QN: ELABORATE COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION AS A PROCESS

QN: ELABORATE COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION AS A PROCESS 

INTRODUCTION

Social Mobilization, as defined by UNICEF, is a broad scale movement to engage people's participation in achieving a specific development goal through self-reliant efforts. It involves all relevant segments of society: decision and policy makers, opinion leaders, bureaucrats and technocrats, professional groups, religious associations, commerce and industry, communities and individuals. It is a planned decentralized process that seeks to facilitate change for development through a range of players engaged in interrelated and complementary efforts. It takes into account the felt needs of the people, embraces the critical principle of community involvement, and seeks to empower individuals and groups for action.

Mobilizing the necessary resources, disseminating information tailored to targeted audiences, generating intersectoral support and fostering cross-professional alliances are also part of the process. While the components of the process may be everyday practice in many development programs, they tend to be taken up in isolation of each other. Social mobilization in total aims at a continuum of activities in a broad strategic framework. The process encompasses dialogue and partnership with a wide spectrum of societal elements. At the policy level, the outcomes should be a supportive framework for decision making and resource allocation to empower communities to act at the grassroots level. The outcomes should be people's active involvement ranging from identifying a need to implementation in achieving the development objective and evaluation effort. The solidarity of bureaucrats and technocrats and a broad alliance of partners among various non-governmental groups are equally critical for the attainment of any change-oriented development goal. Simply stated, social mobilization calls for a journey among partners and results in the successful transformation of development goals into societal action (ww.tulane.edu/~icec/socmob.htm)

DEFINITION OF KEY TERMS

Community, a group of people living together in one place especially one practicing common ownership(wikipedia Dictionary.com)

Mobilization, act of marshaling and organizing and making ready for use or action (Webster 1913)

Community mobilization is a process through which action is stimulated by a community itself, or by others, that is planned, carried out, and evaluated by a community’s individuals, groups, and organizations on a participatory and sustained basis to improve the health, hygiene and education levels so as to enhance the overall standard of living in the community,(http;//en.wikipedia.org/w/index)

Community mobilization; is the process of engaging communities to identify community priorities, resources, needs and solutions in such a way as to promote representative participation, good governance, accountability and peaceful change.(http://www.mercycorps.org/sectors/communitymobilization)

According to our perspective community mobilization is the dynamic process that involves planned actions to reach, influence, enable and involve the key segments of the community in order to collectively create an environment that will effect positive behavior and bring about desired social change in the community.

COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION PROCESS

Community mobilization will only happen after a careful developmental process that involves participation of community people in making decision, establishing common ground, describing and agreeing on everyone’s right and responsibility in the process. In order to mobilize people in the community towards achieving a certain things you must consider the issue process which can help others to join, participate, and contribute for the betterment of the project you desired for them and this could impossible in isolation of community mobilization process, so let us see the process or steps to consider in community mobilization as follows:-

(1)Preparing to mobilize, it is the first stage in community mobilization process, the following sub steps should be considered in preparing to mobilize community as follows;-

Organizing and training community mobilization teams, community mobilization team members will typically consists of community mobilization officers and  any other resources person assigned to support community mobilization, train and orient staffs on the community team, this in order to build a strong, capable team with similar mission, vision and skills also to recommend areas for group discussion and orientation

Understanding selected communities, before making initial contact with selected communities, its recommended to gather all the information available on this community before action, in addition it is commended that you begin the process of defining the community boundaries and what areas you will be covering some recommended areas to look into include geography/accessible, economy, politics, local leaders, organizations, socio-cultural environment

Making contact with communities, one of the highest priorities for community mobilization is building strong relationship with members of each community. Community mobilization team may closely and observed by members of the community in addition informal channel should be strong its important to have carefully plan meetings and discussion in the community and how to develop a strong group

Gathering more information on communities that you have established relationship in the community and have some members who are interested in the ideas and have demonstrated leadership and commitment, you should begin gathering more information also by using formative research this is very useful for better understanding the issue of the community the finding  should be eventually be shared with your community at different levels to raise great awareness in local issues, increase motivation to act and gain consensus.

Assets and barriers, building on the information gathered so far it can be useful to discus various assets and barriers associated with your community, it will be important to begin tracking constraints such as key members of the community who are either not motivated to work on the issue or who have an interest in blocking the success of any initiatives.

 Community mobilization plan, with good understanding of the strengths and weakness of the community, the people involved and how easily the community can be organized a community mobilization plan for each community will be helpful in guiding the way the purpose of this plan is to define the objectives and process approach this process will differ by community since each is so unique by documenting the plan, this will help all the other partners understand what steps are being taken to initiate community mobilization in each community.

(2) organizing the community for action, in the process of organizing the community for action the following should be considered as follows:-

Orienting the community, in this step you will figure out how best to organize to organize your community for collective action. You will also be working to gain the participation of as many varied people/ voices as you can and also you will continue meeting with people having on discussion about the concerned issue, seeking advice or how to involve others

Building relationship and trust, building trust and rapport with the community is the one of the most important step to successful community mobilization, listen to the needs of community members learn and respect local customs adopting social customs and other traditions, to identify, support and promote local leaders, building on existing network, house to house visits can be effective way of building trust

Encouraging community participation, arranging meetings at a time and place that is most convenient to the majority of participants.If there is no agreed upon time for all, perhaps rotating days or times so that interested members can participate can help. Encourage community leaders to help build the sense of team for the group. They can contribute by taking notes, recapping meetings (building ‘group memory’) and even facilitation. They can also help notify community members of meeting times and places

(3) Explore the problem and set the priority, it’s the third stage in community mobilization, before engaging in participatory exercises with the problem and the broader communities its useful to begin these process with the leader ship team in gaining familiarity with the participatory exercises and discussion that will be held with the leadership team and also to gain a better understanding of the problem of the selected community. The explanation of the problem in the field can achieved through discussion of the community member and real stories or person reflection

(4) Planning together, the purpose of this step is to determine who in the community should be involved in the planning process, to come up with consensus in objective and to determine how planning will be conducted. In these step leadership should consider components like what needs to be achieved, how it will be achieved who will be responsible for what resources available, when and where activities will be implemented, how success will monitored. The internal support team should brainstorm and then come to consensus and what they feel are the most important objectives for those phases of the community mobilization process.

(5) Act together, this was  the stage of implementation where  by the step from number one to number four have been recognized and this stage you  come into action where by in this stage leaders and other members who are the victim of that issue come into collaboration in order to achieve what they have desired, for instance the issue of building schools when they will reach this stage is where you can see other people participating in this issue such as making bricks, fetching water and making the foundations

(6) Evaluate together, this is the last stage in community mobilization process, in evaluating you can asses the following such as performance and quality of the project intended, successful  completion, and the potential impact of the project intended. This is the stage where you can proceed mobilizing community to other issues or to start again from the stage number one when the purpose of community mobilization was proved failure.

CONCLUSION

Generally, mobilizing community towards achieving a certain things it does not occur abruptly like a mushroom growth but it must follow some process in achieving. Community mobilization will be impossible in isolation of community mobilizer who have skills like communication and advocacy. There are some ways for community mobilization such as mass media public meeting of village through influential leaders and study tour, we insist in community mobilization simply because it play  a great significance in the society for instance to strengthen the capacity of the group[p or people for them to understand, identify and seek solution of their problems     

      

 by ROSE SAMSON, SANGA FESTORY H, MPUNZA PASCAL (TEOFILO KISANJI UNIVERSITY TEKU).