 Just to kick us off. Good morning or afternoon or evening, depending on where you are today. I'm Stacy Fiella and the executive director of the Woodcock Foundation. I'm really excited about this conversation we're having here and these great leaders who are joining us to share their insights. The topic at hand as you saw from the agenda is elevating community voices and international development efforts in order to increase their impact and sustainability. And while there's tons of innovation in the field, there are plenty of really big success stories in the broad landscape of international development. There are also a lot of efforts that ultimately fail. And we said in the session description, both philanthropy and impact investing funds and the projects that they support unfortunately miss the mark in many cases. And that can range from limited impact to actually causing harm in the places that they aim to do good because they fail to involve the community members in the process. There's very frequently a lack of accountability for development efforts. So in other cases, we don't actually know the impact a few years down the road. And at the same time, there's a growing recognition that community members who are most proximate to the issues that are surrounding them understand them best and are also most suited to help design the solutions that work and that last. There are a range of practices that have emerged to engage community members in due diligence and in project design and planning. But they do vary quite a bit in the level of voice and control that they put into the hands of community members and the level to which they create any accountability both for their outcomes and for the communities where they're located. The practice of community driven development involves real listening and ensuring community participation and at it best it also centers community voices and leadership in development practices and puts communities into the driver seat. So our panelists today are going to share some examples of projects gone wrong as well as models for elevating community voices and minimizing risk and driving sustainable change. We'd really love for this to be an interactive conversation. So please put your questions into the chat as you think of them so that they're queued up for our Q&A. And to kick us off, our panelists are going to provide brief introductions before I jump into some questions for them. So I'm going to go. We'll have Natalie, then Gabino, Sasha and Nana. Good morning, everyone. I'm Natalie Bridgeman Fields. I'm the founder and director of Accountability Council, a global organization working around the world to defend the human rights and environment of communities when they've been harmed by international finance and development. And I'm thrilled to be here at Socap again. I'm a former Socap entrepreneur and to see so many of you. Good morning, Natalie. Oh, great. Gabino. Thanks. Hola. Muy buenos días a todos. Mi nombre es Gabino Vicente, indígena originario de la comunidad de Santa Ursula. Good morning. My good morning. My name is Gabino Vicente. I am an indigenous member of the community of Santa Ursula in Oaxaca, Mexico. In the municipality of Tuxatec in the state of Oaxaca. We had the pleasure of working with Accountability Council since 2011, and an effort to defend our community with the great team at Accountability Council. Thank you, Gabino. I'm here to share the experience of the complaint process of Serra de Oro, Santa Ursula, los reyes en Paso Canoa, the four villages for which this was a very important process. It's important for us to share the experience of these communities with investors so that investors can understand how to work with communities before an investment is made. And before the beginning of a project is initiated, and especially to understand the lessons from our communities before an investment comes to a conclusion. This is why I'm here to share these experiences with all of you and thank you and looking forward to being here with you today. Thanks so much. Over to Sasha. Thanks. And Gabino, so wonderful to meet you on here and to be with this great group of folks who are pushing for a new era of development and financing. I'm Sasha Fisher. I'm the co-founder and executive director of Spark Microgrants at Spark. We are changing how foreign aid is working instead of being top-down and prescriptive, imposing solutions on communities facing poverty. We are initiating a community-driven methodology where community members have the decision-making power over the changes that are in their village, over the capital that's coming into their village. And we are working today in partnership with the government of Rwanda and a number of civil society organizations, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa. And we hope to see a new day where aid is shifted from prescriptive to community-driven and that that is the norm. So I'm grateful for everybody who's here doing that. Thanks so much, Sasha. Yeah, so yeah, good afternoon from Ghana. Actually, it's afternoon here. So I'm Nanama, I'm Ketyakedu. I am working at Advocate for Community Alternatives, ACA. We are a U.S.