Over the course of a 6-year partnership with Shanta, villages create committees to manage the different projects and areas of interest they have chosen. This might be an education committee to increase school supplies or improve teacher housing, an infrastructure committee to build roads or bridges, and so on. A Village Development Team (VDT) is elected, and these leaders of the village work together and include all members of the community through regularly scheduled open meetings where reports are shared on active projects as well as decision-making for future activities. The VDT is unified and equipped to lead the community into the future with success. After intense training and monitoring by our staff over the years, the villagers prove their responsibility, capacity, and dedication to improving the lives of their families and neighbors.
Unification and Trust
- At the graduation, our staff helps the village outline future, independent projects.
- Everyone must be confident that the VDT can guide the village into a brighter future by continuing improvement projects, monitoring completed projects and implementing maintenance schedules for projects completed.
- It is vital that women hold active roles in the VDT and participate in discussion, decision making and implementation.
- The village must have full confidence in its VDT to manage their Community Bank for ALL the villagers. Community banks are vitally important for village members to raise funds for future projects as well as having access to loans for livelihood opportunities, expanding their farming or home projects.
After a graduation ceremony, we bid the village farewell but revisit after 1-year, 3-years and lastly, after 6-years to monitor and gathering data to help us improve programming for future partnerships.
The real success is the village being prepared to continue development work independently without outside assistance.
“There are many visible developments in our village during six years partnership with Muditar such as village is having post primary school building and good water system. But also there are invisible developments like committee (VDT) members are planning and working together without discrimination of role and position. VDT and village leaders have more unity. Our VDT members have learned how to mobilize and organize villagers to participate in village development activities.”
“I realized that village leadership members have more courage to meeting and speak out to other organization and government officers, answer back their question very well after they got training and experience from Muditar. It was very difficult and didn’t have enough confidence to answer back government officers questions in the past. VDT members can speak out in front of all the villagers, can present well with lots of knowledge.”
“We have more time to work in the fields when we don’t to spend time in getting water for cooking and washing so far from the stream. It’s because of water system project by partnering with Muditar. The other thing I am very happy is : village has post primary school and children don’t need to go to far villages to attend middle school.”
