Choosing the Right Leaders

One strategy used by several development projects to increase their self-sustainability is to choose the right leaders.

Many initiatives have realized that in order to make their projects more self-sustainable, working together with local leaders is key to help motivate and organize local community engagement. After all, community participation comes with opinions, points of view, knowledge and other resources that are valuable to the initiative because they can be leveraged to become less dependent on external resources, making projects more comprehensive and relevant to the local context. 

However, through their different experiences, several initiatives have noted that some leaders are more stable than others, either because of their socioeconomic status (adults migrate less than youth, women than men, etc.), because of the institution they represent (a public agency is more stable than a political party), or for other reasons. Moreover, not all members of a community have the same impact on others, nor are they all equally capable of leading the initiative’s different interventions. Therefore, when choosing local leaders to work with, many projects carefully assess who are the community members most capable of driving and sustaining the initiative’s objectives over time. 

But who the right leaders may be also depends on each project’s agenda. 

As part of their objectives, some initiatives want to promote more equitable conditions among the members of the communities they work with and, in order to set an example and break stigmas, they decide to give leadership roles to members who are traditionally discriminated against –such as the untouchables in India or women in male-dominated societies. In other cases, when the initiatives have an exit plan –that is, when they gear efforts towards creating conditions for beneficiary communities to eventually take control of their projects– what they need is someone who can follow up the initiative over time, so they identify the most stable members of the community. And projects that are looking to scale their initiative may choose leaders who already have leadership roles in the community in question (or good outside contacts, perhaps) because this can promote and disseminate the initiative’s work.