Overview:
This three-year project is Phase II to a community development project also supported by Entrust. The project will hire and train up ten new facilitators in the state of Rakhine, to work with local communities to undertake participatory, community-driven, sustainable development. The facilitators will be trained in livelihoods development, conflict resolution, community development, monitoring and evaluation and facilitation skills. This will provide a base to work within their community on the community’s development priorities. Seed funding will also allow the community to undertake a few small projects first without having to access all the required resources (they will be required to share costs). The idea is at the end of three years the communities understand how to facilitate their own development and are keen to continue the work begun under the project.
What we like about it:
Phase I delivered strong results with the communities impacted going on to impact other villages in their area. In one location the target community combined with 7 non-target villages in the same area to work together to build a road that would benefit all. This is just one community which is now empowered to further develop! We appreciate that all facilitators will be chosen from the target community. They will be trained on how to develop a livelihood and encouraged to develop this over the course of the three years at the same time as working for the community. This means that the facilitator will have an ongoing source of income once the project ends and will remain available for the community to use his or her expertise in their ongoing development.
Budget: $54,000 for 2019 (Year 3). This budget will cover the cost of supporting ten facilitators and enable them to seed fund initial projects in each community.
The Need:
Rakhine State has experienced a great deal of inter-ethnic violence and continues to do so, particularly since August 2017 with the Burmese military conducting “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya people into Bangladesh.
It has also suffered from extreme weather events, with severe flooding in 2015, 2016 and 2017. The people are extremely poor and resources are limited or non-existent. This is an area of huge need that is suffering terribly.
Life Change:
