Harnessing the Power of Community Involvement To Promote Development: The NBU Success Story

Description

Community development is fully attained when residents come together to make collective decisions, actions and sustainably generated solutions to issues pertaining to each location. SOS Children’s Villages in Ghana continues to be present in the lives of community members and intensifies its partnership with Community Based Organizations in working to ensure coordinated mechanisms that address issues that arise. This makes room for the provision of support groups, VSLA, community networks, training opportunities and social action plans among others. This is also based on the belief system that when community development is effective, there is little or no room to harbor crime, gender disparity and unemployment as opportunities of growth is enhanced. While it is the intention of SOS CV Ghana to foster immense development at the community level for the benefit of children and other vulnerable groups, this will be achieved in stages and will also require active community participation in growing, managing and scaling up shared responsibilities at each stage of the process. The NBU has had significant impact in the lives of its beneficiaries to bring about social change. For the duration of the project, the NBU acted as a link between the community and industry players which include Civil Society Organisations, local authorities and the Municipal Assembly.