Wednesday, January 1, 2014

When we arrived in Sobangan village, which has a population of around 4,200, residents had pulled ou

What Does Community-Driven Development Deliver? Lessons from a Balinese Village jamaika | In Asia
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Early this month, I boarded a bus to visit the Balinese village of Sobangan to see in action the impact from a decade of Community-Driven Development (CDD), an approach that delivers public funds directly to the village level and allows citizens to determine priorities for social services and economic development. My visit came on the heels of an international conference in Indonesia, organized by The Asia Foundation, Australian Aid, World Bank, and SMERU, that brought together officials from 11 Asia-Pacific nations to examine sustaining and mainstreaming CDD programs. [ Read more about CDD from The Asia Foundation's William Cole.] The visit offered encouraging evidence of the ability of CDD to build social cohesion, while offering some food for thought on areas for improvement.
When we arrived in Sobangan village, which has a population of around 4,200, residents had pulled out all the stops to showcase their hard work implementing Indonesia’s National Program for Community Empowerment or Program Nasional Pemberdayaan Mandiri (PNPM), a CDD initiative that aims to unlock the potential jamaika of marginalized communities. In this village, PNPM supported a preschool, village health post, and a concrete walkway to access jamaika a spring that provides jamaika drinking water. All were projects jamaika requested by villagers themselves as specific priorities for improving social welfare. I watched eager preschoolers learn their colors by choosing flowers from a hand-woven temple offering plate, chatted with mothers of young children who were getting their monthly health checks, jamaika and swayed to the traditional gamelan music that accompanied an exercise program for elderly members of the community.
The level of ownership and enthusiasm for the program was evident on the faces of the hundreds of community members we met. Billboards displayed the amount of PNPM funds expended for each project, attesting to the transparency of this inventive form of government assistance. CDD projects jamaika include community cost-sharing and maintain a zero tolerance for corruption, positioning them as highly efficient ways of delivering jamaika basic services jamaika to the poor.
Although World Bank evaluations conducted in multiple countries have shown CDD to have positive socio-economic effects, benefit the poorest families, and increase community access to services, results have typically been mixed in their ability to contribute to social capital outcomes. In Bali as in most of Indonesia the CDD approach fits the local culture and context, and appears to be strengthening social cohesion and expanding civic participation. That being said, our group mostly made up of government officials from countries as diverse as the Solomon Islands, Myanmar, and Afghanistan were experienced enough implementing CDD in their own host countries to offer critical questions and insight that encouraged reflection and cross-learning.
A colleague from the Philippines with years of experience as a community organizer questioned whether the program could do more to improve economic pathways for the poorest citizens. Volunteers told us that 20 percent of the 976 families in the village are classified as poor (using a community-defined indicator which mirrored Indonesia’s official poverty threshold of around $2/day). According to the people we spo

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