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A community-driven development approach to fighting rural poverty

What is community-driven development?

Efforts to reduce rural poverty in the past tended to focus on increasing the income and food security of rural poor people. Increasingly, there has been a greater emphasis on the human and social factors that cause poverty. This broader understanding of the factors affecting poverty in rural areas has been reflected in many IFAD projects since the mid-1990s. Project design has stressed peoples’ participation and empowerment, enhanced social capital, demand-driven development and a community-driven development approach.

Community-driven development (CDD) involves a degree of devolution of responsibility to communities for managing their development, including the design and implementation of projects. This requires that the communities themselves have the capacity to assume responsibility. It also requires a culture of public administration that views communities as development partners in their own right, rather than as simply recipients of benefits through public expenditure. The extent to which communities can shape their own development priorities within a project context defines the extent to which the project is applying a community-driven development approach.

The CDD approach

Community-driven development is a way to manage development, including the design and implementation of policies and projects, that facilitates access by poor rural people to social human and physical capital. CDD achieves this by creating the conditions for:

• Enabling community organizations to play a broader role in the design and implementation of policies and programmes aimed at improving the livelihood of community members, particularly of the poor and marginalized people within those communities
• Changing the organizational culture of the agents working for rural development and rural poverty reduction, and diversifying and shifting the power configuration that confronts rural communities in matters related to the communities’ own socio-economic development
• Emphasizing the importance of good local governance through a commitment to a long-term capacity-building processes
• Maximizing the impact of public expenditure on the local economy at community level

This approach emphasizes that CDD refers to the way a policy or a project is designed and implemented, not to the content of a policy or project component. It is concerned with community-based civil society and private sector organizations and with decentralization.

Source: IFAD