Spark: Community Driven Development in East & West Africa

For over a decade we have seen more elections and less democracy affecting more than half the global population. At the core of a successful democracy is the ability for residents to engage in and affect local change. We have a dire need to open opportunities to engage beyond elections and enable community-driven innovations to emerge and prosper. Spark has designed the leading solution for stimulating community-driven innovation at scale, tested across over 260 communities from mining affected villages in Ghana to refugee settlements in Uganda to villages in the poorest country on our planet, Burundi. Spark’s model doubles civic engagement rates, and improves household assets by 20-80%. Today we are building a citizen text message program to hold governments and NGOs accountable to community-driven  demands, enshrining citizens with the right to determine their own future.

Half of the global population lives in a declining democracy, meaning we have fewer civil liberties today than before. Simultaneously our ‘sense of community’ is decreasing, giving birth to an epidemic of loneliness, and rising economic inequity. Democracy is predicated on a belief that residents should meet, deliberate and drive local progress, but today we have limited opportunities to engage beyond elections.

In rural communities across East and West Africa mothers and fathers sit on the sidelines as government and NGO leaders make decisions on their behalf. Families lack mechanisms to voice demands, leaving governments unaccountable, despite civic engagement being a critical factor in program success. In Rwanda a recent poverty analysis report highlighted no significant change in the 57% of the population facing poverty and attributed the lack of citizen engagement as the primary barrier to poverty alleviation programs success. When citizens lack economic and political power, democracy has little chance to take root. And when they lack a vehicle or platform to voice their concerns and feedback, there is little opportunity for change.

Spark works with communities facing rural poverty and who are sidelined from development efforts meant to uplift them. This may be a refugee community in northern Uganda who fled from South Sudan and are surviving off of short term food relief, or a village in Ghana where mining companies are attempting to illegally grab families farm land. 

Spark’s model enables families to meet, deliberate and plan for local development through a six month village planning process paired with a seed grant of $8,000. Residents determine their own priorities, whether a farm to resolve food insecurity or a school to send their children to. The process is optimized for engagement; 83 attendees on average and 56% are women. 70% of leadership elected are first time leaders and 44% are women, even in areas where women have never attended a public forum in the past. 

The key metric for success of Spark’s process is rate of civic engagement; how many people attend each meeting, disaggregated by gender.  As we replicate, accountability to community members is paramount. We are building a text message tool to gather demands from and send critical grant updates to residents as well as track civic engagement.

Spark systematically builds the political and economic power of communities today sitting on the sidelines of change by encouraging inclusive citizen participation and arming participants with the confidence and tools they need to drive their own development. Spark’s entire process focuses on inclusive participation of traditionally excluded groups, like youth and refugees, and ensures women participate and lead equally. In fact, 44% of elected leaders are women, illustrating how Spark’s model creates shifts in attitudes and power dynamics. We believe our model’s ability to foster inclusion is central to our success and sustainability.

Spark’s model combines six month of community organizing with a seed grant of $8,000. We’ve worked with over 260 communities across seven countries, 100% of village partners have launched community innovations from locally-owned farms, to health centers. Communities double their rates of civic engagement and increase household assets by 20-80%. Spark proactively reaches out to communities who are disorganized and not taking action, offers a planning process of weekly community meetings and a seed grant of $8,000 in East Africa. People show up for the money and stay for the community. Women and men, young and old attend, sometimes for the first time ever to a formal village meeting. More than half the families in each village attend on average. With weekly face to face meetings families build their social bonds and 94% continue to take civic action over time. Having this consistent broad-based and equitable input ensures that community funds and resources are not captured by a handful of elders or entrenched leaders.

While ‘participatory’ models have become popular, enabling citizens to ‘participate’ in government planning or non profit projects, they are insufficient in giving citizens decision-making control over local budgets, plans and projects. Spark has built a new sector of ‘community-driven’ development where citizens don’t only have voice, but decision-making power over village plans and small grants.

