Two recently designed food-security-oriented IFAD projects, in Andhra Pradesh (India) and Mali, emphasize the need for well-designed participatory approaches and community development activities, but must take better account of traditional power structures and interest groups.

Both projects learned from difficulties encountered in earlier phases.

The Andhra Pradesh Participatory Tribal Development Project (II) places the notion of village institution-building, genuine and representative participation and gender-awareness at the heart of its development activities.

The project’s overall objectives are to raise the income and food security of tribal people and to improve their quality of life through greater self-reliance. In its first phase, the project placed much more stress on the hardware components, such as the construction of irrigation systems.

Community development had been understood more in terms of mobilizing village groups to undertake infrastructural work. In contrast, all new project activities involve the communities actively in planning, implementation and evaluation.

Fundamental to this process is the development of capable and sustainable village tribal development associations based on traditional village structures. These associations would be responsible for executing project activities with the assistance of project staff. Action plans are drawn up for each village through a process of extensive consultations in which participatory rural appraisal methods form an integral part. More conscious efforts are being made to include women, the landless and the poor in this process. The project also envisages a process of building self-confidence among women and sensitizing men to the issues of gender.

The Zone Lacustre Development Project in Northern Mali supports the institutional strengthening and participation of smallholders and herders through farmer organizations.

Its innovative mechanisms for enhanced beneficiary participation include (i) a flexible approach of establishing different types of grass-roots associations for different circumstances and purposes – namely village associations, economic interest groups or intervillage land and water user associations; (ii) an incentive framework, through community development funds (CDFs) to encourage communities to work together; and (iii) support for decentralized administrative structures to give villagers more important roles in political decision-making. Other project activities include agricultural and rural infrastructure development, improved public health, nutrition and sanitation facilities and services and a viable rural financing system. The project would establish self- managed grass-roots organizations that represented the various interest of all segments of the population. These organizations would manage their own CDFs and mutual credit and savings unions. The new project supports the organization of beneficiaries along the lines of specific traditional interest groups. Village associations were largely ineffective during the project’s first phase owing to conflicts with the traditional village councils and other existing power structures. In this phase, the project would establish clear mechanisms on how these associations would be organized, who would organize them and what their internal operational rules would be in order to ensure that these groups would be truly representative of the interests of their members.