Capacity Building of Community-Based Organisations for Participatory Development: Need, Approach and Strategy

The approaches to development through participation have been undergoing change. In the '70s, the stress was on popular participation and in the '80s, it was participatory development, and subsequently in the '90s, there was further shift from participatory development to capacity building. During the '70s and '80s, it was the NGOs who stressed on the people's participation for effective implementation of poverty alleviation programmes. However, since the '90s, the concept has been increasingly adopted by other development agencies as well as the government. Experiments have shown that participation of community members in any developmental programme is essential for its sustainable development. To ensure their participation, development initiatives should be made by forming viable people's organisations with bottomup approach. To achieve this, the government is providing a conducive atmosphere through decentralisation of power and by encouraging private and public partnership which facilitates developmental process at the cutting-edge level. Such an environment is paving the way for the emergence of Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) in the rural areas. In this context, the question generally asked is whether the groups promoted by various agencies have the capacity and capability to perform the required tasks. This paper tries to examine the need, approach and strategy for capacity-building of CBOs for empowering the poor to enable them to participate in developmental programmes for their sustainable development.