Why Community Engagement is key to Succeed in International Development

For over 20 years I have observed and learnt about community engagement initiatives through the lenses of global interventions introduced by development partners with keen interest on education, health and environment through a sample of interventions being implemented in African communities.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been pumped into Global Health interventions designed in the global west with zero input from the affected communities.

Designing a global health intervention should be done with primary consideration of the narratives that shape the communities. Global health continues to suffers from fatal design flaws ending up with spurious surprising data fundamentally questioning the targeted communities.

Most researchers and scientists in the global west assume the supply chain ends when their interventions hit the global south, yet the true last mile is the invisible territory between a clinical solution and a human belief system. A human belief system that has been the building stone of cohesive communities, a narrative that is a strange phenomenon in the west.

One must invest time to understand the driving forces that make communities believe in their traditions. If a community perceives an illness through a spiritual or cultural lens, then a purely chemical solution will be erroneous.

One of the most expensive mistake that is frequently made is that of treating cultural anthropology as a soft skill rather than the core of implementation. It will not matter how sophisticated your intervention is, as long as it collides with culture, there will be fundamental clashes and culture will most definitely win at the expense of the millions of dollars invested.

Public health interventions must must consider behavior change through community participatory design and ideation as priority.

Great scientific interventions that ignored cultural knowledge fail. Science dictates how a pathogen moves, but culture dictates whether a cure will spread and have positive or negative impact.

Intersecting indigenous knowledge with global health science through bridging a narrative that centers the stories people tell about their bodies, yields in transforming passive beneficiaries into active partners.

Investment in development initiatives must be centered around trust. Story telling is a powerful mode of communication at community level that has worked for interventions that have stood the test of time. We must start treating community members as key stakeholders in interventions that target them and not merely as beneficiaries.

Many health care solutions being dumped to communities end up in home storage and wasted away. Some vaccines sit in warehouses to their expiry because the interventions ignored cultural sensitivities of building community acceptance.

I translate knowledge to sit well within anthropological realities. From evidentiary science to policy, to cultural narratives that transform communities.