For the longest time, we have debated the true meaning of development – is it a boost to our economy? Is it the empowerment of our people? Can these go hand-in-hand? No matter how we measure development, building schools, hospitals, and banks remain a half measure without ensuring equal access into their hallowed walls. This is where strengthening communities inclusively and equitably becomes all-important.
In the context of strengthening communities, community engagement becomes our primary concern. How we prioritise this and invest in this process impacts the kind of results we want to achieve in terms of developing and strengthening the community as a whole.
What Is Community Engagement?
WHO has defined community engagement as “a process of developing relationships that enable stakeholders to work together to address health-related issues and promote well-being to achieve positive health impact and outcomes”.1
This definition can be further stretched to incorporate development goals of education, gender equality, elimination of violence, poverty eradication, accessing clean water and sanitation, organising climate action, and so on. Engaging community members in decision-making processes promote more inclusive and sustainable efforts toward strengthening the community while ensuring that no one is left behind.
Why Is Community Engagement Important?
While community engagement can be understood and is applicable in different contexts, in terms of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) or a community-based organisation (CBO) working towards achieving better developmental outcomes within a community, community engagement becomes beneficial in the following ways. It:
- Establishes trust and acceptance towards the organisation’s work and efforts.
- Enables the organisation to make better-informed choices and decisions keeping in mind the needs and interests of the community.
- Empowers community members to participate as partners in development rather than passive participants or bystanders.
- Enhances agency within the community.
- Develops ownership of developmental initiatives resulting in sustainability of efforts.
- Reduces chances of dissent and creates better opportunities to manage conflicts.
While all of these points listed above make for a strong foundation for NGOs and CBOs to establish themselves and create a stronghold for their ideas and initiatives within a community, attached with this are a few responsibilities for them:
- Inclusion and greater acceptance of marginalised voices in decision-making.
- Equitable access to developmental initiatives.
- Continuous re-evaluation of engagement strategies through community feedback.
While a conceptual understanding of community engagement is important, we must pause to take into consideration actual practice that reflects the opportunities and hurdles while trying to make headway within a community.
Typically, when an organisation first enters a community, it makes efforts to understand the needs and problems faced by the community that it could take into account while building its developmental plans. A baseline survey would be conducted, focused group discussions, and personal interviews with various community members would be held. Then, depending on the expertise of the organisation and its commitment, programmes would be rolled out to build awareness about a particular issue or provide services to plug the gaps observed.
Let us take the help of an example. An organisation working to reduce instances of gender-based violence opens crisis intervention centres and provides counseling and para-legal services after observing reports of rising incidences of violence in a community. This proves highly beneficial to survivors of violence who are provided immediate psycho-social counseling services and find help navigating legal hurdles. Pamphlets are circulated to community members to build awareness about the consequences of resorting to violence of any kind, along with its long-lasting impact on survivors.
While the work being done by this organisation is commendable, it does not address the root cause of gender-based violence that is an inherent part of our socialisation. Thus it has a limited impact in terms of preventing violence and changing the community mindset. When we deep dive into our social structures we find women and girls to be more likely to accept violence as a means of disciplining them or simply normalising it as a part of their everyday lives while men and boys are explicitly encouraged to imbibe violent behavior to maintain a dominant standing within the social hierarchy. Here, working with men and boys would help challenge norms of masculinity and promote more equitable behavior thereby reducing instances of violence within the community. It would encourage men and boys to become allies in the process of eliminating gender-based violence rather than being bystanders or even perpetrators.
While the example above examines the role of men and boys in programmes on gender-based violence, their role is equally essential in other areas such as accessing public health services, enrolling in higher education, upholding the rights of sexual minorities, and generating better livelihood opportunities, or ensuring climate-friendly waste disposal. Seeing men and boys as important stakeholders while rolling out development initiatives within a community strengthens the overall outcomes of any given programme. Along with creating an enabling environment for women and girls, and queer community members, it also recognises the pressures of masculinity on men and boys that impacts their mental health and well-being.
To be able to work effectively with men and boys, organisations need to recognise their capacity as change agents as well as strong support groups. The specific needs of men and boys would need to be incorporated while designing programmes that seek to strengthen communities. Further, men and boys as a homogenous group without delving into existing power hierarchies based on caste, religion, socio-political standing, economic background, physical ability, sexual orientation, and many other such intersectionalities, need to be deconstructed. This is necessary for a more nuanced understanding of the group otherwise dismissed as the already empowered group in the community.
For community-strengthening initiatives to be successful, the powerless and the powerful must be willing to walk together, sharing and giving up power to dismantle the social fabric that discriminates rather than empowers. This is the role that organisations must imbibe to become catalysts of change.2
Notes
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World Health Organization (2020). Community engagement: a health promotion guide for universal health coverage in the hands of the people. ↩︎
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National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2016). Community engagement: improving health and wellbeing and reducing health inequalities. NICE guideline NG44. ↩︎