Community engagement for inclusive rural transformation and gender equality
Community engagement is now recognized as a critical component of international development practice and humanitarian assistance. It facilitates agency and the empowerment of all social groups in rural communities, enhances local participation, sustainability and ownership, and builds upon local resources and capacities, thereby leaving no one behind.
Recognizing the importance of community engagement as a key factor in achieving a world free from hunger and poverty, and as a prerequisite for community-led collective action, FAO organized a series of five webinars between 2020 and 2021 titled ‘Community Engagement Days.’[1] This created a space for academics, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development and humanitarian agencies and field development practitioners to come together to explore the concept of community engagement, exchange experiences and good practices as well as challenges and opportunities to bring these approaches at scale.
The webinars provided an opportunity to share research and field experiences across five interlinked themes (gender, resilience, peace, evidence, and collective action), encouraging reflection and dialogue on community engagement strategies, practices and approaches. Nearly 1,000 participants from NGOs, governments, the United Nations (UN), international development organizations, civil society, the private sector, and academia joined the series.
Based on these conversations it became clear that while multiple definitions of community engagement exist – and there is no “one size fits all” – these definitions do share common approaches (community-led, rights-based, gender-responsive/gender-transformative); principles (inclusive, participatory and people-centered, conflict-sensitive) and characteristics (contextual and adaptive, and empowering). The key outcomes of the webinars highlighted the importance of recognizing and challenging power dynamics, integrating reflexivity in research and implementation, prioritizing gender equality, fostering resilience and peace, and supporting collective action. Furthermore, the need for systematic knowledge sharing and creating spaces for ongoing dialogue and peer-to peer learning was emphasized to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of community-driven initiatives.
The Community Engagement Days webinar series was not a standalone initiative but a platform for discussion aimed at exchanging experiences, forging innovative alliances and partnerships to highlight the value of community engagement in both development and humanitarian contexts.
Given the scope of the series, the shared experiences were just a snapshot of existing approaches and practices. To provide an opportunity to expand the audience and hear voices from a variety of actors, the Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division of FAO (ESP) initiated this call for submissions and invites stakeholders to share their experiences, good practices and views on community engagement for inclusive rural transformation and gender equality.[2]
This call for submissions is open to individuals and organizations from both the development and humanitarian sectors who have experience implementing community engagement strategies, interventions, approaches/methodologies, or innovations. It also welcomes contributions from a wide range of sectors, including agriculture, education, health, sanitation, civic engagement and others critical to inclusive rural development.
Through this initiative, FAO is eager to hear more, learn, and exchange insights both internally and externally on what interventions and practices have worked and what can be improved in community engagement and community-led collective action to achieve inclusive rural transformation and gender equality. By capturing a diverse range of contributions, FAO aims to promote the adoption and scaling-up of community engagement approaches, address barriers to their implementation and refine these practices to make them more inclusive, effective, and sustainable.
| Please use the submission template in any of the three languages (English, French or Spanish). The background document can serve as a reference for completing the template for submissions. |
The submissions will be publicly available on this webpage and featured in the proceedings report of this call, enhancing the visibility of participants' work and fostering learning, inspiration, and networking among a broader audience. Depending on the relevance and content, FAO may also include contributions in knowledge products such as case studies, compendiums, and reports, and use them to inform its work on community engagement and collective action, with due acknowledgment of the contributions. Beyond this call, the initiative offers participants the potential for continued engagement and collaboration, laying the groundwork for further learning, networking, and community-building.
Criteria for submissions
We are looking for ‘good practices’—tested methods that have proven successful in multiple settings and can be widely adopted. We also consider ‘promising practices’—innovative approaches that have shown success in a specific context and have the potential for broader application but may need more evidence or replication. Both types contribute valuable insights for continuous learning and improvement.
