Participatory Project Planning Approaches: Reflections from Community Development Initiatives in Low Resourced Countries

Abstract

Participatory planning approaches are direct engagement with the community in decision-making and give full consideration to their total input in any undertaking that affects them.  Projects are created to satisfy community-based or people-centered needs where their input to the project planning will be critical. The procedure of their presence in these project activities is opposed by several challenges in countries that have inadequate resource where development donors support several projects. These projects apply the concept of participatory planning approaches before the projects take off and where the community plays a role in the development of the initiative. The concept has been utilized across new projects in low resource countries, nevertheless met with several constraints thus, growing absence of motivation to the community's participation. This paper is a desktop review of five articles. The papers were searched using Zotero through Google network support.  The paper concluded that there is a demand for government and development partners to focus their attention on low resource countries credibly for community participation to thrive. There is a concern going forward since community participation has been misrepresented by governments and the donor community in LRCs. This paper recommended there should be appropriate community participation approaches with the focus to project planning, design, and implementation. There is a need of emphasizing on a policy framework that improves community participation on all development community projects. There should be institutional mainstreaming of community project identification at all the levels of project cycle phases so that they are involved in discovering projects that affect them. Also, there is need for key stakeholders in project development (project developers, bilateral, multilateral agents, banks and project beneficiaries among others) to develops a guiding policy that supports the community participation concept.

Keywords: Community participation, Development Initiatives, Low Resource Countries, Monitoring and Evaluation, Participatory Project Planning Approaches, Project management competence, Project planning.