FAO/AbdulRahman Al-Kour

The involvement of the local community to actively lead the identification of the needs and prioritizing these needs to improve their living conditions and livelihood, especially agricultural, is fundamental to ensure sustainability of resources and resilience of people. Once a community’s mindset turns from aid-dependence to a self-reliant and development driven mindset, people will take charge of their lives with determination.

With the view to fostering community action planning, FAO, through the United Nations Joint Programme funded by the EU, Norway and Italy, has organized several training sessions in Deir Ez-Zor and Dara’a governorate focused on supporting society members and community groups’ leaders with the skills to analyze the resources, problems and needs, then prioritize the needs and advocate them in the form of micro-projects to stakeholders towards implementation of these suggestions. At the same time, strengthening their status as representatives and entry points for their communities.

The process of composing groups of village neighborhoods representative is explained by Hazar Anwar, a committee member in Ataman village, Daraa governorate, she said: “Our village members have met after this training to identify the neighborhoods’ representatives based on their reputation, credibility, and their will to volunteer. These representatives must meet with people to understand the needs and problems, put a plan, set the priorities then communicate with stakeholders,”

On the other hand, these training sessions enabled trainees to acquire the necessary knowledge on problem and cause analysis, initial micro-project plans, and systematic action planning and developmental projects. Hence, these committees will design recovery projects taking into consideration sustainable outputs that would help local communities survive crisis outcomes relying on their local resources.

Kinana Ahmad, from Hatla village in Deir Ez-Zor governorate, said: “As a member of a local committee, we have jointly proposed projects based on the needs we observed from the field. For example, I proposed dairy and eggs hatchery projects based on the needs of some people in the area to access a sustainable source of certain food, and livelihoods as well. 

Placing local committees and other community representatives at the center of recovery and resilience efforts is an essential phase that enables them to properly communicate the needs and solutions to stakeholders/Organizations to receive assistance towards implementing these solutions and reach the desired objective. It also inspires and revitalizes local governance to foster more durable solutions to the current challenges related to poverty, food insecurity, climate change and degradation of natural resources.

It is worth mentioning that the UN Joint Programme builds on the comparative advantage of the six participating UN agencies–FAO, UNDP, UNFPA, UN-Habitat, UNICEF, and WFP–under the leadership of the UN Resident Coordinator to provide integrated responses to multifaceted resilience challenges in the country.