NAC has created a community-driven development approach, partnering with grassroots organizations, involving a broad range of actors to avoid elite capture and ensure greater sustainability.
Afghanistan is rated by the OECD as the 3rd most fragile state in the world. The UN estimates that 97 percent of the population lives in poverty and 20 million are facing food insecurity and hunger. In the absence of a functional state, sustainable development has proven difficult, and local communities are left with the responsibility to manage their own development. This fact informs all NAC programming, putting communities in the driver’s seat.
Engaging whole communities
A typical community-driven project would involve the local communities approaching NAC with a request. Then a commission consisting of appointed members of the community who supervise the project from beginning to end on a voluntary basis would be created. Projects often involve a cash-for-work component, providing job opportunities for community members. Projects that are implemented by local communities using local materials and know-how are cost efficient as well as sustainable.
Dialogue and conflict transformation is a core element in community-driven development projects. Access to resources such as water and arable land can often be a source of conflict within local communities. Through dialogue, community members come together to explore the root cause of these conflicts and identify solutions.
NAC as a source of learning
CMI conducted a review of several other organizations working in Afghanistan, one of them being NAC. Their report on Norwegian-funded community-driven development or community-based projects in Afghanistan discusses the concepts of community-driven or community-led approaches. Ideally, such processes would involve the community in all stages of a project, including setting goals, identifying target groups, prioritizing sub-projects and budgets, monitoring implementation and evaluating the results. Usually, this is ensured through the involvement of community development councils (CDCs).
Comparing the approaches of a selection of NGOs working in Afghanistan, CMI concluded that NAC has taken this approach beyond CDC involvement by also partnering with community development committees, village and school shuras, water management and rangeland committees, farmer associations, and youth, women and child-led organizations. In this way, elite capture is avoided, and greater sustainability ensured. These partnerships are formalized in memorandums of understanding and community contracts.
This broad inclusion led CMI to conclude that the NAC way of working is a useful source of learning for other organizations working in Afghanistan. The credit goes to the Afghan communities, who time and again prove that donor funding only takes you so far, and that their future lies firmly in their own hands.
