Giving Compass' Take:
- Degan Ali, director of Nairobi-based Adeso, explains how to incorporate participatory, community-driven change in humanitarian aid work by empowering communities to drive their solutions forward.
- Ali believes that the participatory approach is just as useful as a systems approach to a problem. What are the key differences?
- Learn more about community philanthropy.
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Degan Ali is the director of Nairobi-based Adeso, an organization that’s trying to change the way people think about and deliver humanitarian aid. Adeso envisions an Africa not dependent on aid, but on the resourcefulness and capabilities of its people, with solutions driven and owned by local communities.
At Adeso, we’re trying to go back to the basics in terms of how aid is delivered—engaging with communities to design and evaluate programs. Communities should be the drivers of change themselves and evaluate the impact of the work we do. Aid organizations, development actors, humanitarian actors, even social entrepreneurs let the donor be the driver of the work rather than the communities and that’s what we are trying to change.
We engage in a very lengthy participatory process with the communities and that often means that you have unknown results—you don’t know where you are heading with the communities, but that’s the kind of flexibility that you need to have. If you have expectations about people’s needs without consulting them when you create programs, you often can’t deliver on what the actual needs are. It’s also about trying to really engage the communities so they understand what resources they need to bring to the table to let them to be the agents of change—to put the power back in their hands.
I think that a logical systematic approach to humanitarian aid is good, but a human-centered approach—sitting in a circle under a tree and listening—is equally valuable. As a sector, we care too much about results and aid delivery is very quick and time bound. We don’t give ourselves the opportunity to just sit and listen.
Because we constantly engaged with the local context, we as a small African organization, understood the communities and that the problem around droughts was a market issue.
Read the full article about participatory community-driven change by Degan Ali at Skoll Foundation.