Within community-driven development projects, involvement of community as direct beneficiaries in programme planning, implementation and monitoring is very crucial in making sure that the projects achieve their outputs, objectives and desired impacts. This fact is also accepted within APMAS target projects.

The Professional Development Needs Assessment has identified prominent issues related to the area of Community Driven Development Process in APMAS target projects from Cambodia, India, Laos and Vietnam. These issues concern mainly on community engagement processes, the utilization of visualization and communication tools in the development process,  leveraging local knowledge in providing solutions, monitoring and evaluation of the development process.

Projects in each country within APMAS working area has different prioritization of these issues, however it is generally acknowledged that addressing these issue can improve project performance in terms of better effectiveness and efficiency of community driven development processes.

A training course in “Managing Community-driven Development Process” is to give project managers necessary knowledge and skills on how the community-driven gender-sensitive development process should be done. The training will draw experience sharing among project managers.

This course will address issues considered essential in improving participation of women and men of community and impacts of community-based activities.

As identified by the PDNA exercise, these issues are community engagement processes, the utilization of visualization and communication tools in the development process, leveraging local knowledge in providing solutions, monitoring and evaluation of the development process. Encouraging women’s participation in project design, implementation and management decision making will also be of focus.

Aside from classroom delivery, this training will also utilize more interactive delivery methods, case studies and group-works. An interesting approach is to allow exchange of experiences among participants regarding policies, their field practices and lessons learnt.

The objectives of the training are as follows:

• Participants understand the principles of community engagement.
• Participants understand, able to select appropriate visualization and communication tools and implement them
• Participants understand the importance of local knowledge and how to leverage for project’s benefits.
• Participants are able to assess the level of participation of women and men in projects and develop strategies to improve it.
• Participants are able to perform gender sensitive monitoring and evaluation for community-driven development

Main learning points of the training are:

• Gender Sensitive Community Engagement Process
  • Introduction to Community Development, cultural influences and gender
  • Determining the right target groups to address poor, marginalized and vulnerable groups (wealth ranking, non-monetary methods)
  • Stakeholder Analysis
  • Gender sensitive problems and target identification
  • Addressing cultural sensitivities and the integration of women in decision making processes
  • Role of community elites
  • Dealing with local government and gender sensitization
• Mainstreaming Gender in Visualization and Communication Tools
  • Conducting a Social Needs Assessment
  • Overview of PRA, Appreciative Inquiry, and other relevant tools
  • Using visual tools
  • Pitfalls in PRA – how to do gender-sensitive PRA
  • Gender-sensitive community discussion facilitation
  • Gender Sensitive Data Collection Tools
  • Aspects in communication for development process
• Monitoring and Evaluation in community-driven development process.
  • SMART Objectives and gender indicators