Whenever we
go through the different facets of communities and its development, we
acknowledge that every effort to bring community together for collective action
is neither great nor insignificant. In this week readings, we have drawn many
lessons, but one lesson is clearly coming out from these readings that there
are two theoretical aspects; one contains the idea of encouraging the technical
intervention, in which, ICTs, organization, management, professional human
resources are considered as important ingredients for involving and helping
people in decision making. While other facet underlines the significance of
learning, reflection, local knowledge, involvement, information, knowledge as a
sequence of building local organization.
In reality, these two different theoretical
aspects of community involvement and development are neither exclusive, but can
work effectively in combination. Readings of this class covers both social and
technical aspect of community involvement at organizational level and show that
there are web of methodologies and directions, which enable us to ‘unlearn’
what we have learned for addressing the issue of community development in
effective ways.
Community is
not a well developed structure but a conglomeration of natural, social economic
diversity and also diverse group of human beings, and they have their own
experience, knowledge, learning and acculturation process. In the similar
manner, the outsider understanding about the community is also based on his or
her interaction, where he or she gets educated, worked and what he or she is
intended to do? Robert Chamber has tried to capture the reality on the basis of
biases, which impediment the development process. In fact, Chamber’s idea of
biases is also not free from ‘stereotyped presentation’ of actors and actions.
For example, rural development is not an easy area, where merely increasing the
agriculture productivity would not able to solve the entire problem. The
biggest challenge of rural development is generalization and mainstreaming with
macro perspective. The lack of comprehensive planning, long term perspective
and monitoring mechanism also make this problematic further.
In fact, rural development demands target
oriented efforts, context specific intervention and consistent capacity
building and training program for both implementing agencies and stakeholders
(rural people, including women and youths). Breaking stereotyped and go away
from the different set of biases is quite challenging at both organizational and
individual level, but not impossible. The effort of many organizations has
addressed these issues effectively.
Robert Chamber
coins “rural development tourism” and argues that the urban based educated
professionals want to get to know and experience about the rural condition and
about the rural people within the short span of visiting time in the rural
areas. On the basis of this short term interaction, they are intended to develop
‘effective strategy’ for inclusive development of people. Chamber believes that
development procedure and development practice is not the same concept, former
is related with ‘things’ and later is related ‘people’. Chamber believes that
every methodology, which encourages people participation, should be fragile in
nature, so we would able to recognize and integrate the innovation and
creativity of local people. He has cited many important methodologies such as
PRA, RRA, ILS etc, which are still evolving and developing whenever these are
practiced with the local people.
Ensuring
involvement of people and their participation, there is need to be evolved a
kind of organization at local level, which would create enabling environment to
establish synergy with the ‘product’ and ‘people’. This coordination between
both, product and people’ is significant and this allows envisioning future
course of action and replication. What I believe that every organizational
efforts of community development at local level have its own valid points,
because nature of developmental issues are quite complex and there is no black
and white kind of solution available. I agree that an effective coordination
between these organizational efforts is possible, when local people recognize
the challenges and build their own network at local level.
In many
successful case studies, this has been acknowledged that vertical nature of
organization at local level have played vital role in bringing the community
together and also enabled the community to build effective communication
channel for better result. In vertical organization, the scope of learning and
reflection is high and encourage every member to share themselves. The
philosophy of participation and its value are core issue, and the local
organization helps in creating the enabling environment to ensure participation
of everyone. Again, the nature of participation and its social dynamics depend
upon deepening the value system of local organization, because ensuring the
participation of everyone at local level is complex issue. This can be resolved
if the organization recognizes the different layers of ‘local knowledge’,
considering this for building the development planning and program.
The local
organization or any kind of organization is not a single entity and even in the
successful cases (Gal Oya, NDDB, SANASA, Grameen), this has been recognized
that the term of reference of these organizations not predefined and preplanned,
but managerial functioning of the organization has been both evolved and
devolved through a process of local participation, building people capacity and
creating right kind of environment to ensure active participation for
collective action and most important was the coordination between local leaders
with the people. Building human resources for the local organization is an easy
task. A different range of training programs and exposure with diverse nature
of methodologies are required for sustaining the organizational effort. For
building capacity of participants and staffs, organization recognizes
technology is important assets. This recognition is called as “improved
hardware”. However, the utility of technology in problem solving at
organization level is crucial and helps in record keeping and monitoring the
resources at lower level. The technology does not help significantly in
improving living standard of local people and also not able to address the real
issue of development effective, because the technology is guiding force not the
guiding principle for the community development.
Here, we have
to recognize that digital divide is quite prevalent in every community and
within the organization. The ICT is a kind of value addition in the existing
system of local organization and people participation in decision making
process. ICT is not panacea but this is playing a vital role in bridging the
divide between the information sharing mechanisms, functioning of the
organizational offices and also creating a culture of transparency and
accountability.
The world is
not flat in real sense, but in virtual sense and macro level, the world is
connected to each other. The important point is here that does ICT help in building
knowledge about community development or poverty alleviation or share the
information, which is filled from the external source? Chamber already has
raised questions over the intention of external sources. Many rural development
projects have been successfully implemented, when the process to involve the
people is integrated to build their own rules and regulation for the
functioning of local organization. There are three main critics of technology
as followed. Technology cannot be used at local level without minimum level of
operational infrastructure and functional literacy. Second, the digital divide
is widely prevalent and third is that a special kind of training methodology is
required for building the capacity and capability of people.
Both cases in
today class provide convincing evidences that people matters and they lie in
the centre of development process. But the importance of other centrifugal
forces and instruments such as local organization, management, training and
development. Human resources etc assist the circle to move smoothly. The best
of agriculture program in Guatemala was that the program recognized those
techniques, which were able to produced ‘visible success’, therefore, the
program involved those kind of equipments which were comfortable to be used by
the people. As Schumacher has called this as ‘intermediate technology’ (in his
book, Small is Beautiful).
In last, this
is not easy to provide a set of management and technological tools, which can
create wonder, but the effective utilization of these tools can produce wonderful
result. The utilization of these tools is based on the skills enhancement and
building capacity of local people and staffs. The propensity of technology is
not sustainable in nature; therefore, to enable the local organization as
technologically viable is also not a sustainable future. In this scenario, the
program and project, which builds human capacity and involve them collectively
to resolve the basic problem provides blueprint for the development and
management of local organization. In last, the unlearning should also be
encouraged for deepening the idea of participation and involvement of local
people and to distinguish about the information and knowledge. Gathering
information is not true meaning of knowledge.