To ensure that relevant experiences are captured, we are looking for practices with the following criteria:
| 1. | Engagement of the community: Interventions should deliberately and actively strive to engage a wide range of segments and groups within the community to ensure inclusivity and broad-based participation, fostering a sense of ownership and collective empowerment among all community members, this should in turn strengthen community-led collective action. This means that they should go beyond merely targeting specific groups or formal structures, such as community-based organizations (farmer organizations, cooperatives, and self-help groups) as entry points. Instead, they should engage diverse groups within the community, fostering inclusivity, collective participation and shared benefits. These interventions promote a collective added value where everyone at the community level, regardless of their direct involvement, can benefit. Ideally, the community itself should be the primary entry point for the intervention, though approaches that indirectly impact the wider community are also welcome if they emphasize community value. Additionally, community-wide interventions do emphasize the participation of groups that are typically left behind. While these interventions are designed to be open to everyone, they are strategically inclusive by deliberately creating spaces and opportunities for marginalized or underserved groups to participate. |
| 2. | Inclusive and gender-responsive/transformative: The intervention should prioritize inclusivity, ensuring active engagement from all segments of the community, regardless of age, ethnicity, disability, gender identity/expression, etc. These efforts acknowledge that gender intersects with various social dimensions and identities, including age, ethnicity, indigeneity, health, psychological resilience, disability, socioeconomic and political status or other characteristics. This intersectionality creates compound inequalities and layers of disadvantage and privilege that the interventions aim to address, promoting greater inclusivity, equality, gender transformative change and positive masculinities.[3] This also involves challenging discriminatory gender social norms and unequal power dynamics and fostering attitudes and behaviors that support gender equality and women’s empowerment. |
| 3. | Rights-based and empowering: The intervention should aim for a process of change over an extended period, rather than relying on short-term or one-off activities such as workshops, trainings or consultations. It should adopt a rights-based approach[4], grounded in the principles of participation, inclusion, accountability, non-discrimination, transparency, human dignity, empowerment and agency. The intervention should position itself at the highest levels of participation (see Figure 1 below), promoting tailored and sustained engagement to achieve long-term impact. By enabling marginalized groups to influence decision-making and enhancing the capacity of individuals as rights holders to know and claim their rights, as well as ensuring that states and public authorities, as duty bearers, fulfill their obligations, accountability, impact, and sustainability can be strengthened. By recognizing and redressing structural inequalities, and by fostering the exchange and development of skills, knowledge, and confidence, community engagement enhances both practical abilities and inner resilience, ultimately contributing to sustainable development. |
| 4. | Self-facilitation and/or participatory facilitation: As a continuous and participatory process the intervention/experience can be self-facilitated by local actors from the outset, embodying bottom-up leadership, or it can be guided by an external facilitator who works closely with the community. The facilitation is focused on enhancing local stakeholders’ empowerment and ensuring their ownership and agency throughout the intervention and beyond (post-project), adopting a forward-looking approach. If the intervention is externally facilitated, facilitators should guide a participatory process that promotes community ownership and autonomy, allowing the intervention to be sustained independently after the project's conclusion. The most effective intervention facilitates the empowerment of the community to take full control, delegating authority, ensuring long-term impact. |
| 5. | Proven implementation: The intervention should either have been implemented or still be ongoing, and should incorporate learning processes throughout its execution. This includes lessons learned and results that can be shared or documented through this call. This knowledge can be generated in various ways, including local and generational knowledge, storytelling, and formal studies or evaluations. The intervention should showcase positive outcomes and lessons learned as well as challenges identified through both traditional and participatory methods. |
While FAO is particularly interested in approaches that specifically meet these criteria, we also recognize the value of methods used at specific phases of an intervention to ensure community engagement. This includes approaches for design and delivery processes or tools used for monitoring, evaluation and learning. Although the call acknowledges that meaningful engagement requires a participatory lens embedded throughout the entire planning and project cycle for higher outcomes and ownership, it is open to learning about tools and methods that support these goals at specific stages of an intervention/project.
Figure 1 Adapted from Pretty (1995), Arnstein (1969), International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), and White (1996). Figure 1 depicts various types of community participation, reflecting different levels of engagement in development interventions at community level. The progression goes from lower to higher levels of community engagement, but it does not prescribe a linear or hierarchical path. Instead, the figure offers a range of possible approaches to facilitate participation, tailored to the specific context and objectives of the intervention. As engagement deepens—from simply providing information to transferring decision-making power to the community— the community’s sense of empowerment and ownership over the process grows. Greater levels of engagement foster collective action, enhance accountability, and enable the community to take the lead in shaping their own development.
The call for submissions is open until 13 December 2024.
We thank participants in advance and look forward to learning from you!
