Sustainable Community Project

The challenge for my community project is job creation and sustainability. The motivation to have a digital literacy community project was to empower youth and women so that they can improve their livelihood through ICT related jobs. As I had explained earlier, I visualize many youth working online and supporting themselves and their families. I visualize women connecting to check for government procurement opportunities, I visualize many community connections motivated by digital literacy.  For this project to have this kind of impact, I need for it to be sustainable.

Increasingly, the emphasis on the sustainability of such a project has moved to engaging communities in order to catalyze self-sustaining growth. Community experts now clearly explain that real change comes from empowering individuals in the community with the capacity to use, maintain and run the community projects.  This means it is not merely about money but more about training and mentorship support. Effective project development therefore requires interventions to be:

• People-focused
• Participatory
• Based on strengths, not needs
• Based on strong partnerships
• Holistic
• Flexible and dynamic

It is also equally important to achieve an effective level of communication and understanding that enables communities to be involved in the project by:

• Inspiring them to identify, manage and control their own development aspirations
• Ensuring the project goals and objectives meet the real needs of the community
• Ensuring the project strategy is appropriate to local circumstances
• Building partnerships, ownership and commitment needed for effective implementation

In my attempt to build an effective level of communication and understanding for the community as well as Buy-In for my community project, I invited thirty opinion leaders to a meeting last week. These were men and women recommended by community leaders for their interest in either youth, women or community development as a whole. The group included youth, women and church leaders. We discussed the project goals and objectives and the importance of maintaining a partnership with them that results in real ownership and commitment to the project.

After a three hour meeting that included group discussions to identify current challenges and ways of overcoming them the group agreed that the project is beneficial to the community and more people need to be involved in marketing as well as managing the project. It was also agreed that we need to continue informing the community about the goals of the project so that we have a complete Community Buy-In by the end of the year. The benefits of the community Buy-in which I talked about two weeks ago are: Building trust, getting the word out, helping foster interest and ensuring the sustainability of the project.

A successful Buy-In strategy will lead to a sustainable community project.