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What we do?
Before speaking of activities, it is good to mention some principles of participation that we follow in order to be successful. Our good Finnish Red Cross colleague in Tajikistan has tried to put together a set of
guiding principles for conducting PCD. They come from own experience and experience taken from others. Take a look, they well describe what rules we have to follow when we run a PCD
project. However a few words more could be of help...
The grounds of participation require that all stakeholders are involved. The main stakeholder is the target group of our intervention - the vulnerable community. It is obvious that communities who are not well organized, are more vulnerable - meaning all people are suffering (those needs are various and will not be mentioned here), but those who by various reasons are the most vulnerable groups among them, suffer more. The most affected are the vulnerable ones, because they have less resources to cope with challenges and changes. They are the forgotten ones, because they do not have power to defend their interests - like the retired people for example. Who remembers the retired when it comes to social reforms? Who has most influence in making reforms? What ways do these people have to influence the decision makers? And many more questions of this type... (Note: This could be different to some extent in the developed countries but here we refer to our region.) So the whole communities are target, but the main target are the most vulnerable in the communities. They have to take an active part in the community development process at any cost. Or better not to start...
There are basic principles, developed by organizations during the years. You can find in the "Other tools"
section some materials written by organizations with much longer professional experience in this field. And among our experience is the guiding principle that everyone in community
should participate. Another one, and that is a Red Cross/Red Crescent principle - that nobody is alone and people should support each-other, in a community or even internationally.
Another one says that we - the Red Cross/Red Crescent people should protect the vulnerable when it comes to clashes with someone with higher authority (and this happens when we try to
give the voice to the vulnerable).
What we do then? We run a community based project cycle, in a participatory way, involving the target groups and all other stakeholders in the field. While making these steps and solving community problems at the end of the cycle (by implementing commnity micro-projects), we are aiming at building skills and capacity within the vulnerable communities. Those capacities are related to knowledge, establishment of partnerships with more powerful local stakeholders, but also to eliminating the various predjudices to concrete vulnerable groups among the general public, authorities and sometimes, among our own local organizations. And the idea behing is to transfer the initiative to the vulnerable, to transform beneficiaries into partners. And meanwhile, many local problems are being solved by the people with support of the other stakeholders. |
About us and PCD
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