Conveners:
- Lauren Phillips, Deputy Director, FAO - Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division (ESP)
- Adriano Campolina, Senior Policy Officer, FAO - Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division (ESP)
Co-facilitators:
- Christiane Monsieur, Project Coordinator, FAO - Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division (ESP)
- Andrea Sánchez Enciso, Gender and Community Engagement Specialist, FAO - Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division (ESP)
How to take part in this call for submissions:
To take part in this Call for submissions, please register to the FSN Forum, if you are not yet a member, or “sign in” to your account. Please review the topic note to understand the criteria we are considering for this call. If you wish to learn more about community engagement, you may refer to the background document. Once you have completed the submission template, upload it in the box “Post your contribution” on the call webpage, or, alternatively, send it to [email protected].
Please keep the length of submissions limited to 1,500 words and feel also free to attach relevant supporting materials.
[1] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2021, March 3). Tapping into community engagement for empowerment. FAO Flexible Multi-Partner Mechanism. https://www.fao.org/flexible-multipartner-mechanism/news/news-detail/en/c/1378190
[2] The call for submissions is directly aligned with the thematic components of collective action within FAO's Programme Priority Areas (PPAs), specifically Better Life 1 (Gender Equality and Rural Women’s Empowerment), Better Life 2 (Inclusive Rural Transformation) and Better Life 3 (Agriculture and Food Emergencies).
[3] A gender-transformative approach “seeks to actively examine, challenge and transform the underlying causes of gender inequalities rooted in discriminatory social institutions. As such, a gender transformative approach aims to address the unequal gendered power relations and discriminatory gender norms, attitudes, behaviours and practices, as well as discriminatory or gender-blind policies and laws, that create and perpetuate gender inequalities.” FAO, IFAD, WFP & CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform. 2023. Guidelines for measuring gender transformative change in the context of food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture. Rome, FAO, IFAD, WFP and CGIAR. https://doi.org/10.4060/cc7940en
[4] A rights-based approach to community engagement emphasizes the fundamental human rights of all individuals, ensuring equal opportunities for everyone to claim and enjoy their human rights. Central to this is agency, the ability of individuals to define their own goals and act upon them. By promoting meaningful participation, accountability, non-discrimination, transparency, human dignity, empowerment and rule of law (‘PANTHER’ principles) this approach not only addresses power imbalances and systemic barriers but also fosters individual and collective agency.
Please read the article of FAO publications on this topic here.
Topics
- Read 158 contributions
I would like to highlight some approaches implemented by IFAD in Malawi under the IFAD-funded Programme for Rural Irrigation Development (PRIDE) and the Financial Access for Rural Markets, Smallholders and Enterprise Programme (FARMSE).
These approaches were showcased to twenty-three technical project staff from thirteen different countries (Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Tunisia, and Uganda), representing thirteen IFAD-funded projects; one UN Joint Programme (JP RWEE, implemented by IFAD, FAO, WFP, and UN Women); FAO; and WFP during the Learning Route titled "Boosting Gender Transformative Approaches in Rural Development Interventions." This event was organized by the IFAD Gender and Social Inclusion Team and PROCASUR, under the framework of the Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition (JP GTA). The JP GTA is a collaboration between FAO, IFAD, and WFP, with financial support from the European Union.
- Theatre for Development (TFD). This is a powerful methodology lead by local communities and youth clubs to enable system-wide changes in relation to unequal gender power dynamics, discriminatory social norms and practices, gender-based violence, teenage pregnancies, and disability exclusion. It raises awareness among people of power asymmetries and stimulates change processes. Performance topics are informed by research activities on gender and are carried out to highlight the norms and dynamics that generate inequality and violence. Community chiefs participate in the dialogue and provide their guidance. With their help, the youth participants identify “problem households” and develop an action plan accordingly. They follow up with these households through periodic visits to maintain commitment to change and assess progress over time.
- Gender Dialogue Sessions (GDSs). These are participatory face to face community forums where community members with support from extension workers discuss pertinent issues on social inclusion; identify their root causes; and develop commitments towards addressing such issues. During the mission, participants joined community members in an interactive discussion around gender-sensitive and inclusive value chains and the challenges associated with these. The process encouraged participants to share their views and ideas on how the issues or challenges can be dealt with. During these sessions, participants generally identify, agree, and document actions that can be undertaken to address the issue at hand. The sessions are held periodically and, in most cases, target the different gender categories or social groups. This approach is enriched by the use of a compendium of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and GALS tools, such as the Gender roles in Agriculture Markets tool; the Gender Balanced Tree; Access and Control profile; the Daily Clock and the Day in the Life tool.
