Approach

CHILDuses community participation and local level action to help development projects have greater IMPACTand SUSTAINABILITY.

CHILD was developed by the World Food Programme in Ethiopia and has been proven to work by more than 300 school feeding communities in Ethiopia.

Inspired by the achievements of the Ministry of Education and World Food Programme, the CHILD Trust and CHILD Ethiopia have been started to bring the benefits of CHILD to many more schools.

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The average pass rate was 13 percentage points higher in CHILD schools than standard project schools.

How does CHILD work?

CHILD facilitates local leaders (they can be social leaders as well as formal ones) to help their community to help themselves. CHILD focuses on schools and educating the next generation as a starting point. But it can lead to much more. The programme is based on the belief that every human being has the creativity and energy to give their children a better future.

Why doesn't this stuff happen already?

It can seem strange that important things like clean water, enough school classrooms, and good sanitation are not being built by communities if they already have the potential to make a difference. There are, however, some good reasons for this.

First is the collective action problem identified by a writer called Mancur Olson. His insight was that when a lot of people want something it is actually less likely to happen than if only a few people want it. Why? Because when many people will benefit from a change, then each individual bears the total cost of the investment that they have to make, but only get a small proportion of the return. The temptation is to let other people pu the effort into making the change because you will also benefit from their hard work. So everybody waits for everybody else.

However, CHILD manages to get a few people to make a big difference in their communities! We are able to do this by reducing the transaction cost of people who invest in changes that will benefit everyone. By creating a supportive and encouraging environment for the people that lead changes under CHILD, they benefit from the social recognition and status that being a change maker brings. This also encourages more people to join in to share the hard work - and make a bigger impact.

A second problem is knowing where to start when a community faces so many challenges. CHILD deals with this by focusing on primary schools. Everybody can agree that the education of the next generation is of vital importance, so this helps us to bring people together with a focus.

The last problem is thinking that the changes that are needed are too big a too expensive to do. For example, to build a new concrete classroom will cost far too much for a community. However, they can afford to build a classroom out of local materials using traditional techniques. CHILD promotes feasible and appropriate solutions such as this; and connects people with good technical information to make sure that their projects are successful.

So now you know how CHILD can achieve so much with so little!

CHILD is non-deterministic and shares many features with the dialectic approach developed in India. CHILD creates change through facilitating the formation and growth of local self-help groups around rural schools and linking them with opportunities and knowledge in the formal development system. It delivers development outcomes through a continuous process of adaptive learning, technical support and strengthening social networks. CHILD can be implemented in its own right or combined with an additional set of inputs (such as small grants or food for education) to multiply impact. Through their community plans and self help groups, CHILD schools and their local education offices are able to leverage additional inputs and mulitply the effects of their efforts.

Projects using the CHILD approach achieve more by working with a whole range of people at different levels at the same time to achieve practical and tangible improvements in the lives of their children and the future of their communities. The projects become more sustainable because they have popular ownership, technical quality and rely more on attitude than resources. CHILD communities work to solve the real problems they face with what they have: when this is not enough then they use creativity and solidarity to mobilise more. And when they are successful in accessing more resources, they already have a plan and capacity to make the best use of them. Not only do CHILD communities achieve more, they also become more interesting to development organisations looking for partners to invest in.

Children in Local Development (CHILD) represents hope. It is a hope based on the deep strength and energy that can be found secluded in the passion that local communities are prepared to put into building a future for their next generations. If this energy is mobilised, it is a powerful force for change in what appear to be even the most desolate communities. When it is combined with practical, tested and low-cost activities then we have a real chance to build a future free from poverty. CHILD is a means of achieving such change. Read more about how CHILD works in Ethiopia.

Central to CHILD is community participation and the mobilisation of community solidarity and capacity to achieve local development through creative self-help. The CHILD framework was created to provide an integrated, replicable, scalable and affordable means for existing programmes and projects to increase their impact and sustainability through community-led partnerships, common purpose and practical action.

Key features of the CHILD blueprint:

• To be completely adaptable and driven by local community needs
• To view problems holistically and leverage all available resources through self-help and creative mobilisation of assistance
• To be independent of the organisations implementing it and freely available
• To combine strategic coherence with practicality and technical excellence
• To focus on people as the answer by investing in community solidarity and social networking
• To provide implementers with a cwide-ranging library of detailed supporting guidelines that can be easily updated or added to by others
• To rationalise monitoring and evaluation and integrate into existing structures
• To actively seek productive open partnerships with other organisations at all levels and integrate with their capabilities
• To address a broad range of interconnected issues and treat them as they are in real life rather than as isolated issues
• To focus on supporting inherent community resilience by promoting adaptability and capacity to absorb shocks

Features of a dialectic approach

Adapted from DFID Research Outputs R7830 and R7839 [www.research4development.info]