-based organization who has interest in working with West African communities that face human and environmental rights abuses from the extractive industry. And for the years that we have worked in West Africa, I think that our focus most we have actually focused mostly on providing useful mobilizing tools, legal support and advocacy strategies for our community to be able to articulate their sustainable future that fit into their unique vision, needs and culture. And we have done these successfully over the years through the help of part microgrants CDD effective tool actually known as the facilitated collective action process that has really helped us to change the narrative. Changing the narrative in West Africa, where decisions are mostly from top to down approach and now trying to make sure that things start from the grassroots to the top. So I'm happy to be here to learn, to share, to ask questions. Thank you so very much. Thank you. You know, thank you to everyone for being here and a special thanks to Gabino and Nanama for being willing to share their experiences. My first question is for both of you. As leaders in your, you know, in your communities and the settings where you're working, you've witnessed firsthand what development efforts can look like and how they can actually cause harm when even when a project is designed for positive impact when it doesn't consider the possible negative consequences and risks. So it would be great if you would share an example of a project that was supposed to have a positive impact where it was actually at risk of harming your communities and also how did you remediate that situation and what do you wish had been different in that situation? And it would be great to kick off with Gabino on this one. Entiende bien Gabino, necesitas traduzca? Gabino no escucho. Está bien, sí, sí escuché. Está bien, este voy a compartir. Justo les mencionaba en los inicios de accountability council en el 2011 en nuestra comunidad tuvimos el intento de unos inversionistas de poder de querer construir una proyección de planta hidroeléctrica I'll start with that in 2011 with accountability council. The story began when a company came to Oaxaca and they wanted to build a hydroelectric project. We are an example because the things began in the opposite way that they should. A generar un proyecto que beneficia las comunidades se debe de priorizar primeramente la consulta. To begin with the company didn't prioritize consultation. They didn't take the time to understand what the needs were in all of the communities where they were seeking to invest. In our story, the harm was particularly bad around water resources and our precious water resource, the Arroyo Sal, a creek. El momento que se empiezan a derrumbar los árboles que por décadas habían estado en este espacio que We began to be affected as we saw the trees along the creek be bulldozed. Trees that had been there for decades. We understood the harm that was starting to happen. We would have liked more to have a project in an integral way, in a consensus way with the communities because we have so much to do in our community from the cultural point of view, from the ecotouristic point of view, to be projects that benefit our peasants who for decades have been in extreme poverty, as is almost in the entire state of Oaxaca. In our community, what we would have wanted to have was a more integrated, consultative approach that had taken into account our natural resources, the importance of our cultural heritage of ecotourism projects and other projects that are integral to our culture and way of life in Oaxaca. It's important to note that we are a community that is not against investment. We are not anti-development. We are pro-investment that takes into account our needs and our desire to have a sustainable future that takes into account our precious natural resources and our communities. Investors don't always pay attention to the policies that require them to really consult with local people to invest with an idea of the means of consultation with communities. That's why it's so important for civil society organizations to be able to work with communities to help them use accountability offices to speak up and to seek accountability when there's been harm and to prevent harm. With accountability council, we created a negotiating platform and after 10 months, we created a dialogue process through that platform. With our negotiating platform, we succeeded. We have today in the Arroyo Sal a live Arroyo Sal. Water is life and through this process we preserve the Arroyo Sal. Our ancestors were not able to preserve our main river, the river that's next to the Papua La Pan Dam and we're not repeating that with the Arroyo Sal. We're saying yes, we want development, we want investment and we want investment that respects sustainable development, our need for jobs and our need for a healthy future. Thank you. Thank you so much, Gabino, for sharing that. I really appreciate your pointing out that you are pro-development and pro-investment and that there actually are policies and processes in place in many cases that are meant to ensure that that will happen even though we know it's not always the case that communities are engaged in appropriate ways and early enough in the process. Nana, over to you would be great to hear your story as well. Okay. Thank you very much, Gabino, for all the good things that you are helping your communities to resist and I would want to speak about a story that happened in one of our communities here in Ghana and I think that for the past four, five years the government discovered cash as one of an effective cash crop and there are four communities where we work in Ghana actually were cited for like they had the fertile soil and the vegetation to be able to grow that cash crop and so consistently we have seen a lot of communities that have ventured into cash you grow just because it's a good venture that people could get livelihood from and so we we entered into one community known as Inuase and Inuase happens to be one of the communities that had a vast land that is good for cash you. Now some soldiers from nowhere actually came and were looking around for land fertile for cash you grow and they went into Inuase spoke with their chief and then told the chief the idea of buying the land for themselves. Actually what is even a difficult situation for the people of Inuase is that they are immigrant who migrated about 50, 50 years ago from the northern part of Ghana and resettled in Inuase and so for the years that they have been there the chief who has chosen to terrorize these people do not respect their their their opinion he cares less about the the power structure that is there