dasra blog | Catalyst for social change

The last day of the exchange held the group together for evaluations, reflections and discussion on the future of community exchanges. Part of the partnership that AJWS and Dasra have built involves the support of these NGOs via community exchanges. These smaller, one on one, exchanges serve to bring two NGOs together, to learn specific things from one another. These exchanges operate on the fact that when people with practical experience share with others, it is often very beneficial.

Take for example, ROSE, the organization we visited with yesterday. Partly why their taskforce model has been so successful in spreading to other villages is because fishermen are teaching other fisherman in a language and way that these communities understand. Furthermore, ROSE itself learned about taskforces by another NGO from Andra Pradesh who came down to Tamil Nadu to facilitate a week of training for ROSE. Vana explained it best when he said “When you don’t have experience, you live in assumption, it’s not factual”.

Need based and already existing interventions can be improved upon through collaboration with other communities and/or NGOs. As one participant remarked, community exchanges are good because “people start to think beyond their community and realize that there exists resources that can help them”. However, attending a community exchange isn’t enough. To be beneficial, there must be follow up so exchanges must happen in a way that takes into consideration geography and community participation.

Bearing these facets in mind, each NGO came up with a list of other NGO’s it would like to meet later in the field and for what reasons. The next step for Dasra in this process will to be to set up these exchanges and hold the NGOs accountable to what they’ve asked to learn and implement.

Wrapping up the exchange, participants shared learnings from the week and evaluations. Participants were candid in their remarks and had a lot to share about what they had gained from the experience overall.

-Sharon

The last field visit of the exchange brought the group to the village of Vellakoil to meet with the beneficiaries of the Rural Organization for Social Education (ROSE). ROSE came to work with the fishermen communities in the region after realizing how the tsunami had so adversely affected the livelihoods’ of this large and vastly unorganized labor force. While ROSE primarily focuses on issues of labor rights, its work with communities throughout the region has expanded the scope of programs implemented.

One of these programs has been a task force in which ROSE has trained the particular community that we met with in how to respond in the event of another tsunami or similar time of crisis. The task force is broken up into 5 groups, each with its own objectives.This program involves the equal participation of men and women in addition to requiring the support of the community at l arge. Subsequently, this group has been going to other villages and training community members there on how to set up their own task forces.

The women in the group were clear on how ROSE not only was open and encouraging of the equal participation of all people in its programs but that it had also come to them at first, asking about their needs and expectations. The following example was given, of which largely illustrates the three phases discussed during the previous three days of the exchange. After the tsunami, ROSE came to this community and asked them what they needed. To which they replied that they needed nets. Together they discussed which types of nets were needed and how many. The community members were given the resources to buy the nets themselves and after some time, both parties met together to assess the quality, benefits or lack thereof of the purchased nets. Overall, the people we met with seemed overly positive about the ways in which ROSE has supported them. While it seems that ROSE had come into this community to implement only a few programs, the people have been so inspired or dare I say, empowered, that they have begun to implement their own ideas on how to improve their lives.

-Sharon

Day four of the exchange concentrated on, what I believe to be, the most talked about but least actively pursued and effectively measured aspect of social work- impact assessment. Over the last few days, we have emphasized the need to include community members in the planning and implementation phases of a program. When it comes to impact assessment, community participation is no less important than undergoing the process itself. It is during this phase that an NGO increases its accountability to its beneficiaries and its funders, realizes what the unintended consequences of a program are in addition to assessing areas of weakness or gaps that should be improved upon. Impact assessment can sometimes be a tedious if not bitter reality check if the planning and implementation have gone poorly and community participation has been at the minimum. Regardless if a program has been successful or not, this phase is an important process in which an NGO should scrutinize itself. Whether the NGO has achieved what it wanted and whether or not it has done the right things are among the questions that should be asked.

Framing the discussion of the day, were the following questions:

• During assessment of the project, why is it important to involve people?

• Have you involved people in the process of impact assessment so far?

• What are the challenges that you organization faces in involving people throughout this phase?

• How do you think you can involve people in assessing impact? How would you plan for this?

Participants talked about how only when community members are involved in this process, can an NGO truly get a sense of what has been done that affected their lives, whether it worked or not. While there were always be a gap between an NGO and the community it works in, the space between can always be shortened. Through impact assessment, an NGO can reframe its plans and rework its programs on the basis of community input to successfully encompass community needs and achieve programmatic aims. In undergoing this process, there are three indicators that help NGOs assess its impacts as pointed out by Dasra coworker, B.S. Vanarajan:

1. People’s conditions
2. People’s opinions
3. People’s long term perspectives

-Sharon

In the afternoon, the group visited with landless dalit (“untouchable”) women farmers in the village of Vellakoil. These women are working in partnership with Panchayath Raj Movement (PRM), an NGO that works to promote the rights of dalit, tenant and marginalized women through the restorative cultivation of tsunami affected lands by promoting sustainable agriculture practices.

Salt deposits left by the Tsunami made cultivation, in previously fertile lands, impossible. In its work, PRM has developed methods by which farmers in these areas can recondition their lands and sustain their livelihoods. The women farmers we met with had organized themselves into a self help group supported by PRM. PRM hopes that the partnership will help these women learn about their rights over their lands, their basic human rights in addition to coming to know about sustainable agriculture practices. In doing so, these women hope to economically lift themselves out of the marginalized position society has placed them in and become empowered to teach other farmers the tools they’ve learned. As one women farmer said “There’s hope for something better and we can do more for ourselves.”

The day concluded at the sea shore where participants took time to enjoy some chai, reflect on days prior and above all, enjoy themselves.

-Sharon