Tool Box: Designing or Implementing a Sustainable Integrated Area Development Strategy

The reduction of poverty incidence at the community level and the elimination of poverty at the household level are paramount concerns of SIAD.

Sustainable Integrated Area Development is a development strategy aimed at reducing poverty and at the same time reforming the factors and conditions that perpetuate the problem.

There are no hard and fast rules about what components or activities make up SIAD as a strategy. There is a wide elbow room out there to experiment as well as innovate ways to design and implement your own SIAD strategy.

Following are tips in designing and implementing a SIAD-oriented program or project:

1. The design must be clear that poverty reduction is paramount in the project.
2. Incorporate components that impact local governance, local economic policies and programs, social relationships including Gender relationship, and resource management. All components must impact poverty in a given bio-geographical area.
3. Using a matrix, Cross-analyze the project components and or activities. The result of the cross analysis would give you an idea whether or not the components harmonize with one another.
4. The expected outcomes as well as the actual outcomes should be perceptible.
5. Benchmark your beneficiaries. They are a good barometer for change.
6. Establish a Management Information Systems that extends up to the individual household level or beneficiary level. Keep a record of your every intervention of each beneficiary as well as their every participation or contribution in the project. Also, keep a record of every participation and contribution of every support agency, organization or personalities.
7. Treat your project as a kind of financial investment; Make a financial analysis per household or beneficiary. Compute the cost of your interventions or assistance per household or beneficiary. Compute also the economic return derived by each household or beneficiary.
8. Orchestrate the implementation of the strategy. Mobilize the existing mechanisms as well as those that you organized. Make sure also that the project gravitates around the beneficiaries and the community or locality and not vice versa.
9. Conduct research (the internet is a good source) about SIAD and innovate approaches on how to implement your SIAD strategy effectively. Everything in the project should be treated as a learning experience. Learn from your own mistakes as well as from the mistakes of others.
10. Harmonize. SIAD is an all-systems approach. It is as much a community development strategy as it is an organizational and management framework of your entire organization.