and so he mostly would take decisions for I mean that he will not put into consideration that the the consequences of what would would would would be meted on the people that he is and so this Inuase community actually are about 1,100 people and everyone there is a farmer they depend on 400 hectares of land that they grow many many crops to survive and this chief just got up one day and said that look I'm giving you guys few few months everyone should vacate the farmland I have sold it off to four soldiers and these four soldiers are going to take over the land to grow cash you without providing an alternative land for his subject and what that means actually is that the people will have nowhere to go they will have nowhere to support your family and it's an indirect eviction telling the people that they should move even though the cash crop which is a cash you cash crop actually would have come into the community probably the the strangers would have employed some individuals to work at the farm to also provide alternative source of livelihood the chief didn't bother to consult with the community and rather used his position as a chief and sold off 400 hectares of land free of charge sold it off and instead of providing them with an alternative source of livelihood he left them there and said that look I am the chief you have to look for a land for yourself whether you can have it whether you he just didn't care and so when we entered into that community we heard about the story we felt that ACA as a human rights organization we could provide legal support and fight for human rights issues but the way the community was divided and so fragile we could feel that they feared the chief nobody could speak against what the chief has done they were finding it difficult even to engage ACA as an organization that has come to help so we saw that instead of providing legal support it was an appropriate time to introduce the F cap which is an all civic engaging tool to properly build the community cohesion level find a way for them to define their own development trajectory and being able to have the ability to advocate for the things that affect them as a community and so when we first introduced the F cap in the community we realized that a lot of people were trying to shy away from the fact that it would review some history some secrets and some other dealings of the achieve which probably they felt that the chief could have used charm and sorcery to kill them and so it took us a lot of time to be able to get people together to be able to convince people to mobilize people to take them through the F cap and being able to choose their own alternative their own unique vision that fits into their culture and for the three year F cap that we have taken the community through we have realized that community actually always have ideas of how they would want their development to look like but the truth is that because in Africa the system of like traditional leadership is very paramount nobody can bypass the chief nobody can bypass an opinion leader to share an opinion or to provide any kind of suggestions and so it's very very difficult for people to even sit down to decide how they think their community development should look like they are always at the receiving and receiving direct instructions from the top and then just even if you to affect them negatively they have no chance to speak against it and so as we took them through the F cap helping to build their their cohesion opening their eyes to see how they can envision for their future and choose a best alternative livelihood instead of just embracing cashew farming which is rather going to render 137 households like homeless and some would actually even would have no land to live on the F cap came in to replace that first leadership style that actually would have scattered the entire community and so we realized that even though it was a quiet moment it was a difficult situation for the community it took them gradual process to understand that community development actually is when you have put power into the hands of the people and they are driving their own controls they are controlling how their development should look like and for the three years they have gone through the F cap they have been able to silence the chief they have been able to advocate strongly using the press they have petitioned to the commissioner for human rights and administrative justice to call the chief to order which is unprecedented because they told us for over 50 years they have stayed there nobody has been able to oppose the chief decision and as we speak right now the ministry of chieftaincy has written an official letter to the original house of chiefs to hold the activities of these strangers soldiers who came to buy the land and have actually told the house of chiefs that they need now to go back to the community engage with the community find out what exactly community would want their land to be used for instead of imposing cashew plantations on them and we are as AC as an organization we are happy seeing this because when we started it wasn't easy it was very very difficult because even at the neighboring communities fellow chiefs and other opinion leaders couldn't come in to oppose a chief's decision and for the three years that the community have gradually gone through the f cap understanding what their vision should look like and being able to identify their actual needs and what they think their future should look like it has really caused a lot of change in the lives of the community and it has given a cascading effect to even other neighboring communities who have gone through similar situations with the chief and opinion leaders trying to also find a way a better way such as the in one state people to be able to articulate their own vision to be able to prepare their own sustainable development plan such in such a way that the the the traditional system where