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Restoring all stakeholders’ legitimacy to overcome short-term emergency activities and promote development

Wed, March 28, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Hilton Reforma, Floor: 2nd Floor, Don Diego 4 Section A

Proposal

According to communities, politicians, locally elected representatives and traditional leaders are the greatest cause of the division at the local (community) level, taking advantage of crisis and emergency projects to enrich themselves or consolidate power. NGOs are also perceived as creating divisions in the community because food distributions and support end up only reaching some populations due to either NGOs’ favoritism or misuse by the community leaders or the program steering committees at the community level. People also expressed a feeling of abandonment by the central government, including the Ministry of Education.

In addition to promotinge resilience through its inputs and own strategies, ERSA decided to promote reconciliation through its partnership and its collaboration with all actors, in order to:
- recreate links between communities and the education sector,
- support local authorities to provide equitable social services
- restore the trust of communities in NGOs

Restoring the legitimacy of all stakeholders and supporting them to work together is required to overcome short-term activities and to achieve the humanitarian-development nexus. The shift from emergency to long-term development activities requires significant strengthening of all actors’ capacities to ensure sustainable development of the education system. To allow the humanitarian-development nexus, interventions should focus on integration and transition to local authorities as early as possible. The nexus is actually the passage from humanitarian aid provided by the North to long-term development strategies steered by the South.

To achieve such objectives, ERSA adopted participative processes for all activities as well as honest communication with communities. This presentation will focus on concrete examples of collaboration, and on the challenges faced, using qualitative data collected with main stakeholders.

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