Understanding the Benefits of Community Voice in Development
Amala was initially thrilled about an NGO’s initiative aimed at boosting income generation in her village through poultry support. However, after three years, the project failed to deliver lasting results. Most of the poultry, not only Amala’s but also that of many others in her village, could not survive. She couldn’t help but wonder why the professional staff she had collaborated with couldn’t anticipate the issue — the poultry sheds provided were unbearably hot in the summer. A similar situation unfolded in Rehana’s village when a project provided smartphones to underprivileged women farmers for easy access to information to support their socio-economic growth. While there were some positive changes in information sharing, many women faced challenges such as family violence, social media harassment, privacy concerns, and added financial burdens due to poorly planned interventions. What frustrated Rehana even more was that she had repeatedly voiced these issues to the project staff, but nothing changed.
Amala and Rehana’s experiences are not isolated cases. Many development projects encounter foreseeable issues that local community members attempt to highlight. In our Benefits of Community Voice article, we look back on three of our own projects and try to understand why, despite the commitment to working with local community members everyone involved espouses, projects still fail to take heed of their warnings and don’t have long-term impact.
The Complexity of Community Voice
One of the primary challenges in grasping the concept of community voice is the varied interpretations of the term across academia, government, and charitable sectors. ‘Community’ can sometimes seem like an artificial construct driven by external agendas. Additionally, when we discuss listening/ hearing voices, we argue it can encompass three distinct meanings:
- Voices as Medium: Engaging in direct conversations with people during development work, as opposed to relying solely on written communication, can be transformative, especially when working with less-literate groups. Such as verbal (e.g., Speech and storytelling) and non-verbal (body language).
- Voices as Input: Allowing projects to gather insights and information from the local population helps in better targeting resources and planning. Such as a diverse range of activities including focus groups, surveys, workshops, town hall meetings and voting on agendas.
- Voices as Dialogue: Continuously engaging in discussions with local residents guides the project’s direction, enabling it to effectively respond and adapt to challenges. Such as opening or democratising project delivery that explicitly places decisions in the hands of the community and continuously attempts to build consensus on project direction through discussions.
We think that work is at its best when it engages with the idea of voice in all three of these ways. Despite the limitations of the term, it remains a crucial concept that should not be overlooked, but the limitations of the term also need to be kept in mind.
A Framework for Embracing Community Voice
We present a framework to discuss four areas community voice benefits a project in, drawing insights from our own experiences and existing academic literature.
i) Understanding Context: Context in development work is vast and encompasses everything from outer to inner contexts, such as government regulations to local and family traditions. While it’s impossible to comprehend every aspect, listening to local voices helps focus attention where it matters.
- Hearing local voices lets us understand the distinction between the broader and smaller stakeholder community.
- Balancing local values with the perspectives of practitioners is essential to project success.
ii) Creating Empathy: Empathy plays a pivotal role in decision-making. We rely on empathy any time we make decisions for others — this is why designing for people like us is easier to do.
- Stories serve as the building blocks of empathy, and dialogue is central to understanding those narratives.
- However, accounts are subjective, and no single one should be taken without question — instead, we must hear multiple people’s voices.
For instance, when deploying smartphones for local women farmers, we initially failed to understand their cultural contexts and experiences, where property rights were often held by their families. This lack of empathy and understanding of contexts caused difficulties that could have been avoided. Over time, empathy with women allowed us to successfully adapt our approach, persuading them to attend training sessions based on family commitment rather than promoting independence.
iii) Leveraging Local Knowledge and Skills: Local communities possess a wealth of knowledge that outsiders often overlook. This knowledge, specific to the community, has the power to transform projects significantly.
- Local knowledge is dynamic and distributed among many individuals, continuous engagement with the community is essential.
- Educational initiatives, in particular, must tap into local knowledge and expertise as a starting point for their work.
iv) Building Trust and Local Buy-In: Listening to and responding to local voices creates a virtuous cycle, fostering trust and encouraging local stakeholders to contribute more.
- Trust acts as a moderator in community discussions, making it easier to build empathy and gain access to local skills and resources.
- Effective and lasting change hinges on trust and buy-in from the community to ensure the project’s sustainability once an NGO departs.
Amala’s and Rehana’s stories exemplify what happens when we fail to leverage local knowledge and skills, resulting in a lack of buy-in. Our reliance on government and NGO partners to source equipment, based on their experience in different environments and western contexts, proved detrimental.
Our hope is that others can learn from our struggles and successes in this area and use the framework we have put forward to reflect on how to better leverage community voice in planning, designing, implementing, and evaluating development projects, programs, and interventions and to inform policies. Engaging with community voices is never easy, but it is undoubtedly rewarding. Developing a comprehensive approach that includes all facets of community voice is key to achieving communities effective, impactful and sustainable community development.