leaders and opinion leaders and the chiefs and traditional rulers would impose certain ideas on community would now become of the first we also realize that ever since the community went through the effort and they have been able to prepare their own sustainable vision and they understand why they they have the need to to fight for the things that they need to fight for it has also helped AC as an organization to better plan and prepare for any legal support that we we intend to provide because we have realized that anytime you would want to work with community and the community is divided the community is very fragile and has no sense of direction of how they want their their development to look like it is even very difficult as you the organization that is coming in to partner with them to work through with them to let them know the new trend of community driven development to understand the angle you are coming from and we have seen a couple of communities that our legal support actually have failed entirely because the community themselves were not involved and it's also because their leadership uh traditional leadership has taken a total control of how communities should even reason out how communities should even think through how their development should look like and at some point we even had to ACA back off all our legal support and comparing what we have used the f-cap for to improve the community's power to make decisions we have realized that even for us as an organization the community helping community to gain power to control their own development vision goes a long way to help ACA as an organization to better prepare legal support or legal strategies and advocacy strategies that will help place the community in a better position of fighting for their rights even at the court at the law court and so I would side with Gabino that community is do not kick against development that is coming if there is any better economic livelihood project that anybody would suggest and say that hey we have gotten a lot of money we want to invest into cashew with the people of Imoase so just come and pick maybe pieces of cashew seeds and grow and make money it doesn't work that way people need to understand why there is this coming they need to even agree whether this new investment and this new development you are bringing is actually what they need is a something that fits into their vision and I think that is what for the past years I have been working with community I've realized that if if community doesn't understand the vision where they would want their the development vision to go and impose certain ideas on them at some point it it divides the community and the kind of projects you would want to implement may not be successful because there is division in the community and everybody wouldn't have a very vision that they would want to follow Michelle sorry I'm sorry please let me grab some water thanks so much for your story Nana Ima I think it's really encouraging to hear you know it's unfortunate how your story started out but so encouraging that when your communities had voice and and power in the decision-making process things really did turn around for you and you were able to achieve outcomes that worked for your communities and on that note it would be really great Natalie and Sasha I know you're all too familiar with these kinds of stories it's become popular to talk about community participation in the sector I think there's often misunderstandings around what that actually looks like so could both of you just explain in a few minutes what your models for engaging communities as decision-makers look like and how they actually move beyond the idea of participation to being about control and accountability and and how do those models address the kind of negative consequences and challenges that Gabino and Nana Ima and their communities are facing Natalie alternative first thank you Nana Ima thank you for that incredibly rich story where there's a lot we can learn and a lot a lot to pull out from that story and Stacey thanks for the question so at accountability council we see communities all over the world like Gabino's like the one in Ghana that Nana Ima is discussing about the cashew farm land grab that that almost succeeded that that's happening everywhere we have cases in Haiti with farmers displaced by USAID and the Inter-American Development Bank by Rio Tinto on Mongolia huge impacts of mhp poultry farms in Ukraine so really working with a very common set of populations where people have in common that were never asked they were never consulted it was top-down decision-making that came into the communities often perpetrating abuse and harm even in the projects that were meant to be part of poverty alleviation from a development finance institution's perspective trying to help people and so the disconnect that we see is countless examples of this where on paper perhaps in Washington DC or in London or in Manila on paper the investment looks great and there's even sometimes social and environmental due diligence that talks about about that there was consultation but then if you peel back what's what's under the paper and you look at real life often there was no consultation at all or it was with a basically a bought-off group small group of non-representative leaders and for an investor to hear that you think well how am I supposed to know what's going on right how am I supposed to figure out what's real what's not when I'm not there and I think that's that's the story of accountability council's work is seeing that the investments go wrong when they're not starting from the point of engaging with the community around their needs their vision for their future is not I'm going to put it so well so what we do is accountability council we're not doing development work but we're doing support of those communities to have their vision realized sometimes their vision is in the case of Gabino's