- Financial Action Learning System for Sustainability (FALS) at Scale. FALS is a participatory and inclusive visual entry point methodology for financial empowerment of women and men from all backgrounds, including the ultra-poor. It aims to enable participants to manage financial resources more effectively and to benefit from financial services, including those from community-based financial organisations and, ultimately, the formal financial sector. Focusing on the very immediate issue and need of both women and men – financial planning for livelihoods – it develops the necessary visual communication but also some participatory leadership and planning skills needed to strengthen membership of Community-based Financial Organisations (CFOs). It also helps to foster a gender transformative financial strategy and can be used as an inclusive, quite low-cost, and stand-alone GTA. With the pilot recently conducted in Malawi by FARMSE, with the support of the IFAD Gender Team and financial support of JP GTA, FALS@Scale has been streamlined and simplified, and it has been ensured that it can be an inclusive and accessible methodology for use by CFOs working in particularly disadvantaged contexts and communities with high levels of illiteracy. The FALS package is currently being piloted by two VSLAs. It includes the following tools: the Vision Journey; the Happy Family Tree (to analyse how women and men can change unequal work, expenditure, decision-making and property relations); the Financial Empowerment Map (identifies the pros and cons of a range of potential sources of finance and how they can contribute to achieve the vision); and the Financial Management Calendar (brings all the previous analysis together as a costed loan proposal for a manageable investment). This approach was piloted and further strengthened through the Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches.
For more information please also see the case studies presented here https://padlet.com/Procasur/learning-route-boosting-gendertransformative-approaches-gtas-1obxds1txozjepu2/wish/O7A9Qmrm8RA9Z6x3
I hope this contributes to the ongoing discussion.
Best regards,
Silvia
Silvia Sperandini
Gender, Targeting and Social Inclusion Specialist for the Gender Team
the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
Bonjour a tous
Recevez la contribution de Plan International Niger sur les bonnes pratiques communautaires
- Capability Statement of RDRS
- Federation writeup
Committed to change through empowering the rural poor
Dear Moderators,
Thank you for this opportunity to contribute to this crucial topic of “Community engagement for inclusive rural transformation and gender equality”.
On behalf of the International Agri-Food Network (IAFN), I am pleased to submit our experience in this area. Please find attached an overview of our best practice, “The FAO-IAFN SME Accelerator Mentorship Programme for Women in sub-Saharan Africa”.
The private sector remains committed to contributing to rural transformation to achieve a world free from hunger and poverty.
With best regards,
Robynne
Robynne Anderson, Secretariat
Attached, please find the complete form and the article "Reflections on the Reflect Approach and its Multiple Evolutions".
David Archer
Head of Programmes and Influencing
ActionAid International
During our work within PRIME project, we made a study to detect the needs of each area of work. Then we focus on the competitive advantage of each area. To be able to success we made an assessment to all available NGOs to work with we developed 178 NGOs and Cooperatives. We established more than 80 women committee within each one we focused not only on women, but we focused also on the environment, so that, we made a kids group to develop the children in addition to men zones in these zones we made programmes to let the men support their women. Moreover, we developed 120 marketing committee that support the farmers to sell their crops and products that made about 235 contracts with total budget 3 billion EGP.
We supported the women, youth, smallholders and marginalized groups with the needed finance to start their projects, where more than 35000 jobs have been created, 30% of them was for women.
Also, we focus on the technology using the Apps. and electronic field schools where one of these tools was our campaign ''right cultivation'' has reached to more than 3 million farmers and their productivity have been improved 25% of them were women and 50% were youth. This new way of extension services has a good effect on the farmers productivity where it increased by 20% within the smallholders and their profitability had increases to 23% than normal.
Dear Sir/Madam,
Measuring the Impact of Community Engagement for Empowerment
A summary of the Webinar “Measuring the Impact of Community Engagement for Empowerment” in the framework of the series of webinars “Community Engagement Days”.
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Moderator: Mr Carlos Barahona, Managing Director, Stats4SD Presenters:
Video recording: https://fao.zoom.us/rec/play/cP92vMfXQ2nAMoVSqOGHFyLgDX6M2guQXUWbV3sGg7dfDoORON0QgCphndKYYJEPRFynAlvoY-6E-l6g.baHtWQuZL6SV6ykM
Article: https://www.fao.org/flexible-multipartner-mechanism/news/news-detail/en/c/1401147/ |
How do we know that community-led empowerment is happening and what the impacts are? Are community-led measurement and analysis of impact possible? This approach turns on its head the notion of outsiders extracting information from communities that they have decided is needed to track and understand local change.
