6-Local Ownership

Several development initiatives promote local participation in order to strengthen their capacity for self-sustainability.

Many projects have come to the conclusion that it is crucial for them to work in tandem with the communities that are meant to benefit from their programs. They believe that people should have the right and responsibility to express what is important to them and participate in their own development and in the solution to their problems. What’s more, these projects realize that beneficiaries have the best understanding of the different factors affecting the problems to be addressed, the local resources that can be used to address them, and what the project may be lacking in order to be more comprehensive. 

Beneficiary participation is also helpful to reduce dependence on external support, because people in the community can help diversify the sources of support for the initiative by lending space to organize activities, offering volunteer work, etc.

Encouraging the participation of the different people affected by the project can be difficult, but the benefits are important because this increases transparency in the decision-making processes, provides a more comprehensive and broader vision of the life of the community benefited by the initiative, balances global and local needs, and fosters local ownership of the projects which can work in favor of their long-term continuity. 

Several initiatives achieve this by showing the concrete ways in which community members can contribute and participate, clearly distributing roles and responsibilities within the project, setting up feedback mechanisms or participatory dynamics designed to define objectives and priorities, or specifically coming up with techniques to encourage cooperation and ensure that there is some local stewardship over the project. 

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. Do you take the different points of view of those affected by your initiative into account? Could you perhaps include more perspectives? Do local people participate in your project? Are they organized? Are you clearly communicating the ways in which the local community could participate in your development programs? What actions, events, structures, organizations or dynamics can you encourage to promote local participation?