Let's get together!

GRRAM team started the process of selecting local households who will participate in the project. For this, community mobilization meetings are being conducted and the team is documenting the lessons learned. Following are three main lessons learned that the team would like to share.

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1. Preparation of the community mobilization meetings is essential: The team asked key local stakeholders and local CBOs to invite the local households to the community meetings. Key local stakeholders help was necessary as it is hard to get local HHs to attend the meetings. Also, team members worked on understanding the area-specific sub-cultures as they greatly affect the households’ participation in the project. In one of the areas, women could not leave their houses to attend trainings or meetings unless their husbands were convinced and agreed.

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2. Community mobilization meetings ensure delivering the right message of the project to households: The teams adopted community mobilization meetings with the aim of informing local households about the project, help participants determine if they wish to participate and complete participants’ applications. This method saved time and effort in terms of delivering the right message of the project directly from the team members to the households; however, it required solid preparation and coordination with the local stakeholders.

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3. Flexibility in time and place of the meetings are necessary: The fact that local households are hard to gather and have commitments to their families, time and place needs to be taken into consideration when preparing for the community mobilization meetings.