Spark leverages technology for successful program implementation, using SMS feedback from community members after each meeting to increase transparency and improve processes. The messages ask participants how a given meeting went with follow up questions depending on whether it was a positive or negative response. The messaging system also pushes notifications to participants when grant funds are being disbursed. This tool allows rapid alerts to challenges leading to quick responsive coaching and accountability to the ultimate users of the Spark model, the communities we serve.

Spark’s model is a departure from traditional western aid that focuses solely on the individual or household level without addressing systemic community-level barriers for change. Spark’s model bolsers the whole village operating system. It creates space for citizens to engage and take action, cementing a framework for sustained impacts. This community orientation, which more closely resembles pre-colonial organizing structures has high persistence in East and West Africa and the USA. 

Spark’s model is unique in that it goes beyond ‘participation’. Citizens gain decision making rights, not just voice within their own communities as they may in comparative models of participatory planning, or participatory budgeting. We optimize for representation and inclusion, ensuring that there is broad engagement. Spark’s model is cheaper and more sustainable than comparative models. It’s ¼  the cost of top-down approaches and out performs comparative small grants programs in citizen participation, secondary projects and gender inclusion. Spark is the first and only organization with expertise on the model and the technology to ensure that our community driven development approach is being implemented and scaled effectively. We have successfully equipped organizations across seven countries to use the model with high success, persistence and growth.

Spark leverages technology for successful program implementation, using SMS feedback from community members after each meeting to increase transparency and improve processes. The messages ask participants how a given meeting went with follow up questions depending on whether it was a positive or negative response. The messaging system also pushes notifications to participants when grant funds are being disbursed. 

Our citizen text message platform has rapidly accelerated our response time to resident demands from roughly three months to two weeks. The tool allows verified data on civic engagement and meeting quality, critical to the success of the program. This platform provides a transparent and quick communications vehicles for residents ensuring that residents are in control of the process and are able to voice their demands.

Over the past decade we have seen Spark’s model successfully stimulate community-driven innovation in 260+ villages across seven countries, and build the economic and political power of families to continue taking action after the process.  

98% of projects sustain, and have a return on investment of 2:1. The process increases social inclusion; 56% of attendees are women, even in regions where women have never attended a public forum previously. In Burundi, Spark community partners see 49% female leaders compared to the 6% local government average. In 2018 in Uganda, 198 community members from villages invested in this model ran for local office, nearly half being women with a 78% success rate of being elected. 

We have proven that a concentrated facilitation process and village grant stimulates community-driven innovations. As soon as six months into the process communities develop the skills they need to implement successful innovation projects while strengthening civic participation and holding leaders accountable. In the long term we see the benefits of social cohesion, civic engagement, and increased access to economic opportunities persist.

Our citizen text message platform has rapidly accelerated our response time to resident demands from roughly three months to two weeks. The tool allows verified data on civic engagement and meeting quality, critical to the success of the program. This platform provides a transparent and quick communications vehicles for residents ensuring that residents are in control of the process and are able to voice their demands.

Across all of our country programs we have partnered with 260 villages and served 194,705 individuals. With the expectation in 2019 of working with 100 new villages, we expect to serve an additional 73,417 individuals this year alone. In the next five years, Spark will have engaged two sectors in each of the thirty districts serving nearly 1.3 million individuals.

In 2019 Spark will double its number of partnerships in Rwanda by partnering with a 100 new communities. This leap has been made possible through Spark’s development of a scaling approach with the Rwandan local government to jointly partner with clusters of communities rather than one at a time. In Northern Uganda, we will conclude the first phase of the pilot to integrate South Sudanese refugees in to local host communities having partnered with 12 new communities.  Furthermore, we will continue to support our training partners in West Africa to expand partnerships with new communities in Liberia, Ghana, and Guinea.

By 2025, making projections for our most established flagship program in Rwanda, citizens across 1,920 villages will have self-designed poverty alleviation plans and stimulated 4,608 new businesses. Spark and the Government of Rwanda will have saturated 2 sectors (a grouping of approximately thirty villages) in each of the 30 districts in Rwanda. 119,040 new families will contribute to village savings, while household assets for the poorest in Rwanda will increase by 117%, or a cumulative $12,142,080 by program completion, not including continued asset growth post-program. This exceeds the sector average of 80% growth in household asset growth demonstrated by a 2005 analysis of programs in southeast Asia. 1,920 young people are elected to office, half will be women. Women’s participation in poverty alleviation programs will increase twofold.

