2.1. Understanding the Umuhuza Community Engagement Approach

2.1. Understanding the Umuhuza Community Engagement Approach

Table 1: Umuhuza Community Engagement Approach explained

1.INFORM (Information sharing)

2.CONSULT (Consultations )

3.INVOLVE (Planning Together)

4.COLLABORATE (Acting Together)

5.REVIEW (Regular monitoring, evaluation & Learning)

• The objective is to regularly share accurate, timely, relevant and easy-to-understand information about new projects, activities and interventions. • Information is shared through passive channels (such as brochures, posters, manuals, concepts, project briefs, media articles, radio programs, posts on our website and other written materials) or active (face-to-face meetings including grassroots-level meetings, awareness raising & consultative meetings with communities, partners and stakeholders, exhibitions & campaigns, etc). • Providing information is critical in ensuring that partners, stakeholders and target communities understands better our programs and activities and increases their capacity to effectively contribute in successive levels of engagement. • The objective is to actively seek opinions and experiences of target communities, partners and stakeholders before a final decision is made. • This is done using a combination of tools and channels that include stakeholder meetings, existing community events/structures (such as

Inteko z’abaturage, umuganda, etc), surveys , etc. • By planning together with the target community in identifying and analyzing issues and identifying preferred solutions to their challenges, Umuhuza ensures that communities and stakeholders provide input into the planning, implementation and evaluation. • This involves building permanent partnerships and a strong reporting mechanism so that we can keep track of contributions from the various groups • This is done through regular stakeholder meetings, workshops, discussions, action plan consultative and review meetings, etc. • Partners, stakeholders, volunteers and target communities/beneficiaries are actively involved in implementing activities (We recognize and value the shared responsibilities to take decisions and implement them). This is critical in ensuring that we build capacity among and empower communities and all our stakeholder groups for efficient planning and implementation of the activities to address community issues. • Constant review and evaluation of our interventions guarantees that we can regularly understand what is working and what is not working so that we can take timely appropriate action to ensure that we reach the set objectives and make the desired impact. • At this stage, we also identify lessons and best practices that we integrate in our future plans and interventions • We do this through our regular review meetings and feedback encounters with our Partners, communities and stakeholders for performance and expenditure monitoring.