3-Comprehensive Solutions

Several development initiatives create and promote socially, environmentally and economically comprehensive solutions in order to strengthen their capacity for self-sustainability.

If a development initiative or project neglects any aspect of a community’s life –such as its geography, customs or the health of its members– people may not be able to take full advantage of whatever service, opportunity or facility the initiative has to offer. To achieve more sustainable development, initiatives often find that a holistic approach works better than isolated interventions.

A common problem is that donors tend to have very specific objectives and often set relatively strict rules on how money must be managed: if a donor sponsors an environmental technology, for example, it is not always easy to channel part of those funds to the education and training of those who will actually use the technology. 

As a result, many development initiatives or projects have to work piecemeal –focusing on one aspect of people’s lives at a time– even in cases where the best way to make their project more sustainable would be to work holistically.

What we can learn from initiatives on site, however, is that many of them have managed to find strategies to make their interventions increasingly comprehensive. In this way, they address problems in a systemic way, that is, taking into account different interrelated aspects. Collaborations with other initiatives seem to be useful to deliver integrated services, and some projects link their different development programs together to be able to distribute their funds, as well as their human and material resources in a more flexible way. 

The more you are aware of the factors that are diminishing the self-sustainability of your project, the better you will be able to tackle and solve them in the long-term. How clear is your initiative about who your target population is and what their context, interests and needs are? What mechanisms does your initiative have in place to identify all the factors that affect the development problem you are working with (economic, nutritional, social or cultural)? How comprehensively does your project address these problems? What changes could you make in this regard?