LEWA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME

The challenge facing Kenya today is to reduce poverty, conservation of natural resources and achieve sustained economic growth for healthy national development.

The government is committed to address this challenge in consultation with key stakeholders in the economy, especially the private sector and other development led organisations. The strategy to achieve this entails the participation and inclusion of all Kenyans, especially the poor, in the design and implementation of strategies aimed at tackling the challenges of poverty. This is in recognition of the fact that it is the poor who understand at first hand the causes, nature and extent of poverty. The greatest challenge is that the government has called upon all the private sector to join hands with it in achieving development in their areas of operations. Hence, Lewa Wildlife Conservancy has taken up the challenge and has become an engine of development in its neighbourhood through conservation and mobilization of the communities to participate in both wildlife and environmental conservation.

Lewa Community Development Programme outlines the priorities and measures necessary for poverty reduction, natural resource utilisation geared to economic development of the local adjacent communities. The programme is a product of broad-based and in depth consultations among all the local communities who are in particular poor at all levels and are direct linked to wildlife. These comprehensive consultations have ensured that the programme fosters local ownership that is necessary to support and implement the development and conservation initiatives where wildlife benefits trickled down to each community area.

Lewa being a catalyst for development aims through the community development programme to put sound strategies necessary for facilitating sustainable and rapid rural economic growth, increased understanding of wildlife conservation, improve governance in the local level, raising income opportunities of the poor, improving the quality of life, and improving equity and participation. These principles remain valid and relevant and form the basis of this programme.

The community programme and the wider local communities have the twin objectives of wildlife conservation and local economic growth and poverty reduction. This is in recognition that sustainable utilisation of our wildlife and environmental conservation is a sufficient condition to ensure poverty reduction. In this regard, measures geared towards improved local benefits from wildlife conservation performance and priority actions that must be implemented to reduce the incidence of poverty among the communities have been identified. Our working principles in the programme identifies strategies that integrate sector objectives and ensure that priority actions are consistent with the goals of spurring growth, decentralized conservation benefits and reducing local poverty.

The programme is central to the development of pro-poor and pro-growth natural resources conservation and sustainable utilization of the same. We at Lewa have put in place strategies that go hand in hand with the government authorities and we also ensure that all the polices the government place and its directives are followed to the later.

It is by this that our community development programme is at the centre of the long-term vision outlined in the National Poverty Eradication Plan (NPEP). The NPEP proposes a fifteen year time horizon to fight poverty and has adopted the international development goals, which aim at reducing global poverty by half.

This provides the vision for our intervention programme to eradicate poverty and poor handling of the meagre natural resources available within the local community areas where wildlife is utilized and conserved to meet our needs.  

Principles and objectives of the Lewa Community Development Programme.

The programme outlines an inclusive participatory approach to planning whose primary aim is to put in place a people centred set of policies and priorities to achieve growth and reduce poverty. This planning approach guided by a set of general principles and key objectives.

Principles.

• Empowering the communities; by taking into account the voices of the local communities in a consultative manner we strengthen and give credibility to poverty reduction efforts. Poverty is not only to be hungry and malnourished, to lack adequate shelter and housing and to be illiterate, but also to be exposed to ill treatment and to be powerless in influencing key decisions affecting lives. Local communities lack voice, power and representation and this makes them more vulnerable to ill health, illiteracy, unemployment, disasters or violence. Our programme corrects these anomalies by empowering communities to identify their basic needs and rights, which are essential for ensuring sustainable livelihoods.

• Participation and ownership: our development initiatives are carried through a participatory process involving the local communities and the rural people within our parameters of work with core concern to the immediate communities.

• Transparency, openness and accountability: for any development initiative to be successful unless the principles of transparency, openness and accountability are embodied into the framework. We have always recommended that the communities be involved in the decision making process in all, the projects we undertake and we ensure that the committees heading the projects are transparent in all the activities  

• Equitable distribution of natural resources and development initiatives. Equity is central to the poverty reduction initiatives in our programme and we have always ensured that in all our intervention programmes, all the community in target is reached by our assistance either directly or indirectly.

Objectives of the Programme.

Linking policy planning and establishment of the community projects; our principle objective is to ensure that in all the initiatives the correct harmonization of the policy framework is done both from the directives of the government and the local needs. This is of course taking into account the availability of resources and how best to utilize them for meaningful development.

Identifying local development objectives and priorities. Our key objective is to identify and define the development objectives and priorities necessary for a well-balanced local community development. This is discussed in our community barazas (group meetings).

Quality expenditures leading to efficiency gains; Quality expenditure is one of the pillars of the Lewa Community Development Programme. This done through putting in place measures that leads to quality expenditure through proper planning, setting of clear targets, prioritization of development initiatives, ranking and costing of activities, which are all necessary conditions for quality expenditures.

Harmonization of the financing framework:  we usually have a needs assessment of any community in focus where the drawn budgets in the fundraising proposal are designed to ensure harmonized financing of growth and poverty reduction efforts that are a key factor for sustained fiscal discipline. One of the strengths of this is that the local leaders consultatively come up with clear set of goals, objectives and priorities that directly address the needs of the local people.