NEWS & ARCHIVE

IAP2SA Webinar Series

On 29 July 2021, IAP2 Southern Africa held the first of a series of webinars around the theme, “Using public participation and stakeholder engagement to mobilise sustainable community development … asset-based community development (ABCD) is just one of those tools!”. It was a successful afternoon, with local and international private practitioners and government practitioners from 14 countries among the audience.

The webinar explored the relationship between the IAP2 public participation spectrum and community-led development. A key observation is that the application of the ABCD approach often stimulates participation, enables involvement and moves engagement into collaboration and empowerment. This allows for a local multiplier effect with the outcomes being more than just the individual project pieces. The uniqueness is that the approach deliberately connects the human asset to the other asset categories – community/social, Institutional, finance/economic and natural resource assets.

An asset-based approach brings out the relationship between participation and the development impact of delivery.