NGUNI’s intervention approach
NGUNI believes that order to contribute to the improvement of people’s lives one must have at the center and forefront beneficiaries’ belief system, values and knowledge that grounds their choices and behaviors. Second most important principle is that NGUNI does not seek to disrupt or destroy beliefs or people’s values but make them, if needed, evolve, or discarded by the very gatekeepers of those values and beliefs. Hence the “Rodas de Conversa” (conversation circles) approach that are crafted to have dialog without a “know-it-all” attitude, but with the understanding of joint (NGUNI and participants) responsibility to contribute to identify issues or problems and, as best as collectively can, share knowledge, suggest solutions or actions to be taken to resolve them.
The starting point of NGUNI’s work in Maciene was a meeting with leadership to understand, in their perspective, challenges their constituency faces and, to their best knowledge, what are the causes and to whom these challenges affect more. And, to the leaders’ best knowledge, what are the assets the community has that could contribute to improve their quality of life. The following rounds of consultation were with key informants (through chain-referral sampling) of the most affected members of the community. This consultation to key informants ended on focus groups that were sex and age sensitive: adult women (making sure that mothers-in-law are not in the same group as their son’s wives); young women; adolescent girls; adult men, young men, adolescent boys. These focus groups intended to:
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Get a “description” of what/how the state of well-being would be for them as individuals, their households, and their communities.
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Identify what would be needed, in their perspective, to attain individual, household and community well-being.
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What are the community’s assets (human, natural and material) that can be harnessed and used to attain the state of well-being.
Below a graphic that summarizes their thinking and it is based on this perspective that NGUNI developed the Theory of Change (TOC) for Maciene and it is based on that NGUNI draws its projects for the community.