Carlos Barahona posited that we need to ask ourselves difficult questions when tackling this challenge. Who gets to decide what impact is valuable or life changing? Is it fair to impose our criteria of what is important? Is it realistic to expect that those who normally decide – the power holders – will open up spaces to allow communities to engage and influence what is to be measured and what are the impacts of interest? Why should they do that?
To illustrate the size of this challenge, Sonal Zaveri, Co-chair of EvalGender+, reflected on a case of failure by outsiders to understand the transformative change that they envisaged for marginalized communities. She recounted her involvement in a project that supported female tea garden workers in India. The women were members of tribal communities brought to Assam by the British in the 1800s. Over hundreds of years, several generations of their communities worked on these tea gardens with very little contact with the outside world. Very few cases of rights violations were reported.
The project assumed that giving skills and resources to those with less power would enable them to make an impact or be impacted. A grassroots NGO provided tea garden workers with cell phones and codes for maternal health rights violations that would theoretically be geomapped and be used as the basis for litigation. Sonal supported the project staff to have conversations with the tea workers and at the same time to question their own assumptions about how change happens. It emerged that self-stigma was preventing many of these women from reporting violations. With this understanding, the project managers overhauled training for their staff so that they first facilitated group discussions about oppression and empowerment and only then went on to discuss digital literacy and geomapping:
“So often the criteria that we use to measure success don’t reflect the realities on the ground. Unless we put on our community lens, our gender lens and our social justice lens then we won’t be supporting communities to understand what really needs to be measured.” (Sonal Zaveri)
Participants reflected on the question: How do we change our lens, and is changing our lens enough to lead to empowerment? Disempowering ourselves is really important so that we can step into other people’s spaces without expecting them to be in our time, our space, our minds. Participation researcher Dee Jupp recalled her work on immersion, most recently in Indonesia, to illustrate this point. It starts with us, the outsiders, immersing ourselves and being totally open minded and “'non- experts'”, staying with people, listening and observing, while giving them the inspiration and support to design and measure the change they want. Dee reflected that “it’s a very different approach when you move into other people’s space.”
Yet disempowering ourselves in this way is not to deny that we as outsiders have a position – broadly liberal and progressive – whilst also having agency in the process. Typically adopting a feminist position, for instance, means using a lens to see false consciousness or a “consciousness gap” that collective reflection and action can bridge. Collaborative Impact’s Jeremy Holland used the example of UN Women Nepal’s ambition to support the end of harmful cultural practices such as chhauppadi ("untouchability during menstruation”) in Nepal as part of a broader country programme supporting change to gendered social norms.
Recognizing our positionality when we talk about unlearning does not mean shortcutting the community engagement approach that we are supporting or facilitating as outsiders. Ben Cislaghi talked about “sticking with the process” rather than getting too hung up on impact and validating our external goals for a community.
Participants discussed the argument that when we support communities in the measurement of their engagement processes, we remain positioned as external agents. Moreover, sometimes our commitment is to the community, while sometimes it is to other agents that come and impose, contribute, or partner with communities. In both scenarios – when we are with the community and when we are with those outside agents – we need to be rigorous but we need to be sensitive and empathetic with the community and sensitive to gender, ethnicity and marginalization. Sonal reflected that the donor-driven methodological trend (for externalized measurement) has “swept away the community dialogue approach that I have come out of.”
Jeremy Holland argued that as outsiders we must try our best to create space for local processes of community-driven social change even in the face of political imperatives to deliver narrow, linear logframe-driven programming. Our role combines, first, a facilitation role to encourage inclusive processes at local levels as well as an interpretive role for others who were not there with us on the ground. Participatory, community-led impact research is a “win-win” for development. First and foremost, participatory research can empower local people in a sphere of research that has traditionally been highly extractive and externally controlled. At the same time, participatory research can generate accurate and generalizable statistics in a timely, efficient (value for money) and effective way for outsiders working to contribute to changes in impact level that they see as progressive and developmental.
