ARE WE DOING TH ARE WE DOING TH
Looking for Answers in Darfur by Rebecca Sutton
A 10 iAM
S PART OF A LIVELIHOODS AND PEACEBUILDING INTERVENTION WAR CHILD CANADA (WCC) IS CARRYING OUT IN THE COMMUNITY OF KRENEK, WEST DARFUR, WE RECENTLY SEARCHED FOR AN EXTERNAL CONSULTANT TO EVALUATE OUR
PROGRAM. Paul O’Hagan’s application caught my eye, with his suggestion to use a form of community consultation called the People-First Impact Method (P-FIM).1
The P-FIM tool is grounded in two core questions:
Are we doing things right? Are we doing the right things? The tool’s emphasis on positioning the opinions of local community members at the forefront of program design and monitoring was appealing to me, and I was curious about whether it could pose a viable alternative to the type of needs-based assessments typically carried out in Darfur by international agencies. The latter are rarely participatory in any meaningful sense. The more I read about the P-FIM method, the more I began to think that we should not have Paul just evaluate our Krenek project: instead, we should bring him to Darfur for a longer period to train the WCC team in P-FIM and engage them in field exercises to test it out. Luckily, two of our main donors agreed to support this, and within a few weeks Paul was on the ground in El Geneina, where WCC’s West Darfur office is based. Since P-FIM is not primarily intended to generate
results that are specific to a particular project or agency, our WCC team gathered local staff representatives from eight other national and international agencies
for the training. All participants were required to be from Darfur and to speak local languages: the P-FIM methodology stipulates that expatriate staff hold only a monitoring role, as consultations should be led by Darfurians themselves. At the training, participants learned a number of key skills and concepts. The session on communication guided them on how to engage community members in a way that moves them past withdrawal or ritual and cliché communication, beyond mere ideas and judgements, and towards a peak form of communication where they feel comfortable sharing feelings and emotions. The session on bias demonstrated to participants
Consulting the commun
that we all have an ‘open’ or free area which contains things that are known to ourselves and clearly visible to others. We have a ‘blind’ area which houses things outsiders might know about us, but that we are unaware of. We have a ‘hidden’ area containing things we know ourselves but do not share with others.
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