Village school participation and involvement (Tajikistan)

A competitive tendering process for project grant money to implement identified SLM practices within a community, and on completion of the implementation activities the village school will be assigned ownership and responsibility for the maintenance and sustainability.

Aims / objectives: The objective of the approach is to find a mechanism by which you can involve large sections of the community, allocate land for the communities benefit, provide a mechanism for long term maintenance, and establish a demonstration area for cross site visits and educational training.

Methods: Several methods were employed to implement the approach, these included community and local government workshops, seminars on proposal writing followed by subsequent proposal development in conjunction with local experts and community mobilization. The project staff used the approach to train active community members on suitable land management practices that would benefit identified degraded lands and develop sustainable competitive proposals to be reviewed by a selection panel. The community was encouraged to provide substantial input into the funding of their proposed project if they wanted to be successful. A predetermined condition was set on awarded grants that the degraded land had to be officially allocated to the school for a twenty year period.

Stages of implementation: The INGO Welthungerhilfe announced a competition amongst the local communities in one region to submit project proposals for addressing community environmental problems. The local government were involved from the outset, were encouraged to help suggest communities that should compete. The communities were provided with workshops on how to develop sustainable land management proposals with support from local agronomists. The proposals had to outline the commitment of the community, the area of land to be re-established and how, and finally the level of community contribution towards the project. The terms of the competition dictated that the area of rejuvenated land would be officially signed over to the school for a period of twenty year and the school community would thereby be responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the land and entitled to invest any profits back into the school, hence indirectly supporting many families in the community. The projects were selected based on a predetermined criterion and the winning projects received part funding in the form of fuel, machinery, fencing etc upto 50% of the final costs. The people were mobilised to implement the project though a community day of action know as a ‘Hashar’ and on completion the school assumed responsibility for the plot of land.

Role of stakeholders: Although the approach is project driven it required buy in from the local authorities, and the heads of collective dehkan farms who dedicate land use right to village schools, however it was the school community that had to be the real driving force to see the proposal developed into a tangible outcome.