65 Guri, Banuoko, Derbile, Hiemstra and Verschuuren
Photo: Bas Verschuuren, ETC COMPAS
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Illegal gold mining affecting water streams.
BCPs to assert and defend community
rights over natural resources.
Supporting endogenous development (ED)
CIKOD’s approach to working with the
Tanchara has been to help them strengthen
their capacity for ‘endogenous development’, that is development driven by
communities, building on their culture,
knowledge, resources and institutions.
Strengthening community capacity is
complex and takes time because communities are diffuse, nebulous, social and
cultural entities, with many diverse dimensions and groups. CIKOD believes that
focusing on just one part of the community,
for example youth, women or traditional
leaders, is likely to generate conflict
because some parts of the community are
excluded. Strengthening ED for the benefit of the entire community means
mobilising different interest groups, the
traditional institutions and communitybased organisations (CBOs). Traditional
leadership, as an integral part of African
society and one of the oldest institutions of
governance on the continent, needs to be
integrated into the development process,
whilst recognising that this may mean
changing with the times to meet the challenges of today: transparency, gender
equity, environmental conservation and
empowerment of the poor.
A community organisational development
process
When CIKOD began working with the
Tanchara community, it facilitated a participatory process to enable the people to
bring together information about their
local/indigenous resources and assets,
create a vision of their own development
and develop action plans to achieve this
vision, drawing on local/indigenous
resources and other relevant resources
from external sources. The steps in this
process are outlined in Box 1. A key part of
the approach was to understand and work
within the communities’ own worldviews,
which underpin daily life and influence
interactions with outsiders and outside
knowledge systems (Box 2). Identifying the