By: Aruna Kamara (BO)
Centre for Advocacy and Sustainable Empowerment (CASE SALONE), has on the 17th September 2022 engaged Waiima community in Bo District in its effort to advancing community led approach for the development of the community.
The engagement meeting was well attended by the community members including the town chief, women’s leader, youth, adolescent and children.
The community people welcomed CASE SALONE in their cultural performance; demonstrating open hands to continue working with the organization to better their community.
To inspire the community about the possibility of a positive and desirable transformation community led approach holds, the organization invited Mr. James Santigie Koroma, a representative from Kokofelay and a community facilitator working with Integrated Development Programme for Teenagers (IDP4T), who offered testimony, highlighting the progress they have made so far as the result of the approach.
Mr. Koroma furthered that the magic trick behind this venture is unity, thereby encouraging the WAIIMA community to embrace togetherness.
“I can see that this community has a lot of wealth/resources that is quite enough to overturn the situation of WAIIMA”, Mr. Korama maintained.
As a follow-up engagement on the wellbeing training workshop that was once conducted, the community members reported to have made progress on certain development agenda they set.
“We slept and dreamed our community had mosque, church, hospital, solar lights, pump/clean water, road, school and health center during the previous workshop, and now we are here to tell you the progress we have made since then” Mr. Bayoh, a community member submitted.
According to him, “since we attended the previous workshop we worked as a team to erect a mosque that is rapidly undergoing completion. Again, with support from the government, the community now has a solar powered electricity supply and street lights that were donated to them by one of their sons of the soil,’’ adding that they further promised to do more than they have done, regardless the challenges they face as a community.
To support them in their community development drive, CASE SALONE guided the community in forming a committee known as the Community Management Committee (CMC), a group that would be charged with the responsibility to steer development in their community. To maintain balance in the committee, the community members suggested equal representation of community members, adding that, that would show community inclusion and ownership.
CASE SALONE staff collectively espoused that the most effective way of transforming lives of communities is to instil in the members of the community a sense of possibility; encouraging them to realize the abundant wealth/resources they have around them, which will capacitate them to aspire for locally rooted change.