The Community-Based Worker (CBW) project is a product of earlier work done by Khanya on 'Institutional Support for Sustainable Livelihoods' that identified the need to strengthen linkages between the micro, meso and macro levels if peoples' livelihoods are to improve. The Community-Based Worker Project addresses one of the six governance issues that emerged from this work ie promoting dispersed, active and locally accountable community workers, who can work in a range of sectors. Read more in the CBW leaflet here....

The 4-country CBW project is working with partners in South Africa, Lesotho, Uganda and Kenya. The project aims to develop revised approaches to the use of community-based workers (CBWs) in service delivery in  the HIV/AIDS and Natural Resource sectors in an effort to respond to the huge challenges facing many African countries.

Khanya-aicdd was also a partner in a parallel comparative research project funded by DFID with the Bradford Centre for International Development (BCID) in Tanzania and South Africa. This project contributes to ongoing debate about participation and its' limits. In exploring the behaviour of socially located individuals and the constraining and enabling effects of the structures within which they live, it touches on many of the arguments both in favour of and criticising participation. By focusing explicitly on the neglected interface between institutions, community workers and individuals we aimed to contribute to a better understanding of the complexity of participatory processes, and their negotiation at local level. Community-Based Workers are para-professsionals, based in and drawn from the community they serve who therefore understand the local context well, and are accountable to the community and to a facilitating agent - maintaining a balance to ensure quality service delivery.

Key project activity included:

• Reviews on current CBW practice in each of the 4 countries;
• 2 workshops involving partners from all 4 countries;
• In-country workshops;
• An international literature review on CBW systems;
• Establishing pilots in each of the 4 countries;
• a study tour to Peru to learn about CBW systems.
• CBW National Workshop - South Africa
• CBW Evaluation Report of pilots - South Africa
• Production of the CBW guidelines for practitioners