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Developing Child
Friendly Community
Te program strengthens the integration and ownership of the
different social, economic and political activities of both the
community and the local government. The approach places the
partners for improving results for children, families, and
communities with group of local stakeholders. This includes the
parents, community members, and youth who live in the community
as well as service providers, elected officials, business
representatives, the faith community, and members of non-profit
and community organizations. Local governance places the
decision-making and the responsibility for effective strategies
in the hands of those who are most affected by the decisions.
The Local Governance Partnership (LGP) offers the structure that
is fundamentally different than traditional organizations. The
LGP offers an inclusive process for local governance and
community decision-making, bringing together diverse viewpoints
in a continuous community exchange that leads to better
decisions and ultimately improved results for children,
families, and communities.
The target of the Local Governance Partnerships is the local and
national government officials. These officials are among the
state executive and legislative branches; others include key
staff from state agencies that work with children and families.
The following six critical factors make-ups the LGP:
Local Decision-Making through Partnership
The partnership identifies issues and problems faced by
children, families, and communities and analyze them in light of
categorical human services system. The Partnership takes
responsibility to work together in addressing these problems and
improving results. The basics about the LGP are elaborated: its
role, characteristics, functions, how it relates to existing
entities, decisions about structure and legal standing,
relationships with state and local government, and relationships
with neighborhoods are laid out concretely through series of
consultation meetings and workshops.
Forming and Sustaining Successful Partnership
This addresses the required knowledge, skills and capacity
development of the LGP members on building
trusting-relationships, negotiating capacity, effective
decision-making, ensuring meaningful parent and community member
involvement and ethnic and gender diversity.
Setting a Community Agenda
The knowledge and capacity of the members are enhanced for
developing community agenda. It includes identifying community
conditions, gathering community perspectives, mapping community
resources, etc. Through the process the members develops skills
to create a vision - with results and indicators - and
establishes community priorities as well as knowledge and skills
for building a wider circle of support and consensus for the
agenda.
Strategies to Achieve Results
This contains knowledge and skill building activities in systems
thinking, researching promising practices, and synthesizing the
information collected into a comprehensive community strategy
and a plan for implementation.
Financing and Budgeting Strategies
This presents the basics to financing a comprehensive mix of
strategies. It includes a collaborative view of financing and
ways to identify existing funding and resources, develop a core
funding base, obtain discretionary and grant funds, restructure
and repackage resources, obtain informal and in-kind resources,
and develop a financial plan and a budget.
Using Data to Ensure Accountability
This deals with accountability and the Local Governance
Partnership. It presents a results framework and roles and
responsibilities for shared accountability as well as knowledge
and skills development for setting up a data collection system,
including collecting, reporting, and using data to determine
progress toward improving results. Together, they are intended
to give local people—both professionals and
non-professionals—the knowledge and skills needed to become
active decision-makers on behalf of children and families in
their community.
It may be noted here that, a large number of the enlightened
people of the community actually do not stay in the local area;
they are situated either in urban cities or abroad. They are
generally little aware about the various development issues of
the local community, however, being more enlightened they can
contribute to the development process significantly, at least by
raising critical issues about governance and the local
government’s overall functioning.
As a result, the entry point for the intervention was fixed at
three levels: 1) Local government level, 2) Community level and
3) Community people living outside. Simultaneously the local
civil society organizations (NGOs, CBOs, and various
associations/shomittees) are also be engaged in the process to
facilitate the development of integration and ownership process.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a critical
role to effectively inform the various stakeholders quickly and
meaningfully.
The primary target of the intervention is to bring all the
parties on same level of understanding. Information
dissemination, awareness creation, capacity building and
mobilization are the major areas of intervention in the initial
phase. In this regard an identification of present void in the
flow of information, awareness and capacity of both the local
government and the community was conducted first. The roles and
responsibilities of the government and the community are
explained and clarified to the parties. The government’s
mandates, rules, regulations and regulatory mechanisms are also
explained to all the parties. The monthly meetings are arranged
in association with the Union Parishad members to discuss about
various critical activities undertaken by UP.
One of the primary focuses of the intervention is to facilitate
the smooth flow of information to all the stakeholders – the
local government, the private sector, the community and the
civil society organizations to keep them updated on the various
programs, activities and actions of all these parties.
The Union Parishad through its 13 subcommittees/standing
committees are entrusted to collect, analyze and disseminate
information to the community people, NGOs, private sector, the
different government authorities and the other stakeholders. The
Unions with telephone connectivity accesses the national server
and UP portal and uploads or downloads information and data
periodically. Where direct connectivity is not available,
off-line media (CD, thumb-drive, disk) are used to transfer the
data at the divisional level to facilitate uploading via local
dial-up connection to the portal for easy access of all the
stakeholders. The Union Tattha Kendras directly uploads
or downloads information from the portal through their own
dial-up modem where telephone connectivity is available later.
Wireless intranet facilities were thought about to bring the
unions, Thana/Upazila Parishads, Zila (District) Parishad,
Divisional LGED department and the central government together
under a Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN)
connection. This at a latter period can be integrated to a GIS
system to analyze the various indicators of Union Parishad more
meaningfully. It may be noted here that the software will
analyze key socio-economic and human indicators (simple
frequency table preparation, correlation analysis, time series
analysis, before-after analysis with figures and graphical
representation and disseminate the same in report form (in
Bangla) to the local community and important stakeholders.
Graphical representation with icons and pictures will be used
extensively for easy understanding of the people with low
literacy rate.
The project would be launched with the installation of “Union
Parishad Information Center (Union Tattha Kendra)” at
union headquarters in four districts – Rangpur, Bogra, Sirajgonj
and Cox’s Bazaar with 10 unions per districts. The 40 unions
will exchange data and information not only with the community
but also divisional LGED and Central Government as well as the
wider stakeholders including non-resident union people living
outside the union.
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