About Community Empowerment Facility

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Documents:

Operating Framework and Guidelines
Cadre et Directives Operationnels
Marco y Directrices Operacionales

Format Guide
Mode de présentation des propositions de projet
Modelo para las propuestas de proyectos

Synthesis of the approved CEF Projects to June 2005 PDF 56KB

Synthesis of the approved CEF Projects to September 2003 PDF 70KB

The Coalition created the Community Empowerment Facilities (CEF) as one of its primary means to strengthen the capacity of the poor to gain and maintain access to land and other productive resources. CEF is a catalytic co-financing grant fund that assists in the capacity-building and institutional strengthening of CSOs and promotes and supports the innovative approaches and initiatives of these organizations.

CEF also seeks to lay the groundwork for the replication and up scaling of successful civil-society and community-based projects. Its primary objective is to enhance the ability of the poor and of their own organizations at local, national and regional levels to gain and maintain access to productive resources and to the tools and processes required to manage these resources, including knowledge, technology, institutional models and finance.

CEF is fuelled by an awareness of the value and importance of the knowledge, expertise and experience that reside in poor rural communities. In keeping with these objectives, CEF activities usually fall under one of the following areas:

Efforts to gain access to land and protect existing rights

This includes the settlement of the tenancy rights of landless workers or peasants to land they are cultivating, facilitating land registration and the legal certification of land titles, and the promotion of tenancy or ownership options through resettlement, restitution, leasing, land sales, sharecropping and other initiatives.

The provision and protection of access to water rights

This includes the strengthening of water-users associations among small farmers and tenants or sharecroppers, the establishment of water-renting and communal irrigation, and the promotion of sustainable water resource management.

The promotion of the participatory management of common property

This includes the establishment and protection of user rights and titles, initiatives in maintenance and conservation, and the establishment of related institutional arrangements.

Efforts to gain access to services in order to achieve the productivity and income benefits accruing from secure access to land.

This includes extension and training, inputs, credit, marketing and other support that may be necessary for both the sustainable management of resources and the enhancement of the skills of community organizations.

Support in conflict resolution

This includes support for relevant efforts within and among communities and between communities and powerful private interests with respect to land, water and other natural resources.

The enhancement of participation

This includes efforts to strengthen the role of women, indigenous people and other marginalized groups in local decision-making on land issues, support for decentralization arrangements with respect to the management of land, water and other assets and in relation to the provision of public goods and services, and support for people-to-people exchanges to facilitate the replication or scaling up of successful organizational models and institutional innovations.

CEF is available exclusively to CSOs, which includes organizations of farmers, producers, women, indigenous people, agricultural workers, landless people, pastoralists, forest users and fisherfolk, as well as community-based organizations and NGOs and their representative bodies, networks and movements.