MEANING OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION
It’s a process of involving community to participate in project initiation decision making, planning, implementation, benefit sharing and evaluation all of giving the community to action the phase of project.
IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION
- It makes the community members to understand their own problems and find ways of solving them.
- Enable the members to take care of their project
- Introduce them to the management of their project
- Enable members to do monitoring and evaluation of their project
- Members will ensure sustainability of project and claim total project.
- To enable members to identify other project as a result of original one.
Process of involving community in project development and management
- The social worker should be sensitive to the culture of the people get their supply and resources and how they solve.
- Identify leaders and know each other. They include chief, church leaders, group leaders etc.
- Identify the stakeholders and group i.e. those managing and supporting the projects and those to benefit from it.
- Utilize the influential people in the community whether they are leaders or not.
- Choose a method for electing committee members to ensure good representation of the community in the management_ committee which oversee the act of the project.
- The leaders and committee should be trained
- Train the leaders using known outsiders on the subject matter.
- The social worker should know how to set achievable goals and objectives.
- The social worker should develop a method of avoiding conflict by analyzing their cause people involved e.t.c. He or she should not make so to avoid conflict so that people can play a new role without conflict.
In order to plan with the people involve all the project activities penetrate to the community through youth groups, opinion leaders and individuals
These people should act as the representative come together and brainstorm to give out their ideas at random. At the end of the meeting all the ideas should be to them each can take the message to his/her people.
The committee then should put all the mentioned activities in order and read to the forum how they will be performed in order of priority.
The forum will be responded by discussing, proposing and passing it to people concerned i.e. the community member
Areas where the community can participate problem identification
- Problem Identification
The community members are the one who identifies the problem in the community leaders for the problem to be solved.
- Project selection
The community are the one to identify the feasibility or the assessment of the project survival and the economic and social worthiness of the project, and the technical requirement.
- Planning for activities
Because the community awareness of the resources available, in the community, they help in planning on the ways of getting the resources to be used in the continuation of the project.
- Project implementation
The community can assist in allocation of resources, organizing on ways of getting the resource, controlling, directing, and record and record keeping
- Monitoring and evaluation
The community helps in monitoring the progress of the project and also judge the value of the achieved results and the affectivities and management of the project
