Understanding Community Organizations

Project Communication Managemet

Communication for Participatory Approach and Transparency to Development Actions and Policies

Seeing Invisible Groups

In a typical poor community, a whole range of organizations are operating: formal or informal, traditional or modern, indigenous or externally established. All these have different functions, be they productive, social, religious, or otherwise. It is often through these organizations that demand is expressed, participatory processes organized, and development services delivered. Some of the most active community organizations are informal. They are not listed in any documents, and they may be unknown even to people familiar with the communities (extension agents, local development agency staff, and so forth). Learning about these groups entails visiting the communities and talking with inhabitants about the decisionmaking units present. A simple "institutional mapping" exercise has been used successfully in several PPAs. Local people were asked to identify the community groups by drawing circles of differing sizes-the bigger the circle the more important and influential the institution it represents. The extent of shared decisionmaking among groups can be represented by how circles are placed in relation to one another: the closer together and the more overlapping, the greater the degree of interaction between the represented groups. These graphics, sometimes called "chapati diagrams," have proved effective in identifying informal groupings that are important "safety nets" for the poorer members of the community and revealing that some of the more obvious organizations are actually quite weak.

Building on Traditional Structures

Many of the projects described in Chapter II worked through existing community organizations and are built on the already established, collaborative experience of these groups. The Nicaragua Municipal Development project, not described in this report, used existing local grassroots organizations-the Sandinista Defense Committees-formed during the Nicaragua Revolution. Because of their structure, motivation, and the cohesion of their members, they proved an extremely effective instrument for reaching and involving the local population. Their participation in civil works construction improved the rate of return, increased the quality of construction, and enhanced efficiency. The planned five-year project was completed in three and a half years. Even where new institutions are formed, they may be most successful if based on pre-existing relationships:

Establishing new groups and building on existing structures requires a good deal of groundwork to increase community awareness about the benefits of organizing to participate in project design and implementation. This preparation is often done by providing facilitators or "catalyst-organizers." These facilitators may be from the implementing agency or from an intermediary organization such as an NGO.

Federated Structures

Effective community action is rooted in local-level systems and is relatively small in scale, often averaging some fifteen to thirty households that are engaged in collective action. To keep authority and responsibility anchored at the local level while providing integration and learning among similar groups, a pattern of "bottom-up" integration emerges in many of the examples we reviewed. In Colombia's Community Child Care and Nutrition project, home-based institutes are administered through a three-tiered community structure. First, parents of children enrolled in ten to fifteen centers form a parents' association. Second, parents at each center elect three representatives to join a local assembly with thirty to forty-five members. Third, the assembly elects five parent representatives to serve as its board of directors. The parents' associations, through the board, manage the project funds and the local contributions from parents.

Potential Pitfalls

A common failure in working with local groups is to create the institutional structure without paying adequate attention to the capability, knowledge, and technical skills the groups will require. Newly established groups have failed because too much was expected of them too soon. Likewise, attempts to modify the form or function of existing groups to serve project needs does not always work.