To illustrate this point, Jeremy described a participatory mass storytelling instrument that is being adopted by UN Women Nepal to measure changes in social norms and harmful cultural practices across the country. Storytelling provides the basis for locally-led individual and collective reflection dialogue and action, empowering women and men to challenge gendered social norms and behaviours. At the same time, it generates “data points” at scale that can be coded and analysed for patterns and trends. In particular, the initiative will utilize a mass storytelling tool such as SenseMaker in tracking and interpreting programmatic contributions linked to the SDG 5 indicators to changes in social norms and gender equality. The mass storytelling research tool combines the interpretive depth of storytelling with the statistical power of aggregated data for tracking patterns and trends in social norm behaviours. With this tool, the aim is to generate a “feedback loop” of evidence and learning into long-term programming for better impact in influencing social norms change and ending harmful practices.
Participants reflected that community engagement in, and community dialogue around, impact measurement can at its best be integrated into programmatic support for community transformation processes. This is in stark contrast to the dominant approach adopted by an industry driven by expensive, large-scale surveys that measure global metrics. Carlos Barahona, of Statistics for Sustainable Development described what he called “single factor targeting of development”, simplistic models that do not embrace complexity:
“Technocratic positions prevail. That prevailing way of thinking attempts to simplify too much and generates resistance. We can work with other partners that bring time, patience and solidarity to the way that we do interventions. Correcting the route that we follow so that we make small adjustments rather than step changes that shift from one indicator to another.” (Carlos Barahona)
To illustrate, Dee Jupp’s powerful case study from Bangladesh explains how members of a land rights coalition analysed the impacts of gaining access to land entitlements. Coalition members identified locally-meaningful metrics – changes that they valued – for measuring their empowerment. A dramatic change in gender roles and relations was powerfully brought to life through participatory theatre, with women explaining how they were now decision-makers in their households and had a voice in their communities.
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“What does community engagement for measuring impact mean to me? Measuring what is valued (by people themselves), not valuing what is measured” Dee Jupp, Participation researcher |
Similarly, Dee’s work in Malawi involved community action groups working in education, health, markets and roads achieving positive change at different speeds and with different issues valued by different groups. Dee’s question was: “what were people valuing and what data did they need to engage with the system?”
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‘This is ours. This is not for the partner organization. They may use some of the information from time to time but this is ours and ours alone’ Village Development Committee member, Malawi |
For Dee Jupp, community engagement is what happens within systems. At one level, this means starting from local people’s priorities and interests, but more fundamentally, it means recognizing both that they “are part of a system and that they have their own information to engage with the system.” Becoming (more) active participants in the system through a community engagement process, they can then make demands, share experiences and build bridges. This is what is “empowering”; this is what is community-driven transformation.
If we shift to a way of thinking in which local knowledge is generated and owned by local people, where does that leave “us” as external agents in someone else’s empowerment process? What is our role as external agents? Are there difficult trade-offs we need to make? Reflecting on our role as facilitators of internal processes, Dee flagged up principles from her experience of facilitating participatory research: using approaches that are informal and engaging; using approaches in community members’ space and time; and letting community members use approaches in their own ways. This then allows us the outsider to collect and cluster change statement information/pattern finding “aside from what the community needs from the data.”
Participants concluded that, on the face of it, community engagement in measuring such results seems like a lot of effort. Community involvement requires significant effort, from many people, and the process is not valued by everyone. But if we think about community-led measurement as an empowerment process in its own right, then this becomes the value that we would like to see.
What of the legacy to date of participatory or community-led research and the way forward for community engagement in impact measurement? We have seen surges of interest and troughs of business as usual. What should we learn from the last 30 years of work in this area as we look to the future?
Dee Jupp set out a vision of future impact measurement systems that communities own and use to measure their engagement and feed collective reflection and action. Locally-generated and owned data feeds collective action and enhances accountability. In this future scenario, the key for “us” as outsiders is to develop systems which borrow “their” data for “our” purposes. We can be so much smarter in finding ways to borrow their data and fit into results frameworks, manage data which is detailed and local to track trends and identify impact in more relevant and meaningful ways. This does not mean that we deny ourselves agency in local development. Instead, we need to reposition our role as outsiders as providers of inspiration, advice and links: “on tap, not on top”.
I am pleased to share my experience and contribute to this platform. I believe initiatives like this should be expanded to other disciplines as well. Through collaboration and partnership, I am confident we can achieve meaningful and impactful results.