Advancing Participatory Democracy

A Training Program in Partnership with the National Endowment for Democracy

The High Atlas Foundation (HAF) is organizing in partnership with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) an experiential participatory training program for the locally elected women (LEW) to communal councils in the AL Haouz province.  The purpose of the training program is to empower the LEWs by building their capacities and provide them with the skills needed to improve their status to be active leaders and ensure good governance.

The province has 84 elected women that represent 42 communes – there are two elected women in each of the province’s communes.  The program is divided into two parts: the first part presents the ideas of participatory development (PD) and democratic processes, and the second is applied in the sense of the LEWs facilitating participatory planning methods with the villages in their communes.

The participatory democratic ideas and principles that are presented, discussed, and considered in the program include:

• • The LEWs voicing the concerns they are facing in their councils.
• • How they will overcome the challenges they are facing in their councils.
• • Share and learn about each other’s experiences
• • Learn about the HAF’s learning-by-doing approach of participatory development
• • Where and how PD is presented in their councils in consideration of the current status and the goals (personal and community) they seek to achieve
• • Understanding the design and purpose of PD methods
• • Training them on the facilitation skills needed to conduct the meetings

Applied experiences and skills include:

• • Identifying the villages in most need in their communes through the pile sorting activity
• • Setting up meetings with the community people (administrative and local procedures)
• • Conducting the methods of PD with the community people bearing in mind the need to draw out gender perspectives of development needs and priorities
• • Ensuring the full participation of all members of the communities
• • Discussing the priority projects identified by the community and developing project options
• • Developing and implementing community-based action plans

To date, HAF has conducted 14 workshops for 17 elected women and 6 members of women’s associations.   Through the 54^th community activity that the elected women facilitated, they were able to deepen the discussions through the pairwise-ranking activity, which identified in total 75 community development projects.     PD helps not only the elected women but also the people to have knowledge and understanding about their project priorities in their communities.

Status of the training program

Graphs