The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) will work to strengthen the capacity of community groups in the Region, in response to findings from a recent pilot assessment, the latest phase of which was recently carried out in Saint Lucia.
Thirty-seven (37) Saint Lucians in seven community groups, in seven communities recently participated in the capacity assessment exercise carried out by CDB’s Basic Needs Trust Fund (BNTF) under its tenth cycle.
This makes Saint Lucia the third country to be assessed under the CDB’s BNTF’s Pilot Beneficiary Group Capacity and Programme Assessment, which seeks to identify areas for strengthening the operations of each group to aid communities in pursuing sustainable local development. Earlier this year, twenty (20) communities were assessed in Jamaica and an additional eight (8) in Guyana.
“It is key that the BNTF be more responsive – to include project beneficiaries more in project design and project implementation. That is a significant part of the reason why we are implementing a beneficiary assessment tool,” said George Yearwood, Portfolio Manager of the BNTF.
The BNTF Programme is the main vehicle of the CDB for pursuing direct poverty reduction in the Caribbean. It responds to needs identified by the most vulnerable communities in the priority areas of water and sanitation, education and livelihoods enhancement, and access and drainage to improve the quality of life of beneficiaries in its nine (9) participating countries.
The groups in the seven communities where assessments were carried out at the end of April were:
1) Vieux Fort Comprehensive Secondary School
2) Soufriere Primary School
3) Babonneau Primary School
4) Goodlands East
5) Choiseul Music Committee
6) La Resource Development Committee
7) Castries South East Constituency Council
At a stakeholder meeting convened to share the assessment findings that was held at the end of the week-long exercise, Community Development Specialist at the CDB, Mr. Richardo Aiken highlighted some of the key findings.
He said that 96 per cent of the participating groups did not have the capacity to do project proposal writing. Roughly 86 per cent of the groups were not registered and did not have a constitution to guide the governance of the group. About 74 per cent of participants were unaware of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) and their applicability to their organisation’s work.
“Successfully mapping the SDGs into the activities of the BNTF and within national plans produces four areas of improved project implementation for CDB and country partners,” explained Aiken. “These areas are: 1) national planning, 2) budgetary programmatic structure, 3) performance evaluation system, and 4) accounting harmonisation.”
For Brandon Antoine, Deputy Project Manager of the BNTF office in Saint Lucia, the exercise has been useful for programme planning.
“The assessment shows some of the areas that we need to improve on and we can incorporate some of these findings into the implementation of the current and future BNTF Cycles,” said Mr. Antoine.
Based on the preliminary findings so far from all three countries, Mr. Aiken indicated that the CDB’s BNTF would be planning some actions to respond to the needs raised.
“We have a few interventions targeted for this year – one is to do a proposal writing workshop in collaboration with the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) and a few other partners. We also will be doing an online Community Development Course in collaboration with the University of Wolverhampton,” he said.