1 Business Partners for Development is funded by the World Bank, DFID and private company contributions.
2 The Water and Sanitation Program is funded by bilateral donors through the World Bank.
3 Such as those typically used by economists in discussions about demand, affordability and willingness to pay.
4 While this book aims to stress the importance of community participation, mechanisms and capacity building to this end are not its primary purpose, and the benefits and processes of participation are documented in detail elsewhere. Participation can take various forms and no one particular form is ideal or static throughout the delivery process. Communities, like delivery agents, are likely to develop capacity to participate and to create their own evolving processes. Participation will also be affected by a range of social, political, cultural, economic and physical factors, and will vary according to the service type (whether solid waste, water supply or sanitation), the stage of delivery (design, implementation, operation or maintenance), and the level of service. The keys to participation are appropriateness, ensuring that roles are understood and objectives agreed, and facilitating capacity building for all partners.
The lessons of participatory poverty reduction initiatives provide a wealth of examples of the benefits of targeted activities, which the poor themselves identified and formulated; they illustrate the increased ownership, status and empowerment that have resulted from the process. Yet participation can be difficult to achieve. One of the corollaries of the involvement of a wide range of stakeholders is the need for time and flexibility. Driven by expenditure goals, few projects have enough time available, and fewer have the flexibility to accommodate the change, feedback and revision processes that make participation meaningful.
These concepts are developed in Municipalities and Community Participation; Plummer, 2000.
5 Amis, 2000.
6 See Plummer, 2000b, describing a participatory assessment of urban poverty in Vientiane.
7 As in society at large, women's groups are also dominated by more powerful (and probably wealthier) women, and their needs are unlikely to reflect the needs of the more vulnerable.
8 DFID definition, available on the DFID sustainable livelihoods website www.livelihoods.org.
9 The SL approach is now mainstreamed by a number of agencies, including the UNDP and DFID. The UNDP has included SL as one of its five corporate mandates.
10 In order to keep to an established framework, the following section draws heavily on the descriptions and structure of DFID literature on SL, predominately the DFID SL guidelines (DFID, 1999).
11 DFID, 1999, 2.4.1.
12 DFID, 1999, 2.4.2.
13 The municipality can choose to elect another actor, such as an NGO, rather than place itself in the coordinator role.