Community Development

Organizing for social and economic gains

Communities, as centers of power, influence and economic opportunity, are fundamental building blocks of all societies. It is natural, therefore, that ACDI/VOCA with its focus on economic development engages communities as natural development partners.

In particular ACDI/VOCA applies community-driven development* approaches, as opposed to more traditional sectoral approaches, where the goal is to transform fragile and conflict-affected regions and contain tensions that have not yet erupted into open conflict. Working through community stakeholder groups, short-term stabilization interventions such as reconstruction and creation of short-term jobs through small infrastructure improvements are integrated with long-term sustainable development activities including skills training, institutional development, technology transfer, improved access to credit for small and medium-sized enterprises, and partnership facilitation. This integrated, multisectoral approach emphasizes both process and concrete outcomes—process to expand citizen participation in democratic and transparent decision making and concrete outcomes to produce tangible results for broad-based community benefit.

Beneficiary groups are as diverse as the populations we serve. They include communities vulnerable to adverse external effects due to isolation and poverty (or in some cases vulnerable to violence, illicit crop production or narcotics trafficking from neighboring regions); unstable communities recovering from conflict; communities characterized by religious and/or ethnic divisions, prominent minority populations and at-risk or restive youth; communities under weak subnational governments featuring poorly skilled, uninformed and ineffective civil society actors.

The results achieved under ACDI/VOCA’s community-driven projects have been impressive. Our work has contributed to peace building and the prevention of renewed violence, thereby creating the basic conditions and fundamental building blocks for sustainable and equitable development.