Context: A core constraint to development in poor communities is that they are tied into the “second economy”, which buys nearly all of its goods and services from the “first economy”. Any money that arrives in the second economy stays but fleetingly before disappearing (via the local super¬market) back into the first. The community stays poor because money simply doesn’t stay around long enough to work for them. The poverty trap is the lack of a local money multiplier, often exacerbated by the demotivation of delivery-dependency.
Sustainable Local Investment Program (SCIP)
This is seen by some as the most important work on the planet right now. The purpose of a SCIP intervention is to support communities, funders and facilitators to engage with each other in a way that systematically and sustainably develops capacity to grow an economy using a brace of collaborative tools (not always in this order):
• develop trust in the community, and then a Community Trust or similar vehicle, to manage the community’s affairs
• develop a transparent budget for the Trust to manage a percentage of funds received into the community (grants, earnings, infrastructure investment, remittances . .)
• develop businesses, run by Trust members, to supply local demands – eg growing food to sell to local schools which have funds from the government schools feeding scheme
• develop a market (initially periodic) to increase the demand for locally-produced goods and services – then boost that market’s utility and attraction by engaging government and commercial services (and entertainers!) to be present
• develop a recognition of, and then a market for, the various rights that Trust members should be enjoying – eg land, water, grazing, housing, child and health rights – to liberate local capital for further investment.
The SCIP model, originally developed to empower rural communities, is now being used both with urban residents and also to guide companies who embark on the exciting journey towards employee ownership – potentially the most resilient form of corporate organisational management.
A SCIP workshop is designed to equip you with the skills necessary to sow and nurture the seeds of development in your communities. In development we all know that Things Take Time. Each of the above steps can take months or years. Whether you are a donor or community worker, an NGO or CSI manager, your ambition must be to avoid the temptation to rescue and run, and to develop a respect for your clients’ ability to work their own way out of the poverty trap. Otherwise your intervention will join the long list of short-lived and unsustainable “projects”, none of them truly owned by the community.
An ideal workshop is a forum of different stakeholders – community members, facilitators and funders – who meet about monthly for several months to deepen their collective understanding of the challenges, and enrich their repertoire of responses in this subtle art. We start with a 2-day introductory session to understand and map the whole process, then meet periodically for one-day reality-checks to share experiences and refine our processes.