community they came to a process where they didn't start off knowing whether they wanted the project or not they needed basic information and through the information gathering they realized that project was going to cause irreparable harm and needed to stop and so that then becomes accountability's goal in our solidarity with that community as their lawyers supporting them through dispute resolution with the overseas private investment corporation at the time which is now part of the US development finance corporation so our work is supporting communities like that one and many others through this accountability process we only work at the request of local communities and that's a hallmark of our work because we are really trying to flip the dynamic of communities having imposed upon them what others think they need and so by by requiring any initial engagement with a local community has to be requested very clearly from a community that's our first mark of whether we're going to engage or not even in the support and advocacy and then we also we need to do our own due diligence to understand the power dynamics that play within a community Nana I'm a very accurately described they're often conflicts in Gabino's case in Santa Ursula Los Reyes Paso Canoa Cerro de Oro they're four indigenous Chinateco communities but there were divisions within those communities as well and as accountability council we don't come in and try to solve those differences we don't interject our opinions we have to follow a local community process of resolving those decisions as a way of moving forward so these issues are not easy but that's why the other intervention that we've created to try to address some of these power disparities and information disparities along with pointing people to advocates for community alternatives and Sasha's group spark micro grants we also have a database called the accountability console of every complaint ever brought to every accountability office and these accountability offices again they're tied to the international financial institutions that finance the projects that can cause harm there are now thousands of complaints so we bundled them into a database so investors can do the due diligence to begin to understand who they need to consult and about what issues so if you want to know all the cases in Mexico or all the cases in Ghana that have dealt with forced displacement or gender abuse or land rights issues that's now knowable as a starting point for investigating what harm could come of an investment to make sure that investment decision-making takes into account the potential negative impacts which are likely to occur without close attention to them thanks so much Natalie it's it's really notable how your model is focused on shifting voice and power from the development actors that are coming in externally and into the hands of the communities where those projects are taking place and I'd love it if you'd put the link to the accountability console into the chat so others can take a look at it as well and I will turn the same question over to Sasha if you could share your model with us at Spark thanks Stacy and so great to hear about all this work today you know in terms of transforming how it is working there's one side which is holding the institutions that are doing harm accountable and I'm grateful for Gabino's leadership and Natalie's leadership on that side and on the other side providing an alternative of how can we actually do this in a way that's beneficial for communities where community members have the rights to determine their own future and at Spark we believe fundamentally that every village should have the right to determine their own positive future have the decision-making control in their hands to make decisions that are about their future and so as Nana Amma actually described earlier we've been developing a model called the facilitated collective action process that taps into indigenous organizing practices and then kind of creates a gender equity model within that so it's essentially an annual village planning process where women and men young and old get together to plan for their village's future and then every village receives an eight thousand dollar seed grant so they can launch the solutions that they've come up with because every village has great ideas and they should have the opportunity to go after them without having to like go through all sorts of weird hoops to apply to a process that you know is from their country to get resources that they don't you know know how to tap into it should be proactively granted to each village today we're actually working with the government of Rwanda on nationalizing that approach so that every village across Rwanda will have that opportunity to drive their own future and Nana Amma's work in Ghana has gained some demand from district level officials and a number of other governments are also interested in taking this up which is encouraging to see because that's how we get comprehensive reach and I want to zoom out though for a moment just to kind of lay the land because I think there's a lot of talk about community engagement and participation and sometimes it can be confusing like what does it really look like when it's happening very well and uh and so I think it's useful to kind of zoom out and talk about the history and the different evolutions of how development is done and I'm speaking partially as somebody who's from the U.S. and wants to see the way that we deploy capital to be used in a better way and that's like part of our job is to make sure that that's that's being done in a more appropriate way that's like our responsibility so the historical model is a prescriptive model one that imposes solutions on communities right going in and saying you're going to do cashew farming or at worst you know we're going to take your land and benefit economically from it and displace you and benefit from that economy