Service delivery
Capacity building
Advocacy
Social mobilisation
Comm. Dev. J., Vol.31, No.3, July 1996.
CLAUDIO SCHUFTAN
schuftan@gmail.com
In service delivery, empowering means…
In capacity building, empowering means…
In advocacy, empowering means…
In social mobilisation, empowering means…
It is not easy to say what is really empowering in community development work. Any attempted operational definition will (always) carry a certain bias depending on the conceptual glasses one is wearing. What is clear is that -in a mostly zero-sum game- the empowerment of some, most of the time, entails the disempowerment of others -usually the current holders of power.
Moreover, different local contexts may make the same action(s) sometimes empowering, other times not. Also, empowering people in community development work may sometimes be dangerous; it can well trigger repressive actions by the authorities.
Empowerment is not an outcome of a single event; it is a continuous process that enables people to understand, upgrade and use their capacity to better control and gain power over their own lives. It provides people with choices and the ability to choose, as well as to gain more control over resources they need to improve their condition. It expands the ‘political space’ within which Assessment-Analysis-Action processes operate in any community.
What follows is a rough taxonomy of what to look for in the well established community development approaches of Service Delivery, Capacity Building, Advocacy and Social Mobilisation when assessing the degree to which they (can) really empower people -as seen through the glasses of the author.
The tables below are, therefore, not checklists, they are primers; they are illustrative rather than definitive; they will have to be adapted to each individual situation being appraised and can be amended and used as needed. They apply mostly to a Third World type of setting.
Within each of the four development approaches covered, actions are listed in no particular order. As can also be seen, several actions are relevant as a means of empowerment in more than one of the four approaches.
Service delivery:
“Service delivery can be characterised as the approach to community development that addresses actions directly related to immediate causes of maldevelopment; it provides a usually structured set of services to defined beneficiaries. Service delivery is most often sectoral, e.g. health, education, agriculture, other -and per-se tends not to be very sustainable.”
In the delivery of services, empowering means, or is, or are actions that tend towards:
– Providing services in a gender sensitive + culture sensitive way.
– Using existing local human resources whenever possible.
– Most people in the community understand the rationale behind the services being offered.
– Community representatives participate in making decisions about the services being delivered.
– Training of staff is mostly competence-based, in-service, aimed at behavioural change and followed by regular support supervision.
– People cease to be passive recipients of services delivered by government and others; they demand a role of responsibility for themselves, especially in determining the type, quality, quantity, place and focus of such services; they take part in both the decision-making process and in the delivery mechanisms.
– Assuring a continuous flow of information between the providers and the end users of services enabling the latter to be equal partners in the planning, delivery, management and evaluation of those services.
Capacity building:
“Capacity building can be characterised as the approach to community development that raises people’s knowledge, awareness and skills to use their own capacity and that from available support systems to resolve the more underlying causes of maldevelopment; capacity building helps them better understand the decision-making process; to communicate more effectively at different levels; and to take decisions, eventually instilling in them a sense of confidence to manage their own destinies. Capacity building strengthens the Assessment-Analysis-Action process in the community and, therefore, leads to more sustainability”.
In capacity building, empowering means, or is, or are actions that tend towards:
– Enabling individuals/families/communities/organisations (through information, training and organisation) to continuously upgrade their ability to know, analyse and understand their situation and their problems.
– Coming up with a shared Conceptual Framework of the causes of the problem(s) at hand.
– Exposing people to relevant information, especially about the real underlying and basic causes behind their problems, so as to change their perceptions. (Includes warning people about ‘misinformation’ they are exposed to and replacing it).
– Raising people’s consciousness to legitimise their claims. (i.e. aiming training at behavioural change).
– Changing people’s perception of their potentials to forge a new reality.
– Investing in human resources development.
– Increasing people’s awareness of what is permissible and fair to do.
– Building growing constituencies for people’s rights-based strategies.
– Using explicit Assessment-Analysis-Action processes and capacitating people in their use and practice (i.e., people themselves collecting, interpreting and using information for action).
– Emphasizing the provision of skills that lead to community ownership of the interventions undertaken.
– Giving high priority to literacy, especially for girls and women.
– Boosting women’s negotiation capabilities, as well as their skills and confidence. Capacity building is culture sensitive and cognisant of women’s needs.
– Raising consciousness about the natural environment.
– Emphasizing the training of local leaders, teaching them to carry out social and political mappings that point to the current structure of control of resources, as well as to carry out decision audits of who currently makes what decisions about what.
– Training community animators/validators as local strategic allies to introduce new ideas.
– Preparing people to act on the determinants of their surrounding reality so they can press-on with needed advocacy and effective lobbying.
– Effecting changes in personal habits and practices and giving people a better income capacity and access to available support systems.
– Building the mental infrastructure for social mobilisation.
Advocacy:
“Advocacy can be characterised as the community development approach that sets in motion the dynamic process of developing concensus and a mandate for action. It brings together like-minded allies with a common goal.”
In advocacy, empowering means, or is, or are actions that tend towards:
– Convincing and persuading people.
– Increasing people’s demand for, access to and utilisation of services (e.g.,health, education) and their access to the means of production.
– Emphasizing work towards the eradication of poverty. (Empowerment implies a reduction of, at least, extreme poverty).
– Increasing household disposable income including actions that create new employment opportunities, democratise access to credit and set up income generation activities for women.
– Fostering actions that decrease the workload of women and give them options for birth spacing.
– Promoting the shifting of the explicit control of resources more to women.
– Promoting a more local control of resources. Striving for more equity, economic justice and fairness and aiming at decreasing the skewedness in the distribution of income and wealth.
– Addressing social and tribal or caste issues.
– Promoting all elements and means of sustainable development.
– Influencing community development-related actions by assuring active people’s participation in informed decision-making and by focusing more on what is possible and doable, and particularly on how it can be done.
– Raising people’s consciousness about what their rights are and translating them into specific claims.
– Improving the access of end-users and facilitators to reliable community development-related information.
Social mobilisation:
“Social mobilisation can be characterised as the community development approach that gets people actively involved in development Assessment-Analysis-Action processes that address the more basic causes of maldevelopment in an effort to increase their power base; it engages them in actions to fight for their rights and to gain more control over the resources they need. Social mobilisation aims at mobilising resources, placing concrete demands, networking, building coalitions and consolidating sustainable social movements.”
In social mobilisation, empowering means, or is, or are actions that tend towards:
– Articulating people’s felt needs into concrete demands and these into claims so they can ultimately better fight for their rights.(i.e., mobilisation of their social power).
– Mobilising people’s own and other identified needed resources including those not previously used.
– Exerting an effective demand for resources other than those readily available.
– Organising people’s actions to effectively use and progressively control external resources.(leading to a consolidation of a new and growing power base).
– Networking with others, striving for achieving a critical mass of concerned people (locally and externally), and building coalitions.(i.e., expanding the power base through solidarity).
– Operating in complete Assessment-Analysis-Action cycles, thus collectively identifying problems, searching for solutions and implementing them to, then, assess their impact…and so on.
– Giving people power over decisions thus increasing their self-esteem and self-confidence.
– Increasing local democracy with people (especially women) participating more actively in local government.
– Decentralising decision-making, including shifting control of finances to the local sphere. (i.e., devolution of power).
– Working proactively and concertedly with all strategic allies.
Claudio Schuftan MD
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.