How Does Community Organizing Scale?

In every country, poor communities stand to benefit from government investment in basic infrastructure. In Elgeyo Marakwet, a rural county in Kenya’s Rift Valley with frequent droughts, the government announced it would build new dams to provide drinking water, hydroelectric power, and irrigation. The dams should have been a boost to the county’s health farming yields — the sort of project that benefits nearly everyone and that only a government could finance. Instead, nearly US$200 million in public funds were lost to corrupt contracts and illegal loans. Just imagine being a farmer in Elgeyo Marakwet, where only 16% of residents have access to tap water, and not being able to water your crops because some wealthy elite in Nairobi were able to game the system.

Similarly, a group of women from the Caltongo neighborhood on the southeastern border of Mexico City discovered that the local government planned to repair and repave the main commercial thoroughfare, Nuevo Leon Avenue, without consulting the community or providing information about the budget, procurement process, or timeline.

Mexican investigative journalist Daniela Rea recently published a 12-minute documentary (in Spanish) and a 20-page investigation (in English) that describe how a small group of committed women from the Caltongo neighborhood partnered with Controla Tu Gobierno (a grantee) to use all of the tools at their disposal to pressure the local government to complete the project with integrity.

The women of Caltongo speaking with workers in charge of the Avenida Nuevo León construction. Credit: Citlali Hernandez Jimenez

Rea reveals the deeply political nature of community organizing and the dangers that were faced by the organizers when they stood up to elected officials and local gang members that sought to benefit from the project. She also notes that repaving Avenida Nuevo Leon is far from the only problem facing the Caltongo neighborhood, which suffers from industrial contamination and illegal development on protected lands.

What should we take away from their struggles and successes? From the perspective of a private foundation with a belief in the potential of public agencies to help improve the lives of poor communities, how should we view these relatively small advances of local communities standing up to their leaders to ensure that they follow the law? After all, for every group of committed women in Caltongo, there are thousands of active infrastructure projects around the world without any oversight at all. For every procurement scandal like the one discovered through leaks and investigative journalism in Makueni County, there are surely hundreds more improper contracts that go by unnoticed.

I’m grateful for your thoughts and reflections in the comments section. Three ideas come to mind, one of which is admittedly a far stretch.

1. First, we can make the organizing work of local residents easier by providing them with better tools to understand how their government agencies budget, spend, and contract public works projects. We should be able to point our phone cameras at any public works project and see on our screen how much it cost, where the money came from, who completed the project, and how to get in touch with them. While we’re not quite there yet, the Mexican watchdog group PODER, a grantee, has made major progress through the launch of Todos Los Contratos, a database of US$1.5 trillion worth of public spending in Mexico.
2. Second, organizing can spread through storytelling and journalism like Rea’s online documentary below. When we see compelling examples of how community organizing effectively influences government priorities, it’s more likely we’ll get involved. Personally, I’m always inspired when I read about the work of Obama Foundation Fellows and Africa Leaders. (Of course, that doesn’t mean that the short-term interests of local communities always reflect the greater good of larger populations or future generations, as my colleague Joseph Asunka and I have argued with regard to fossil fuel subsidies.)
3. Finally, what if national governments were to encourage local communities to monitor public works programs by offering 50 or so $10,000 awards at the end of each year to the community groups that do the best monitoring of public works projects? The point wouldn’t necessarily be to uncover corruption, but rather to work with local authorities to ensure proper public consultation, due diligence, a competitive procurement process, and follow-through. Already countries including Brazil, Nigeria, and Canada have offices of procurement ombudsman; what if they were given a small budget for awards to incentivize more community monitoring?

What are your thoughts on the role of private philanthropy to support community organizing? How much should we focus on supporting national tools and platforms that ought to make the work of local organizers easier versus directly supporting the organizers themselves? How can we leverage the roles of government audit institutions and the media? I’m grateful for your thoughts in the comments section. And if you’d like to see some video of the beautiful Caltongo neighborhood, do check out Daniela Rea’s beautiful documentary below.

David Sasaki is a Program Officer on the TPA team and leads on our governance channels substrategy. You can find him on Twitter @oso.