How does a Congolese village decide what to do with $30,000?
Blogged by: Lydia Gomersall
Reuters and AlertNet are not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.
A fallen tree blocks the road to Kaziba. IRC/Lydia Gomersall
The eastern Congolese district of Kaziba, home to 36,000 people in 15 villages, lies high up in the mountains, 30 bone-jarring miles by road to the southeast of Bukavu town.
The scenery en route in this part of South Kivu, is breathtaking, a thin muddy track lined with banana palms, winding up vertiginous valley sides, thatched villages nestling below.
The peaceful scene makes it hard to imagine the fear and anarchy that ruled here for so many decades.
Reminders occasionally lurch into view - rickety trucks laden with teenage soldiers teetering precariously on piles of bedding, pots, cans, buckets and all the other paraphernalia of their peripatetic lives.
Those who aren't lucky enough to find a perch atop the trucks can be seen throughout the day, trudging slowly uphill in ones and twos, each with a large gun or mortar slung casually over his shoulder.
Our journey has its interruptions as a temporary log bridge is constructed over a stream that has split the road during the night and a fallen tree barring our way is sawn into removable logs.
From time to time we come across a bamboo pole - one of the infamous barriers of which we had heard so much in town yesterday, where soldiers, young bullies or just unscrupulous chancers cause massive distress by extorting precious cents from those too poor to pay, just to pass along what should be a public highway.
The project we are visiting is going well. It's about community ownership. Each of the participating villages had originally been allocated $700 to spend on a project of their choice.
That accomplished, a much larger sum, in the region of $25,000 - $30,000, was allocated to fund a project benefiting all the villages in their community.
Our staff had encouraged local officials, church and traditional leaders and other authority figures to take part right from the beginning.
Once convinced, they in turn explained it within their communities.
Then secret ballots were organised to elect committees to represent cross-sections of each village.
In Chirimiro, a community of three villages, we stop on a grass verge outside a church, just brick walls and a tin roof with simple wooden benches lined up on an uneven dirt floor, but still the most substantial building in the mud hut village.
The atmosphere inside is electric, and faces at the windows suggest that many more than the committee are interested in the outcome.
Twenty-five out of a possible total of 30 committee members have brought suggestions from their villages as to how the $30,000 should be used, and a list is written up on the wall.
The voting gets under way with a show of hands for each project.
New maternity equipment emerges as the clear winner with 25 votes.
Refurbishing the local school comes a close second, with drinking water, a tailor's shop, electricity, a grain mill, subsidised medicine and literacy and nutrition centres all getting substantial votes but not enough to be adopted.
The final decision of the afternoon is that any money left over after buying the maternity equipment will be spent on the school.
Although supported by the IRC, each project is the total responsibility of the beneficiaries, from planning to completion.
Voting over and it is the women who are eager to talk. They want a permanent end to conflict, without which, they say, their future is bleak.
They ask us to take the message home that they need our help in securing that lasting peace.
Yuri, a mother of eight, has been voting enthusiastically from the rear, grandson Tresor fast asleep on her back.
I ask her why she wanted to be a village representative and she smiles. "Because," she says, "I want a better future for my village and the best way to do that is to get involved."
Read more from IRC's Lydia Gomersall in Congo:
Why are Congo's babies dying?
What do Congo's women really want? Congo's road to health care is full of potholes
Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external websites.
2 responses to “How does a Congolese village decide what to do with $30,000?”
Please note that comments should not be regarded as the views of Reuters.
Leave a Reply
When you submit a comment to us we request your name, e-mail address and optionally a link to a website. Please note where you submit a website address, we may link to it via your name. By sending us a comment, you accept that we have the right to show the comment and your name to users. Although we require your email address, this will not be published on the site, and is only required to enable us to check facts with you, e.g. if you are making a claim we can not confirm easily. Additionally, if you would like your comment removed at anytime, you'll have to use this e-mail address when you contact us. To remove a comment at any time please e-mail us at blogs-(at)-reuters-(dot)-com (address obscured to avoid spam) specifying who you are and what you would like removed. We moderate all comments and will publish everything that advances the post directly or with relevant tangential information. We reserve the right to edit comments in order to maintain the quality of the comments, and may not include links to irrelevant material. We try not to publish comments that we think are offensive or appear to pass you off as another person, and we will be conservative if comments may be considered libelous. Reuters will use your data in accordance with Reuters privacy policy. Reuters Group is primarily responsible for managing your data. As Reuters is a global company your data will be transferred and available internationally, including in countries which do not have privacy laws but Reuters seeks to comply with its privacy policy.
08 Apr 2007 12:02:36 GMT
I also work in South Kivu, and I am sorry to say that I recognise hidden in this article the same problems I have had. The writer says:
"Our staff had encouraged local officials, church and traditional leaders and other authority figures to take part right from the beginning. Once convinced, they in turn explained it within their communities." The problem is, simply that they don't, otherwise they would lose their authority (they believe). True discussion is very rare even on such un-controversial topics as education (the field I work in) when there is no money involved. The churches are the worst in my experienced, being unable to cope with the idea that the congregation may have an opinion different from that 'approved' by their leaders (just try asking women privately about contraception or through their leaders). You cannot be sure that your own staff are truly committed to such communication (not the case in two or three S Kivu based international NGOs I know) not just paying lip-service. The so-called 'explanation' to their people - I have listened in on these (I am fluent in Swahili) and they just consist of hectoring them most of the time and telling them what they have to do --, there is a grave danger of buying into the myth that consultation has taken place. We then make another leap into assuming that after that there is real participation, rather than a demand of contribution of labour or voluntary work from people already at the end of their tethers (as the writer notes earlier int he article). It is gratifying that the people ended up choosing what we approve of (and in such a philoprogenitive country, maternity will always come up top), but let us not believe that the poorest of the poor were really consulted. Barry Sesnan Consultant in education in difficult circumstances.10 Apr 2007 09:20:04 GMT
In Afghanistan, activities such as those that Lydia writes about have been going on for over four years. The National Solidarity Programme (NSP) has 24 facilitating partners (as IRC in DRC) work throughout the country at the community level promoting the election of Community Development Councils (CDCs) Once these CDCs are formed, communities prioritize their needs (from water supply, micro hydro power, community centres, literacy, etc) and develop implementation plans. Although the the programme is focused solely on hardware, currently there are dozens of communities that are "graduating" from the programme and will work with donors directly on sublimenting their current projects. For a project that is only 4 years old and plans on reaching over 20,000 communities throughout the whole of Afghanistan, it is doing really great work and reaching the country from the community levels and working itself up.