Synthesis of the Gambia-un Country Team Development Forum 2003

This compendium highlights the activities of the Gambia-United Nations Country Team Development Forum in sharing experiences and examinations of the complexities of the development process. It advocates for volunteerism and CSR as key drivers of sustainable development

Community participation agreements: a model for welfare reform from community-based research

Summary In its June 2001 budget, the Federal Government announced a new framework for welfare reform, Australians Working Together. One component of the framework is the proposed development of Community Participation Agreements in remote Indigenous communities, to deal with welfare income payments, mutual obligation and related service delivery. This paper presents the results of community consideration and the author’s field research between March and August 2001 at Mutitjulu, Central Australia, regarding what such an Agreement might look like on the ground. Mutitjulu presents a microcosm of many of the issues currently affecting remote Indigenous communities. As Mutitjulu residents struggle daily to come to terms with substantial economic and social difficulties, they find their culturally-based forms of social and cultural capital are being undermined by external factors seemingly beyond their immediate control. These include: the continuing failure of governments to develop a comprehensive approach to planning and service delivery, reflected in a band-aid approach to addressing welfare dependence; the debilitating impacts of inter-generational dependence on welfare income; and the multiplicity of local corporate structures and institutions with ill-defined roles and poor accountability to the Mutitjulu community. The failure to adequately address welfare dependence and major community problems of substance abuse, family breakdown, domestic violence, and low levels of education is viewed by Anangu (local Aboriginal people) as directly contributing to a noticeable deterioration in the wellbeing of individuals, their families and the community at large. There is growing frustration over the failure, at all levels, to deal effectively with these matters. The Mutitjulu Community Council has formally decided to proceed with the development of a Community Participation and Partnership Agreement (the ‘Mutitjulu Agreement’), in partnership with government and other stakeholders, as one means to begin addressing these matters. The development of practical partnerships with key government departments and local agencies will be a critical factor in the overall success of the proposed Mutitjulu Agreement. It is for this reason that the name of the proposed Agreement has been expanded to include the strategy of ‘partnership’ and well as ‘participation’. The paper begins with an overview of the background to the community-based research, terms of reference and research methodology. The proposed Mutitjulu Agreement is then placed in its national policy context to identify the factors that have generated this particular initiative. The paper goes on to describe the community context for the Agreement, including the nature of the local welfare economy, and Anangu views about the impacts of the welfare system. Consideration is given to the nature of contemporary Anangu social and economic relations, and how the term ‘participation’ might be most relevantly defined for the purposes of a community agreement about participation

Learning From the Journey: Reflections on the Rebuilding Communities Initiative

Provides lessons learned by the foundation staff, technical assistance providers, community residents, and other participants who worked to build local capacity, establish partnerships, alter service systems, and bring resources to five communities

Towards a Smarter organization for a Self-servicing Society

Traditional social organizations such as those for the management of healthcare are the result of designs that matched well with an operational context considerably different from the one we are experiencing today. The new context reveals all the fragility of our societies. In this paper, a platform is introduced by combining social-oriented communities and complex-event processing concepts: SELFSERV. Its aim is to complement the "old recipes" with smarter forms of social organization based on the self-service paradigm and by exploring culture-specific aspects and technological challenges.Comment: Final version of a paper published in the Proceedings of International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAI'16), special track on Emergent Technologies for Ambient Assisted Living (ETAAL

World Bank work with nongovernmental organizations

This report reviews 24 out of 202 Bank projects that involved nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in order to identify ways to improve Bank-NGO collaboration. It identifies five functional categories of NGO interaction with the Bank along a public-private continuum, based on the varying degrees to which they represent social goals on the public end of the continuum and economic goals on the private end. Discussion focuses on the benefits and difficulties arising from the involvement of NGOs in each category in Bank-supported projects. It recommends involving NGOs before implementation, developing creative financing mechanisms to support them, and learning what they have to teach Bank staff about motivation, education and organization. The challenge for the Bank is to forge institutional links between governments and NGOs that extend and complement government capabilities. Governments and NGOs must learn to respect each other so they can work toward such mutual goals as poverty alleviation.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Economics&Finance

Can local institutions reduce poverty? Rural decentralization in Burkina Faso

The authors present evidence that in Burkina Faso, certain high-performing local institutions contribute to equitable economic development. They link reduced levels of poverty, and inequality to a high degree of internal village organization. The structure of these high-performing local organizations means they can exist in a number of African countries, because they depend more on internal participation, rather than on nay one country's cultural assets. The authors find that: 1) Service-asset management groups (SAMs) - one of three local institutions identified in the study - have helped to significantly reduce inequality in participating households. SAMs are a fusion of long-standing development committees, and indigenous management councils that collectively manage community assets, such as water. SAMs have combined the productivity goals of growth, with the values of equity, and solidarity. 2) Current development approaches use growth as an initiator, assuming that surpluses will be used to benefit the poor. SAMs, and other local institutions in Burkina Faso, start with equity, and solidarity, and aim for a result of growth, and development. 3) Internal participation is essential for SAMs to function. Only locally anchored participation can power the realignments, and institutional revisions needed to scale up development action. SAMs, and other local institutions have launched their communities on equitable growth paths, and are reducing poverty with little, or no outside assistance, despite severe resource constraints. Their impact could be enormous if external development resources augmented their potential. World Bank programs, and policy interventions could build on local strength, and make their activities more sustainable by mapping local institutions to guide new initiatives in pro-poor investment, and using that mapping to formalize, and increase internal local participation - expanding nationwide by using a network of local institutions. SAMs, and other local institutions, could be the vehicle for ensuring transparency, and accountability. Working with the results of local activities, national policies could favor the development of indigenously based, but externally oriented local economies.Decentralization,Regional Rural Development,Public Health Promotion,Enterprise Development&Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Regional Rural Development,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Assessment,Governance Indicators,National Governance

Volunteering and Civic Service in Three African Regions: Contributions to Regional Integration, Youth Development and Peace

This paper broadly looks at the role of youth volunteering in cultivating peace and development in Sub-Saharan Africa