What we do
Our main responsibility encompasses a range of approaches and activities that aim to improve the welfare and livelihoods of people living in rural areas. Rural community as a branch of community development, we carry out these approaches by paying attention to social issues particularly community organizing. This is in contrast to other forms od rural development that focus on public works such as rural roads and electrification and technology aiming at providing tools and techniques for improving agricultural production.
While rural community development is important in developing countries where a large part of the population is engaged in farming, ISRCD supports rural people to organize themselves with cooperatives or community-based organizations in to benefit from our financial programmes. Our financial programmes aim to strengthen rural organizations by providing credits and grants depending on the projects owned by those CBOS or Cooperatives. We support also private companies that have projects which are implemented in rural settings. These projects must impact positively the rural people by improving their living standards.
Our approach for funding rural organizations.
A range of community development methods have been created and used by many organizations involved in international development but without real results. Why? Because there was a lack of community participation in planning, designing and implementing projects. That’s why we use community participation approach (CPA) in the entire process. From planning, designing and implementation. Before funding any organization, we assess the community participation to ensure that there is community ownership of the project. Without this, there is sustainable solutions to the problem the project intended to yield. While private companies may come up with a good business plan but that has not taken into consideration the needs of the community, we will help the applying company to incorporate community participation in the project so that local community might find itself integrated in the business. Otherwise, there will not be tangible results even though the project will be carried out in rural settings. The sustainability of the efforts must be clearly proved in order to be guaranteed of our financial support. Any project or business plan must lead to rural community empowerment. This is our major concern. Does your project or business plan empower rural people? If yes, then you are eligible to our funding programmes.
International Solidarity for Rural Community Development (ISRCD) was established with the aim of helping rural people transform constructively their own lives and take charge of their own destiny, while creating within them a sense of self-worth and confidence hence becoming change agents that will lead to sustainable and inclusive development.
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ISRCD was established in 1989 but it started funding rural organizations in 1992 after a long journey of researches that aimed to find out how rural people can catch up with urban people in having improved living conditions.Â
Our programmes
Youth Empowerment and Development Program (YEDP)
Women Empowerment Programme (WEP)
Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP)
