Community involvement and participation

Overall Objective: to promote increased participation of communities in designing and implementing community and district level poverty programmes

Specific Objective

Specific Action

to create an enabling environment for the implementation of a participatory planning process

	initiate community capacity building programmes through training local community leaders and community groups
	introduce village animators
	give training in and implement a village/ community action planning system
	improve the democratic system of election for all local leaders
	develop consistent participatory monitoring systems and arrange regular meetings on community development issues

Recent approaches to poverty reduction include the active encouragement of stakeholder participation in policy formulation, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The principle is now deeply embedded in the planning process in Tanzania and it is the intention of ZPRP to strongly support a similar process in Zanzibar.

This involves three strategic thrusts:

	support for community capacity building to empower the population
	development of a participatory planning system
	development of a micro projects scheme as a main channel for passing development funds directly to communities that are very poor.

the active encouragement of stakeholder participation in policy formulation, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation

How can NGOs help to increase community participation in designing and implementing poverty programmes? (ZPRP-PTF)

It is important that existing funds are targeted on the communities that most need them. This in turn requires a system of poverty indicators that can be used to identify the most disadvantaged communities.