Voice from participant of ILDC2024 – Kshamata
What’s new about participatory approach?
Even before I participated in ILDC, I already had some idea about “participatory approach”, since some alumni in my organization including the Founder and the Executive Director were using the term. However, I did not know how to do “participatory” in the community activities.
In the training course, we did reflection many times, like every day. We gave feedback not only on the learning contents, but also on how we learned, such as our behavior and attitude in the group discussion. I wondered why we needed it, because I was rather expecting to spend our time for learning about the new knowledge in terms of community development from AHI as well as other participants. So, in the beginning, I was a little frustrated.
But as the days went by, I chatted with other participants on various day-to-day situations and imagined how these things happen in our own communities. At that time, we found that the purpose of daily reflection is to reflect how we used to behave and communicate with people in our community activities. At least until now, I have never had the opportunity to reflect on my facilitation with others. By struggling in planning and facilitation of the session, I think I learned the process of participatory approach for adapting to our daily routines.
Any challenges?
This was my first time to participate in a training abroad, and I was a little nervous at first because of all the new things, such as living together with people from different countries. Also, I worked hard to come up with a “great” idea and shared with others, but they were sometimes not accepted, and even modified. I hadn’t had many such experiences before. Especially in the second week, most of us were feeling homesick like me, and I was upset and struggling to find what I was learning.
Since our coordinator said, “Make mistakes as much as possible, because this is a lab”, I began to see everything as a “learning opportunity”. If I fail, for example, in my facilitation, I can turn it into a “good lesson,” and if I succeed, I can turn it into a “strength” as it is. Since then, I began to take my responsibility and find it interesting to hear other opinions.
How will you apply your learning?
One of my learning needs was to learn new strategies for sustainability of my CBO (Kopila Independent Development Societies). In order to enhance their ownership, I will encourage them to create a conducive environment for their activities by giving clear guidelines. For that we will facilitate session with group members to collaboratively set the ground rules for discussions, decision making and daily managements. Actually, there was already ground rules for the CBO, but they were introduced by NGO (Kopila-Nepal) which I belong to. So, they can develop these rules and criteria to be agreed upon by all members.
Also, I want to introduce a participatory capacity assessment to identify their learning needs with the CBO members.
We really learned that the participatory approach takes time, but I believe that it would ultimately lead to develop secondary leadership and sustain CBO’s activities.
