Our Approach To Development
The ethos of AEGIS Foundation for Development is to empower local communities and help develop locally owned programs that are integrated and sustainable. For instance, our initial project in Koidu, Sierra Leone involves integrating a home and drop in center for street youths with a small holder agriculture project. By integrating the two, and using some of the profits/investment returns from the agricultural activity to fund the youth center, the program is highly sustainable. More importantly, all our activities and programmes are owned and designed by local communities and organizations, and we now work with and support more than 10 community organizations in similar fashion across Africa. Our indirect support of integrated community initiatives makes our programs incredibly cost effective, sustainable, and successful in achieving the accountability and community cohesion essential for development. While we have stringent criteria and the expertise of our trustees, volunteers and current partner organizations for assessing initiatives, in the end we aim to work with communities to help them structure economic and social goals that are their own.
Integration
AEGIS Foundation for Development has a unique approach to development. The initiatives we support are not limited as economic programs (like an agriculture project), social programs (like an orphanage), or governance initiatives (like civil society projects). Instead, our partners engage in multifaceted activities which are mutually reinforcing- see Our Partners page for some excellent examples. Integration is an exceptionally effective approach to development: The social benefits of an economic initiative help galvanize the community around it, while the linking of economic programs to social initiatives makes them sustainable and donor independent. The developmental tool that AEGIS uses is a model of the social corporation (see below). This sort of model is not unique to AEGIS, though in our work we have encountered a myriad of local organizations which have had to integrate economic and social ventures due to a lack of donor funding. For an example of such an organization, please see Kids Action Sierra Leone in Our Partners' section.
The Social Corporation
AEGIS' model of the social corporation is an example of our intention to integrate development in the context of local ownership. The model is simple: First, ensure that local businesses or entrepreneurs have a solid business plan (it is subject to scrutiny by experienced local business partners and AEGIS members who have studied economics to a Masters level). Second, ensure that the local infrastructure (i.e. Roads/Labour) exists or can be developed to fit the business plan. Third, help the local entrepreneurs develop their business plan by a) incorporating them in a fashion that allows community inclusion and the support of local community programs (such as building a much needed water well or school), and also involves a democratic and accountable business structure. AEGIS makes this happen by b) providing some start up investment to help get the project off its feet. Importantly AEGIS also helps to network the community corporation with relevant government officials and other businesses and potential investors.
The social corporation not only serves an important economic function within the community, but also builds social cohesion through rejoining community activities. Perhaps most importantly, however, the social corporation offers a chance for democratic values and accountability to take root in communities with traditional, non-democratic systems of governance. The management of the corporation must be executed in an egalitarian, democratic and accountable manner, therefore offering an economic avenue to build civil society, social capital and the potential for change. This amounts to a chance for locally driven (and therefore accountable) political change at the local level: change that operates from within, is non-confrontational, and uses powerful economic motives to build the knowledge and capacity for democratic governance.
Accountability
Despite the billions of development dollars pouring into underdeveloped countries around the world, people in countries like Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo are still poor and have few opportunities. AEGIS Foundation for Development believes that a lack of accountability in political, economic and social programming is largely responsible for this lack of progress.
Accountability is something we take for granted in the developed world. Accountability simply implies a feedback loop; that those affected by economic, social and political reforms/decisions have a hand in determining them. In other words, that people effect the institutions and reforms that affect them. Accountability is a basic, if often understated, principle of economics and politics. What makes an economy work is the input of buyers and sellers into a free market (top down, command economise do not have a favourable track record due to their lack of accountability in this sense). What makes a democracy work is the input of citizens in choices of governments (dictatorships do not work either). What makes social programs work is the sort of local support that comes only from local ownership.
However, in poor African countries where social, political and economics programs are often driven by foreign donors, non-governmental organizations and unilateral international institutions, this accountability is often lacking. Programs are designed, driven and often implemented by people who don't live in the communities/countries that they are supposed to help.
AEGIS that accountability needs to be at the core of any political, social or economic reforms/programs for them to work:
1) Accountability is the basic mechanism through which political and economic(markets) are responsive and therefore effective
2) Accountability acts as the process through which communities and states are galvanized and become cohesive
3) Accountability allows for members of any system, whether it be a market, polity or community, to have reasonable expectations about investments and commitments
4) Accountability is appropriate as a measure of the ends as well as means of development. Accountability in this sense has not been properly placed at the heart of economic, social and political development projects. Though attempts are being made to address a lack of political accountability in poor countries, these attempts are often top-down and not structurally accountable or locally driven.
Regardless of the policy debates taking place in western universities, the basic ownership by people involved in systems of those systems is essential. This is why AEGIS' approach is one of local ownership and "bottom up" support, where local communities are at the center of decision making and program design.
Cohesion
Top down reforms often fail to achieve their objectives because they fragment community development efforts, artificially separating economic programs from social programs from governance reform. This fragmentation is exacerbated when a plethora of different international organizations with different goals are responsible for different aspects of a community's development. Particular issues are addressed at the expense of others, often with the community having little or no say in what issues a project addresses.
AEGIS has a different approach. We put the decisions in the hands of the local community, and this serves to galvanize the community. Rather than separating out civil society and attempting to build it through various top down programs, AEGIS builds community cohesion indirectly through community ownership. By integrating economic, social and political programs, and implementing indirectly through community based organizations, AEGIS' programs are more effective, more sustainable, and through their implementation build community capacity and cohesion. Our community-driven, accountable and integrated approach to development therefore not only achieves economic, social and political development, but operates indirectly to galvanize community stakeholders and their interests into a more cohesive, integrated and development-oriented atmosphere. A state, or economy, cannot be built from the top down: it must grow from the bottom up.