EEEGL

Enterprises at the grassroots: dealing with internal governance

The EEEGL programme supports community-based organizations or enterprises (we call them often enterprise CBOs or ECBOs) to deliver social, economic and environmental goods. Our strategy relies on identifying development opportunities, nurturing local actors and linking these enterprises to local, regional and national markets.

The impact of these initiatives depends on a number of factors, including access to productive assets (e.g., land, forests), the availability of support services, the policy environment, the capacity of value chain actors, relationships and conflicts among stakeholders, terms of engagement between community organizations, public services, authorities and private sector, market realities, and so on.

Among these factors, the development of robust systems of internal governance of the CBOs is very important. Internal governance refers to those systems through which the CBO pursues its institutional mission, takes decisions and holds internal bodies accountable mutually and towards stakeholders (e.g., community members, regulatory authorities, business partners). Many ECBOs frequently face challenges, due to poor internal and external accountability, elite capture, lack of transparency, and internal conflicts. These common problems are sometime especially acute in remote areas (such as those near national parks), where opportunities for development, learning, exposure and dialogue may be few.

When we launched our enterprise development work in agriculture and eco-tourism, we realized that we needed to take a fundamental look at this aspect. The development of organizational capacities has been a mainstream development agenda for a long time, especially in agriculture and social sectors. Programmes dealing with integrated conservation and development promoting ECBOs often battle to support adequate institutional development processes. These are demanding: they take long time, require multiple skills (legal, technical, management, financial), acute awareness of power relations and need to acknowledge the fact that effective CBO governance processes can, and at times implicitly or explicitly pursue, transformational changes for member communities.

We decided to undertake the production of good practice guidelines to support the development of internal governance and capacity of enterprise oriented CBOs in the tourism and agriculture sectors, which would be relevant to the contexts where we work. We joined hands with SNV Rwanda and Oxfam GB Rwanda, who shared a similar interest. We formed a team to spearhead this process.

We reviewed available literature and experiences on the topic. We have since produced a protocol to guide a self-assessment process by ECBOs, supported by facilitators external to the target organization. This protocol deals with a wide range of factors that impact internal governance, summarized in the table below:

The purpose of the process is not just to provide external advice and rules to the organization, but rather to build better governance in a more fundamental way: we intend to build reflective practice within the organization, empower members and staff through participation and consultation, and seek consensus on corrective measures through an open process of dialogue. The protocol is delivered through a staged process, summarized in this slide:

We are presently testing this protocol in a number of agriculture and eco-tourism enterprises within the EEEGL target area. We intend to further refine and adapt the guidelines for broader applicability, based on real life experiences and lessons learned during the process.

Giuseppe Daconto,  EEEGL.