Community-Based Partnerships

Partnership is a dynamic process and working in collaboration with other organizations has never been easy. Effective management of partnerships is important because partnership working can be disastrous and ruin an organization's credibility and legitimacy in the market. Partnerships are becoming a widely used approach to create development actions across sectors to alleviate poverty. Many development projects in Africa use a "partnership" approach. However most of the partnerships tend to be viewed as creating dependency because most of the engagements have been at a philanthropic level but in the recent years, there has been a gradual shift to pursuing more strategic NGO engagements at community level. International NGOs and donors are reevaluating the traditional philanthropic approaches to partnerships and adopting new strategic approaches of engagement to sustain project outcomes. This has generated an interest in initiating strategic community-level partnerships with local NGOs while undertaking community interventions to ensure there is a broader impact at the community level. This book combines the author's field experiences and explores a variety of thought provoking and interesting perspectives shared by selected authors on partnership experiences to build a case for nurturing community-based partnerships among NGOs that are empowering. The book focuses on partnerships but with an underlying message to NGOs. There is a great need for NGOs to refocus their motivation in engaging in partnerships and to build their competencies in order to improve transparency, openness, accountability, impact and responsiveness within development partnerships. Organizational attitudes and competencies need to change if community-based partnerships are going to broaden their influence and produce sustainable impact at the community level. This book will benefit any development-conscious individual who desires to promote more empowering partnerships at the local community level.