Lack of Support for Community Driven Approaches: Spark is in a unique position, establishing a new way to do development that is more cost effective and sustainable than traditional prescriptive approaches. Despite widespread knowledge in the field that this is not just a nice but necessary way to do development, there are not pre-existing funding pools and evaluations that back the field up.

Dilution of Spark's Model: In partnering and scaling with a national government there is the potential for them to make inappropriate changes to the Spark Model or ineffectively implementing the Model. This would put Spark Microgrants and the communities that we hope to serve at risk. 

Freedom of Speech in East & West Africa:  While citizens of a number of these countries certainly experience on average greater freedoms than those in many neighboring countries in sub-saharan Africa, there is often still a culture that is quite repressive when it comes to speech that in any way disagrees with the current administration. As a goal of Spark's Model is to increase civic engagement and improve good governance from the bottom up, we understand that this may clash with the tight grip that the current administration has.

Lack of Support for Community Driven Approaches: Spark sees community driven approaches as core to the success of any future programming at the village level. This provides us an enormous opportunity to contribute to the literature, establish a new funding community and build a community of practice to uplift community-driven approaches that build community agency. 

Dilution of our Model: Spark will build protections and clauses into the MOUs and policies with our partners to ensure that our model is not compromised and that citizens are getting the best version of the Spark process.  Spark will also maintain a stream of independent funding to allow our organization to do quality control to ensure that the process has not been compromised

Freedom of Speech in East & West Africa:  Recognizing the underlying challenges, we will adapt our quality metrics to properly measure the level with which citizens involved in our Model are able to speak freely and engage civically.  We will also expand our citizen engagement feedback tool to include a more robust questionnaire to ensure that citizens are able to provide honest and open feedback about Spark's process and the way in which they are working with local government officials.

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Spark team of fifty-nine staff hail from nine countries. Fifty-three are based in East Africa, where we have offices in Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, with a headquarters in Kampala, Uganda. Three staff members, working on fundraising and the global community of practice are based in the USA. Spark’s existing team have trained and actively support seven organizations including four that operate where we have no staff.

Spark’s team comes with a wealth of experience and in country knowledge.  The team is organized across three domains: 1) Demand creation, 2) Delivery excellence, and 3) Organizational Advancement. 

Demand creation is led by Hannah Duncan, she comes with experience managing cross-ministerial, bilateral and multilateral work in Afghanistan on the Citizens Charter, a major decentralization initiative. Her team curates the national coalition in Rwanda with the World Bank, Ministry of Finance, DFID, GIZ and district partners and the global community of practice with all FCAP training partners. 

The Delivery Excellence team is led by Alexandra Muyama and Anne Angsten. Alex has experience in local government in Uganda and started at Spark as a facilitator. She has since led trainings for facilitators around the world. Anne comes with business experience in West Africa and McKinsey. They are in charge of training services including the development of technology tools, FCAP guides, in person training and quality control. 

In Organizational Advancement, Sasha Fisher is the Executive Director and has served in this capacity since co-founding the organization in Rwanda in 2010. She is an inaugural Obama Fellow, Draper Richards Kaplan Entrepreneur, Forbes 30 under 30 and the recipient of the Muhammad Ali award for Respect. Shai Fogelson, leads private philanthropic investments. He has already secured Spark’s two largest gifts to date.

To date, Spark has seven partners that have been trained on the Spark model and are implementing this methodology in their local context. In Ghana and Liberia, Advocates for Community Alternatives and Village Development Fund are piloting the process to protect communities from extractive mining companies and provide alternative sources of financing for village development initiatives. In Uganda, Community Empowerment for Rural Development (CEFORD) is piloting the Spark model to increase the self-reliance of South Sudanese refugee communities amidst the largest refugee crisis on the continent as they prepare for the withdrawal of emergency aid. In Burundi, FVS-AMADE is using the Spark model to establish inclusive, village level governance across every province in the country. Finally, in Rwanda, Spark is working with government partners to embed the process into the village governance model across the country.

