WHAT IS COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION?

There are nearly as many definition of community mobilization today as there are communities and organizations using it as a strategy. For the purpose of this program, community mobilization is: “a capacity-building process through which community members, groups, or organization plan, carry out and evaluate activities on a participatory and sustained basis to improve their conditions, either on their own initiative or stimulated by others”

Although this strategy can be applied to any aspect of community development, in this context we will start by focusing on community mobilization to eradicate poverty through improving access to educational resources. Its primary actors include community organizations with their respective links to external resources.

Participation is the essential element of community mobilization, but it is important to recognize that all participation is not equal. As community participation increases, community ownership capacity increase, with the result that community action and continuous improvement in the quality of community life are more likely to be sustained overtime. Degrees of Community Participation

COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP AND SUSTAINABILITY

Collective Action: people set their own agenda and mobilize to carry it out.
Co-learning: people share their knowledge to create new understanding and work together to for form action plans
Cooperation: people work together to determine priorities
Consultation: Options are asked; leaders analyze and decide on a course of action
Compliance Task are assigned, with incentives; leaders decide agenda and direct the process
Co-option: Token involvement of the people; representatives are chosen

When carried out at the higher levels of participation;

• Builds on social networks to spread support, commitment, and changes in social norms and behaviors
• Builds local capacity to identify and address community needs
• Motivates communities to advocate for policy changes to respond better to their real needs disenfranchised population have a voice in decision-making and increased access to information and services while addressing many of the underlying social causes of poverty, low self-esteem and self-efficacy, low social status, etc.
• Mobilizes local and external resources to address the issue and establishes coordination and monitoring systems to ensure transparency, accountability, and effective management of these resources.
• Plays a key role in linking communities to educational services, helping to define, improve on, and monitor quality of care from the joint perspectives of community members and service providers, thereby improving availability of, aces to, and satisfaction with educational services.
True community mobilization incorporates value and principles that empower people to develop and implement their own solutions to poverty and other challenges. Programs that carry out all of the community mobilization steps but do not embrace these values and principles will empower communities to achieve lasting results. They may also run the risk of setting poor precedents that leave communities feeling co-opted, manipulated, and reluctant to work with external organizations in the future.

How Does Community Mobilization Work?

Community mobilization at its best does not merely raise community awareness about an issue or persuade people to participate in activities that have been prioritized and planned by others. Rather, it is a comprehensive strategy that includes the following activities:

1. Carrying out careful formative research to understand the community context and designed the process;
2. Entering the community and establishing credibility and trust
3. Raising community awareness about poverty as a result of ignorance;
4. Exploring the issue to understand what is currently being done and why (helpful, harmful, and benign practices, beliefs and attitudes) so that they can set priorities;
5. Planning; implementing the community plan; and monitoring and evaluating progress.

Design Questions:
There are some critical questions about the community mobilization strategy that need to be answered before proceeding with a mobilization effort. These include:
• What is the goal? (Described in terms that motivate citizens)
• Who is the community? (Those most affected by and interested in the issue)
• Who is stimulating the process? (outside of or inside the community)
• Who will be facilitating the process? (community members? Staff)
• What support structure exists for facilitators? (Training, facilitation materials, monitoring/supervision, logistic and transport)
• What external and internal resources are potentially available to contribute to the effort?
• To what extent do people have experience participating in community action? Who is included? Who is left out? Why?
• Is the effort realistic? What is the potential for longer-term community ownership and sustainability?

Success Factors:
The primary ingredients of a successful community mobilization program consist of:
• Program staff including: a program manager, team of facilitators;
• Trainers (s)
• Transport budget, depending on where facilitators and managers are based and may include MEANS OF transport if facilitators need to travel longer distances;
• Budget for developing training and educational materials (e.g; training manuals, picture cards, booklet, audio-video aids);
• Media budget (depends on distance to training site number of days, and number of participants and existing skills/knowledge of trainees); and
• Other direct cost associated with office expenses.

The most important personnel decision a program can make is who will facilitate the process in the community
Programs need to take into account existing organization and their relationship with community members, especially women of parenting age, must respect, trust, and feel comfortable communicating with the facilitator.

Ideally, programs would develop the skills of community members to facilitate the process so that this capacity remains in the community, and increasingly more programs are moving in this direction.

Measuring community capacity to sustain welfare improvements and successfully address other issues is equally important.

Design Questions:

There are some critical questions about the community mobilization strategy that need to be answered  before proceeding with a mobilization effort. These include:

• What is the goal? (Described in terms that motivate citizens)

• Who is the community? (Those most affected by and interested in the issue

• Who is stimulating the process? (outside of or inside the community)

• Who will be facilitating the process? (community members? Staff)

• What support structure exists for facilitators? (Training, facilitation materials, monitoring/supervision, logistic and transport)

• What external and internal resources are potentially available to contribute to the effort?

• To what extent do people have experience participating in community action

• Who is included? Who is left out? Why?

• Is the effort realistic? What is the potential for longer-term community ownership and sustainability?

CAN COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION BE SUCCESSFULLY CALLED UP?

Inherent in community mobilization is the potential and promise for taking successful project to a larger scale. But what do we mean by “large”? Must countries mobilize every community in order to have a significant impact on poverty? How many communities constitute large scale? How many people?

The NGO experience dictates that extensive coverage alone Is insufficient to ensure that the most vulnerable benefit and that programs and result are sustained in the long term. A definition of “scaling up” that takes into account these points is offered by the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction: calling-up refers to effort to bring more quality benefits to more people over a wider geographical area more quickly, more equitably, and more lastingly.”

It is not always necessary and is often too expensive to reach every community, nor is it necessary to reach every person in every participating community. Social network studies have documented that people who do not directly participate in community initiatives often benefit from the participation of their friends, family, and others with whom they interact.

For example, a woman who attends a women’s group meeting and discusses how to identify danger signs of pregnancy then returns home and tells her neighbor about the discussion. The neighbor learns about the signs, and when her daughter is pregnant and begins to bleed, she takes her to the health facility immediately. As more and more people become aware of the activities of those directly involved, they may gain knowledge, may decide to participate themselves, and/or may become participants in changing community norms by adopting new beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

Four scaling-up strategies are:

1. Quantitative scale –up in which the number of beneficiaries increases, often through geographical expansion;
2. Functional scale- up in which a program incorporates additional technical interventions to an existing project;
3. Political scale-up that seeks to diminish barriers to program implementation through advocacy to change policies, by enacting legal reform, and by using sociopolitical networks to influence decision-making;
4. Organizational scale-up that strengthens organizations’ capacity to support effective programs over tie through expanding their linkages to resources, fostering alliances and coalitions, strengthening organizational systems, and learning new technical skills.

Ideally, a community program would pursue all four scaling – up strategies to be effective over the long term.

Community mobilization can spread organically or in a planned manner from one community to others as broader awareness and interest are raised.

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