Tackling child marriage in Malawi by putting communities in the driver’s seat
This blog is one in a series that aims to show what community-driven systems change (CDSC) looks like in practice and the real impact it produces.
Ensuring community ownership
One fundamental difference between Global North funding models and the community-driven systems change (CDSC) approach promoted by Firelight is the emphasis that we place on the active involvement and ownership of communities themselves.
Where traditional funding approaches tend to treat communities as passive recipients, our support for community ownership reflects our values and fundamental belief in the agency of the people impacted by an issue. More than that, it recognizes that the best and most sustainable solutions to a community’s challenges will come from ‘within’ and not through the efforts of external agencies, however well meaning.
Ensuring community ownership is so important to CDSC that we have developed mechanisms for making sure that community members are involved from the very first days of a project – for example, they help validate the CBOs to be approved as partners and they share their needs and potential solutions. Engagement of communities does not end with the launch of the program. Every year the CBO is asked to revisit the work plan with the community to compare intention and outcome, and then use that information to write up their plans for the year ahead.
How it works in practice
Our support to five CBOs in Malawi to tackle early child marriage is a great example of how these processes have worked in practice. It was the first program where we applied the community-driven systems change methods from the outset.
We started by giving the five CBOs time and funding to engage with their communities to unpack the root causes of early child marriage and to create a list of priorities and possible solutions that they could submit to Firelight as a funding proposal.
It became clear through the community consultation processes that many of the root causes of child marriage were understood to be interconnected and that a holistic approach was needed to address them. In one case, this involved the CBO partner working with youth clubs to provide dedicated information on sexual and reproductive health while also working to overcome stigma with parents, teachers, and community elders. At the same time, the CBOs worked with traditional leaders to strengthen by-laws against child marriage and with parents on income generating programs so that they could have the resources to meet household emerging needs and keep their children in school.
Real impact
These activities have all had an impact. Young people now feel confident identifying situations that could lead to child marriages and have a direct connection to traditional leaders to report such cases. Traditional leaders have a base of by-laws from which they can work to terminate the marriage. Changes like these are important signs of the shift towards community ownership and are valuable because they can be sustained without support from the CBO or Firelight funding. The shift in mindset could also be seen in the decision of a group of mothers to focus on distributing sanitary pads to girls who had been missing school due to their menstrual periods.
This kind of community involvement is also a way to ensure effective accountability for the other stakeholders in the equation. For example, one CBO partner was struggling to complete the reporting as laid out in their initial proposal. Our team at Firelight, in addition to working with the CBO, reached out to the local area development committee to get their input and support in lieu of more traditional accountability measures such as those used by auditors.
A real shift in power and decision-making
Ultimately, the biggest shift we’ve seen has been in the confidence and belief in themselves that the CBOs and community members have gained as they have taken control of the project, impacting their community and families.
For many CBOs, this shift was a dramatic departure from traditional approaches where they have played the role of implementer but had limited input into the choice of programs being implemented.
In contrast, the CDSC approach has invited CBOs to be ‘in the driver's seat’ of the process throughout – while also recognizing that, as the funding partner, Firelight should play a role limited to what is useful.
While there were certainly some growing pains in adjusting to the CDSC approach, it has ultimately allowed Firelight to formalize and accelerate processes that were already organically occurring in the community by explicitly building structures to allow for a true shift in power and decision-making.
By rejecting the externally driven model of traditional development work where communities are mostly passive recipients, CDSC has allowed community members to meaningfully engage with, and contribute to, the interventions taking place in their community. Further, their engagement comes with a full understanding of the intention and purpose of the work itself.
The agent of change is not Firelight. Our funding instead acts as one input in a much larger process, working in tandem with local and national governments, the CBOs, and the community to arrive at solutions that work towards lasting, sustainable, community-owned change.
More about this work may be found here.
