Section A: How to Use This Guidance Note

why we have developed this guidance note who it is for and what you can expect to get out of it the different sections of the guidance note, and how to navigate them.

A1 Why this guidance note?

A2 What is in the guidance note?

The Community Disaster Risk Reduction Fund (CDRRF) and the Basic Needs Trust Fund (BNTF) are two of CDB’s grant facilities that specifically focus on improving quality of life and building resilience of poor and vulnerable communities. Both programmes emphasise community participation and ownership in the design and implementation of projects—a focus aligned to the Bank’s commitment to safeguarding vulnerable communities and beneficiaries.

With common goals, approaches and community-based focus, both the CDRRF and BNTF acknowledge the need to sharpen strategies used to design and implement transformative development initiatives at the community level. Anecdotal evidence from both programmes shows that limited use of community engagement strategies in project design can result in minimal community participation during execution and weaknesses in project performance. Another identified issue is excellent engagement in the design stage followed by weak engagement once a project is underway, resulting in loss of enthusiasm and ownership by the communities concerned. Local buy-in to development investments suffers from a lack of community inclusion opportunities around the project life cycle. Programmes need to address these gaps to secure stronger ownership, maximise and sustain project impact and strengthen community resilience. Overall, there is recognition that standard approaches to project management should incorporate community involvement, including adequate social and environmental risk identification and management and distribution of project opportunities and benefits.

In this note, we start by explaining community engagement and its importance and explore when and how different forms of community engagement might be appropriate (Section B), focusing on the circumstances of Caribbean communities.

We then detail aspects of community engagement to consider, particularly how to evaluate a community’s readiness to engage and the importance of reaching all relevant parts of a community, particularly those frequently marginalised and excluded (Section C).

Finally, we offer guidance and information on skills, methods and tools that a community practitioner might find helpful (Section D) throughout the project management lifecycle.

With this guidance note, our purpose is to equip community-serving practitioners with relevant and practical guidance to inform their community development work. It provides a framework to strengthen community involvement around the project management life cycle across the BMCs of the CDB.

You do not need to read this guidance from beginning to end to benefit from its utility. You can dip in and out or use it as a reference as and when needed. We hope it will become your handy companion when you carry out your community engagement activities!