Local Participation in Decision Making

When deciding on new projects our philosophy is to focus on things that the beneficiaries can largely manage themselves. The activities we support are those which the local people see as most important in trying to improve their lives, and often local people will see a cluster of small projects as being more suitable than a single large one. A typical project might cost the NTA around $500 in materials and often the local contributions exceed those of the NTA. These contributions provide a real incentive to the locals to do their best to make the projects succeed. Keeping things relatively small also means that small communities are more likely to have the capacity to manage a project, and this too leads to greater likelihood of success.

All our activities are developed through a process of active discussion with the communities concerned. A major part of this development process occurs at bi-annual community meetings or musyawarah in which representatives of local people gather at central points and discuss their aims and aspirations, and formulate ideas about how NTA might help. This process of consultation also operates at more local levels when members of participating local groups or kelompok meet with NTA representatives to discuss what interventions the locals would like to see over the following six months as long as the locals have fulfilled their promises from the previous period. If rotating credit is involved, the NTA-paid extension officers make sure money is repaid at agreed times. The NTA and its counterparts are always available to provide technical advice when it is needed, to check that money and goods are going where they're supposed to, and to negotiate any adjustments that might be needed for the programs.

We operate all of our projects in cooperation with local NGOs. In 2008 we are working on the island of Semau, on the mainland of West Timor and in the kabupaten or (district) of Sikka on the island of Flores. On Semau we cooperate with the Yayasan Pengembangan Masyarakat Pulau Semau (The Group for the Advancement of the People of Semau Island) and in Sikka we work with the Yayasan Pengembangan Masyarakat Flores (The Group for the Advancement of the People of Flores). Elsewhere we work directly through our own staff. We estimate we are having substantial effects on the lives of some 10,000 people.

The tangible benefits of NTA's activities are obvious enough in themselves, but some of the intangible benefits are often more important in the long run. Because self-help and cooperation are important parts of all our projects, there have been substantial improvements in villagers' capacity to initiate projects themselves, to advocate for themselves, and to manage the finances of their projects themselves. People also share their successes: in NTA's early days on Semau, we provided a lot of help with the construction of sanitary toilets but now the people of Semau have taken over this work themselves and most houses now have toilets that don't pollute underground drinking water thanks in part to the training and technical assistance originally provided by NTA. This kind of capacity building and empowerment of local communities is probably the most important thing we can do to assist real long-term development.