| Author/Presenter |
Brian Hull (Treasury Board-Canada) |
| Title |
Elements of effective approaches to bottom-up/community-based development |
| Abstract |
Growing interest in the workability and effectiveness of international development assistance is generating new attention to methods for examining and tracking the effectiveness of international development projects as well as sparking a renewed interest in identifying, sharing and replicating methodologies that have a consistent record of workability. While there is evidence from the earliest post World War II history of ODA that community-based, bottom-up projects can and do work, since the Pearson Report, the overwhelming body of attention and resources have been channelled by most countries offering ODA through top-down, externally driven approaches with heavy reliance on external interventions for ideas, as well as human and financial assistance. Based on an exploratory or Beta project in India which began to reveal a well-defined methodology, by the early 1990s The Hunger Project had developed a consistent, replicable approach for bottom-up, community based development called Strategic-Planning-in-Action (SPIA) which has at its core a process for identifying high leverage interventions through the participation of those local people who will be most involved on an enduring basis. Employing methods with a very light foot-print in external human and financial resources, The Hunger Project has refined SPIA to suite local needs in Africa, Bangladesh, India, Mexico and several countries in Latin America. Brian Hull drew upon documented experience of successful bottom-up development under the Colombo Plan in Sri Lanka for his first introductory work on international development, (Hull: International Development, Challenge to Christians, NYC, 1970) and became a founding volunteer in The Hunger Project in Canada in 1977. He currently serves on the board of The Hunger Project Canada and has previously served on the global secretariat of The Hunger Project in NYC. |
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