Empowering communities, and building their capacity means giving them a voice, an awareness that communities should have decision-making powers, and access to resources.
FCP’s Work on it:
FCP aims to work towards community empowerment by a three key faceted approach:
- Organizing and improving community participation – The participatory process allows communities to analyze and discuss their local situation systematically, identify community needs and implement action plans. Only communities know their local conditions and issues and are best placed to decide what their priorities are. The participatory process is inclusive of all the different social, and ethnic groups within a given community.
- Financing communities through matching grants – To develop local planning and resource allocation capacities, there must be a shift from earmarking to matching untied grants where communities have control over the funds. Untying matching grants does not mean giving money with no rules or conditions at all. On the contrary, it must be accompanied by guidelines to ensure wide local participation; promote transparency and accountability; prevent fraud and misuse; to avoid elite capture and social exclusion. The concept of matching grants implies that local communities will contribute part of the share of project costs. Good social accountability mechanisms accompanied by a strategic communication and information dissemination campaign is a prerequisite. Communities must be equipped with the information and knowledge required for them to actively participate and contribute towards the design and implementation of their development initiatives.
- Targeting interventions to ensure the participation of socially excluded sections – It is important to recognize that communities are not homogeneous, and targeting may be needed to reach normally excluded groups such as the poor, women, youth, elderly, handicapped, socially marginalized groups, and minorities.
Foundation for Climate Protection, a nonprofit organization. Our organization’s aim is to create a self-sustaining ecosystem where nature thrives and sustains life while making the biosphere less vulnerable and minimizing the effects of human-induced activities.