The bad news that every facilitator of CLCP should know

A story of Local Response from Katabi community, Uganda by Phil

The bad news that every facilitator of CLCP should know

We had 6 facilitators from 3 organisations that came together for our project and in June we were all given training in SALT and CLCP. In early July, our project involved the 6 facilitators going to Kibaha a district in Tanzania with the objective of working in 10 communities. The purpose of the project was to encourage the communities to take ownership of their own health.

In early July we started to work with 2 of the 10 communities. We worked with them to build their dream and the community was full of enthusiasm and commitment. Because this was the first time that we had facilitated this process, initially, we were not at all sure that we would be successful. So you can imagine how delighted we were when the communities were so committed.

We were careful to ensure that the Action Plan of the communities was filled with manageable and doable actions. One action concerned working with the elderly people to improve their eating habits and a second action involved the community creating a vegetable garden.

But when we came back after one month, we found that no progress had been made. Nothing had happened. The community was full of reasons why it had been impossible to do anything. All of the facilitators were very depressed. All of us were concerned that our facilitation had not been up to standard and that it was our fault.

But we decided to build our team of facilitators again. We sat down together to see what we could do better. We had to improve and we had to support the communities. So we met with the communities. We sat down with them and we talked to them. We moved from household to household. We found this work very difficult and very challenging. This was probably our low point. But we simply had to have the belief that if we continued to work hard then things would improve. And the end of the day we as a team of facilitators were very relieved to start to see changes happening in the community.

So in the 10 communities that we were allocated we saw that at least in 6 communities things were happening. People were happy and were practising healthy living styles.

When we started to facilitate the CLCP process things went well while the community only had to talk about doing things. However, when the community had to take action on their Action Plan, the actions were not taken and even with encouragement, the response of the community was not convincing. It is at this point that we had to continue work with great determination before we began to see progress.

We believe that all facilitation teams should be prepared that this response will happen and will have a strong impact on the morale of the facilitation team.