Community-driven development

Community-driven development (CDD) is a development initiative that provides control of the development process, resources and decision making authority directly to groups in the community. The underlying assumption of CDD projects are that communities are the best judges of how their lives and livelihoods can be improved and, if provided with adequate resources and information, they can organize themselves to provide for their immediate needs. CDD projects work by providing poor communities with direct funding for development with the communities then deciding how to spend the money. Lastly, the community plans and builds the project and takes responsibility for monitoring its progress. Community-driven development (CDD) is a development initiative that provides control of the development process, resources and decision making authority directly to groups in the community. The underlying assumption of CDD projects are that communities are the best judges of how their lives and livelihoods can be improved and, if provided with adequate resources and information, they can organize themselves to provide for their immediate needs. CDD projects work by providing poor communities with direct funding for development with the communities then deciding how to spend the money. Lastly, the community plans and builds the project and takes responsibility for monitoring its progress. CDD programmes are motivated by their trust in people (Naidoo and Finn, 2001) and hence it advocates people changing their own environment as a powerful force for development. By treating poor people as assets and partners in the development process, studies have shown that CDD is responsive to local demands, inclusive, and more cost-effective compared to centrally-led NGO-based programmes. CDD can also be supported by strengthening and financing community groups, facilitating community access to information, and promoting an enabling environment through policy and institutional reform (Dongier, 2002). Following from this description, field practitioners at the World Bank have denoted five key characteristics of CDD projects. Community-driven development is derived from community-based development (CBD) which can include a much broader range of projects. For example, CBD projects can include everything from simple information sharing to social, economic and political empowerment of community groups. However, CDD projects fit on the empowerment end of CBD by actively engaging beneficiaries in the design, management and implementation of projects. The stress on actual control of decision-making and project resources at nearly all stages of a subproject cycle distinguishes CDD from the previous generation of CBD projects. In this continuum of community participation covered by CBD, new-generation CDD projects are located at the extreme right (Tanaka, 2006). Since community-driven development has only recently diverged from the broad community-based development there are a few contrasts visible in the five characteristics of CDD programmes. In essence, all five properties of CDD projects exist together only in the newer generation of CDD implementations. Nevertheless, the first attribute of community focus would apply to all CDD projects and CBD projects. In contrast, the second characteristic of participatory planning and design and the fourth property of community involvement are often visible among all CDD projects but very rarely in CBD projects. Moreover, community-based monitoring and evaluation which is the fifth aspect of CDD projects is only found in some of the newer projects. The fifth characteristic is what positions many of the newer CDD projects in the extreme right of the CDD cluster as diagrammatically demonstrated in Figure 1. As mentioned above, the third characteristic of community control of resources seems to be the key factor to conceptually distinguish between CDD and CBD projects. However, many of the early NGOs implementing CDD projects did not always interpret this factor rigorously (Tanaka, 2006). Thus, the distinction between CDD projects and CBD projects with CDD components was not always clear; however, this would be expected since there was a gradual evolution of CDD out of CBD. To alleviate the earlier problems of over-reliance on central governments as the main service provider, CDD programs were launched by the World Bank to improve the accountability and services in key areas. However, NGOs quickly learned that well designed and implemented CDD programmes had ripple effects of promoting equity and inclusiveness, efficiency and good governance. By effectively targeting and including the vulnerable and excluded groups, as well as allowing communities to manage and control resources directly it was evident that CDD programs could allow poverty reduction projects to scale up quickly. Efficiency is gained through demand responsive allocation of resources, reduced corruption and misuse of resources, lower costs and better cost recovery, better quality and maintenance, greater utilization of resources, and the community‘s willingness to pay for goods and services. Good governance is promoted by greater transparency, accountability in allocation and use of resources because the community participates in project decision-making processes. Some of the principles of CDD—such as participation, empowerment, accountability, and nondiscrimination—are also worthy ends in themselves (Asian Development Bank, 2008). It was as early as 1881 when T.H. Green who wrote about the maximum power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves (Zakaria, 1999). However, it was not until the 1970s with John Rawls’ book ―A Theory of Justice and in the 1990s with Amartya Sen‘s book ―Development as Freedom where the notions of substantive freedom and the multidimensional nature of poverty were made explicit to the multilateral development banks. This recognition of the multidimensional nature of poverty as well as the combined failures of both markets and governments and the socio-political complexity of ground level realities has made it clear that relying on traditional top-down, state-led, ―big development‖ strategies would not be effective to combat poverty. Moreover, this resurgence in participatory development and bottom-up approaches in the NGO and development sector has come in only the last two decades as explained above. Since the mid-1990s, community-driven development has emerged as one of the fastest-growing investments by NGOs, aid organizations and multilateral developments banks. This continued investment in CDD has been driven mostly by a demand from donor agencies and developing countries for large-scale, bottom-up and demand-driven, poverty reduction subprojects that can increase the institutional capacity of small communities for self-development. The success and scale of some CDD projects in the World Bank are especially notable. The World Bank supported approximately 190 lending projects amounting to $9.3 billion in 2000–2005 (Tanaka, 2006). Initiated by the International Development Association (IDA) at the World Bank, CDD projects have been instrumental in harnessing the energy and capacity of communities for poverty reduction. Since the start of this decade, IDA lending for CDD has averaged annually just over 50 operations, for an average total of US$1.3 billion per year (International Development Association, 2009).