When the workshop begins the group is quiet, unsure. While projects have come and gone in this community before, this is the first time these farmers, market vendors, fishers, local officials, and private sector stakeholders have been invited to a planning session. The animator puts a rough map of the community up on the board and then turns to the room and asks, where are the most valuable natural resources in your area? Once one resident shouts out the name of the water source at the top of the ravine, others in the room start to chime in and a vision of the community and its natural ecological strengths begins to appear.
Participation is a guiding principle of the Haiti Takes Root initiative and it is part of almost every organization and project’s mission in Haiti. But what does participation really look like? In 2017, cultural anthropologist and expert on watersheds, environment and community organizations, Glenn Smucker wrote a definitive Step-by-Step Guide to Participatory Watershed Management Planning. With support from the World Bank and J/P Haitian Relief Organization, Smucker formalized a methodology based on sixty years of lessons learned and best practices in Haiti, in addition to his own decades of experience.
The methodology is characterized by participation at every level of a project – from the initial conception and planning, to the execution and evaluation stages. The first stage of the process produces a rapid expert assessment by combining local knowledge gained through interviews with key informants and local residents encountered during walking tours of the sub-watershed, with expert analysis of the ecology, geology, hydrology and biodiversity in the area. The result of this assessment is the subject of the first participatory workshop.
During the workshop, community stakeholders and local leaders validate the assessment by mapping resources and threats in the community and discussing potential interventions to protect and strengthen natural resources in the area. At the end of the workshop, experts seek additional information to prepare for a second participatory workshop, where local stakeholders rank and prioritize intervention activities for the watershed. The end result of the second workshop is the watershed management plan.
In early 2018, a series of planning workshops using Smucker’s methodology were carried out in the Nippes department in anticipation of the launch of the Resilient Productive Landscapes (RPL) project there. RPL is a $26 million project led by the Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Agriculture with technical and financial support from the World Bank and J/P HRO. More than thirty participatory workshops were held throughout four major watersheds in the Nippes department focused on communities in Petite Riviere de Nippes, Paillant/Bondeau, the Baconnois Plain in Anse-a-Veau, and the Javel/Sault du Baril area.
In addition to the two workshops recommended in Smucker’s methodology, a third workshop was held in each community to share and validate the Participatory Watershed Management Plans that were written based on community participation. RPL is the first major project in Haiti to use the Participatory Methodology and the feedback from communities has been extraordinary. However, in order to ensure the success of the method, participation must be at the heart of all activities carried out over the next five years.