How One Community’s Experiment with Participatory Development Helped Shape a National Program for Rural Capacity Building

A New Approach to Rural Development in Guinea

In the mid 1990s, the Government of Guinea approached the World Bank with a request for assistance in developing a new national program for rural development. Although 70 percent of Guinea’s population lived in rural areas, most of the country’s economic growth remained concentrated around the city of Conakry, and residents of thousands of outlying villages were living day-to-day without basic access to education, health care, clean water and other essential social and economic infrastructure.

Guinea had taken steps to address this imbalance by launching a rural road rehabilitation project. The initiative had paid thousands of rural residents cash wages for manual labor on local road improvements, but it had produced very disappointing results. Rural communities had played virtually no part in project planning and had expressed different priorities for local development. As a result, when funding for road improvements stopped, local efforts to maintain the roads ceased as well. West Africa’s rainiest climate quickly reclaimed much of what had been done.

Based on this experience, Guinean officials recognized the need for a new approach to rural capacity building - a strategy capable of mobilizing sustained local investment in projects that directly addressed the real and immediate needs of rural communities.

The Village Support Program (PACV)

The World Bank was thus invited to conduct a pilot program to design an effective model for Guinea’s new Village Support Program (PACV in French), and it was charged with: (1) finding new ways to engage local communities as direct participants in development; and (2) producing a framework for a new network of decentralized, self-governing village-level institutions that could be integrated into broader district-level and national-level development planning and implementation.

To create an organizational foundation for the PACV, Guinea established 303 Rural Development Communities (CRDs in French) across its four major provinces. The World Bank then invited the African Development Foundation (ADF) and three other international organizations with participatory development experience to help it implement the PACV’s pilot phase and evaluate various strategies for generating demand-driven, community-led development. ADF agreed to finance projects in the CRDs of Bady, Baguinet, and Banguigny.

The pilot-year phase of the PACV program was launched in 1997 and designed to provide officials of the Government of Guinea and The World Bank with an opportunity to: (1) compare several different models for implementing participatory development methods and (2) incorporate best practices and lessons learned from each of the four pilot projects into a model for a 12-year nationwide PACV implementation program.

A School for Development in Bady

ADF began its funding activities under the PACV in Bady, a rural area nestled in the valley lowlands of Guinea’s Maritime province that had derived little economic benefit from its close proximity to a major bauxite processing center in the city of Fria. The Foundation financed a group of local Guinean development experts to act as the implementing team in Bady. This group began its work by organizing general village assemblies across the CRD. They invited every segment of the community to take an active role in open conversations about the PACV and discuss ways that local villages could take part in the development process.

These meetings ultimately led to the formation of village-level discussion groups that were divided up according to age, gender, and other social categories. The groups agreed to debate and prioritize their most pressing development needs and then send representatives to general village assemblies that would openly debate the recommendations of the smaller groups and determine an equitable set of community development priorities.

The general village assemblies then elected delegations of representatives – usually two men and two women - to present their village’s development agenda to a district-wide meeting of village representatives from the CRD of Bady.

Each of the four field operators participating in the PACV pilot program followed a different project-implementation methodology. Some placed little emphasis on community engagement and quickly implemented projects that expatriate development experts had recommended based on consultations with local community leaders. Other field operators took more time to engage local communities in participatory development exercises but then assumed all of the details related to project implementation and construction.

Because it focused time and effort on creating broad-based decision-making forums, the ADF-financed project in Bady took time to get moving – indeed, much more time than either the Foundation or the World Bank expected. And as the pilot phase of the PACV program reached its first review period, the Bady project was clearly lagging behind the other three pilot projects in measurable results. While the others were reporting significant progress toward implementation, Bady residents were still negotiating with one another over details on how they would invest the US $100,000 that had been allotted to the CRD for the first year of the five-year project.

The approach of the Guinean development experts who implemented the Bady project stood out from the others by virtue of its focus on ensuring direct community control of the project from start to finish. They recognized that Bady’s residents were the primary stakeholders in their own development and worked to integrate them into every facet of decision-making.

At one end, the ADF-financed implementing team worked with local communities to develop socially representative planning committees that could effectively debate and prioritize local development needs. And at the other end, the team trained local residents in all the essentials of project management and financial management so that they could directly control the bidding, selection and payment of contractors; organize local materials and labor to reduce project costs; provide on-the-ground oversight of construction activities; and identify successes and failures along the way.

This comprehensive approach to local capacity building necessarily took time, and the slow pace of implementation in Bady began to raise concerns among the World Bank’s program managers.

Dick Day, ADF’s Coordinator of Program Operations, recalls that “there was a sense of frustration that the ADF team was taking too much time in getting its pilot going. Bank officials wanted to see for themselves whether real progress was being made. But what they heard and saw at their meetings in Bady definitely changed their minds.”

World Bank officials, accompanied by a local government representative, inspected the work site where the construction of Bady’s first PACV project – a single-story primary school equipped with three classrooms and an outdoor lavatory system – had just started. They were visibly impressed with the quality of the construction and even more impressed that local residents were pitching in to contribute sand, stone and labor.

The World Bank visitors were surprised, however, when they learned that ADF had placed a local residents’ committee in charge of controlling and disbursing all payments to the builder. This information raised questions of accountability and the potential for malfeasance.

Yet concerns over the issue were quickly put to rest when local committee members produced a financial ledger and offered a detailed cost itemization of the building contract. Each purchase on a long list of acquisitions was accompanied by a receipt.

Moreover, the committee had developed a rigorous system for monitoring the builder’s use of concrete. Committee members had stored all of the concrete for the school in a locked shed and were dispensing it to the contractor in carefully portioned daily allotments. Every evening they asked the contractor to return the bags he had emptied so that they could keep a running inventory of his usage.

These details left a notable impression with World Bank officials, as did the dynamics of a mid-day discussion that Bank officials held with local CRD committee members, ADF-Washington staff, and a local member of Guinea’s parliament. As World Bank staff began asking specific questions about the Bady project, the member of parliament began answering on behalf of his constituents. He praised ADF for the work it was doing in Bady and thanked the Foundation for building a new school and health clinic.

After a few minutes of silence, a representative of the village committee politely interrupted the discussion to offer some important clarifications. He noted that his village was indeed grateful for ADF’s support in financing the project. But he made clear that his community - not ADF - was implementing the project and achieving its goals. His community was building the school and the clinic. His community was contributing time and labor to the project. He also noted that local families had pooled their savings to hire a temporary teacher so that their children would not have to wait for a new school year for the government to assign instructors.

As Dick Day remembers, “It was a moment that helped convince the Government of Guinea and the World Bank that something really special was happening in Bady. It brought to life the power of ADF’s unique participatory development methods. When the committee members spoke up, they spoke with commitment, knowledge and authority about every last detail of the project. They made it clear that this was their project. And they were proud of what they had achieved.”

A New Model for Participatory Development

The meeting helped transform the Bady pilot project into a development model worth replicating, and the seven-part participatory development methodology that ADF's Guinea team had created in close partnership with the people of Bady soon became an integral feature of the PACV program across Guinea and a guide for similar World Bank-funded development initiatives in Niger and Senegal.

The model that the ADF team produced through their work with Bady residents emphasizes the central importance of community participation in conceiving, designing, implementing, and evaluating local investments in rural development. The ultimate goal of the model is to provide local communities with the knowledge and skills they need to manage their own development.