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Use
of Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches
The
programme began by creating a framework to define what is
needed to sustain rural livelihoods: an integration of community
knowledge, appropriate technologies, access to credit, and
enabling policies. This work led to a more holistic understanding
of community development and also revealed important factors
that constrain communities from participating effectively
in policy and investment decisions.
The
Community Adaptation and Sustainable Livelihoods then developed
and tested tools to help local people work within the sustainable
livelihoods framework, so that they can define their own future.
The tools help communities create a vision of the future based
on their strengths, which they then communicate to decision-makers.
The
Community Adaptation and Sustainable Livelihoods is testing
a method called appreciative inquiry to turn the current approach
around. Appreciative inquiry gets a community to focus on
achievements rather than problems, and seeks to go beyond
participation to foster inspiration at the grassroots level.
First developed in the early 1990s at Case Western Reserve
University to help corporations sharpen their competitive
advantage, appreciative inquiry recently has been applied
in community development projects in Mauritania and Ghana,
with encouraging results.
Most
relevant programme activities include the following:
Adaptive Strategies for Sustainable Livelihoods in
Arid and Semi Arid Lands Project - Focused on nine
communities in five sub-Saharan African countries during 1994-95:
Burkina Faso; Ethiopia; Kenya; South Africa; and Zimbabwe.
Within each country, local organizations were selected to
coordinate a combination of participatory field research and
policy analysis. The field researchers spent considerable
time working with the communities to identify ways in which
their livelihood systems had changed in response to both internal
and external forces over the past few decades. That information
then directed in-depth analyses of the regional, national,
and local policies which had either constrained or supported
sustainable livelihoods.
Community Drought Mitigation Project, Zimbabwe -
This project enabled the program to test the usefulness of
its sustainable livelihoods framework in the field. Over three
years, the project supported the adaptive strategies of local
people to drought and economic stress with appropriate technologies
and policy analysis.
Myrada
Appreciative Inquiry Project - a two-year DFID funded
project that used appreciative inquiry to help rural people
in Southern India plan and implement community projects. CASL
worked with MYRADA, a local non-governmental organization,
to help local people create a development vision based on
community strengths. The project shared lessons learned both
locally and internationally by producing a training video
on appreciative inquiry and by creating an Internet site for
broader dissemination.
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