Secondly, what are the governance challenges that need to be identified in the above partnership to make the benefits of the envisaged inclusive growth more transparent, participatory and bottom up?

What’s the Link Between Social Development Practice and Communication? Some Techniques and Approaches

Sabina Panth's picture

In development practices, the process of information gathering and dissemination has remained in the domain of social development.  While the process itself contributes to social development through knowledge transmission and critical consciousness (topic for another blog post), the tools and techniques required for effective use and dissemination of information comes from the communication school.  Yet, rarely do we find social development experts with communication training and vice-versa.   My recent exposure to CommGAP’s work and my decade long experience as a social development professional have impelled me to examine areas where communication and social development are intertwined and where they complement one another.  In this blog post, I wish to sketch an outline of a research work that I wish to undertake on the subject for feedback and suggestions from readers and practitioners in the field.