Community Diagnostics in the Commune of Bikok
There are associations in every village, but such meetings that bring together many villages do not take place often. When they do, they are not so deliberately planned.
For this occasion, Bikok Municipality had taken pains to inform the 57 villages ahead of time. They had been asked to organize themselves in such a way as to ensure full representation of each village as well as choose a central location where they can meet.
What was more, the Municipality had insisted on delegation from the various groupings in the community: women, men, children, traditional leaders, government service providers.
On each of the five days, the village delegates met to discuss how they felt about the development in the Commune in general, and its vision to become a Child-friendly Commune.
Each village association had designated two people to join others to attend the big gatherings made up of about 50 people, with rotating venues. The government representatives for Health, Nutrition, Water and Sanitation, Child Protection and Education and the members of traditional councils and leaders were all present at the meetings. Some of them facilitated the sessions which lasted for about half a day.
The facilitators used local materials and community diagnostic tools and approaches to help the communities to agree on issues and set some priorities. Before the end of each session, the meetings identified two community agents from their respective communities to liaise with the mayor’s office to conduct village dialogues and focus group discussions on the key negative practices and social norms and begin to find ways to adopt positive behaviors in favour of the children.
The BIKOK Municipal Council is clear in their minds about what they sought to achieve with these meetings. The had decided that the advancement of the Municipality was going to involve all inhabitants there. To ensure that the development was not driven only by the leaders and decision makers, they had made it a point to bring community members to the discussions, first to share the vision, and then seek their engagement for the plans to be collectively laid out in favour of their children.
The Mayor of Bikok Madam Odette Crescent OTTOU is eager to work with all the members of the community “we are very keen to demonstrate the wonders that women’s leadership can achieve socially and economically, because we put children first and focus on the well-being of our families and communities, not just infrastructure” she once declared.
The discussions started with what people could recount about the history of their communities, and how they made their decisions to settle there. For many, the attraction was having fertile land on which to farm. The discussions gradually shifted to livelihoods, how they earn a living farming and how that affects the care for children. The children themselves are expected join their parents on the family farms and many do as soon as they are of age. Some community members have not come to terms with the notion that this could slip into a form of child labour if it keeps children away from school. In the discussions, community members pointed to some of the social practices that do not make for positive parenting, and impact negatively on the children and their rights as they grow.
UNICEF supports such participatory processes with technical expertise. These discussions are crucial for the identification of collective issues of concern to the people. In the process, the communities also propose or agree to initiate solutions to solve some of the problems.
UNICEF’s partnership with the Commune of Bikok is hinged on finding solutions to benefit children, and for which both parties have mutual interest, capacity to implement, and the institutional mandate to do so.