that's prescriptive imposing solutions on an area then what's popular today as people are learning that increased community participation actually leads to better development outcomes you have this whole model of participatory development which says let's get some community members to chime in on the process so they can have a say in the cashew project and determine how that cashew project is being done or how the school is being built but it's still the project is still being imposed by the organization or by potentially a government institution and the participation it's not full ownership so we're advocating to shift to a future that's community ownership over the change that's happening and community ownership means that it's not just one or two community members participating in a process right it's not just the local village elite who are participating in an externally driven process you're actually getting equitable participation across women and men non-binary folks of all different genders and ages and to participate together to collectively decide what their future should look like and in that model if there's capital flowing into the village community members have the final decision-making say not just input but the decision-making power over how that capital is used and what the projects are that it's going towards and that cascades then also to a number of other benefits of what can the community advocate for what can be done at the village level even without the external capital and that's the power that is there is immense right because that is people having greater authority in determining their own future and the agency to create that future and the capital piece is still important right it's it's still useful because that transforms into great local solutions coming to life and I'm going to just dispel two other myths if I can do I have time for two minutes okay the two myths that I hear often about this type of work one is that it's not scalable so you have a great community led initiative but it just exists in one community and like that can't go to scale but that's a myth the best most scalable approaches are actually highly decentralized approaches right they're things like cash transfers or microfinance or what we're calling the facilitate collective action process where the power and decision-making is decentralized down to the people who are using that opportunity so it's actually the most scalable approach not the least scalable and the second thing is that it's high risk that how can we trust community members to make their own decisions which is just silly it's actually the lowest risk in development models there's very very high rates of failure and the way to mitigate that failure is actually to have greater levels of community ownership and the greater the level of community ownership the lower risk it technically is by all evaluations of any project around the world so I feel like those two things are really good nuggets for us to like go in full force and see can we realize this future where the normal model is community driven and prescriptive models are really a thing of the past yeah thanks so much for that Sasha I you know I think it's so important that Sparks model is really about putting full ownership into community members hands and it's about creating a process through which they can decide for themselves what they need and then access the resources to make that happen and we are closing in on the end of our time so I would like to just bring it back to something that Nana Ama and Gabino both mentioned they used the word consult and talked about the value of consulting with communities and the consequences of not doing so and it's such a fitting word to me because we think of consultants as experts and it really is time that we all recognize that communities are the experts at what they need and we need to treat them as such and act that way so the best thing that we all can do to improve the success of development efforts whether it's with grant funding or impact investing is to consult with the communities from the very beginning of the process and engage them throughout it and that's the pathway for ethical effective and sustainable development so thank you again all of you for sharing your stories and your work Sasha if you could also put a link in the chat box around the fcat model and if Nana Ama and Gabino if you have any other links that you'd like to share about your work that would be great and again just thank you all for for sharing your experiences and the work you're doing and Harold USAID is about to get a new accountability office for the first time we have a policy shop at accountability council in DC working really hard on that right now so uh change change is coming amen congratulations thank you all so much and thanks to everybody and it's doing their own great work out there last comment 22 we have a we have a contaminated water resource in the Rio Papua upon our main river and we're going to do a project with the municipality next year to try to clean up this river I invite you to come and see Tuxtapec our beautiful city and this river that we're trying to preserve and clean as part of a government priority is we form a new municipal government this is it going to be a government and civil society and local community project to clean this river and so this is that that's part of their vision for their community going forward their affirmative vision that they're creating to preserve their environment they said thank you Stacy thanks so much for now nice to see you again after many years since we connected at a past conference in person and thank you to the investors our doors are open we prioritize sustainable investment in our local natural resources thank you thanks so much I did see a couple questions just coming in at the end so we will try to figure out how to get answers to people and the great questions but thank you again everybody