Community Development Department is one of the Departments in Kisarawe District Council that was established in the 1961 as Community Development Division. The Department is dedicated into providing services in areas of community Development at different community levels.
The Department applies different participatory methods and tools and techniques which enable communities to make decision in the process of planning, a voluntary contribution by the people in one or another of the public programs supposed to contribute to national development, but the people are not expected to take part in shaping the program.
Participation includes people’s involvement in decision making process, in implementing programs; their sharing is benefits of development programs and their involvement efforts to evaluate such programs.
However, all these techniques were biased towards identification of problems, thereby raising community expectations that there would be immediate external assistance to address their concerns. This encourages the altitude of dependency.
Community economic empowerment that the Department is carrying the process by which people take control and action in order to overcome obstacles. For the women it is the process by which women mobilize to understand, identify and overcome gender discrimination in order to achieve gender equality.
COMMUNITY DEPARTMENT FUNCTIONS
Among others, the core functions of the department are:-
To ensure that community programmes are conducted in line with the district council mission and vision.
To advocacy and robbing for the vulnerable groups such as youth, children, women, disabled and elders against violence and abuses.
To offer services for facilitation, mobilization and sensitization community members to increase awareness hence change their mind sets and behavior.
Provision of soft loans by contributing 10% of the council own source to Women Development fund (WDF) – 4%,Youth Development Fund (YDF),-4% and people with disability - 2% in order to empower women,youth,and disabled people to carry income generating activities (IGA).
To ensure community participation on identification of their problems, utilization of available resources, people involvement in social planning and management of their social projects.
Administratively, Community department has dived into five sections namely:-
Gender, Children and Women Desk: - This desk dealing with coordinating how male and female members relate and interact with each other in the context of social, political, economic and cultural aspects in Kisarawe society. Also the desk is dealing with advocating vulnerable groups of women, children and elders against violence and abuses.
Statistics, Monitoring and Research:- This desk is routing assessing the use of inputs and transformation of inputs into outputs. It provides the department with information to be used for strategic decision making in the process of programmes/ projects implementations.
Coordination of NGOs, CBOs, FBOs and COWSO Desk: -This Desk is coordinating, guardians, and collaborating with NGOs, CBOs, FBOs, on implementation of their development activities. Also Desk is responsible to capacitate community to manage, operate and make maintenance on their rural water project
Youth Development Desk:-The Youth Desk has a role of creating awareness on various National Youth Policies, collaborating with development stakeholders to capacitate and empowerment of youth groups by facilitating formation of youth income generating activities groups, and provision of soft loans through youth Development Fund (YDF)
Community Economic Empowerment Desk:-This Desk has the role of mobilizing community members to engage into income generating activities groups, to promote establishment of small and medium scale industries. Also desk provide technical support to community to improve their livelihood and to capacitate local rural communities to utilize available resources.
Despite of the sections/desks the Department has attached with two units namely:-
TASAF Unit: -are autonomous units which dealt with increasing and enhancing the capacity of communities and stakeholders to prioritize implements and manage sustainable development initiatives and in the process improve socio –economic services and opportunities. TASAF unit is operating through the local government machinery.
HIV/AIDS Unit: -This unit has the role to coordinate initiatives to control HIV/AIDS new infections, advocate for voluntary counseling and testing (VCT), coordinate formation of PLWHIV groups and empower PLHIV group with loan so as to meet their basic needs. Also the unit provides awareness on various policies concerning HIV/AIDS to the government officials, religious leaders and leaders of non-governmental organizations.
CHALLENGES. Community Department is facing with the following challenges:-
Insufficient funds allocated to the department to implement planned strategies.
Shortage of staffs (Community Department Officers) to all wards and villages.
Lack of refresher courses to community development officers.
Shortage of office equipment and office consumables
Lack of transport facilities such as motorcycles to Ward Community Development Officers (DCDO) to help them to in routing visiting to all villages in the ward.
THE WAY FORWARD
Collaborating with development stakeholders in mobilizing, robbing community to identify their problems and utilization of available resources to overcome their concerns.
Robbing to council management to allocate funds to community development department in order to implement planned strategies.
To mobilize community to do initiatives so as to bring quality livelihood ( by engaging into income generating activities)