Spark’s approach is ¼ the cost of top down approaches and out performs comparative small grants programs, in citizen participation, secondary projects and successful advocacy attempts. Across the board, 94% of villages continue to meet regularly, 93% have launched secondary projects, and 88% have successfully advocated to government. 

Household assets double within the first year for community members directly involved in the project and household participation in recognized savings groups increases 250%. Spark’s process isn’t just local, it’s inclusive; 56% of ideas come from women, 43% of leaders are naturally elected women and 100% of villages have youth in leadership.

Spark’s Systems Change strategy demands a minimum of $8,530,391 over the next three years. Spark has a highly leveraged investment model that combines the power of private philanthropy to attract bilateral and multilateral investment building towards ‘buy-out’ financing for scaled initiatives with combined village and state based funding. 

We are applying for Solve because our ability to leverage technology and build the next phases of our citizen text message platform is critical to our success replicating our process and scaling from 260 to 12,000 villages. We have a budding technology team in Uganda and Rwanda and we are seeking mentors for our product managers and programmers to ensure we are dreaming big and building our technology for scale. We are seeking to integrate three unique components; citizen feedback, grant disbursement alerts and responses. All three are direct Spark to resident today but are not fully integrated in the back end. Eventually the data on civic engagement should inform local government policy across the continent and beyond. We have demand from Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Hungary, Puerto Rico, and from mayors across the USA to name a few places. 

Similarly we find networks of leaders who are intensively building for social good provide the right social fabric to continue stimulating our own creativity. 

Finally, the funds will allow us to directly invest in new features of streamlined reports of resident demands and bulk feedback from Spark to citizens. 

In these ways, we believe the connections and support offered by Solve will be invaluable in bringing us into a carefully selected cohort of promising tech entrepreneurs dedicated towards driving transformational change and learning from influential Solve members at year round annual workshops and events.

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The Spark Process fosters inclusion and equality through collective action that endures long after project completion, creating measurable improvements in empowerment of women and youth. These groups otherwise excluded from decision-making including access to education and resources to participate in political and economic life, are encouraged to voice opinions and participate, including in elected office. Working side-by-side, social cohesion is increased and attitudes and power dynamics are shifted. 56% of attendees are and ideas come from women in Spark partnered communities.  73% of leaders elected to leadership positions on Spark funded projects are first time leaders often women or young adults both frequently underrepresented populations. With this money, Spark will further invest in developing the resources to train thousands of first time leaders, women and young adults, to successful launch businesses, lead their communities, and to run for office. This increased influence on decision making power will provide access to political and economic opportunities.$25,000 will be used to host a series of organized workshops for these leaders to discuss challenges affecting their communities, successes they have had in their leadership roles in the village strengthening process, and share ideas on how they can continue contributing to improving the quality of life in their communities, the country of Rwanda, and on a global level. This will also be an opportunity to bring in speakers to discuss pressing global issues with this core of youth leadership to further their understanding and desire to enact change at the global level.

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Given the ways in which the Spark process facilitates collective community action and sustainable development, it is uniquely positioned to address refugee integration. In 2018, Spark piloted a project in Northern Uganda, the epicenter of one of the world’s largest refugee crises, partnering with local NGO CEFORD. The model is used in refugee and mixed refugee/host communities so that refugees and hosts develop shared goals and cooperate to accomplish those goals, working together. In addition to increased social cohesion, our model enables these communities to address an imminent development challenge in the short-term and increase their access to opportunities to resources and jobs, creating communities that are self-sustaining and cooperative, rather than straining host communities. If awarded the Innovation for Refugee Inclusion Prize, we will be able to expand our pilot project in the West Nile working with five new communities to bring about sustained prosperity to both refugee and northern Uganda host communities.  $50,000 will enable Spark to cover the cost of five $8,000 seed grants for each of these communities to launch their own projects and comprehensive facilitation and trainings to ensure they have the tools for sustained collective action. The success of this pilot will act as a blueprint for a new form of international aid for refugee communities allowing them to take control in the “now” and drive their own long term development.

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